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Lady Crusoe
by
She picked out a lovely little pitcher and gave it to me. I did not learn until afterward that it was pink lustre and worth a pretty penny. She paid in that way, you see, for her supper, and something in her manner made me feel that I must not refuse it.
She did not ask us to come again, yet I was sure that she liked us. I felt that perhaps it was the grocery store which had made her hesitate. But whatever it was, I must confess that I was a little lonely as I went away. You see we had come to look forward to our welcome at the Empty House. We had known that we were the honored guests of the flying squirrels and the lizards and of old Prince Charming. But now that the house was no longer empty, we would not be welcome. I was sorry that I had accepted the pink pitcher. I should have preferred to feel that I owed no favor to the lady with the twinkling eyes.
It wasn’t long after our adventure at the Empty House that Billy asked William Watters to take a big load to a customer two miles out. But William couldn’t. He was working, he said, at a regular place. We couldn’t imagine William as being regular about anything. He and his mule were so irregular in their habits. They came and went as they pleased, and they would take naps whenever the spirit moved them. But now, as William said, he was “wukin’ regular,” and he refused to say for whom he worked. But we found out one day when he drove Lady Crusoe down in a queer old carriage with his mule as a prancing steed.
He helped her descend as if she had been a queen, and she came in and talked to Billy. “You see, I’ve hunted up my friendly savages,” she said. “I’ve reached the end of my resources.” She gave a small order, and told Billy that she wasn’t at all sure when she could pay her bill, but that there were a lot of things in her old house which he could have for security.
Billy said gallantly that he didn’t need any security, and that her account could run as long as she wished and that he was glad to serve her. And he got out his pad and pencil and stood in that nice way of his at attention.
I listened and looked through a window at the back. I had seen her drive up, and she was stunning in the same tan motor-coat that she had worn when we first saw her. But she had on a brown hat and veil and brown shoes instead of the lace cap and rosy slippers.
She asked about me, and Billy told her that I was in the garden. And I was in the garden when she came out; but I had to run. She sat down in a chair on the other side of my little sewing-table and talked to me. It is such a scrap of a garden that there is only room for a tiny table and two chairs, but a screen of old cedars hides it from the road, and there’s a twisted apple-tree, and the fields beyond and a glimpse of the mountains.
“How is the island?” Billy asked her.
She twinkled. “I have a man Friday.”
“William Watters?”
She nodded. “The Watters negroes have been our servants for generations. And William thinks that he belongs to me. He cooks for me and forages. He shot two squirrels one morning and made me a Brunswick stew. But I couldn’t stand that. You see the squirrels are my friends.”
I thought of the flying squirrels and the blue-tailed lizards and the old toad, and I knew how she felt. And I said so. She looked at me sharply, and then she laid her hand over mine: “Are you lonely, my dear?”