Billy had been a member of the Beacon Street household a week before she repeated her visit to Cyril at the top of the house. This time Bertram was not with her. She went alone. Even Spunk was left behind—Billy remembered her prospective host's aversion to cats.
Billy did not feel that she knew Cyril very well. She had tried several times to chat with him; but she had made so little headway, that she finally came to the conclusion—privately expressed to Bertram—that Mr. Cyril was bashful. Bertram had only laughed. He had laughed the harder because at that moment he could hear Cyril pounding out his angry annoyance on the piano upstairs—Cyril had just escaped from one of Billy's most determined “attempts,” and Bertram knew it. Bertram's laugh had puzzled Billy—and it had not quite pleased her. Hence to-day she did not tell him of her plan to go up-stairs and see what she could do herself, alone, to combat this “foolish bashfulness” on the part of Mr. Cyril Henshaw.
In spite of her bravery, Billy waited quite one whole minute at the top of the stairs before she had the courage to knock at Cyril's door.
The door was opened at once.
“Why—Billy!” cried the man in surprise.
“Yes, it's Billy. I—I came up to—to get acquainted,” she smiled winningly.
“Why, er—you are very kind. Will you—come in?”
“Thank you; yes. You see, I didn't bring Spunk. I—remembered.”
Cyril bowed gravely.
“You are very kind—again,” he said.
Billy fidgeted in her chair. To her mind she was not “getting on” at all. She determined on a bold stroke.
“You see, I thought if—if I should come up here, where there wouldn't be so many around, we might get acquainted,” she confided; “then I would get to like you just as well as I do the others.”
At the odd look that came into the man's face, the girl realized suddenly what she had said. Her cheeks flushed a confused red.
“Oh, dear! That is, I mean—I like you, of course,” she floundered miserably; then she broke off with a frank laugh. “There! you see I never could get out of anything. I might as well own right up. I DON'T like you as well as I do Uncle William and Mr. Bertram. So there!”
Cyril laughed. For the first time since he had seen Billy, something that was very like interest came into his eyes.
“Oh, you don't,” he retorted. “Now that is—er—very UNkind of you.”
Billy shook her head.
“You don't say that as if you meant it,” she accused him, her eyes gravely studying his face. “Now I'M in earnest. I really want to like YOU!”
“Thank you. Then perhaps you won't mind telling me why you don't like me,” he suggested.
Again Billy flushed.
“Why, I—I just don't; that's all,” she faltered. Then she cried aggrievedly: “There, now! you've made me be impolite; and I didn't mean to be, truly.”
“Of course not,” assented the man; “and it wasn't impolite, because I asked you for the information, you know. I may conclude then,” he went on with an odd twinkle in his eyes, “that I am merely classed with tripe and rainy days.”
“With—wha-at?”
“Tripe and rainy days. Those are the only things, if I remember rightly, that you don't like.”
The girl stared; then she chuckled.
“There! I knew I'd like you better if you'd only SAY something,” she beamed. “But let's not talk any more about that. Play to me; won't you? You know you promised me 'The Maiden's Prayer.'”
Cyril stiffened.
“Pardon me, but you must be mistaken,” he replied coldly. “I do not play 'The Maiden's Prayer.'”
“Oh, what a shame! And I do so love it! But you play other things; I've heard you a little, and Mr. Bertram says you do—in concerts and things.”
“Does he?” murmured Cyril, with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.
“There! Now off you go again all silent and horrid!” chaffed Billy. “What have I said now? Mr. Cyril—do you know what I think? I believe you've got NERVES!” Billy's voice was so tragic that the man could but laugh.
“Perhaps I have, Miss Billy.”
“Like Miss Letty's?”
“I'm not acquainted with the lady.”
“Gee! wouldn't you two make a pair!” chuckled Billy unexpectedly. “No; but, really, I mean—do you want people to walk on tiptoe and speak in whispers?”
“Sometimes, perhaps.”
The girl sprang to her feet—but she sighed.
“Then I'm going. This might be one of the times, you know.” She hesitated, then walked to the piano. “My, wouldn't I like to play on that!” she breathed.
Cyril shuddered. Cyril could imagine what Billy would play—and Cyril did not like “rag-time,” nor “The Storm.”
“Oh, do you play?” he asked constrainedly.
Billy shook her head.
“Not much. Only little bits of things, you know,” she said wistfully, as she turned toward the door.
For some minutes after she had gone, Cyril stood where she had left him, his eyes moody and troubled.
