A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill
“You see,” Miss Lady went on, unconsciously, “you have taken Daddy's
place in so many ways that I have been depending on you for everything.
It makes me awfully lonesome when I think of your leaving. Down here you
have just belonged to Miss Wuster and me, and once you get back to town
you will be the famous Doctor Queerington again and belong to everybody.
I shan't dare write to you for fear I spell a word wrong.”
“Indeed, I shall expect a weekly letter reporting the progress of your
studies, and I shall come to see you from time to time and help you with
your plans for the future.”
“Yes, but it won't be the same. We will sit in the parlor, and you'll
be company, and I shall be afraid of you. I am always afraid of you the
minute I get out of your sight.”
“What nonsense! I never criticize anything but your pronunciation, and
an occasional exaggeration of statement. If I have seemed severe--”
“You haven't! You've been an angel! When I think of all the time you
have taken from your writing to help me, I am ashamed for letting you do
it.”
“You must not think,” said the Doctor slowly, “that I have been wholly
disinterested. I have found you singularly helpful to me. I think I may
say that you stimulate me and refresh me more than any one I know.”
“_I_ do? Oh! Doctor! That's about the nicest thing I ever had said to
me.”
He was not prepared for the radiant face of gratitude that was lifted to
his, nor for the proximity of her glowing eyes which gave him no further
reason for doubting their exact hue.
“Yes,” he said with slight embarrassment, “your mind interests me
exceedingly. It is not complex, nor subtle, but remarkably intuitive.
You have imagination and humor, and great receptivity.”
Miss Lady wore the absorbed look people usually wear when their
characteristics are undergoing vivisection; she could not have been more
fascinated had she been viewing her face for the first time in a mirror.
“This little volume now,” the Doctor continued, picking up an elementary
treatise on evolution; “I am particularly anxious to see what effect it
will have on a fresh, unsophisticated mind. Make notes as you read, and
we will discuss it when you have finished.”
“And you won't forget to send me the copy of Mrs. Browning?”
“No, I seldom forget. But I may not send it. Science is better for
you just now than poetry. What is that blossom you are so carefully
cherishing?”
Miss Lady's eyes fell, and the color leapt to her face.
“This? Just a wild rose I found over there by the wall. I thought they
had stopped blooming weeks ago.”
The Doctor took it in his hand and examined it minutely: “It is the
_Rosa Blanda_,” he said, “five cleft sepals that terminate in a tube.
Pliny tells us that in ancient days the warriors used the petals of this
rose to garnish their choicest meats. Who is that quaint person coming
over the stile?”
“It's Miss Ferney. What a nuisance, on our last day! But I forgot, I
asked her to come. If she stays very long, just tell a little fib, won't
you, and say you need me for something?”
“It will not be a fib,” said the Doctor quietly, “I do need you.”
Miss Lady met her caller at the front porch and relieved her of the jar
she was carrying.
“It's pickles,” said Miss Ferney, a withered little woman whose small,
nibbling face suggested a squirrel's. “I thought having company you
might need 'em. Don't know though. City people may be too aristocratic
to eat country pickles.”
“The idea, Miss Ferney! Don't you sell them in the city all the time?”
“Yes, under labels. City people lay stress on labels. When I was a
child, I wasn't allowed to eat things that was labeled. I hear he's
going?”
“Who?”
“Your Doctor. Don't see how you've ever stood him so long.”
“Oh! you don't know Doctor Queerington! It's been a great privilege to
have him here, He is a very distinguished man, Miss Ferney, and so kind
and good!”
“Good or bad, they are all the same to me. Just as soon have a fly under
my mosquito bar as a man buzzing around in my house. When's he going?”
“To-morrow. Will that be too soon for you to come over?”
“No, I'm ready to come. Sis 'Lizzie will be sure to try some of those
new-fangled receipts and spoil a bushel or two of cucumbers, but I
said I'd come and I will. What is this Jimpson is telling me about your
taking the examinations for the county school?”
Miss Lady sighed: “I may have to teach; I don't know.”
“Sell off some more land. You don't need a hundred acres.”
“We've sold too much already! It will be the house next. I am determined
to hold on to Thornwood if the roof tumbles in on my head!”
“I know how you feel,” said Miss Ferney whose sentiments ran to real
estate. “I've been saving every nickel I made for nearly twenty years to
buy back our place. From all the talk we heard last spring, Sis Lizzie
rather allowed you was going to get married.”
“Well, I am not.”
“I am glad of it. Folks are keen enough to believe in every beau a girl
has 'til she's thirty. After that they don't believe in any of them. Sis
was misled by what they told her over at the Wickers'.”
“What did they tell her?” asked Miss Lady, training a rebellious moon
vine up the trellis.
“Oh, they told her about that young city fellow you was rampaging all
over the country with last spring. Mrs. Wicker said he hadn't a thought
in his head but you. That he wore her plumb out telling her about you,
just as if she hadn't help raise you on a bottle!”
Miss Lady still found the vine absorbing, but she took time to say over
her shoulder:
“Tell your sister and Mrs. Wicker that that young man has gone to
China.”
“Well, nobody could wish him further! I hope he will stay. You are too
nice a girl to get married. What do women want to marry for anyway? Look
at me! Forty years single and not one minute of it spent in wishing I
was married! I glory in my independence, I glory in my freedom.”
