"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?"