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Lady Crusoe
by
I said that I was–a little. Billy had gone in to wait on a customer, so I dared say it. I told her that nobody had called.
“But why not?” she demanded.
“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 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.