CHAPTER XVI.TANGLED THREADS.
As Thurston had predicted, there was a great deal of trouble and no end of expense; but Rex attended to everything, while Bertha devoted herself to Louie, who had gone from one hysterical paroxysm into another until she was weaker and more helpless than she had ever been, but not too weak to talk continually of Fred, who, one would suppose, had been the tenderest of husbands. All she had suffered at his hands was forgotten, wiped out by the message he had left for her and by knowing that his last thoughts had been of her. But she spurned the idea of not wearing black, and insisted that boxes of mourning dresses and bonnets and caps should be sent to her on approbation from Geneva and Lausanne, until her room looked like a bazaar of crape, and not only Bertha and Martha, the maid, but Rex was more than once called in for an opinion as to what would be most suitable. It was rather a peculiar position in which Rex found himself,—two young ladies on his hands, with one of whom he was in love, while the other would unquestionably be in love with him as soon as her first burst of grief was over and she had settled the details of her wardrobe. But he did not mind it; in fact, he found it delightful to be associated daily with Bertha, and to be constantly applied to for sympathy and advice by Louie, who treated him with the freedom and confidence of a sister, and he would not havethought of a change, if Bertha had not suggested it. She had been told of the bequest which secured the Homestead from sale and made it no longer necessary for her to return to Mrs. Hallam, and she wrote at once asking to be released from her engagement, but saying she would keep it if her services were still desired.
It was a very gracious reply which Mrs. Hallam returned to her, freeing her from all obligations to herself, while something in the tone of the letter made Bertha suspect that all was not as rose-colored at Aix as it had been, and that Mrs. Hallam would be glad to make one of the party at Ouchy. This she said to Rex, suggesting that he should invite his aunt to join them, and urging so strongly the propriety of either bringing her to him, or going himself to her, that he finally wrote to his aunt to come to him, and immediately received a reply that she would be with him the next day. Rex met her at the station in Lausanne, and Bertha received her at the hotel as deferentially and respectfully as if she were still her hired companion, a condition which Mrs. Hallam had made up her mind to ignore, especially as it no longer existed between them. Taking both Bertha’s hands in hers, she kissed her effusively and told her how much better she was looking since she left Aix.
“And no wonder,” she said. “The air there was not good, and either that or something made me very nervous, so that I did things for which I am sorry, and which I hope you will forget.”
This was a great concession which Bertha received graciously, and the two were on the best of terms when they entered Louie’s room. Louie had improved rapidly during the week, and was sitting in an easy-chairby the window, clad in a most becoming tea-gown fashioned at Worth’s for the first stages of deep mourning, and looking more like a girl of eighteen than a widow of twenty-five. Notwithstanding her husband’s assertion that black would not become her, she had never been half so lovely as she was in her weeds, and her face was never so fair as when framed in her little crêpe bonnet and widow’s cap, which sat so jauntily on her golden hair. “Dazzlingly beautiful and altogether irresistible,” was Mrs. Hallam’s opinion as the days went by, and Louie grew more and more cheerful and sometimes forgot to put Fred’s photograph under her pillow, and began to talk less of him and more to Rex, whose attentions she claimed with an air of ownership which would have amused Bertha if she could have put from her the harrowing thought of what might be a year hence, when the grave at Mount Auburn was not as new, or Louie’s loss as fresh, as they were now.
“He cannot help loving her,” she would say to herself, “and I ought to be glad to have her happy with him.”
But she was not glad, and it showed in her face, whose expression Rex could not understand. Louie’s was one of those natures which, without meaning to be selfish, make everything subservient to them. She was always the centre about which others revolved, and Rex was her willing slave, partly because of Thurston’s dying charge, and partly because he could not resist her pretty appealing ways, and would not if he could. But he never dreamed of associating his devotion to her with Bertha’s growing reserve. She was his real queen, without whom his life at Ouchy would have been veryirksome, and when she suggested going home, as Dorcas had written urging her to do, he protested against it almost as strenuously as Louie. She must stay, both said, until she had seen something of Europe besides Aix and Ouchy. So she stayed, and they spent September at Interlaken and Lucerne, October in Paris, and November at the Italian lakes, where she received a letter from Grace, written in New York and signed “Grace Haynes Travis.”
