The Gay Cockade
"Look at that," I said, and laid it before him, "and she has asked us to
supper for next Sunday!"
Well, we couldn't make anything of it. Why was a woman with a name like
that down here with nothing to eat but the things that William Watters
could forage for, and that Billy could supply from his little store, and
that she paid for with Sheffield trays?
We had supper that Sunday night in the great dining-room. There was a
five-branched candlestick with tall white candles in the center of the
shining mahogany table and William Watters acted as butler. You never
would have believed how well he did it. And after supper we had coffee
on the front porch and looked out over the hills at the sunset, and the
silver moon and the old toad came out from under his stone and sat with
us.
Lady Crusoe was in a thin white dress which she had made for herself,
and she talked of the old place and of her childhood there. But not a
word did she say of why she had come back to live alone on the Davenant
ancestral acres.
It was her mother, we learned, who was a Davenant, and it was her
mother's father who was the old admiral. She said nothing of the man
whose name was on her card. It was as if she stopped short when she came
to that part of her life, or as if it had never been.
She took me up-stairs after a while and left Billy to smoke on the
porch. She said that she had something that she wanted me to see. Her
room was a huge square one at the southwest corner of the house. There
was a massive four-poster bed with faded blue satin curtains, and there
was a fireplace with fire-dogs and an Adam screen. Lady Crusoe carried a
candle, and as she stood in the center of the room she seemed to gather
all of the light to her, like the saints in the old pictures. She was so
perfectly lovely that I almost wanted to cry. I can't explain it, but
there was something pathetic about her beauty.
She set the candle down and opened an old brass-bound chest. She took
out a roll of cloth and brought it over and laid it on the table beside
the candle.
"I bought it with some of the money that your Billy got for my Sheffield
tray," she said. Then she turned to me with a quick motion and laid her
hands on my shoulders. "Oh, you very dear--when I saw you making those
little things--I knew that--that the good Lord had led me. Will
you--will you--show me--how?"
I told Billy about it on the way home.
"She doesn't know anything about sewing, and she hasn't any patterns,
and I am to go up every day, and William Watters will come for me with
his mule--"
Then I cried about her a little, because it seemed so dreadful that she
should be there all alone, without any one to sustain her and cherish
her as Billy did me.
"Oh, Billy, Billy," I said to him, "I'd rather live over a grocery store
with you than live in a palace with anybody else--"
And Billy said, "Don't cry, lady love, you are not going to live with
anybody else."
And he put his arm around me, and as we walked along together in the
April night it was like the days when we had been young lovers, only our
joy in each other was deeper and finer, for then we had only guessed at
happiness, and now we knew--
Well, I went up every day. William Watters came for me, and I carried my
patterns and we sat in the big west room, and right under the window a
pair of robins were building a nest.
We watched them as they worked, and it seemed to us that no matter how
hard we toiled those two birds kept ahead. "I never dreamed," Lady
Crusoe remarked one morning, "that they were at it all the time like
this."
"You wait until they begin to feed their young," I told her. "People
talk about being as free as a bird. But I can tell you that they slave
from dawn until dark. I have seen a mother bird at dusk giving a last
bite to one squalling baby while the father fed another."
Lady Crusoe laid down her work and looked out over the hills. "The
father," she said, and that was all for a long time, and we stitched and
stitched, but at last she spoke straight from her thoughts: "How dear
your husband is to you!"
"That's what husbands are made for."
"Some of them are not, dear," her voice was hard, "some of them expect
so much and give so little--"
I kept still and presently she began again. "They give money--and they
think that is--enough. They give jewels--and think we ought to be
profoundly grateful."
"Well, my experience," I told her, "is that the men give as much love as
the women--"
She looked at me. "What do you mean?"
"Love costs them a lot."
"In what way?"
"They work for us. Now there's Billy's grocery store. If Billy didn't
have me, he'd be doing things that he likes better. You wouldn't believe
it, but Billy wanted to study law, but it meant years of hard work
before he could make a cent, and he and I would have wasted our youth in
waiting--and so he went into business--and that's a big thing for a man
to do for a woman--to give up a future that he has hoped for--and that's
why I feel that I can't do enough for Billy--"
"I don't see why you should look at it in that way," she said, and her
eyes were big and bright. "Women are queens, and they honor men when
they marry them--"
"If women are queens," I told her, "men are kings--Billy honored me--"
She smiled at me. "Oh, you blessed dear--" she said, and all of a sudden
she came over and knelt beside me. "What would you think of a man who
married a woman whom the world called beautiful and brilliant, and
whom--whom princes wanted to marry--And he was a very plain man, except
that he had a lot of money--millions and millions--and after he married
the woman whom he had said that he worshiped, he wanted to make just an
every-day wife of her. He wanted her to stay at home and look after his
house. He told her one night that it would be a great happiness for him
if he could come in and find her warming--his slippers. And he said that
his ideal of a woman was one who--who--held a child in her arms--"
I looked down at her. "Well, right in the beginning," I said, "I should
like to know if the woman loved the man--"
She stared at me and then she stood up. "If she did, what then? She had
not married to be--his slave--"
I pointed to the mother robin on the branch below. "I wonder if she
calls it slavery! You see--she is so busy--building her nest she hasn't
time to think whether Cock Robin is singing fewer love songs than he
sang early in the spring."