“I suppose I might have played—something,” he muttered at last; “but—'The Maiden's Prayer'!—good heavens!”
Billy was a little shy with Cyril when he came down to dinner that night. For the next few days, indeed, she held herself very obviously aloof from him. Cyril caught himself wondering once if she were afraid of his “nerves.” He did not try to find out, however; he was too emphatically content that of her own accord she seemed to be leaving him in peace.
It must have been a week after Billy's visit to the top of the house that Cyril stopped his playing very abruptly one day, and opened his door to go down-stairs. At the first step he started back in amazement.
“Why, Billy!” he ejaculated.
The girl was sitting very near the top of the stairway. At his appearance she got to her feet shamefacedly.
“Why, Billy, what in the world are you doing there?”
“Listening.”
“Listening!”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
The man did not answer. He was too surprised to find words at once, and he was trying to recollect what he had been playing.
“You see, listening to music this way isn't like listening to—to talking,” hurried on Billy, feverishly. “It isn't sneaking like that; is it?”
“Why—no.”
“And you don't mind?”
“Why, surely, I ought not to mind—that,” he admitted.
“Then I can keep right on as I have done. Thank you,” sighed Billy, in relief.
“Keep right on! Have you been here before?”
“Why, yes, lots of days. And, say, Mr. Cyril, what is that—that thing that's all chords with big bass notes that keep saying something so fine and splendid that it marches on and on, getting bigger and grander, just as if there couldn't anything stop it, until it all ends in one great burst of triumph? Mr. Cyril, what is that?”
“Why, Billy!”—the interest this time in the man's face was not faint—“I wish I might make others catch my meaning as I have evidently made you do it! That's something of my own—that I'm writing, you understand; and I've tried to say—just what you say you heard.”
“And I did hear it—I did! Oh, won't you play it, please, with the door open?”
“I can't, Billy. I'm sorry, indeed I am. But I've an appointment, and I'm late now. You shall hear it, though, I promise you, and with the door wide open,” continued the man, as, with a murmured apology, he passed the girl and hurried down the stairs.
Billy waited until she heard the outer hall door shut; then very softly she crept through Cyril's open doorway, and crossed the room to the piano.
May came, and with it warm sunny days. There was a little balcony at the rear of the second floor, and on this Mrs. Stetson and Billy sat many a morning and sewed. There were occupations that Billy liked better than sewing; but she was dutiful, and she was really fond of Aunt Hannah; so she accepted as gracefully as possible that good lady's dictum that a woman who could not sew, and sew well, was no lady at all.
One of the things that Billy liked to do so much better than to sew was to play on Cyril's piano. She was very careful, however, that Mr. Cyril himself did not find this out. Cyril was frequently gone from the house, and almost as frequently Aunt Hannah took naps. At such times it was very easy to slip up-stairs to Cyril's rooms, and once at the piano, Billy forgot everything else.
One day, however, the inevitable happened: Cyril came home unexpectedly. The man heard the piano from William's floor, and with a surprised ejaculation he hurried upstairs two steps at a time. At the door he stopped in amazement.
Billy was at the piano, but she was not playing “rag-time,” “The Storm,” nor yet “The Maiden's Prayer.” There was no music before her, but under her fingers “big bass notes” very much like Cyril's own, were marching on and on to victory. Billy's face was rapturously intent and happy.
“By Jove—Billy!” gasped the man.
Billy leaped to her feet and whirled around guiltily.
“Oh, Mr. Cyril—I'm so sorry!”
“Sorry!—and you play like that!”
“No, no; I'm not sorry I played. It's because you—found me.”
Billy's cheeks were a shamed red, but her eyes were defiantly brilliant, and her chin was at a rebellious tilt. “I wasn't doing any—harm; not if you weren't here—with your NERVES!”
The man laughed and came slowly into the room.
“Billy, who taught you to play?”
“No one. I can't play. I can only pick out little bits of things in C.”
“But you do play. I just heard you.”
Billy shrugged her shoulders.
“That was nothing. It was only what I had heard. I was trying to make it sound like—yours.”
“And, by George! you succeeded,” muttered Cyril under his breath; then aloud he asked: “Didn't you ever study music?”
Billy's eyes dimmed.
“No. That was the only thing Aunt Ella and I didn't think alike about. She had an old square piano, all tin-panny and thin, you know. I played some on it, and wanted to take lessons; but I didn't want to practise on that. I wanted a new one. That's what she wouldn't do—get me a new piano, or let me do it. She said SHE practised on that piano, and that it was quite good enough for me, especially to learn on. I—I'm afraid I got stuffy. I hated that piano so! But I was almost ready to give in when—when Aunt Ella died.”