Miss Ferney was allowed to glory undisturbed, for Miss Lady, leaning
against the railing of the porch, had apparently forgotten her
existence.
“You just make up your mind to take that school job, and lead a useful,
independent life. I know a teacher in Shelby County that's had the same
school for fifteen years, ever since she was a plump, pretty girl, and
she's thin as I am now, and gray as a rat. Kept that same position and
done well all these years.”
Miss Lady wheeled suddenly and flung out her arms:
“If you don't hush this minute, Miss Ferney, I'll run off and join the
circus! I'd lots rather stand on one toe in fluffy, spangled skirts, and
jump through a hoop than teach school!”
Miss Ferney looked scandalized: “You don't seem right well,” she said as
if in excuse for such flippancy. “I do believe you've got a fever. I'm
going straight home and mix you up a tonic.”
Miss Lady sat for some time on the steps with her eyes on the distant
river. Up the hillside the treetops rippled in the breeze, and down
in the valley the winding stream danced in the shallows or loitered
in brown pools to whisper secrets to the low-hanging boughs. The world
seemed to her not only very beautiful, but very lonesome, and the vow
of eternal celibacy, made to Uncle Jimpson, loomed large and terrible in
the presence of Miss Ferney.
“Oh, here you are,” said the nurse, coming around the house; “the Doctor
has been refusing to lie down until you come out to the garden. He says
he needs you for something. Deliver me from convalescents!”
Miss Lady laughed and ran down the path to the garden, where the Doctor
greeted her with his rarest smile. The rest of the morning they pored
over manuscripts, sorting notes, and making corrections, she happy
in having even a tiny share in his great work, and he finding her
enthusiasm and interest a welcome condiment to stir his jaded appetite
for his task. Meanwhile, a bedraggled little rose languished unnoticed
beneath the manuscript of “The History of Norman Influence on English
Language and Literature.”
CHAPTER XI
For three hundred and sixty-five days Myrtella Flathers held undisputed
sway in the house of Queerington. The Doctor's semi-invalidism, after
his return from Thornwood, threw all responsibility upon her, and while
she permitted him to wear the crown, it was she who wielded the scepter.
Never had the house been in such immaculate order, nor the young
Queeringtons appeared in such presentable garments, and never had the
front door been slammed so persistently in the face of unwelcome guests.
For the Queerington family tree was afflicted with too many branches.
There were little dry twigs of maidenly cousins, knotted and dwarfed
stumps of half-gone uncles and aunts, vigorous, demanding shoots of
nephews and niece's, all of whom had hitherto imposed upon the Doctor's
slender income, and his too generous hospitality.
Myrtella objected to the inroads these invaders made on his time
and strength, and she also objected to the extra work their presence
entailed upon her. In short, she felt that the family tree needed
pruning, and she set herself right heartily to the job. By persistent
discourtesy she managed to lop off one relative after another, until she
gained for the Doctor a privacy hitherto undreamed of.
“There ain't a hour in the day that I ain't headin' off somebody!” she
triumphantly announced one day to the cook from next door. “When I come
here you'd 'a' thought it was a railroad station, people comin' and
goin' with satchels; and bells a-ringin', and trunks being dragged over
the carpets. Dirt from the top of the house to the bottom; Miss Hattie
with her petticoats hanging down below her dress; and all the neighbor
children racing in and out, and actually takin' the mattress off
Bertie's bed to coast down the stairs on!”
“In the name of St. Patrick!” sympathized Norah, the visitor; “and their
pa not doin' nothin' with 'em at all?”
“Who said he wasn't?” blazed Myrtella instantly. “You'll be hintin'
around next that I was talkin' about the Doctor behind his back. You're
fixin' to lose me my place, that's what you are doin'.”
“Not me! It's braggin' on you I was not over a week ago, sayin' what a
fine, nice cook you was, and how grand and clean it was over here.”
“Of course,” said Myrtella haughtily, “I may not be workin' fer a lady
that's so smart she wouldn't even know her own kitchen if she met it
walkin' up the street. I may not work in a house where they pull down
the shades and burn red lamps in the day time to keep from showin' the
dirt under the sofa. We don't keep two servants and not have enough to
feed 'em, but _I'm_ satisfied. At least fer the present. The day will
come when I won't have to be in service to no one. I'm puttin' by each
week, and the time ain't distant when I'll be settin' at the head of my
own boardin'-house table, an' it will be 'Miss Flathers,' if you please!
You, Bertie!” this to a frail-looking little boy in the back yard. “You
git up off the grass this minute! Fixin' to catch the croup and have me
up with you all night, like I was last week.”
“Sure 'n I might find a worse place than Mrs. Ivy's,” continued
Norah. “A bit of blarney, and frish flowers every day in front of her
photygraph, and things right for Mr. Gerald, is all she wants. The last
place I worked,--Mrs. Sequin's, bad luck to her!... It was a party or a
dinner between me and me rest ivery night of the week! Sorra a bit did
I care for the whole kit of 'em, barring Mr. Don Morley, as fine a young
gentleman as ever set foot in sole leather!”
“Him that shot Dick Sheeley and run away?”
“Him they laid it on,” said Norah with indignant emphasis. “It was that
good-for-nothin' Mr. Lee Dillingham done it, and Mrs. Sequin a-movin'
heaven to marry Miss Margery off to him. I seen how they was tryin' to