13. Frank Apologizes
Kit was doing some homework in the library one Saturday morning, when all at once she was conscious of someone who stood at the west end of the room, looking at her. For a moment Kit was absolutely speechless, not believing the evidence of her own eyes. But the next minute Billie’s own laugh, when he found out he had been discovered, startled her with its reality.
“Billie Ellis,” she exclaimed, springing to her feet and scattering reference books and notepaper helter-skelter. “How on earth did you ever get way out here?”
Billie colored slightly, as he always did at any display of emotion, and tried to act as if it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him to appear at Delphi, when he was supposed to be in Washington in school.
“We had our exams last week, and Frank had to come out to Minnesota for the government, so he took me along to help him.”
“Billie, are you really after bugs and things—I mean, are you going to really be a naturalist?”
“I guess you’d kind of call it being a business naturalist,” laughed Billie. “I don’t think I’ll ever live in a shack on a mountainside, and write beautiful things about them, now that I know Frank. You want to roll up your sleeves and pitch in like he does.”
“Is he here now?” asked Kit eagerly.
“Yep.” Billie nodded out of the window toward Kemp Hall, the boys’ dormitory. “After we found out that you didn’t live here, we were going on down to the Dean’s to find you, but he looked over the boys’ freshman class, and found he had a cousin or nephew or somebody on the list, Clayton Diggs.”
“I know him,” Kit said. “He’s awfully nice. I’ve got to be back for lunch, and you’re coming down with me, of course. How long can you stay?”
“Just this afternoon. We’re going back on the five forty-five, and catch the night express out of Chicago. If you wait here, I’ll chase after Frank, ’cause he’ll want to have lunch with the Diggs boy, and he can join us later.”
Kit walked along the path which crossed the campus. The coming of Billie unexpectedly, just at a time when she was feeling her first homesickness, struck Kit as a rare piece of luck. But with only five hours to visit with him, she knew it would be all the harder after he had gone. He joined her on a run as she reached the sidewalk, and they hurried down to the Dean’s just in time for lunch. Kit beamed when she introduced her friend from the hills to Della and the Dean.
“Don’t you remember, Uncle Bart,” she asked eagerly, “my talking about Billie? Well, here he is.”
The Dean’s gray eyes twinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his glasses. “You come highly recommended, young man,” he said.
“You could have a lovely time studying over Uncle Bart’s Egyptian Scarabs, Bill,” said Kit. “Weren’t you telling me something about a place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms, Aunt Della? You see, Billie’s main interest is insects and birds.”
Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other. Never before had youngsters sat lunching at that table with her and her brother in quite such a way. The Dean usually took his meals in absolute silence when they were alone together, for he held that desultory conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit’s coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she happened not to be there.
After lunch they all went into the library to look over the Dean’s newly arrived treasures, the Amenotaph urn and the statue of Annui.
“Well, gol-lee,” exclaimed Kit, as she stood before the plain, squat, terra-cotta urn, “is that the royal urn? I expected to see something enormous, like everything else that is wonderful and ancient in Egypt.”
“My dear,” the Dean replied happily as he bent down to trace the curious, cuneiform markings that circled the urn. “This antedates the time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell positively, until I have opened it and deciphered what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful. I cannot believe that it is contemporary with Nineveh. Della, you can recall how overjoyed I was when we unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh mounds years ago. Think of reading something which was written by living man several thousand years before that.”
“What fun it must have been,” Billie remarked. “If you wanted to write anything in those days, you just picked up a handful of mud and made a little brick out of it, and wrote away with a stick, didn’t you?”
“Stylus, my boy, stylus,” corrected the Dean absently. “Yes, it did away with much of our modern detail.”
“Where’s the statue, Uncle Bart?” Kit asked.
“It’s just behind you, my dear. And it’s perfect. Perfect,” murmured the Dean.
Kit turned, expecting to face one of the usual blandly smiling Egyptian pieces of art, with a few wings scattered over it here and there. But instead, there stood in the center of the table a strangely attenuated figure about three feet high. It had a head that was a cross between an intelligent antelope and a rather toplofty baby rat. Its arms were extended at sharp angles, and seemed to be pointing in arch accusation at someone. Wings spread fanwise from the shoulders, and its feet were like those of a griffin.
