The Gay Cockade Part 42

"I think," I said slowly, "it is because we live--over the store."

"I see." And she did see; it was in her blood as well as in the blood of the rest of them.

Presently she stood up and said that she must go, and it was then that she noticed the work that was in my basket on the table. She lifted out a little garment and the red came into her cheeks. "Oh, oh!" she said, and stood looking at it. When she laid it down, she came around the table and kissed me. "What a dear you are!" she said, and then she went away.

William Watters came in very often after that; but he said very little about Lady Crusoe. He was a faithful old thing, and he had evidently had instructions. But one morning he brought a fine old Sheffield tray to Billy and asked him to take his pay out of it, and let Lady Crusoe have the rest in cash. William Watters didn't call her "Lady Crusoe," he called her "Miss Lily," which didn't give us the key to the situation in the least. Billy didn't know how to value the tray, so he asked me. I knew more than he did, but I wasn't sure. I told him to advance what he thought was best, and to send it to the city and have it appraised, or whatever they call it, so he did; and when the check from the antique shop came it was a big one.

It wasn't long after that that Lady Crusoe called on me. It was a real call, and she left a card. And she said as she laid it on the table: "As I told you, I'd rather the rest of the natives didn't know--they haven't seen me since I was a child, and they think that I am just some stranger who rents the old place and who wants to be alone."

After she had gone I picked up the card, and what I read there nearly took my breath away. There are certain names which mean so much that we get to look upon them as having special significance. The name that was on Lady Crusoe's card had always stood in my mind for money--oceans of it. I simply couldn't believe my eyes, and I took it down to Billy.

"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 s.h.i.+ning 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 ma.s.sive 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 bra.s.s-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 st.i.tched and st.i.tched, 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 wors.h.i.+ped, 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 c.o.c.k 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--"