A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill
come back, that as soon as he was able to travel he would go on around
the world, and that it didn't make much difference where he landed.”
“Quite a tragic little romance,” Gerald said. “What a lot of mischief
you women have to answer for, Mrs. Q.!”
But Miss Lady did not hear him, she was still leaning forward absorbed
in Decker's narrative.
“If he comes home, in answer to your cable, when can he get here?” she
asked.
“Not before Christmas I should say.”
“If I were Lee Dillingham I should go South for the winter,” Gerald
said, going to the piano and striking a few random chords.
After Cropsie Decker left, Miss Lady sat very quiet in the big chair,
while Gerald played to her. It was well that only the kindly old bust of
Liszt looked down on her tense white face, and clasped hands.
For over two months she had been fighting a specter, never daring to
lift her eyes to it, but fighting it blindly, passionately, unceasingly.
She had denied its existence, refuted every memory, filled her life to
the brim with other interests, other affections, and here suddenly she
had met it face to face, and it was no longer horrible, but a beautiful,
radiant vision, a thing to be buried in her innermost being, a sacred,
solemn thing, not to be looked at, or dwelt upon, but no longer to be
denied.
The stormy, insistent strains of the “Appassionata” filled the room,
surging through every fiber of her, lifting and abasing her by turns.
How could she get hold of herself while Gerald played like that? She was
sinking in a great sea of emotion and the music swept about her like a
mighty gale, shutting out everything in the world but Donald Morley. He
had not failed her, it was she who had failed him. He was coming home,
and it was too late. She would have to meet him face to face, to see
all that he had suffered in his eyes and speak no word. Surely she might
give him this one hour, just while the music lasted; give it to him and
to herself for the lifetime together they had missed.
She did not know when the music stopped, she did not know when Gerald
came back to the hassock at her feet. He had evidently been there some
time when she was aware of his elbow on the arm of her chair, and his
head buried in it.
“Gerald!” she said, starting up; “what's the matter?”
“Everything. Is that your trouble?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you are unhappy,” he said, catching her hand.
She sprang to her feet and snapped on the electric lights.
“Do I look as if I were unhappy?” she demanded, flashing on him her
old, bright smile. “It was the music, and the twilight, and the way you
played. That sonata ought never to be played except in a crowded room
with all the lights on.”
“It wasn't the music,” Gerald persisted; “you know it wasn't.
Something's troubling you, and something is troubling me. May I tell you
what is the matter with me, Miss Lady?”
He was looking at her very intently across the table, and Miss Lady for
the first time recognized the danger signals in his eyes.
“Let me guess!” she cried, her wits springing to her rescue. “I think I
know. I thought so when I first came in. It's mumps!”
Gerald's hand flew instinctively to his face, and his eyes sought the
mirror. Miss Lady, in applying to Gerald Ivy, Uncle Jimpson's remedy for
a balking mule, had averted a disaster.
CHAPTER XV
Time was an abstraction of which the inhabitants of Bean Alley took
little notice. The arbitrary division of one's life into weeks and days
and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the
men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day.
As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every
corner of the world.
On this particular fall afternoon, just outside Phineas Flathers'
cottage, a lively game was in progress. It was a game known in Bean
Alley as “Sockabout,” and it had to do with caps or battered hats laid
in a row, and with a small rubber ball that was thrown into them from
a distance. Like many other apparently simple diversions, Sockabout had
its complexities. In fact, the rules admitted of so many interpretations
that an umpire was indispensable.
Under ordinary circumstances Chick Flathers would have scorned so
passive a role as umpire, but to-day he was handicapped. In the first
place he had no cap to contribute to the row on the ground, and in the
second he was burdened with a very large and wriggly bundle, which gave
evidence of marked disfavor the moment he ceased to jolt it violently on
his knees.
In the midst of an unusually fierce altercation, in which four boys
contended for the same cap, Skeeter Sheeley's voice rose above the
clamor.
“It's our turn! Umpire says so, didn't you, Chick? Aw, you did, too! I
kin understand you better 'n you kin understand yourself. 'Course it's
ours. Stop shovin' me, Gussie McGlory, I'll swat yer in the jaw in a
minute! Look out, Chick! Look out fer the kid!”
The youngest resident of Bean Alley was probably saved from premature
death by the timely appearance of two ladies at the far end of the
street.
Chick, recognizing the younger one, started joyfully to meet her, but at
sight of her companion he stopped short. For two years he had regarded
that plump, smiling, elderly lady as his arch enemy. She was after him.
She wanted to put him in something that sounded like “The Willows Awful
Home.” Once she had almost gotten him, but Aunt 'Tella interposed. He
was not afraid of the truant officer, nor of the cop, although they were
generally after him, too, but he had horrible nightmares in which he saw
himself being dragged into captivity by this bland lady in the purple
dress, who always smiled.
Just as he was seeking a hiding-place sufficiently large to accommodate
himself and his charge, he was summoned home. Considerable commotion was
apparent in the crowded kitchen and Mr. Flathers was moving about with
an alacrity unusual to him.
“Git off your shoes and stockings, Chick, and turn your coat inside out.
Here, I'll hold the baby; yer Mammy's nursing the other one. Shove that
beer can under the stove, and hide that there cuckoo clock.”
