A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill Part 16

"Good or bad, they are all the same to me. Just as soon have a fly under my mosquito bar as a man buzzing around in my house. When's he going?"

"To-morrow. Will that be too soon for you to come over?"

"No, I'm ready to come. Sis 'Lizzie will be sure to try some of those new-fangled receipts and spoil a bushel or two of cuc.u.mbers, but I said I'd come and I will. What is this Jimpson is telling me about your taking the examinations for the county school?"

Miss Lady sighed: "I may have to teach; I don't know."

"Sell off some more land. You don't need a hundred acres."

"We've sold too much already! It will be the house next. I am determined to hold on to Thornwood if the roof tumbles in on my head!"

"I know how you feel," said Miss Ferney whose sentiments ran to real estate. "I've been saving every nickel I made for nearly twenty years to buy back our place. From all the talk we heard last spring, Sis Lizzie rather allowed you was going to get married."

"Well, I am not."

"I am glad of it. Folks are keen enough to believe in every beau a girl has 'til she's thirty. After that they don't believe in any of them. Sis was misled by what they told her over at the Wickers'."

"What did they tell her?" asked Miss Lady, training a rebellious moon vine up the trellis.

"Oh, they told her about that young city fellow you was rampaging all over the country with last spring. Mrs. Wicker said he hadn't a thought in his head but you. That he wore her plumb out telling her about you, just as if she hadn't help raise you on a bottle!"

Miss Lady still found the vine absorbing, but she took time to say over her shoulder:

"Tell your sister and Mrs. Wicker that that young man has gone to China."

"Well, n.o.body could wish him further! I hope he will stay. You are too nice a girl to get married. What do women want to marry for anyway? Look at me! Forty years single and not one minute of it spent in wishing I was married! I glory in my independence, I glory in my freedom."

Miss Ferney was allowed to glory undisturbed, for Miss Lady, leaning against the railing of the porch, had apparently forgotten her existence.

"You just make up your mind to take that school job, and lead a useful, independent life. I know a teacher in Shelby County that's had the same school for fifteen years, ever since she was a plump, pretty girl, and she's thin as I am now, and gray as a rat. Kept that same position and done well all these years."

Miss Lady wheeled suddenly and flung out her arms:

"If you don't hush this minute, Miss Ferney, I'll run off and join the circus! I'd lots rather stand on one toe in fluffy, spangled skirts, and jump through a hoop than teach school!"

Miss Ferney looked scandalized: "You don't seem right well," she said as if in excuse for such flippancy. "I do believe you've got a fever. I'm going straight home and mix you up a tonic."

Miss Lady sat for some time on the steps with her eyes on the distant river. Up the hillside the treetops rippled in the breeze, and down in the valley the winding stream danced in the shallows or loitered in brown pools to whisper secrets to the low-hanging boughs. The world seemed to her not only very beautiful, but very lonesome, and the vow of eternal celibacy, made to Uncle Jimpson, loomed large and terrible in the presence of Miss Ferney.

"Oh, here you are," said the nurse, coming around the house; "the Doctor has been refusing to lie down until you come out to the garden. He says he needs you for something. Deliver me from convalescents!"

Miss Lady laughed and ran down the path to the garden, where the Doctor greeted her with his rarest smile. The rest of the morning they pored over ma.n.u.scripts, sorting notes, and making corrections, she happy in having even a tiny share in his great work, and he finding her enthusiasm and interest a welcome condiment to stir his jaded appet.i.te for his task. Meanwhile, a bedraggled little rose languished unnoticed beneath the ma.n.u.script of "The History of Norman Influence on English Language and Literature."

CHAPTER XI

For three hundred and sixty-five days Myrtella Flathers held undisputed sway in the house of Queerington. The Doctor's semi-invalidism, after his return from Thornwood, threw all responsibility upon her, and while she permitted him to wear the crown, it was she who wielded the scepter.

Never had the house been in such immaculate order, nor the young Queeringtons appeared in such presentable garments, and never had the front door been slammed so persistently in the face of unwelcome guests.

For the Queerington family tree was afflicted with too many branches.

There were little dry twigs of maidenly cousins, knotted and dwarfed stumps of half-gone uncles and aunts, vigorous, demanding shoots of nephews and niece's, all of whom had hitherto imposed upon the Doctor's slender income, and his too generous hospitality.