“I never thought it would look just like that, did you, Billie?” Kit asked confidentially, when they started back to the campus later.
“Well, I knew what to expect, because we’ve been going to the Smithsonian Institute pretty often,” replied Billie. “Some of them look worse than that. But they can’t beat our own Alaskan and Mexican ones. I wonder what people were thinking about back in those days to worship that sort of thing?”
But Kit caught sight of five of the girls just rounding the corner and she waved to them to come over, much to Billie’s inward disgust. While he thoroughly approved of Kit, he viewed the average girl with indifference. But Kit introduced him in a casual manner which put him at his ease, and when they started up the path, it was Tony Conyer who had taken possession of Billie, and was interesting him by telling of her father’s big stock farm in northern Wisconsin.
They found Frank Howard waiting for them outside the boys’ dorm and Clayton was with him. The girls got Kit aside and Amy faced her accusingly.
“You never told us a word about this boy,” she declared, “and all the time you’ve had him up your sleeve. Explain please.”
Kit laughed at them and said, “Well, he’s a relative, if you must know. He’s my father’s first cousin’s husband’s grandson. Now what are you going to do about it?”
Rather mollified, the girls rejoined the boys on the steps in front of the dorm. “I suppose Hope looks pretty small to you after the universities back East,” Georgia said to Billie.
“Looks swell to me,” returned Billie. “I think you can have lots more fun in a place like this than you can at the big schools. But don’t get the idea I’m going to college now, I’m just at prep school and taking up a few extra courses outside with Frank.”
“What kind of courses?” asked Georgia.
“Science and physics, but specially entomology and forestry. He’s in government service. I wish I knew all he does. It’s wonderful to have a friend like Frank.”
Kit was behind the others with Amy and Anne. Now that they had joined the others, and the girls were talking about Frank also, she had become strangely silent.
“You don’t know him very well, do you?” Amy asked. “I mean, he isn’t related to you.”
Kit shook her head with bland indifference.
“He’s a friend of Billie’s. I only met him at home when he came to chase a gypsy moth in Elmhurst.”
She did not add that with Tommy’s help and able cooperation, she had managed to curtail the chase of the gypsy moth, temporarily, by holding the chaser captive in the family corncrib, but she inwardly suspected that Frank was remembering it. Every once in a while she caught him looking at her, with a look of amused retrospection that made her vaguely uncomfortable.
As they left the campus, Georgia, leading with Billie, took the street that led to the bluffs overlooking the lake, and somehow or other in the scramble down the narrow pathways, Kit found Frank at her elbow. No one could have been more dignified or distant in her manner than Kit, but Frank refused to be frozen out.
“I’ve just found out something, Kit,” he said genially. “I forgave you long ago for locking me up in your corncrib and nearly landing me in the local jail, but you don’t forgive me one bit for trespassing in your berry patch.”
Kit’s profile tilted ever so slightly upward. She had thoroughly made up her mind that very day when Mr. Hicks made his memorable and fruitless journey to Woodhow that not even government experts had any right to climb over fences into people’s private property without first asking permission. Perhaps the sudden popularity of the trespasser with all the rest of the family had something to do with Kit’s stand against him. Even Doris had remarked that she didn’t see how Kit could ever have imagined that a person looking like Frank could be a berry thief.
“I don’t want you to forgive me,” she said calmly. “I’ve never been one bit sorry for it. I think you ought to have come up to the house and asked permission to go in there. And you never said that you were sorry. It always seemed to me as if you rather acted as if you thought it was a good joke”—she hesitated a moment, before adding pointedly—“on me.”
“Suppose I apologize now.” Frank’s tone was absolutely serious, but Kit, with one quick look at the precipitous path ahead of them, laughed.
“Not here, please. Wait until we hit the level shore. You do really have to pay attention on this path, or you miss your footing and toboggan all at once.”
“Then, suppose,” he persisted, “we just consider that I have apologized. And if you accept, you can raise your right hand at me.”
Kit immediately raised her left one. Before he could say any more, she had hurried ahead and caught up with the rest.