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Lady Crusoe
by
“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 until whispers of wind stirred the trees, and then we went away and left our dear lady alone.
As the time went on we hated more and more to leave her, but she was very brave about it. “I have my good man Friday,” she told us, “to protect me, and my grandfather’s revolver.”
So the summer passed, and the fall came, and the busy robin and all of her red-breasted family started for the South, and there was rain and more rain, so that when October rolled around the roads were perfect rivers of red mud, and the swollen streams swept under the bridges in raging torrents of terra-cotta, and the sheep on the hills were pinker than ever. There was no lack of color in those gray days, for the trees burst through the curtain of mist in great splashes of red and green and gold. But now I did not go abroad with William Watters behind his old gray mule, for things had happened which kept me at home.