A Romance of Billy-goat Hill
Copyright© 2024 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 19
The new year began inauspiciously at the Queerington’s. In the first place Bertie woke up with the chickenpox and was banished to the nursery. Then the Doctor followed his annual custom of going over his business affairs, with the usual result that he found his accounts greatly overdrawn. This fact was solemnly communicated to each member of the family in turn together with admonitions in regard to the future. By lunch time Hattie had been sent to her room for impertinently suggesting that her father spent more on his books than she did on her clothes, and Connie was sulking over a reduced allowance.
“Of course,” the Doctor explained to Miss Lady as he sank exhausted into his invalid chair which had been pressed into service again during the past few weeks, “I have no doubt but that Basil Sequin can arrange things for me. He always has in the past, but he seems very pressed of late, very harassed. I hardly like to approach him so soon again for a loan.”
“Couldn’t we rent a smaller house, and have less company?” suggested Miss Lady.
The Doctor shook his head. “It would be very difficult for me to adjust myself to new surroundings. The conditions here for my work are fairly satisfactory. The Ivy’s piano, to be sure, is a constant annoyance, but by using cotton in my ears I obviate that nuisance. It is particularly unfortunate that this complication about money should come just at the most critical point of my work. Unless Basil Sequin can make some arrangement, I shall be seriously embarrassed.”
“I’ll tell you what we can do,” cried Miss Lady brightly, just as if she had not been trying to get herself up to the point of making the offer for a week. “We can sell off another bit of Thornwood. Since the Sequins built out there ever so many people have asked about ground.”
“No,” said the Doctor, the lines of care deepening in his fine, grave face. “There is little left now but the house and farm. Your sentiment regarding the place is such that I cannot permit the sacrifice. The matter will doubtless adjust itself. I shall take some private pupils at the university and perhaps arrange an extra course of lectures. The exigencies of the past two years have been exceptional.”
“But you are already working yourself to death,” protested Miss Lady. “Doctor Wyeth said last week that you could not stand the strain. The rest of us ought to do something; we must do something!”
“You are doing something, my dear. You are relieving me of innumerable burdens in regard to the house and the children. You are proving of great assistance to me in my work, not only by your reading aloud, but by the unfailing sympathy and understanding you give me. Whatever success shall crown my life work will be in a measure due to you.”
She was sitting on a hassock at his feet, and she looked up at him with strange, dumb eyes. His frail body and towering ambition, his loveless life that knew not what it missed, roused in her a pity almost maternal. A fierce resentment rose within her against herself, for not loving him as she knew a husband should be loved. If he had only won her with his heart instead of his head!
The door bell rang and Miss Lady glanced up apprehensively.
“It was the pickle woman,” announced Myrtella, coming in a moment later from the hall. “I sent her about her business.”
“Not Miss Ferney!” cried Miss Lady, springing up and rushing out to call her.
Miss Ferney Foster with much difficulty was persuaded to return and sit on the edge of a hall chair. On New Year’s in the past she had always made a formal call at Thornwood and presented the Colonel with a sample of her best wares. The Colonel in turn had invariably sent down cellar for one of the cobwebbiest bottles on the swinging shelf and bestowed it upon her with great gallantry. The indignity of having been refused admittance at the house of the Colonel’s daughter was almost more than she could bear.
“Now, tell me about everybody out home,” demanded Miss Lady eagerly. “Begin at the bottom of the hill and go right straight up.”
“I don’t know much news,” Miss Ferney said, plucking at the fingers of her cotton gloves. “I been sewing up to the Sequins’ all week.”
“Mercy! How grand we are getting!”
“Just hemming table clothes and napkins. I can’t say I think much of their new place. It’s kind of skimpy.”
“Why, Miss Ferney! It is the biggest house I was even in!”
“I ain’t talking ‘bout the size. I’m talking ‘bout the fixings. There ain’t a single carpet that fits the floor by two feet, and the wallpaper’s patched in every room but one. As for the dining-room! Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes! They haven’t got a picture, or a tidy, or a curtain, or a lamberkin, of any kind. ‘Spose I oughtn’t to tell it on ‘em, but the day I was there they didn’t even have a tablecloth!”
Miss Lady laughed in spite of herself, and Bertie heard her and got out of bed to call over the banisters that if they were telling jokes to please come up there.
“You know that young man that used to be out to the Wickers’?” asked Miss Ferney on the way up. “Well, he’s Mrs. Sequin’s brother. He’s giving ‘em considerable trouble.”
“How do you mean?”
“They want him to go ‘way somewheres, and he won’t do it. The servant girl told me that him and his sister had been having it up and down, and that Miss Margery took his side.”
“Is he going to stay?” Miss Lady paused and her fingers gripped the banister.
“I dunno. I guess if he gits mad enough he’ll run off to China like he did before. Ain’t that somebody calling you?”
It was Connie who had run up to say that a young man was at the front door who looked like a tombstone with a blond pompadour.
“Noah Wicker!” exclaimed Miss Lady. “I forgot that I told him I would try to get him into Mr. Gooch’s law office the first of the year. Wasn’t it like him to arrive the first day? You go down, Connie, that’s a darling, and entertain him ‘til I come. I’ll be there directly.”
But “directly” proved an elastic term, for after Miss Ferney had left, and four different persons had been assured over the telephone that all invitations were being declined on account of the Doctor’s indisposition, Miss Lady found Hattie still sulking in her room, and spent a half hour in restoring peace to that troubled bosom.
Meanwhile Myrtella came up to announce with elation that a waterpipe had burst in the cellar. Few things roused such joy in Myrtella as the bursting of a waterpipe. It was an act of insubordination on the part of the pipe, with which she deeply sympathized.
“And it’s Mr. Gooch’s night for supper, and if that man in the parlor stays, too, the ice cream won’t go ‘round,” she declared, with evident satisfaction in the cumulative tragedy.
By the time the knots were untied, Miss Lady had forgotten all about Noah Wicker, and it was only when Connie came in declaring indignantly that she wouldn’t talk to the stupid fellow another minute, that she remembered.
“You poor dear child!” she cried, giving her a repentant squeeze. “I am sorry. Hattie, would you mind going down and entertaining him a second, ‘til I change my dress?”
“I would,” said Hattie firmly.
Of course Noah stayed to dinner, and Miss Lady regarded it as an act of Providence that he and Mr. Gooch should have thus immediately been thrown together.
But when Mr. Gooch arrived he was concerned with much more important affairs. He brought the astounding news that Donald Morley had returned home and, against the advice of his family and his lawyers, decided to stand his trial for the shooting of Dick Sheeley!
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