Chapter 14

Billy and I came down from the North and opened a grocery store at Jefferson Corners. It is a little store and there aren't many houses near it--just the railroad station and a big shed or two. Beyond the sheds a few cabins straggle along the road, and then begin the great plantations, which really aren't plantations any more, because nobody around here raises much of anything in these days. They just sit and sigh over the things that are different since the war.

That's what Billy says about them. Billy is up-to-date and he has a motor-cycle. He made up his mind when he came that he was going to put some ginger into the neighborhood. So he rides miles every morning on his motor-cycle to get orders, and he delivers the things himself unless it is barrels of flour or cans of kerosene or other heavy articles, and then he hires somebody to help him. At first he had William Watters and his mule. William is black and his mule is gray, and they are both old. It took them hours to get anywhere, and I used to feel sorry for them. But when I found out that compared to Billy and me they lived on flowery beds of ease, I stopped sympathizing. They both have enough, to eat, and they work only when they want to. Billy and I work all the time. We have our way to make in the world, and we feel that it all depends on ourselves. We started out with nothing ahead of us but my ambitions and Billy's energy, and a few hundred dollars which my guardian turned over to me when I married Billy on my twenty-first birthday.

As soon as we were married, we came to Virginia. Billy and I had an idea that everything south of the Mason and Dixon line was just waiting for us, and we wanted to earn the eternal gratitude of the community by helping it along. But after we had lived at Jefferson Corners for a little while, we began to feel that there wasn't any community. There didn't seem to be any towns like our nice New England ones, with sociable trolley-cars connecting them and farmhouses in a lovely line between. You can ride for miles through this country and never pass anything but gates. Then way up in the hills you will see a clump of trees, and in the clump you can be pretty sure there is a house. In the winter when the leaves are off the trees you can see the house, but in the summer there is no sign of it. In the old days they seemed to feel that they were lacking somewhat in delicacy if they exposed their mansions to the rude gaze of the public.

There was one mansion that Billy took me to now and then. It was empty, and that was why we went. The big houses which were occupied were not open to us, except in a trades-person sort of fashion, and Billy and I are not to be condescended to--we had a pair of grandfathers in the _Mayflower_. But that doesn't count down here, where everybody goes back to William the Conqueror.

That great big empty house was a fine place for our Sunday afternoon outings. We always went to church in the morning, and people were very kind, but it was kindness with a question-mark. You see Billy and I live over the store, and none of them had ever lived on anything but ancestral acres.

So our Sunday mornings were a bit stiff and disappointing, but our afternoons were heavenly. We discovered the Empty House in the spring, and there was laurel on the mountains and the grass was young and green on the slopes, and the sky was a faint warm blue with the sailing buzzards black against it. Billy and I used to stop at the second gate, which was at the top of the hill, and look off over the other hills where the pink sheep were pastured. I am perfectly sure that there are no other sheep in the whole wide world like those Albemarle sheep. The spring rains turn the red clay into a mud which sticks like paint, and the sheep are colored a lovely terra-cotta which fades gradually to pink.

The effect is impressionistic, like purple cows. Billy doesn't care for it, but I do. And I adore the brilliant red of the roads. Billy says he'll take good brown earth and white flocks. He might be reconciled to black sheep but never to pink ones.

We used to eat our supper on the porch of the Empty House. It had great pillars, and it was rather awe-inspiring to sit on the front steps and look up the whole length, of those Corinthian columns. Billy and I felt dwarfed and insignificant, but we forgot it when we turned our eyes to the hills.

The big door behind us and the blank windows were shut and shuttered close. There were flying squirrels on the roof and little blue-tailed lizards on the stone flagging in front of the house; and there was an old toad who used to keep us company. I called him Prince Charming, and I am sure he was as old as Methuselah, and lived under that stone in some prehistoric age.

We just loved our little suppers. We had coffee in our thermos bottle, and cold fried chicken and bread and butter sandwiches and chocolate cake. We never changed, because we were always afraid that we shouldn't like anything else so well, and we were sure of the chicken and the chocolate cake.

And after we had eaten our suppers we would talk about what kind of house we would build when our ship came in. Billy and I both have nice tastes, and we know what we want; and we feel that the grocery store is just a stepping-stone to better things.

The sunsets were late in those spring days, and there would be pink and green and pale amethyst in the western sky, and after that deep sapphire and a silver moon. And as it grew darker the silver would turn to gold, and there would be a star--and then more stars until the night came on.

I can't tell you how we used to feel. You see we were young and in love, and life was a pretty good thing to us. There was one perfect night when the hills were flooded with moonlight. We seemed all alone in a lovely world and I whispered:

"Oh, Billy, Billy, and some folks think that there isn't any God--"

And Billy put his arm around me and patted my cheek, and we didn't say anything for a long time.

