CHAPTER XVII

BILLIE’S FIGHTING CHANCE

It was the Friday before Easter when they arrived. Jean looked around eagerly as she jumped to the platform, wondering which of the family would drive down to meet them, but instead of Kit or Shad, Ralph McRae stepped up to her with outstretched hand. All the way from Saskatoon, she thought, and just the same as he was a year before. As Kit had said then, in describing him:

“He doesn’t look as if he could be the hero, but he’d always be the hero’s best friend, like Mercutio was to Romeo, or Gratiano to Benvolio. If he couldn’t be Robin Hood, he’d be Will Scarlet, not Alan a Dale. I couldn’t imagine him ever singing serenades.”

Jean introduced him to Carlota, who greeted him in her pretty, half foreign way, and Mr. Briggs waved a welcome as he trundled the express truck past them down the platform.

“Looks a bit like rain. Good for the planters,” he called.

Princess took the long curved hill from the station splendidly, and Jean lifted her head to it all, the long overlapping hill range that unfolded as they came to the first stretch of level road, the rich green of the pines gracing their slopes, and most of all the beautiful haze of young green that lay like a veil over the land from the first bursting leaf buds.

“Oh, it’s good to be home,” she exclaimed. “Over at Cousin Beth’s the land seems so level, and I like hills.”

“They were having some sort of Easter exercises at school, and the girls could not drive down,” Ralph said. “Honey and I arrived two days ago, and I asked for the privilege of coming down. Shad’s busy planting out his first lettuce and radishes in the hotbeds, and Mrs. Robbins is up at the Judge’s today. Billie’s pretty sick, I believe.”

“Billie?” cried Jean. “Not Billie?”

Even to think of Billie’s being ill was absurd. It was like saying a raindrop had the measles, or the wind seemed to have an attack of whooping cough. He had never been sick all the years he had lived up there, bare headed winter and summer, free as the birds and animals he loved. All the long drive home she felt subdued in a way.

“He came back from school Monday and they are afraid of typhoid. I believe conditions at the school were not very good this spring, and several of the boys came down with it. But I’m sure if anybody could pull him through it would be Mrs. Ellis,” said Ralph.

But even with the best nursing and care, things looked bad for Billie. It was supper time before Mrs. Robbins returned. Carlota had formed an immediate friendship with Mr. Robbins, and they talked of her father, whom he had known before his departure for Italy. For anyone to have known and appreciated her father, was a sure passport to Carlota’s favor. It raised them immensely in her estimation, and she was delighted to find, as she said, “somebody whose eyes have really looked at him.”

Kit was indignant and stunned at the blow that had fallen on her chum, Billie. She never could take the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the proper humble spirit anyway.

“The idea that Billie should have to be sick,” she cried. “How long will he be in bed, Mother?”

“I don’t know, dear,” Mrs. Robbins said. “He’s sturdy and strong, but the fever usually has to run its course. Dr. Gallup came right over.”

“Bless him,” Kit put in fervently. “He’ll get him well in no time. I don’t think there ever was a doctor so set on making people well. I’d rather see him come in the door, no matter what ailed me, sit down and tell me I had just a little distemper, open his cute little black case, and mix me up that everlasting mess that tastes like cinnamon and sugar, than have a whole line up of city specialists tapping me.”

Helen and Doris clung closely to Jean, taking her and Carlota around the place to show her all the new chicks, orphans and otherwise. Greenacres really was showing signs of full return this year for the care and love spent on its rehabilitation. The fruit trees, after Shad’s pruning and fertilizing, and general treatment that made them look like swaddled babies, were blossoming profusely, and on the south slope of the field along the river, rows and rows of young peach trees had been set out. The garden too, had come in for its share of attention. Helen loved flowers, and had worked there more diligently than she usually could be coaxed to on any sort of real labor. Shad had cleared away the old dead canes first, and had plowed up the central plot, taking care to save all the perennials.

“You know what I wish, Mother dear,” said Helen, standing with earth stained fingers in the midst of the tangle of old vines and bushes. “I wish we could lay out paths and put stones down on them, flat stones, I mean, like flags. And have flower beds with borders. Could we, do you think? And maybe a sun dial. I’d love to have a sun dial in our family.”

Her earnestness made Mrs. Robbins smile, but she agreed to the plan, and Cousin Roxy helped out with slips from her flower store, so that the prospect for a garden was very good. And later Honey Hancock came up with Piney to advise and help too. The year out west had turned the bashful country boy into a stalwart, independent individual whom even Piney regarded with some respect. He was taller than her now, broad shouldered, and sure of himself.

“I think Ralph has done wonders with him,” Piney said. “Mother thinks so too. He can pick her right up in his arms now, and walk around with her. She doesn’t seem to mind going west any more, after seeing what it’s made of Honey, and hearing him tell of it. And Ralph says we’ll always keep the home here so that when we want to come back, we can. I think he likes Gilead someway. He says it never seems just like home way out west. You need to walk on the earth where your fathers and grandfathers have trod, and even to breathe the same air. Mother says the only place she hates to leave behind is our little family burial plot over in the woods.”

In the days following Easter, while Mrs. Robbins was over at the Ellis place helping care for Billie, Helen, Piney and Carlota formed a fast friendship, much to Jean and Kit’s wonderment. It was natural for Helen and Carlota to be chums, but Carlota was enthusiastic over Piney, her girl of the hills, as she called her.

“Oh, but she is glorious,” she cried, the first day, as she stood at the gate posts watching Piney dash down the hill road on Mollie. “My father would love to model her head. She is so fearless. And I am afraid of lots and lots of things. She is like the mountain girls at home. And her real name—Proserpine. It is so good to have a name that is altogether different. My closest girl friend at the convent was Signa Palmieri and she has a little sister named Assunta. I like them both, and I like yours, Jean. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” Jean answered, musingly, as she bent to lift up a convolvulus vine that was trying to lay its tendrils on the old stone wall. “It is the feminine of John, isn’t it?”

“Then it means beloved. That suits you.” Carlota regarded her seriously. “My aunt says you have the gift of charm and sympathy.”

Jean colored a little. She was not quite used to the utter frankness of Carlota’s Italian nature. While she and the other girls never hesitated to tell just what they thought of each other, certainly, as Kit would have said, nobody tossed over these little bouquets of compliment. It was entirely against the New England temperament.

Just as Carlota started to say more there came a long hail from the hill, and coming down they saw Kit and Sally Peckham, with long wooden staffs. Sally dawned on Carlota with quite as much force as Piney had. Her heavy red gold hair hung today in two long plaits down her back. She wore a home-made blue cloth skirt and a loose blouse of dark red, with the neck turned in, and one of her brothers’ hats, a grey felt affair that she had stuck a quail’s wing in.

“Hello,” called Kit, “we’ve been for a hike, clear over to the village. Mother ’phoned she needed some things from the drug store, so we thought we’d walk over and get them. Billie’s just the same. He don’t know a soul, and all he talks about is making his math. exams. I think it’s perfectly shameful to take a boy like that who loves reading and nature and natural things, and grind him down to regular stuff.”

She reached the stone gateway, and sat down on a rock to rest, while Jean introduced Sally, who bowed shyly to the slim strange girl in black.

“I didn’t know you had company, excepting Mr. McRae,” she said. “Kit wanted me to walk over with her.”

“I love a good long hike,” interrupted Kit. “Specially when I feel bothered or indignant. We’ve kept up the hike club ever since the roads opened up, Jean. It’s more fun than anything out here, I never realized there was so much to know about just woods and fields until Sally taught me where to hunt for things. Do you like to hike, Carlota?”

“Hike?” repeated Carlota, puzzled. “What is it?”

“A hike is a long walk.”

Carlota laughed in her easy-going way.

“I don’t know. Not too long. I think I’d rather ride.”

“I also,” Helen said flatly. “I don’t see a bit of fun dragging around like Kit does, through the woods and over swamps, climbing hills, and always wanting to get to the top of the next one.”

“Oh, but I love to,” Kit chanted. “Maybe I’ll be a mountain climber yet. Children, you don’t grasp that it is something strange and interesting in my own special temperament. The longing to attain, the—the insatiable desire to seize adventure and follow her fleeing footsteps, the longing to tap the stars on their foreheads and let them know I’m here.”

“Kit’s often like this,” said Helen, confidentially to Carlota. “You mustn’t mind her a bit. You see, she believes she is the genius of the family, and sometimes, I do too, almost.”

“There may be a spark in each of us,” Kit said generously. “I’ll not claim it all. Let’s get back to the house. I’m famished, and I’ve coaxed Sally to stay and lunch with us.”