“And all you play then is just by ear?”
“By—ear? I suppose so—if you mean what I hear. Easy things I can play quick, but—but those chords ARE hard; they skip around so!”
Cyril smiled oddly.
“I should say so,” he agreed. “But perhaps there is something else that I play—that you like. Is there?”
“Oh, yes. Now there's that little thing that swings and sways like this,” cried Billy, dropping herself on to the piano stool and whisking about. Billy was not afraid now, nor defiant. She was only eager and happy again. In a moment a dreamy waltz fell upon Cyril's ears—a waltz that he often played himself. It was not played correctly, it is true. There were notes, and sometimes whole measures, that were very different from the printed music. But the tune, the rhythm, and the spirit were there.
“And there's this,” said Billy; “and this,” she went on, sliding into one little strain after another—all of which were recognized by the amazed man at her side.
“Billy,” he cried, when she had finished and whirled upon him again, “Billy, would you like to learn to play—really play from notes?”
“Oh, wouldn't I!”
“Then you shall! We'll have a piano tomorrow in your rooms for you to practise on. And—I'll teach you myself.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Cyril—you don't know how I thank you!” exulted Billy, as she danced from the room to tell Aunt Hannah of this great and good thing that had come into her life.
To Billy, this promise of Cyril's to be her teacher was very kind, very delightful; but it was not in the least a thing at which to marvel. To Bertram, however, it most certainly was.
“Well, guess what's happened,” he said to William that night, after he had heard the news. “I'll believe anything now—anything: that you'll raffle off your collection of teapots at the next church fair, or that I shall go to Egypt as a 'Cooky' guide. Listen; Cyril is going to give piano lessons to Billy!—CYRIL!”
Bertram said that the Strata was not a strata any longer. He declared that between them, Billy and Spunk had caused such an upheaval that there was no telling where one stratum left off and another began. What Billy had not attended to, Spunk had, he said.
“You see, it's like this,” he explained to an amused friend one day. “Billy is taking piano lessons of Cyril, and she is posing for one of my heads. Naturally, then, such feminine belongings as fancy-work, thread, thimbles, and hairpins are due to show up at any time either in Cyril's apartments or mine—to say nothing of William's; and she's in William's lots—to look for Spunk, if for no other purpose.
“You must know that Spunk likes William's floor the best of the bunch, there are so many delightful things to play with. Not that Spunk stays there—dear me, no. He's a sociable little chap, and his usual course is to pounce on a shelf, knock off some object that tickles his fancy, then lug it in his mouth to—well, anywhere that he happens to feel like going. Cyril has found him up-stairs with a small miniature, battered and chewed almost beyond recognition. And Aunt Hannah nearly had a fit one day when he appeared in her room with an enormous hard-shelled black bug—dead, of course—that he had fished from a case that Pete had left open. As for me, I can swear that the little round white stone he was playing with in my part of the house was one of William's Collection Number One.
“And that isn't all,” Bertram continued. “Billy brings her music down to show to me, and lugs my heads all over the rest of the house to show to other folks. And there is always everywhere a knit shawl, for Aunt Hannah is sure to feel a draught, and Billy keeps shawls handy. So there you are! We certainly aren't a strata any longer,” he finished.
Billy was, indeed, very much at home in the Beacon Street house—too much so, Aunt Hannah thought. Aunt Hannah was, in fact, seriously disturbed. To William one evening, late in May, she spoke her mind.
“William, what are you going to do with Billy?” she asked abruptly.
“Do with her? What do you mean?” returned William with the contented smile that was so often on his lips these days. “This is Billy's home.”
“That's the worst of it,” sighed the woman, with a shake of her head.
“The worst of it! Aunt Hannah, what do you mean? Don't you like Billy?”
“Yes, yes, William, of course I like Billy. I love her! Who could help it? That's not what I mean. It's of Billy I'm thinking, and of the rest of you. She can't stay here like this. She must go away, to school, or—or somewhere.”
“And she's going in September,” replied the man. “She'll go to preparatory school first, and to college, probably.”
“Yes, but now—right away. She ought to go—somewhere.”