It was just a week later that Lady Crusoe came. I knew that some one was in the house as soon as we passed the second gate. The door was still closed, and the shutters were not opened, but I heard a clock strike--a ship's clock--with bells.

I clutched Billy. "Listen," I said.

He heard it, too; "Who in the dickens?" he demanded.

"There's somebody in the house--"

"Nonsense--"

"Billy, there must be, and we can't sit on the porch."

"You stay here, and I'll go around to the back."

But I wouldn't let him go alone. At the back of the house a window was open, and then we were sure.

"We'd better leave," I said, but Billy insisted that we stay. "If they are new people, I'll find out their names, and come up to-morrow and get their orders."

We went around to the front door and knocked and knocked, but nobody answered. So we sat down on the front step and presently Billy said that we might as well eat our supper, for very evidently nobody was at home.

I didn't feel a bit comfortable about it, but I opened our basket and got out our cups and plates, and Billy poured the coffee and passed the chicken and the bread and butter sandwiches. And just then the door creaked and the knob turned!

My first impulse was to gather up the lunch and tumble it into the basket; but I didn't. I just sat there looking up as calmly as if I were serving tea at my own table, and Billy sat there too looking up.

The door opened and a voice said, "Oh, if you are eating supper, may I have some?"

It was a lovely voice, and Billy jumped to his feet. A lovely head came after the voice. Just the head, peeping around--the body was hidden by the door. On the head was a lace cap with a gold rose, and the hair under the cap was gold.

"You see, I just got up," said the voice, "and I haven't had any breakfast--"

Billy and I gasped. It was seven P.M., and the meal that we were serving was supper!

"Do you mind my coming out?" said the voice. "I am not exactly clothed and in my right mind, but perhaps I'll do."

She opened the door wider and stepped down. I saw that her slippers had gold roses and that they were pale pink like the sunset. She wore a motor coat of tan cloth which covered her up, but I had a glimpse of a pink silk negligee underneath.

She sat quite sociably on the steps with us. "I am famished," she said. "I haven't had a thing to eat for twenty-four hours."

We gasped again. "How did it happen?"

"I was--shipwrecked," she said, "in a motor-car--I am the only survivor--"

Her eyes twinkled. "I'll tell you all about it presently." Then she broke off and laughed.

"But first will you feed a starving castaway?"

Yet she didn't really tell us anything. She ate and ate, and it was the prettiest thing to see her. She was dainty and young and eager like a child at a party.

"How good everything is!" she said, at last with a sigh. "I don't think I was ever so hungry in my life."

Billy and I didn't eat much. You see we were too interested, and besides we had had our dinner.

As I have said, she didn't really tell us anything. "It was an accident, and I came up here. And the old clock that you heard strike belonged to my grandfather. He was an admiral, and it was his clock. I used to listen to it as a child."

"What happened to the rest--?" Billy asked, bluntly. He was more concerned about the automobile accident than about her ancestors.

"Oh, do you mean the others in the car?" she came reluctantly back from the admiral and his ship's clock. "I am sure I don't know. And I am very sure that I don't care."

"But were any of them killed?"

"No--they are all alive--but you see--it was a shipwreck--and I floated away--by myself--and this is my island, and you are the nice friendly savages--" she touched Billy on the arm. He drew away a bit. I knew that he was afraid she had lost her mind, but I had seen her twinkling eyes. "Oh, it's all a joke!" I said.

She shook her head. "It isn't exactly a joke, but it might look like that to other people."

"Are you going to stay?"

"Yes."

"I'll come up in the morning for orders," said Billy promptly. "I keep the grocery store at Jefferson Corners."

"Oh," she said, and seemed to hesitate; "there won't be any orders."

Billy stared at her. "But there isn't any other store."

"Robinson Crusoe didn't have stores, did he? He found things and lived on the land. And I am Lady Crusoe."

"Really?" I asked her.

"I've another name--but--if people around here question you--you won't tell them, will you, that I am here--?"

She said it in such a pretty pleading fashion that of course we promised. It was late when we had to go. I insisted that we should leave what remained of the supper, and she seemed glad to get it. "You are nice friendly savages," she said, with that twinkle in her eyes, "and I am very grateful. Come into the house and let me show you my clock--"

She showed us more than the clock. I hadn't dreamed in those days when Billy and I sat alone on the steps of the treasures that were shut up behind us. The old furniture was dusty, but all the dust in the world couldn't hide its beauty. The dining-room was hung with cobwebs, but when the candles were lighted we saw the Sheffield on the old sideboard, the Chinese porcelains, the Heppelwhite chairs, the painted sheepskin screen--

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?"

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.

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 massive 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 brass-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 stitched and stitched, 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 worshiped, 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 Cock 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--"