A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill
late and you must be dead tired. You go to bed. I'll understand.”
Donald, standing a few steps above her, shot a questioning glance at
her, then he, too, understood.
“Oh, all right,” he said, biting his lip; “I believe I won't come down.
You might send Marge up, after the people leave, just to say 'Hello.'”
“Of course, we'll both be up. Nothing could hold her if she knew you
were here. But it is better that nobody should know. I was careful not
to mention your name before the servants. You can have a nice little
visit with us, and get away again without any one being the wiser. It is
so lovely you got here in time for Christmas! _Good_ night.” She came up
two steps and presented her other cheek for a kiss.
The delinquent John, meanwhile, was performing acrobatic feats with the
bags, getting them so mixed up with his own legs and the stair steps
that Donald snatched them from him, and, eliciting a vague direction
concerning the room he was to occupy, went up to find it alone.
He felt something of the hot rebellion and resentment that he had
experienced on another Christmas night in the long ago, when the
cross-eyed French nurse had put him to bed at five o'clock and left
him alone in the big hotel in Paris. Then he had cried himself to
sleep because there wasn't any Santa Claus and because he didn't have a
sweetheart. But the consolations of six are denied to twenty-five.
On the second floor he followed directions and turned to the right. The
dressing-rooms were deserted, the maids having taken their seats on the
steps to peep at the dancers below. He, too, paused, and looked down at
the gaily whirling throng. There was his old familiar world, the fellows
he had been through college with, the girls he had flirted with, the
very music he had danced to, times without numbers. And he was as much
out of it all as if he had died of the fever in that gray old hospital
in Singapore? Ah, if he only had!
He turned abruptly and started up the second flight of stairs, and as he
did so something rose precipitately from the steps, and fluttered ahead
of him.
He looked up and as he did so chaos broke loose within him. There at the
top, in the subdued light from the upper hall, startled, uncertain,
off her guard stood Miss Lady, not the pretty, harum-scarum girl of his
dreams, but a beautiful, wistful woman with trembling lips and startled
eyes, who held out her hands to him in involuntary welcome.
He lost his head completely. All the blood in his body rushed to his
throat. Something sang through every fiber of him.
“Miss Lady!” he cried, catching the hands she extended in both of his,
then as she drew back from his too ardent look, he remembered. “I beg
your pardon of course it's Mrs. Queerington, now.”
“Not to you, Don. When did you come? Are you well again? Didn't any one
know you were coming? Have the others seen you?”
She poured forth her questions eagerly, as if she feared another pause.
She was making a desperate effort to appear easy, but her eagerness
betrayed her. She repeated that she had no idea he was in America, and
took refuge in a general assurance that everybody would be so glad to
have him home again.
Donald, lean and tanned, stood silent, watching her searchingly. His
deep-set eyes were clearer and steadier than of old, but they were no
longer the eyes of a boy. He was like a mariner whose ship has been
wrecked. He had nothing worse to dread and nothing to hope for. He
simply desired to see the rock on which his life craft had smashed.
Miss Lady continued to ask questions, but she evidently did not always
heed the answers as she asked some of them twice over. It was not until
Donald's trouble was touched upon that her mood steadied and she lost
her self-consciousness.
“Of course you must stand the trial,” she said, and her voice rang with
the old assurance; “you must fight the whole matter out once for all,
and prove your innocence.”
“Oh, the Court will prove that all right, but what does it matter? If
people were willing to damn me without hearing, to believe that I had
shot a man's eye out, then run away to escape the punishment--Bah! it's
sickening.”
“But everybody doesn't believe it. The Doctor doesn't, nor Margery, nor
Cropsie Decker, nor I. Hundreds of your friends are ready to stand by
you. Don't listen to what anybody else says, but stay and fight it out.”
He looked up suddenly. “Did you ever get that letter I wrote you before
I sailed from 'Frisco?”
He hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, the question that had
tortured him so long, but her sympathy and friendliness had unnerved
him.
Leaning forward with all his soul in his eyes, he watched the color
mount steadily from her throat to her cheeks, then to her brow. He heard
her draw a sharp, quivering breath as one who walks on a precipice, then
she faced him steadily.
“Yes, Donald,” she said, meeting his gaze unflinchingly, “I got it.”
He dropped his head on his hand where it rested on the banister, and
they stood for a moment in silence save for the strains of music that
came up from below. Then he straightened his shoulders.
“That's all. I had to make sure, you know. And you didn't believe in
me?”
Across her face quivered the desire for speech, and the necessity for
silence.
“I do believe in you, Don,” she said earnestly. “I believe in you with
all my heart and soul. And we are going to be your friends; you'll let
us, the Doctor and me?”
He took the hand she offered, but he said nothing, and after she was
gone he went into his room, and flinging himself across the bed, buried
his face in the pillows.
CHAPTER XIX
The new year began inauspiciously at the Queerington's. In the first
place Bertie woke up with the chickenpox and was banished to the
nursery. Then the Doctor followed his annual custom of going over his
business affairs, with the usual result that he found his accounts
greatly overdrawn. This fact was solemnly communicated to each member of
the family in turn together with admonitions in regard to the future. By
lunch time Hattie had been sent to her room for impertinently suggesting
that her father spent more on his books than she did on her clothes, and
Connie was sulking over a reduced allowance.