“Why, yes, for the summer, of course. But those plans aren't completed yet. Billy and I were talking of it last evening. You know the boys are always away more or less, but I seldom go until August, and we let Pete and Dong Ling off then for a month and close the house. I told Billy I'd send you and her anywhere she liked for the whole summer, but she says no. She prefers to stay here with me. But I don't quite fancy that idea—through all the hot June and July—so I don't know but I'll get a cottage somewhere near at one of the beaches, where I can run back and forth night and morning. Of course, in that case, we take Pete and Dong Ling with us and close the house right away. I fear Cyril would not fancy it much; but, after all, he and Bertram would be off more or less. They always are in the summer.”
“But, William, you haven't yet got my idea at all,” demurred Aunt Hannah, with a discouraged shake of her head. “It's away!—away from all this—from you—that I want to get Billy.”
“Away! Away from me,” cried the man, with an odd intonation of terror, as he started forward in his chair. “Why, Aunt Hannah, what are you talking about?”
“About Billy. This is no place in which to bring up a young girl—a young girl who has not one shred of relationship to excuse it.”
“But she is my namesake, and quite alone in the world, Aunt Hannah; quite alone—poor child!”
“My dear William, that is exactly it—she is a child, and yet she is not. That's where the trouble lies.”
“What do you mean?”
“William, Billy has been brought up in a little country town with a spinster aunt and a whole good-natured, tolerant village for company. Well, she has accepted you and your entire household, even down to Dong Ling, on the same basis.”
“Well, I'm sure I'm glad,” asserted the man with genial warmth. “It's good for us to have her here. It's good for the boys. She's already livened Cyril up and toned Bertram down. I may as well confess, Aunt Hannah, that I've been more than a little disturbed about Bertram of late. I don't like that Bob Seaver that he is so fond of; and some other fellows, too, that have been coming here altogether too much during the last year. Bertram says they're only a little 'Bohemian' in their tastes. And to me that's the worst of it, for Bertram himself is quite too much inclined that way.”
“Exactly, William. And that only goes to prove what I said before. Bertram is not a spinster aunt, and neither are any of the rest of you. But Billy takes you that way.”
“Takes us that way—as spinster aunts!”
“Yes. She makes herself as free in this house as she was in her Aunt Ella's at Hampden Falls. She flies up to Cyril's rooms half a dozen times a day with some question about her lessons; and I don't know how long she'd sit at his feet and adoringly listen to his playing if he didn't sometimes get out of patience and tell her to go and practise herself. She makes nothing of tripping into Bertram's studio at all hours of the day; and he's sketched her head at every conceivable angle—which certainly doesn't tend to make Billy modest or retiring. As to you—you know how much she's in your rooms, spending evening after evening fussing over your collections.”
“I know; but we're—we're sorting them and making a catalogue,” defended the man, anxiously. “Besides, I—I like to have her there. She doesn't bother me a bit.”
“No; I know she doesn't,” replied Aunt Hannah, with a curious inflection. “But don't you see, William, that all this isn't going to quite do? Billy's too young—and too old.”
“Come, come, Aunt Hannah, is that exactly logical?”
“It's true, at least.”
“But, after all, where's the harm? Don't you think that you are just a little bit too—fastidious? Billy's nothing but a care-free child.”
“It's the 'free' part that I object to, William. She has taken every one of you into intimate companionship—even Pete and Dong Ling.”
“Pete and Dong Ling!”
“Yes.” Mrs. Stetson's chin came up, and her nostrils dilated a little. “Billy went to Pete the other day to have him button her shirt-waist up in the back; and yesterday I found her down-stairs in the kitchen instructing Dong Ling how to make chocolate fudge!”
William fell back in his chair.
“Well, well,” he muttered, “well, well! She is a child, and no mistake!” He paused, his brows drawn into a troubled frown. “But, Aunt Hannah, what CAN I do? Of course you could talk to her, but—I don't seem to quite like that idea.”
“My grief and conscience—no, no! That isn't what is needed at all. It would only serve to make her self-conscious; and that's her one salvation now—that she isn't self-conscious. You see, it's only the fault of her environment and training, after all. It isn't her heart that's wrong.”
“Indeed it isn't!”
“It will be different when she is older—when she has seen a little more of the world outside Hampden Falls. She'll go to school, of course, and I think she ought to travel a little. Meanwhile, she mustn't live—just like this, though; certainly not for a time, at least.”
“No, no, I'm afraid not,” agreed William, perplexedly, rising to his feet. “But we must think—what can be done.” His step was even slower than usual as he left the room, and his eyes were troubled.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg