Miss Billy by Eleanor Hodgman Porter (best ebook reader for surface pro TXT) 📖

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ice cream?” he questioned. “I thought it was roast beef and boiled potatoes that was supposed to be handed out to gaunt-eyed hunger.”

“It is,” nodded Billy, “and that’s why I think sometimes they’d like ice cream and chocolate frosting. Besides, to give sugar plums one doesn’t have to unwind yards of red tape, or worry about ‘pauperizing the poor.’ To give red flannels and a ton of coal, one must be properly circumspect and consult records and city missionaries, of course; and that’s why it’s such a relief sometimes just to hand over a simple little sugar plum and see them smile.”

For a minute Bertram was silent, then he asked abruptly:

“Billy, why did you leave the Strata?”

Billy was taken quite by surprise. A pink flush spread to her forehead, and her tongue stumbled at first over her reply.

“Why, I—it seemed—you—why, I left to go to Hampden Falls, to be sure. Don’t you remember?” she finished gaily.

“Oh, yes, I remember THAT,” conceded Bertram with disdainful emphasis. “But why did you go to Hampden Falls?”

“Why, it—it was the only place to go—that is, I WANTED to go there,” she corrected hastily. “Didn’t Aunt Hannah tell you that I—I was homesick to get back there?”

“Oh, yes, Aunt Hannah SAID that,” observed the man; “but wasn’t that homesickness a little—sudden?”

Billy blushed pink again.

“Why, maybe; but—well, homesickness is always more or less sudden; isn’t it?” she parried.

Bertram laughed, but his eyes grew suddenly almost tender.

“See here, Billy, you can’t bluff worth a cent,” he declared. “You are much too refreshingly frank for that. Something was the trouble. Now what was it? Won’t you tell me, please?”

Billy pouted. She hesitated and gazed anywhere but into the challenging eyes before her. Then very suddenly she looked straight into them.

“Very well, there WAS a reason for my leaving,” she confessed a little breathlessly. “I—didn’t want to—bother you any more—all of you.”

“Bother us!”

“No. I found out. You couldn’t paint; Mr. Cyril couldn’t play or write; and—and everything was different because I was there. But I didn’t blame you—no, no!” she assured him hastily. “It was only that I—found out.”

“And may I ask HOW you obtained this most extraordinary information?” demanded Bertram, savagely.

Billy shook her head. Her round little chin looked suddenly square and determined.

“You may ask, but I shall not tell,” she declared firmly.

If Bertram had known Billy just a little better he would have let the matter drop there; but he did not know Billy, so he asked:

“Was it anything I did—or said?”

The girl did not answer.

“Billy, was it?” Bertram’s voice showed terror now.

Billy laughed unexpectedly.

“Do you think I’m going to say ‘no’ to a series of questions, and then give the whole thing away by my silence when you come to the right one?” she demanded merrily. “No, sir!”

“Well, anyhow, it wasn’t I, then,” sighed the man in relief; “for you just observed that you were not going to say ‘no to a series of questions’—and that was the first one. So I’ve found out that much, anyhow,” he concluded triumphantly.

The girl eyed him for a moment in silence; then she shook her head.

“I’m not going to be caught that way, either,” she smiled. “You know—just what you did in the first place about it: nothing.”

The man stirred restlessly and pondered. After a long pause he adopted new tactics. With a searching study of her face to note the slightest change, he enumerated:

“Was it Cyril, then? Will? Aunt Hannah? Kate? It couldn’t have been Pete, or Dong Ling!”

Billy still smiled inscrutably. At no name had Bertram detected so much as the flicker of an eyelid; and with a glance half-admiring, half-chagrined, he fell back into his chair.

“I’ll give it up. You’ve won,” he acknowledged. “But, Billy,”— his manner changed suddenly—“I wonder if you know just what a hole you left in the Strata when you went away.”

“But I couldn’t have—in the whole Strata,” objected Billy. “I occupied only one stratum, and a stratum doesn’t go up and down, you know, only across; and mine was the second floor.”

Bertram gave a slow shake of his head.

“I know; but yours was a freak formation,” he maintained gravely. “It DID go up and down. Honestly, Billy, we did care—lots. Will and I were inconsolable, and even Cyril played dirges for a week.”

“Did he?” gurgled Billy, with sudden joyousness. “I’m so glad!”

“Thank you,” murmured Bertram, disapprovingly. “We hadn’t considered it a subject for exultation.”

“What? Oh, I didn’t mean that! That is—” she stopped helplessly.

“Oh, never mind about trying to explain,” interposed Bertram. “I fancy the remedy would be worse than the disease, in this case.”

“Nonsense! I only meant that I like to be missed—sometimes,” retorted Billy, a little nettled.

“And you rejoice then to have me mope, Cyril play dirges, and Will wander mournfully about the house with Spunkie in his arms! You should have seen William. If his forlornness did not bring tears to your eyes, the grace of the pink bow that lopped behind Spunkie’s left ear would surely have brought a copious flow.”

Billy laughed, but her eyes grew tender.

“Did Uncle William do—that?” she asked.

“He did—and he did more. Pete told me after a time that you had not left one thing in the house, anywhere; but one day, over behind William’s most treasured Lowestoft, I found a small shell hairpin, and a flat brown silk button that I recognized as coming from one of your dresses.”

“Oh!” said Billy, softly. “Dear Uncle William—and how good he was to me!”

CHAPTER XXIV CYRIL, THE ENIGMA

Perhaps it was because Billy saw so little of Cyril that it was Cyril whom she wished particularly to see. William, Bertram, Calderwell—all her other friends came frequently to the little house on the hill, Billy told herself; only Cyril held aloof—and it was Cyril that she wanted.

Billy said that it was his music; that she wanted to hear him play, and that she wanted him to hear her. She felt grieved and chagrined. Not once since she had come had he seemed interested— really interested in her music. He had asked her, it is true, in a perfunctory way what she had done, and who her teachers had been. But all the while she was answering she had felt that he was not listening; that he did not care. And she cared so much! She knew now that all her practising through the long hard months of study, had been for Cyril. Every scale had been smoothed for his ears, and every phrase had been interpreted with his approbation in view. Across the wide waste of waters his face had shone like a star of promise, beckoning her on and on to heights unknown… And now she was here in Boston, but she could not even play the scale, nor interpret the phrase for the ear to which they had been so laboriously attuned; and Cyril’s face, in the flesh, was no beckoning star of promise, but was a thing as cold and relentless as was the waste of waters across which it had shone in the past.

Billy did not understand it. She knew, it is true, of Cyril’s reputed aversion to women in general and to noise; but she was neither women in general nor noise, she told herself indignantly. She was only the little maid, grown three years older, who had sat at his feet and adoringly listened to all that he had been pleased to say in the old days at the top of the Strata. And he had been kind then—very kind, Billy declared stoutly. He had been patient and interested, too, and he had seemed not only willing, but glad to teach her, while now—

Sometimes Billy thought she would ask him candidly what was the matter. But it was always the old, frank Billy that thought this; the impulsive Billy, that had gone up to Cyril’s rooms years before and cheerfully announced that she had come to get acquainted. It was never the sensible, circumspect Billy that Aunt Hannah had for three years been shaping and coaxing into being. But even this Billy frowned rebelliously, and declared that sometime something should be said that would at least give him a chance to explain.

In all the weeks since Billy’s purchase of Hillside, Cyril had been there only twice, and it was nearly Thanksgiving now. Billy had seen him once or twice, also, at the Beacon Street house, when she and Aunt Hannah had dined there; but on all these occasions he had been either the coldly reserved guest or the painfully punctilious host. Never had he been in the least approachable.

“He treats me exactly as he treated poor little Spunk that first night,” Billy declared hotly to herself.

Only once since she came had Billy heard Cyril play, and that was when she had shared the privilege with hundreds of others at a public concert. She had sat then entranced, with her eyes on the clean-cut handsome profile of the man who played with so sure a skill and power, yet without a note before him. Afterward she had met him face to face, and had tried to tell him how moved she was; but in her agitation, and because of a strange shyness that had suddenly come to her, she had ended only in stammering out some flippant banality that had brought to his face merely a bored smile of acknowledgment.

Twice she had asked him to play for her; but each time he had begged to be excused, courteously, but decidedly.

“It’s no use to tease,” Bertram had interposed once, with an airy wave of his hands. “This lion always did refuse to roar to order. If you really must hear him, you’ll have to slip upstairs and camp outside his door, waiting patiently for such crumbs as may fall from his table.”

“Aren’t your metaphors a little mixed?” questioned Cyril irritably.

“Yes, sir,” acknowledged Bertram with unruffled temper. “but I don’t mind if Billy doesn’t. I only meant her to understand that she’d have to do as she used to do—listen outside your door.”

Billy’s cheeks reddened.

“But that is what I sha’n’t do,” she retorted with spirit. “And, moreover, I still have hopes that some day he’ll play to me.”

“Maybe,” conceded Bertram, doubtfully; “if the stool and the piano and the pedals and the weather and his fingers and your ears and my watch are all just right—then he’ll play.”

“Nonsense!” scowled Cyril. “I’ll play, of course, some day. But I’d rather not today.” And there the matter had ended. Since then Billy had not asked him to play.

CHAPTER XXV THE OLD ROOM—AND BILLY

Thanksgiving was to be a great day in the Henshaw family. The Henshaw brothers were to entertain. Billy and Aunt Hannah had been invited to dinner; and so joyously hospitable was William’s invitation that it would have included the new kitten and the canary if Billy would have consented to bring them.

Once more Pete swept and garnished the house, and once more Dong Ling spoiled uncounted squares of chocolate trying to make the baffling fudge. Bertram said that the entire Strata was a-quiver. Not but that Billy and Aunt Hannah had visited there before, but that this was different. They were to come at noon this time. This visit was not to be a tantalizing little piece of stiffness an hour and a half long. It was to be a satisfying, whole-souled matter of half a day’s comradeship, almost like old times. So once more the roses graced the rooms, and a flaring pink bow adorned Spunkie’s fat neck; and once more Bertram placed his latest “Face of a Girl” in the best possible