She laughed and was down on her knees beside me again. "Oh, you funny
little practical thing! But it wasn't because I missed the love songs.
He sang them. But because I couldn't be an every-day wife--"
"What kind of wife did you want to be?"
"I wanted to travel with him alone--I planned a honeymoon in the desert,
and we had it--and I planned after that to sail the seas to the land of
Nowhere--and we sailed--and then--I wanted to go to the high plains--and
ride and camp--and into the forests to hunt and fish--but he wouldn't.
He said that we had wandered enough. He wanted to build a house--and
have me warm--his slippers--"
"And so you quarreled?"
"We quarreled--great hot heavy quarrels--and we said things--horrid
things--that we can't forgive--"
She was sobbing on my shoulder and I said softly: "Things that _you_
can't forgive?"
"Yes. And that _he_ can't. That's why I ran away from him."
I waited.
"I couldn't stand it to see him going around with his face stern and set
and not like my lover's. And he didn't speak to me except to be polite.
And he asked people to go with us--everywhere. And we were never
alone--"
"What had you said to make him--like that?"
She raised her head. "I told him that I--hated him--"
"Oh, oh--"
She knelt back on her heels.
"It was a dreadful thing to say, wasn't it? That's why I ran away. I
couldn't stand it. I knew it was a thing no man--could--forgive--"
I smoothed her hair and rocked her back and forth while she cried. It
was strange how much of a child she seemed to me. And I was only the
wife of a country grocer and lived over the store, and she was the wife
of a man whose name was known from east to west, and all around the
world. But you see she hadn't learned to live. Neither have I, really.
But Billy has taught me a lot.
I think it was a comfort for her to feel that she had confided in me.
But she made me promise that whatever happened I wouldn't let him know.
"Unless I--die," she said, and she was as white as a lily, "unless I
die, and then you can--set him--free--"
Billy was sorry that I had promised. "Somehow I feel responsible,
sweetheart, and I'll bet her poor husband is almost crazy."
"Would you be, Billy?"
He caught me to him so quickly that he almost shook the breath out of
me. "Don't ask a thing like that," he said, and his voice didn't sound
like his own. "If anything should happen to you--if anything should
happen--I should--I should--oh, why will women ask things like that--?"
In the days that followed, Billy didn't want me out of his sight. He
even hated to have me go up to the Davenant house with William Watters.
"Take care of her, William," he would say, and stand looking after us.
William and I got to be very good friends. He was a wise old darky, and
he was devoted to Lady Crusoe. He usually served tea for us out under
the trees, unless it was a rainy day, and then we had it in the library.
It was on a rainy day that Lady Crusoe said: "I wonder what has become
of William. I haven't seen him since you came. I have hunted and called,
and I can't find him."
He appeared at tea time, however, with a plate of hot waffles with
powdered sugar between. When his mistress asked him about his mysterious
disappearance, he said that he had cleaned the attic.
"But, William, on such a day?"
"I kain't wuk out in the rain, Miss Lily, so I wuks in--"
That was all he would say about it, and after we had had our tea, she
said to me, "There are a lot of interesting things in the attic. Let's
go up and see what Willie has been doing--"
The dim old place was as shining as soap and water could make it, and
there was the damp smell of suds. There was the beat of the rain on the
roof, and the splash of it against the round east window. Through the
west window came a pale green light, and there was a view over the
hills. As we became accustomed to the dimness our eyes picked out the
various objects--an old loom like a huge spider under a peaked gable, a
chest of drawers which would have set a collector crazy, Chippendale
chairs with the seats out, Windsor chairs with the backs broken, gilt
mirror frames with no glass in them--boxes--books--bottles--all the
flotsam and jetsam of such old establishments. Most of the things had
been set back against the wall, but right in the middle of the floor was
an object which I took at first for a small trunk.
Lady Crusoe reached it first, and knelt beside it. She gave a little
cry. "My dear, come here!" and I went to her, and in another moment, I,
too, was on my knees. For the dark object was a cradle--a lovely hooded
thing of mahogany, in which the Davenants had been rocked for
generations.
"William got it out," Lady Crusoe said, "ready to be carried down. Oh,
my good old man Friday! Do you mind if I cry a little, you very dear?"
It rained a great deal that summer, and it was hot and humid. Billy and
I longed for the cold winds that sweep across the sea on the North
Shore, but we didn't complain, for we had each other, and I wouldn't
exchange Billy for any breeze that blows.
Lady Crusoe suffered less than I, for she was on her native heath, and
in the afternoon when we sewed together William Watters made lemonade,
and in the evening when Billy came up for me we sat out under the stars