Chick followed instructions with the air of one who understood the
situation. It was not the first time he had prepared hurriedly for
visitors.
“They're stopping at Jireses',” reported Mr. Flathers from the window.
“Here, take this kid and set out there on the door-step. Don't you dare
budge till they've saw you and spoke to you.”
Chick resumed his position on the door-step with a heavy heart. The line
of battle had been pushed south, and he was completely out of the firing
line.
His bare feet and legs were cold in the biting November air, and he had
jolted the baby until he felt there were no more jolts left in him. It
was, moreover, a terrifying business to sit there and calmly wait his
fate.
“Them's them!” announced Skeeter Sheeley, racing down the alley. “They
give Mr. Jires some oranges. If they give you one, you goin' to gimme
half?”
Chick was too miserable to answer. The bars of an institution seemed to
be already closing upon him.
Mrs. Ivy, holding her skirts very high and picking her way gingerly
around the frozen puddles, was the first to reach him.
“Ah! Here's our good little friend Rick, or Dick, is it? And this is the
sweet little baby sister that God sent you.”
“Naw it ain't,” said Skeeter; “that there's a boy, an' it ain't no kin
to him. Its paw's in the pen, an' its maw's up fer ninety days, an' its
jes' boardin' at his house.”
“The case that was reported for the Home,” said Mrs. Ivy, turning with a
significant nod to her companion who had just come up.
At the word “home” Chick shuddered. It was the most terrible word in the
English language to him.
“What's the matter with your thumb, old fellow?” Miss Lady asked, seeing
his frightened look. “Come here, Skeeter, and tell me what he says.”
She relieved Chick of the young person whose parents were not in a
position to minister to his wants, and sat on the door-step between the
two boys, listening with flattering attention to a detailed description
of each hero's wounds and scars and how they had been received.
Mrs. Ivy, meanwhile, a veritable spider in the midst of a web
of institutions, was warily planning to ensnare every helpless,
poverty-stricken fly that came her way. To her, the web was not made
for the fly, but the fly for the web; supplying flies was her chief
occupation.
Standing just inside the kitchen door with her skirts still gathered
carefully about her, she viewed her surroundings with mournful sympathy.
“The fact are,” Phineas was saying as he held his coat together at the
collar, in a pretended effort to conceal his lack of a shirt, “that we
ain't been prosperin' since you was last here. Looks like the hand of
the Lord--”
“Ah, Mr. Flathers,” remonstrated Mrs. Ivy, with a finger on her lip,
“never forget that whom He loveth He chasteneth.”
“I don't, Mrs. Ivy, I don't. I keep that in mind. If it wasn't fer that,
Mrs. Ivy, I declare I don't know what I would do. Now you comin' to-day
was a answer to prayer! I just ast that some way would be pervided 'fore
the rent man come back at six o'clock. I didn't say in my prayer _what_
way, I just said _a_ way, that _a_ way would be pervided. And when I
seen you and the young lady turnin' in the alley, I sez to Maria, 'never
try to shake my faith no more, the clouds has been lifted!'”
Mrs. Ivy, who was much more given to dispensing morals than money,
shifted her position.
“Mr. Flathers,” she said, looking at him with what she conceived to be a
searching glance, “do you ever drink?”
Assuring himself that Chick had gotten the can quite out of sight,
Phineas looked at her reproachfully:
“Me? Why, Mrs. Ivy, I thought everybody knowed that since I joined the
Church--of course I ain't denying that there _was_ a time when I knowed
the taste of liquor. There ain't no good denying that, and, besides
confession is good fer me, it humbles my spirit, Mrs. Ivy, it keeps me
from being a publican.”
“And tobacco?” queried Mrs. Ivy. “Liquor and tobacco go hand in hand,
they are twin evils. Are you addicted to the use of tobacco?”
“Not me!” said Phineas, truthfully for once. “I ain't soiled my lips
with a seegar for over twenty years, and you couldn't git me to chew if
you chloroformed me. Ef liquor is the drink, terbaccer is the food of
the devil, as I see it.” Mrs. Ivy beamed upon him, as she opened the
silver bag at her belt. “I shall report your case at our next meeting,”
she said with enthusiasm. “I shall quote your very words. And now I
am going to pin this little badge on you, this little white badge that
tells the world you belong to the Anti-Tobacco League. You have the
honor of wearing what few of our greatest statesmen can wear! You have
proven that a humble laborer can lead the way to Reform.”
Miss Lady appeared at this point with the Boarder, who like most
individuals of his class, complained continuously of the quantity and
quality of his food.
“You find us in a bad way, Mis' Squeerington,” Phineas said, offering
her a bottomless chair with the air of a Christian martyr. “If my sister
Myrtella knowed the half of what we was passin' through she wouldn't
continue to steel her heart against us.”
“Myrtella's heart's all right,” said Miss Lady cheerfully; “she takes
care of Chick, doesn't she?”
“She does, mam, in a way. But there's heavy expenses on a pore man with
a family. Mrs. Flathers now ain't been able to have a see-ance since
before the baby come. She did give one trance settin' yesterday, but
she says she don't know what's got into her, she feels so sort of weak
like!”
“How long has she been taking care of this other baby?” Miss Lady asked.