“Of course,” the Doctor explained to Miss Lady as he sank exhausted into
his invalid chair which had been pressed into service again during
the past few weeks, “I have no doubt but that Basil Sequin can arrange
things for me. He always has in the past, but he seems very pressed of
late, very harassed. I hardly like to approach him so soon again for a
loan.”
“Couldn't we rent a smaller house, and have less company?” suggested
Miss Lady.
The Doctor shook his head. “It would be very difficult for me to adjust
myself to new surroundings. The conditions here for my work are fairly
satisfactory. The Ivy's piano, to be sure, is a constant annoyance, but
by using cotton in my ears I obviate that nuisance. It is particularly
unfortunate that this complication about money should come just at
the most critical point of my work. Unless Basil Sequin can make some
arrangement, I shall be seriously embarrassed.”
“I'll tell you what we can do,” cried Miss Lady brightly, just as if she
had not been trying to get herself up to the point of making the offer
for a week. “We can sell off another bit of Thornwood. Since the Sequins
built out there ever so many people have asked about ground.”
“No,” said the Doctor, the lines of care deepening in his fine, grave
face. “There is little left now but the house and farm. Your sentiment
regarding the place is such that I cannot permit the sacrifice. The
matter will doubtless adjust itself. I shall take some private pupils
at the university and perhaps arrange an extra course of lectures. The
exigencies of the past two years have been exceptional.”
“But you are already working yourself to death,” protested Miss Lady.
“Doctor Wyeth said last week that you could not stand the strain. The
rest of us ought to do something; we must do something!”
“You are doing something, my dear. You are relieving me of innumerable
burdens in regard to the house and the children. You are proving of
great assistance to me in my work, not only by your reading aloud,
but by the unfailing sympathy and understanding you give me. Whatever
success shall crown my life work will be in a measure due to you.”
She was sitting on a hassock at his feet, and she looked up at him with
strange, dumb eyes. His frail body and towering ambition, his loveless
life that knew not what it missed, roused in her a pity almost maternal.
A fierce resentment rose within her against herself, for not loving him
as she knew a husband should be loved. If he had only won her with his
heart instead of his head!
The door bell rang and Miss Lady glanced up apprehensively.
“It was the pickle woman,” announced Myrtella, coming in a moment later
from the hall. “I sent her about her business.”
“Not Miss Ferney!” cried Miss Lady, springing up and rushing out to call
her.
Miss Ferney Foster with much difficulty was persuaded to return and sit
on the edge of a hall chair. On New Year's in the past she had always
made a formal call at Thornwood and presented the Colonel with a sample
of her best wares. The Colonel in turn had invariably sent down cellar
for one of the cobwebbiest bottles on the swinging shelf and bestowed
it upon her with great gallantry. The indignity of having been refused
admittance at the house of the Colonel's daughter was almost more than
she could bear.
“Now, tell me about everybody out home,” demanded Miss Lady eagerly.
“Begin at the bottom of the hill and go right straight up.”
“I don't know much news,” Miss Ferney said, plucking at the fingers of
her cotton gloves. “I been sewing up to the Sequins' all week.”
“Mercy! How grand we are getting!”
“Just hemming table clothes and napkins. I can't say I think much of
their new place. It's kind of skimpy.”
“Why, Miss Ferney! It is the biggest house I was even in!”
“I ain't talking 'bout the size. I'm talking 'bout the fixings.
There ain't a single carpet that fits the floor by two feet, and the
wallpaper's patched in every room but one. As for the dining-room! Well,
I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes! They
haven't got a picture, or a tidy, or a curtain, or a lamberkin, of any
kind. 'Spose I oughtn't to tell it on 'em, but the day I was there they
didn't even have a tablecloth!”
Miss Lady laughed in spite of herself, and Bertie heard her and got out
of bed to call over the banisters that if they were telling jokes to
please come up there.
“You know that young man that used to be out to the Wickers'?” asked
Miss Ferney on the way up. “Well, he's Mrs. Sequin's brother. He's
giving 'em considerable trouble.”
“How do you mean?”
“They want him to go 'way somewheres, and he won't do it. The servant
girl told me that him and his sister had been having it up and down, and
that Miss Margery took his side.”
“Is he going to stay?” Miss Lady paused and her fingers gripped the
banister.
“I dunno. I guess if he gits mad enough he'll run off to China like he
did before. Ain't that somebody calling you?”
It was Connie who had run up to say that a young man was at the front
door who looked like a tombstone with a blond pompadour.
“Noah Wicker!” exclaimed Miss Lady. “I forgot that I told him I would
try to get him into Mr. Gooch's law office the first of the year. Wasn't
it like him to arrive the first day? You go down, Connie, that's a
darling, and entertain him 'til I come. I'll be there directly.”
But “directly” proved an elastic term, for after Miss Ferney had left,