Myrtella objected to the inroads these invaders made on his time and strength, and she also objected to the extra work their presence entailed upon her. In short, she felt that the family tree needed pruning, and she set herself right heartily to the job. By persistent discourtesy she managed to lop off one relative after another, until she gained for the Doctor a privacy hitherto undreamed of.

"There ain't a hour in the day that I ain't headin' off somebody!" she triumphantly announced one day to the cook from next door. "When I come here you'd 'a' thought it was a railroad station, people comin' and goin' with satchels; and bells a-ringin', and trunks being dragged over the carpets. Dirt from the top of the house to the bottom; Miss Hattie with her petticoats hanging down below her dress; and all the neighbor children racing in and out, and actually takin' the mattress off Bertie's bed to coast down the stairs on!"

"In the name of St. Patrick!" sympathized Norah, the visitor; "and their pa not doin' nothin' with 'em at all?"

"Who said he wasn't?" blazed Myrtella instantly. "You'll be hintin'

around next that I was talkin' about the Doctor behind his back. You're fixin' to lose me my place, that's what you are doin'."

"Not me! It's braggin' on you I was not over a week ago, sayin' what a fine, nice cook you was, and how grand and clean it was over here."

"Of course," said Myrtella haughtily, "I may not be workin' fer a lady that's so smart she wouldn't even know her own kitchen if she met it walkin' up the street. I may not work in a house where they pull down the shades and burn red lamps in the day time to keep from showin' the dirt under the sofa. We don't keep two servants and not have enough to feed 'em, but _I'm_ satisfied. At least fer the present. The day will come when I won't have to be in service to no one. I'm puttin' by each week, and the time ain't distant when I'll be settin' at the head of my own boardin'-house table, an' it will be 'Miss Flathers,' if you please!

You, Bertie!" this to a frail-looking little boy in the back yard. "You git up off the gra.s.s this minute! Fixin' to catch the croup and have me up with you all night, like I was last week."

"Sure 'n I might find a worse place than Mrs. Ivy's," continued Norah. "A bit of blarney, and frish flowers every day in front of her photygraph, and things right for Mr. Gerald, is all she wants. The last place I worked,--Mrs. Sequin's, bad luck to her!... It was a party or a dinner between me and me rest ivery night of the week! Sorra a bit did I care for the whole kit of 'em, barring Mr. Don Morley, as fine a young gentleman as ever set foot in sole leather!"

"Him that shot d.i.c.k Sheeley and run away?"

"Him they laid it on," said Norah with indignant emphasis. "It was that good-for-nothin' Mr. Lee Dillingham done it, and Mrs. Sequin a-movin'

heaven to marry Miss Margery off to him. I seen how they was tryin' to keep Mr. Don from comin' home and hearin' the tales they was tellin'. He is worth the whole bunch of 'em tied in a knot; a gentleman inside and out, and his hand in his pocket ivery time you served him. Ain't that somebody a-callin' ye down the back stairs?"

"Let 'em call," said Myrtella, to whom these comparisons of past places were replete with interest. "It's just Miss Hattie; if she's got anything worth sayin', she can come down and say it."

It was evidently worth saying, for a moment later, a thin, sharp-featured girl of fourteen thrust her head in at the door.

"Myrtella, I told you I wanted that white dress fixed. I am going to wear it this afternoon."

"It's too early to wear summer clothes," Myrtella announced, continuing her ironing. "I never sewed the b.u.t.tons on a purpose, so 's you couldn't wear it."

"Well I _will_ wear it! I am going right straight up stairs and pin it on."

As the door slammed, Myrtella turned a beaming face on Norah:

"It ain't hemmed!" she said with satisfaction.

Norah shrugged her shoulders:

"It would be a cold day that'd see anybody makin' me do the cookin' and nursin', and sewin' for a family of four, for five dollars a week!"

Myrtella glared at her across the ironing board:

"Who said anybody was makin' me? I'm paid to do the cookin' and housework in this house, and if I see fit to light in and boss things 'round a bit, it's my own business. Thank the Lord, I got manners enough to attend to it! How much coffee did you come over here to borrow?"