“What good times many can have,” Carlota slipped her arm in Jean’s on the walk back through the garden. “Sometimes I wish I had been many too, I mean with brothers and sisters. You feel so oddly when you are all the family in yourself.”

“Well,” laughed Jean, “it surely has some disadvantages, for every single one wants something different at the same identical moment, and that is comical now and then, but we like being a tribe ourselves. I think the more one has to divide their interests and sympathies, the more it comes back to them in strength. Cousin Roxy said that to me once, and I liked it. She said no human beings should have all their eggs in one nest, but make a beautiful omelet of them for the feeding of the multitude. Isn’t that good?”

Carlota had not seen Cousin Roxy yet. With Billie down seriously ill, the Judge’s wife had shut out the world at large, and instituted herself his nurse in her own sense of the word, which meant not only caring for him, but enfolding him in such a mantle of love and inward power of courage that it would have taken a cordon of angels to get him away from her.

Still, those were long anxious days through the remainder of April. Mrs. Gorham and Jean managed the other house, while Mrs. Robbins helped out at the sick room. There was a trained nurse on hand too, but her duties were largely to wait on Cousin Roxy, and as Mrs. Robbins said laughingly, it was the only time in her life when she had seen a trained nurse browbeaten.

Kit was restless and uneasy over her chum’s plight. She would saddle Princess and ride over on her twice a day to see what the bulletins were, and sometimes sit out in the old fashioned garden watching the windows of the room where Cousin Roxy kept vigil. She almost resented the joyous activity of the bees and birds in their spring delirium when she thought of their comrade Billie, lying there fighting the fever.

And oddly enough, the old Judge would join her, he who had lived so many years ignoring Billie’s existence, sit and hold her hand in his, gazing out at the sunlight and the growing things of the old garden, and now and then giving vent to a heavy sigh. He, too, missed his boy, and realized what it might mean if the birds and bees and ants and all the rest of Billie’s small brotherhood, were to lose their friend.

Jean never forget the final night. She had a call over the telephone from her mother about nine, to leave Mrs. Gorham in charge, and come to her.

“Dear, I want you here. It’s the crisis, and we can’t be sure what may happen. Billie’s in a heavy sleep now, and the old Doctor says we can just wait. Cousin Roxy is with him.”

Jean laid off her outer cloak and hat, and went in where old Dr. Gallup sat. It always seemed foolish to call him old although his years bordered on three score. His hair was gray and straggled boyishly as some football hero’s, his eyes were brown and bright, and his smile something so much better than medicine that one just naturally revived at the sight of him, Cousin Roxy used to say. He sat by the table, looking out the window, one hand tapping the edge, the other deep in his pocket. One could not have said whether he was taking counsel of Mother Nature, brooding out there in the shadowy spring night, or lifting up his heart to a higher throne.

“Hello, Jeanie, child,” he said, cheerily. “Going to keep me company, aren’t you? Did you come up alone?”

“Shad drove me over. Doctor, Billie is all right, isn’t he?”

“We hope so,” answered the old doctor. “But what is it to be all right? If the little lad’s race is run, it has been a good one, Jeanie, and he goes out fearlessly, and if not, then he is all right too, and we hope to hold him with us. But when this time comes and it’s the last sleep before dawn, there’s nothing to do but watch and wait.”

“But do you think—”

Jean hesitated. She could not help feeling he must know what the hope was.

“He’s got a fine fighting chance,” said the doctor. “Now, I’m going in with Mrs. Ellis, and you comfort the Judge and brace him up. He’s in the study there.”

It was dark in the study. Jean opened the door gently, and looked in. The old Judge sat in his deep, old arm chair by the desk, and his head was bent forward. She did not say a word, but tiptoed over, and knelt beside him, her cheek against his sleeve. And the Judge laid his arm around her shoulders in silence, patting her absent-mindedly. So they sat until out of the windows the garden took on a lighter aspect, and there came the faint twittering of birds wakening in their nests.

Jean, watching the beautiful miracle of the dawn, marvelled. The dew lent a silvery radiance to every blade of grass, every leaf and twig. There was an unearthly, mystic beauty to the whole landscape and the garden. She thought of a verse the girls had found once, when they had traced Piney’s name in poesy for Kit’s benefit, one from “The Garden of Proserpine.” Something about the pale green garden, and these lines,

“From too much love of living, From joy and care set free.”

And just then the old doctor put his head in the door and sang out cheerily,

“It’s all right. Billie’s awake.”