“We were married yesterday,” she wrote, “and to-morrow we start for our Florida cabin and orange grove, near Orlando, where so many English people have settled. Mother gave in handsomely at the last, when she found there was no help for it, and I actually won over Lady Gresham, who used to think me a Hottentot, and always spoke of me as ‘that dreadful American girl.’ She invited mother and me to her country house, The Limes, near London, and suggested that Jack and I be married there. But I preferred New York; so she gave us her blessing and a thousand pounds, and mother, Jack, and I sailed three weeks ago in the Umbria. When are you coming home? and how is that pretty little Mrs. Thurston? I saw her once, and thought her very lovely, with that sweet, clinging, helpless manner which takes with men wonderfully. I have heard that she was an old flame of Rex Hallam’s, or rather a young one, but I’ll trust you to win him, although as a widow she is dangerous; so, in the words of the immortal Weller, I warn you, ‘Bevare of vidders.’”
There was much more in the same strain, and Bertha laughed over it, but felt a pang for which she hated herself every time she looked at Louie, whose beauty andgrace drew about her many admirers besides Rex, in spite of her black dress and her frequent allusions to “dear Fred, whose grave was so far away.” She was growing stronger every day, and when in December Rex received a letter from his partner saying that his presence in New York was rather necessary, she declared herself equal to the journey, and said that if Rex went she should go too. Consequently the 1st of January found them all in London, where they were to spend a few days, and where Rex brought his aunt a letter, addressed, bottom side up, to “Mrs. Lucy Ann Hallam, Care of Brown, Shipley & Co., London.Post Restant.”
There was a gleam of humor in Rex’s eyes as he handed the missive to his aunt, whose face grew dark as she studied the outside, and darker still at the inside, which was wonderful in composition and orthography. Phineas Jones had been sent out to Scotland by an old man who had some property there and who knew he could trust Phineas to look after it and bring him back the rental, which he had found it hard to collect. After transacting his business, Phineas had decided to travel a little and “get cultivated up, so that his cousin Lucy Ann shouldn’t be ashamed of him.” Had he known where she was, he would have joined her, but, as he did not he wrote her a letter, which had in it a great deal about Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the huckleberry pasture and the circus and the spelling-school, all of which filled Mrs. Hallam with disgust. She was his only blood kin extant, he said, and he yearned to see her, but supposed he must wait till she was back in New York, when he should pay his respects to her at once. And she wouldn’t be ashamed of him, either. He knew what was what, and had hob-a-nobbed with nobility,who took a sight of notice of him. He was going to sail the 10th in the Germanic, he said, and if she’d let him know when she was coming home he’d be in New York on the wharf to meet her.
As it chanced, the Germanic was the boat in which the Hallam party had taken passage for the 10th, but Mrs. Hallam suddenly discovered that she had not seen enough of London; Rex could go, if he must, but she should wait for the next boat of the same line. Rex had no suspicion as to the real reason for her change of mind, and, as a week or two could make but little difference in the business calling him home, he stayed, and when the next boat of the White Star line sailed out of the docks of Liverpool it carried the party of four: Louie, limp and tearful as she thought of her husband who had been with her when she crossed before; Mrs. Hallam, excited and nervous, half expecting to see Phineas pounce upon her, and haunted with a presentiment that he was somewhere on the ship; and Rex, with Bertha, hunting for the spot where he had first seen her and knocked her down.
It was splendid weather for a few days, and no one thought of being sea-sick, except Mrs. Hallam, who kept her room, partly because she thought she must, and partly because she could not shake off the feelingthat Phineas was on board. She had read the few names on the passenger-list, but his was not among them, nor did she expect to find it, as he had sailed two weeks before. Still, she would neither go on deck nor into the dining-saloon, and without being really ill, kept her berth and was waited upon by Eloïse, who was accompanying her home. Louie, who was still delicate and who always shrank from cold, stayed mostly in the salon. But the briny, bracing sea air suited Bertha, and for several hours each day she walked the deck with Rex, whose arm was sometimes thrown around her when the ship gave a great lurch, or when on turning a corner they met the wind full in their faces. Then there were the moonlight nights, when the air was full of frost and the waves were like burnished silver, and in her sealskin coat and cap, which Louie had bought for her in Geneva, Bertha was never tired of walking and never thought of the cold, for, if the exercise had not kept her warm, the light which shone upon her from Rex’s eyes when she met their gaze would have done so. Perhaps he looked the same at Louie,—very likely he did,—but for the present he was hers alone, and she was supremely happy while the fine, warm weather lasted and with it the companionship on deck. But suddenly there came a change.
Along the western coast of the Atlantic a wild storm had been raging, and when it subsided there it swept towards the east, gathering force as it went, and, joined by the angry winds from every point of the compass, it was almost a cyclone when it reached the Teutonic. But the great ship met it bravely, mounting wave after wave like a feather, then plunging down into the green depths below, then rising again and shaking off thewater as if the boiling sea were a mere plaything and the storm gotten up for its pastime. The passengers, who were told that there was no real danger, kept up their courage while the day lasted, but when the night came on and the darkness grew deeper in the salon, where nearly all were assembled, many a face grew white with fear as they listened to the howling of the wind and the roaring of the sea, while wave after wave struck the ship, which sometimes seemed to stand still, and then, trembling in every joint, rose up to meet the angry waves which beat upon it with such tremendous force.
Early in the day Louie had taken to her bed, where she lay sobbing bitterly, while Bertha tried to comfort her. As the darkness was increasing and the noise overhead grew more and more deafening, Rex brought his aunt to the salon, where, like many of the others, she sat down upon the floor, clinging to one of the chairs for support. Then he went to Louie and asked if he should not take her there too.
“No, no! oh, no!” she moaned. “I’d rather die here, if you will stay with me.”
Just then a roll of the ship sent her out upon the floor, where every movable thing in the room had gone before her. After that she made no further resistance, but suffered Bertha to wrap her waterproof around her, and was then carried by Rex and deposited upon one end of a table, where she lay, too much frightened to move, with Rex supporting her on one side and Bertha on the other. And still the storm raged on, and the white faces grew whiter as the question was asked, “What will the end be?” In every heart there was a prayer, and Rex’s mind went back to that night at theHomestead and the prayers for those in peril on the deep. Were they praying now, and would their prayers avail, or would the sad news go to them that their loved one was lying far down in the depths of the sea?
“Oh, if I could save her!” he thought, moving his hand along upon the table until it touched and held hers in a firm clasp which seemed to say, “For life or death you are mine.”
Just then Louie began to shiver, and moaned that she was cold.
“Wait a minute, darling,” Bertha said, “and I will bring you a blanket from our state-room, if I can get there.”
This was no easy task, for the ship was plunging fearfully, and always at an angle which made walking difficult. Twice Bertha fell upon her knees, and once struck her head against the side of the passage, but she reached the room at last, and, securing the blanket, was turning to retrace her steps, when a wave heavier than any which had preceded it struck the vessel, which reeled with what one of the sailors called a double X, pitching and rolling sidewise and endwise and cornerwise all at once. To stand was impossible, and with a cry Bertha fell forward into the arms of Rex Hallam.
“Rex!” she said, involuntarily, and “Bertha!” he replied, showering kisses upon her face, down which the tears were running like rain.
She had been gone so long that he had become alarmed at her absence, and with great difficulty had made his way to the state-room, which he reached in time to save her from a heavy fall. Both were thrown upon the lounge under the window, where they sat for a moment, breathless and forgetful of their danger,Bertha was the first to speak, saying she must go to Louie, but Rex held her fast, and, steadying himself as best he could, drew her face close to his, and said, “This is not a time for love-making, but I may never have another chance, and, if we must die, death will be robbed of half its terrors if you are with me, my darling, my queen, whom I believe I have loved ever since I saw your photograph and thought it was poor Rose Arabella Jefferson.”
He could not repress a smile at the remembrance of that scion of the Jeffersons, but Bertha did not see it. Her head was lying upon his breast, and he was holding to the side of the door to keep from being thrown upon the floor as he urged his suit and then waited for her answer. Against the windows and the dead-lights the waves were dashing furiously, while overhead was a roar like heavy cannonading, mingled with the hoarse shouts of voices calling through the storm. But Rex heard Bertha’s answer, and at the peril of his limbs folded her in his arms and said, “Now we live or die together; and I think that we shall live.”
Naturally they forgot the blanket and everything else as they groped their way back to the door of the salon, where Rex stopped suddenly at the sound of a voice heard distinctly enough for him to know that some one was praying loudly and earnestly, and to know, too, who it was whose clear, nasal tones could be heard above the din without.
“Phineas Jones!” he exclaimed. “Great Cæsar! how came he here?” And he struggled in with Bertha to get nearer to him.
Phineas had been very ill in Liverpool, and when the Germanic left he was still in bed, and was obliged towait two weeks longer, when he took passage on the same ship with Mrs. Hallam. Even then he was so weak that he did not make up his mind to go until an hour before the ship sailed. As there were few passengers, he had no difficulty in securing a berth, where during the first days of the voyage he lay horribly sea-sick and did not know who were on board. He had been too late for his name to be included in the passenger-list, and it was not until the day of the storm that he learned that Mrs. Hallam and Rex and Bertha were on the ship. To find them at once was his first impulse, but when the cyclone struck the boat it struck him, too, with a fresh attack of sea-sickness, from which he did not rally until night, when he would not be longer restrained. Something told him, he said, that Lucy Ann needed him,—in fact, that they all needed him in the cabin, and he was going there. And he went, nearly breaking his neck. Entering the salon on his hands and knees, he made his way to the end of the table on which Louie lay, and near which Mrs. Hallam was clinging desperately to a chair as she crouched upon the floor. It was at this moment that the double X which had sent Bertha into Rex’s arms struck the ship, eliciting shrieks of terror from the passengers, who felt that the end had come. Steadying himself against a corner of the table, Phineas called out, in a loud, penetrating voice:
“Silence! This is no time to scream and cry. It is action you want. Pray to be delivered, as Jonah did. The captain and crew are doing their level best on deck. Let us do ours here, and don’t you worry. We shall be heard. The Master who stilled the storm on Galilee is in this boat, and not asleep, either, in the hindermost part. If He was, no human could get to Him, with theship nearly bottom side up. He is in our midst. I know it, I feel it; and you who are too scart to pray, and you who don’t know how, listen to me. Let us pray.”
The effect was electric, and every head was bowed as Phineas began the most remarkable prayer which was ever offered on shipboard. He was in deadly earnest, and, fired with the fervor and eloquence which made him so noted as a class-leader, he informed the Lord of the condition they were in and instructed Him how to improve it. Galilee, he said, was nothing to the Atlantic when on a tear as it was now, but the voice which had quieted the waters of Tiberias could stop this uproar. He presumed some of them ought to be drowned, he said, but they didn’t want to be, and were going to do better. Then he confessed every possible sin which might have been committed by the passengers, who, according to his statement, were about the wickedest lot, take them as a whole, that ever crossed the ocean. There were exceptions, of course. There were near and dear friends of his, and one blood kin, on board, for whom he especially asked aid. He had not looked upon the face of his kinswoman for years, but he had never forgotten the sweet counsel they took together when children in Sturbridge, and he would have her saved anyway. Like himself, she was old and stricken in years, but——
“Horrible!” came in muffled tones from something at his feet, and, looking down, he saw the bundle of shawls, which, in its excitement, had loosened its hold on the chair and was rolling down the inclined plane towards the centre of the room.
Reaching out his long arm, he pulled it back, and,putting his foot against it, went on with what was now a prayer of thanksgiving. Those who have been in a storm at sea like the one I am describing, will remember how quick they were to detect a change for the better, as the blows upon the ship became less frequent and heavy and the noise overhead began to subside.
Phineas was the first to notice it, and, with his foot still firmly planted against the struggling bundle to keep it in place, he exclaimed, in a voice which was almost a shriek:
“We are saved! We are saved! Don’t you feel it? Don’t you hear it?”
They did hear it and feel it, and with glad hearts responded to the words of thanksgiving which Phineas poured forth, saying the answer to his prayer had come sooner than he expected, and acknowledging that his faith had been weak as water. Then he promised a forsaking of their sins, and a life more consistent with the doctrine they professed, for them all, adapting himself as nearly as he could to the forms of worship familiar to the different denominations he knew must be assembled there. For the Presbyterians there was a mention made of foreordination and the Westminster Catechism, for the Baptists, immersion, for the Methodists, sanctification, for the Roman Catholics, the Blessed Virgin; but he forgot the Episcopalians, until, remembering, with a start, Rex and Lucy Ann, he wound up with:
“From pride, vainglory and hypocrisy, good Lord deliver us. Amen.”
The simple earnestness of the man so impressed his hearers that no one thought of smiling at his ludicrous language, and when the danger was really over andthey could stand upon their feet, they crowded around him as if he had been their deliverer from deadly peril, while Rex introduced him as his particular friend. This stamped him as somebody, and he at once became a sort of lion. We are all more or less susceptible to flattery, and Phineas was not an exception; he received the attentions with a very satisfied air, thinking to himself that if his recent prayers had so impressed them, what would they say if they could hear him when fully under way at a camp-meeting?
“Where’s your aunt?” he asked Rex, suddenly, while Rex looked round for her, but could not find her.
More dead than alive, Mrs. Hallam had clung to the chair in momentary expectation of going down, never to rise again, and in that awful hour it seemed to her that everything connected with her life had passed before her. The old, yellow house, the grandmother to whom she had not always been kind, the early friends of whom she had been ashamed, the husband she had loved, but whom she had tried so often, all stood out so vividly that it seemed as if she could touch them.
“Everything bad,—nothing good. May God forgive it all!” she whispered more than once, as she lay waiting for the end and shuddering as she thought of the dark, cold waters so soon to engulf her.
In this state of mind she became conscious that some one was standing so close to her that his boots held down a portion of her dress, but she did not mind it, for at that moment Phineas began his prayer, to which she listened intently. She knew it was an illiterate man, that his boots were coarse, that his clothes were saturated with an odor of cheap tobacco, and that hebelonged to a class which she despised because she had once been of it. But as he prayed she felt, as she had never felt before, the Presence he said was there with him, and thought nothing of his class, or his tobacco, or his boots. He was a saint, until he spoke of Sturbridge and his blood kin who was old and stricken in years. Then she knew who the saint was, and as soon as it was possible to do so she escaped to her state-room, where Rex found her in a state of great nervous excitement. She could not and would not see Phineas that night, she said. Possibly she might be equal to it in the morning. With that message Phineas, who was hovering around her door, was obliged to be content, but before he retired, every one with whom he talked knew that Mrs. Hallam was his cousin Lucy Ann, whom he used to know in Sturbridge when she was a girl.
Naturally the captain and officers made light of the storm after it was over, citing, as a proof that it was not so very severe, the fact that within four hours after it began to subside the ship was sailing smoothly over a comparatively calm sea, on which the moon and stars were shining as brightly as if it had not so recently been stirred to its depths. The deck had been cleared, and, after seeing Louie in her berth, Bertha went up to join Rex, who was waiting for her. All the past perilwas forgotten in the joy of their perfect love, and they had so much to talk about and so many plans for the future to discuss that the midnight bells sounded before they separated.
“It is not very long till morning, when I shall see you again, nor long before you will be all my own,” Rex said, holding her in his arms and kissing her many times before he let her go.
She found Louie asleep, and when next morning Bertha arose as the first gong sounded, Louie was still sleeping, exhausted with the excitement of the previous day. She was evidently dreaming, for there was a smile on her lips which moved once with some word Bertha could not catch, although it sounded like “Rex.”
“I wonder if she cares very much for him,” Bertha thought, with a twinge of pain. “If she does, I cannot give him up, for he is mine,—my Rex.”
She repeated the name aloud, lingering over it as if the sound were very pleasant to her, and just then Louie’s blue eyes opened and looked inquiringly at her.
“What is it about Rex?” she asked, smiling up at Bertha in that pretty, innocent way which children have of smiling when waking from sleep. “Has he been to inquire for me?” she continued; and, feeling that she could no longer put it off, Bertha knelt beside her and told her a story which made the bright color fade from Louie’s face and her lips quiver in a grieved kind of way as she listened to it.
When it was finished she did not say a word, except to ask if it was not very cold.
“I am all in a shiver. I think I will not get up. TellMartha not to come to me. I do not want any breakfast,” she said, as she turned her face to the wall.
For a moment Bertha lingered, perplexed and pained,—then started to leave the room.
“Wait,” Louie called, faintly, and when Bertha went to her she flung her arms around her neck and said, with a sob, “I am glad for you, and I know you will be happy. Tell Rex I congratulate him. And now go and don’t come back for ever so long. I am tired and want to sleep.”
When she was alone, the little woman buried her face in the pillows and cried like a child, trying to believe she was crying for her husband, but failing dismally. It was for Rex, whom she had held dearer than she knew, and whom she had lost. But with all her weakness Louie had a good deal of common sense, which soon came to her aid. “This is absurd,—crying for one who does not care for me except as a friend. I’ll be a woman, and not a baby,” she thought, as she rung for Martha to come and dress her. An hour later she surprised Bertha and Rex, who were sitting on a seat at the head of the stairs, with a rug thrown across their laps, concealing the hands clasped so tightly beneath it. Nothing could have been sweeter than her manner as she congratulated Rex verbally, and then, sitting down by them, began to plan the grand wedding she would give them if they would wait until poor Fred had been dead a little longer, say a year.
Rex had his own ideas about the wedding and waiting, but he did not express them then. He had settled in his own mind when he should take Bertha, and that it would be from the old house in which he began to have a feeling of ownership.
Meanwhile Mrs. Hallam had consented to see Phineas, whom Rex took to her state-room. What passed at the interview no one knew. It did not last long, and at its close Mrs. Hallam had a nervous headache and Phineas’s face wore a troubled and puzzled expression. He would never have known Lucy Ann, she had altered so, he said. Not grown old, as he supposed she would, but different somehow. He guessed she was tuckered out with fright and the storm. She’d be better when she got home, and then they’d have a good set-to, talking of the old times. He was going to visit her a few days.
This accounted for her headache which lasted the rest of the voyage, so that she did not appear again until they were at the dock in New York. Handing her keys to Rex, she said, “See to my trunks, and for heaven’s sake—keep that man from coming to the house, if you have to strangle him.”
She was among the first to leave the ship, and was driving rapidly home, while Phineas was squabbling with a custom-house officer over some jewelry he had bought in Edinburgh as a present for Dorcas, and an overcoat in London for Mr. Leighton, and which he had conscientiously declared.
“I’m a class-leader,” he said, “and I’d smile to see me lie, and when they asked me if I had any presents I told ’m yes, a coat for the ’Square, and some cangorms for Dorcas, and I swan if they didn’t make me trot ’em out and pay duty, too; and they let more’n fifty trunks full of women’s clothes go through for nothin’. I seen ’m. Where’s Lucy Ann? I was goin’ with her,” he said to Rex, who could have enlightened him with regardto the women’s clothes which “went through for nothin’,” but didn’t.
“Mr. Jones,” he said, buttonholing him familiarly as they walked out of the custom-house, “my aunt has gone home. She is not feeling well at all, and, as the house is not quite in running order, I do not think you’d better go there now. I’ll take you to dine at my club, or, better yet, to the Waldorf, where Mrs. Thurston and Miss Leighton are to stop, and to-morrow we will all go on together, for I’m to see Mrs. Thurston home to Boston, and on my way back shall stop at the Homestead. I am to marry Miss Bertha.”
“You be! Well, I’m glad on’t; but I do want to see Lucy Ann’s house, and I sha’n’t make an atom of trouble. She expects me,” Phineas said, and Rex replied, “I hardly think she does. Indeed, I know she doesn’t, and I wouldn’t go if I were you.”
Gradually the truth began to dawn upon Phineas, and there was a pathos in his voice and a moisture in his eyes as he said, “Is Lucy Ann ashamed ofme? I wouldn’t have believed it, and she my only kin. I’d go through fire and water to serve her. Tell her so, and God bless her.”
Rex felt a great pity for the simple-hearted man to whom the glories of a dinner at the Waldorf did not quite atone for the loss of Lucy Ann, whom he spoke of again when after dinner Rex went with him to the hotel, where he was to spend the night.
“I’m an awkward critter, I know,” he said, “and not used to the ways of high society, but I’m respectable, and my heart is as big as an ox.”
Nothing, however, rested long on Phineas’s mind, and the next morning he was cheerful as ever when hemet his friends at the station, and committed the unwonted extravagance of taking a chair with them in a parlor car, saying as he seated himself that he’d never been in one before, and that he found it tip-top.
The words were said in the old Homestead about a year from the time when we first saw Bertha walking along the lane to meet her sister and holding in her hand the newspaper which had been the means of her meeting with Rex Hallam. The May day had been perfect then, and it was perfect now. The air was odorous with the perfume of the pines and the apple-blossoms, and the country seemed as fresh and fair as when it first came from the hands of its Creator. The bequest which Fred had made to Bertha, and which he wished he had doubled, had been quadrupled by Louie, who, when Bertha declined to take so much, had urged it upon her as a bridal present in advance. With that understanding Bertha had accepted it, and several changes had been made in the Homestead, both outside and in. Bertha’s room, however, where Rex had once slept, remained intact. This he insisted upon, and it was in this room that he received his bride from the hands of her bridesmaids. It was a very quiet affair, with only a few intimate friends from Worcester and Leicester, and Mrs. Hallam from New York. Berthahad suggested inviting Mrs. Haynes, but Rex vetoed that decidedly. She had been the direct cause of so much humiliation to Bertha that he did not care to keep her acquaintance, he said. But Mrs. Haynes had no intention to be ignored by the future Mrs. Rex Hallam, and one of the handsomest presents Bertha received came from her, with a note of congratulation. Louie and Phineas were master and mistress of ceremonies, Louie inside and Phineas outside, where he insisted upon caring for the horses of those who drove from Worcester and the village.
He’d “smile if he couldn’t do it up ship-shape,” he said, and he came at an early hour, gorgeous in swallowtail coat, white vest, stove-pipe hat, and an immense amount of shirt-front, ornamented with Rhine-stone studs. In his ignorance he did not know that a dress-coat was not just as suitable for morning as evening, and had bought one second-hand at a clothing-store in Boston. He wanted to make a good impression on Lucy Ann, he said to Grace, who had been at the Homestead two or three days, and who, declaring him a most delicious specimen, had hobnobbed with him quite familiarly. She told him she had no doubt he would impress Lucy Ann; and he did, for she came near fainting when he presented himself to her, asking what she thought of his outfit, and how it would “do for high.” She wanted to tell him that he would look far better in his every-day clothes than in that costume, but restrained herself and made some non-committal reply. Since meeting him on the ship she had had time to reflect that no one whose opinion was really worth caring for would think less of her because of her relatives, and she was a little ashamed of her treatment of him. Perhaps,too, she was softened by the sight of the old homestead, which had been her husband’s home, or Grace Travis’s avowal that she wished she had just such a dear codger of a cousin, might have had some effect in making her civil and even gracious to the man who, without the least resentment for her former slight of him, “Cousin Lucy Ann”-ed her continually and led her up to salute the bride after the ceremony was over.
There was a wedding breakfast, superintended by Louie, who, if she felt any regret for the might-have-been, did not show it, and was bright and merry as a bird, talking a little of Fred and a great deal of Charlie Sinclair, whom business kept from the wedding and whose lovely present she had helped select. The wedding trip was to extend beyond the Rockies as far as Tacoma, and to include the Fair in Chicago on the homeward journey. The remainder of the summer was to be spent at the Homestead, where Rex could hunt and fish and row to his heart’s content, if he could not have a fox-hunt. Both he and Bertha wished a home of their own in New York, but Mrs. Hallam begged so hard for them to stay with her for a year at least that they consented to do so.
“You may be the mistress, or the daughter of the house, as you please, only stay with me,” Mrs. Hallam said to Bertha, of whom she seemed very fond.
Evidently she was on her best behavior, and during the few days she stayed at the Homestead she quite won the hearts of both Mr. Leighton and Dorcas, and greatly delighted Phineas by asking him to spend the second week in July with her. In this she was politic and managing. She knew he was bound to come some time, and, knowing that the most of her calling acquaintancewould be out of town in July, she fixed his visit at that time, making him understand that he could not prolong it, as she was to join Rex and Bertha in Chicago on the 15th. Had he been going to visit the queen, Phineas could not have been more elated or have talked more about it.
“I hope I sha’n’t mortify Lucy Ann to death,” he said, and when in June Louie came for a few days to the Homestead, he asked her to give him some points in etiquette, which he wrote down and studied diligently, till he considered himself quite equal to cope with any difficulty, and at the appointed time packed his dress-suit and started for New York.
This was Monday, and on Saturday Dorcas was surprised to see him walking up the avenue from the car.
He’d had a tip-top time, he said, and Lucy Ann did all she could to make it pleasant.
“But, my!” he added, “it was so lonesome and grand and stiff; and didn’t Lucy Ann put on the style! But I studied my notes, and held my own pretty well. I don’t think I made more than three or four blunders. I reached out and got a piece of bread with my fork, and saw a thunder-cloud on Lucy Ann’s face; and I put on my dress-suit one morning to drive to the Park, but took it off quicker when Lucy Ann saw it. Dress-coats ain’t the thing in the morning, it seems. I guess they ain’t the thing for me anywhere. But my third blunder was wust of all, though I don’t understand it. Between you ’n’ I, I don’t believe Lucy Ann has much company, for not a livin’ soul come to the house while I was there, except one woman with two men in tall boots drivin’ her. Lucy Ann was out and the nigger was out, and I went to the door to save the girlsfrom runnin’ up and down stairs so much. I told her Mis’ Hallam wa’n’t to home, and I rather urged her to come in and take a chair, she looked so kind of disappointed and tired, and curi’s, too, I thought, as if she wondered who I was; so I said, ‘I’m Mis’ Hallam’s cousin. You better come in and rest. She’ll be home pretty soon.’
“‘Thanks,’ she said, in a queer kind of way, and handed me a card for Lucy Ann, who was tearin’ when I told her what I’d done. It was the servants’ business to wait on the door when Peters was out, she said, and on no account was I to ask any one in if she wasn’t there. That ain’t my idea of hospitality. Is’t yours?”
Dorcas laughed, and said she supposed city ways were not exactly like those of the country. Phineas guessed they wasn’t, and he was glad to get where he could tip back in his chair if he wanted to, and eat with his knife, and ask a friend to come in and sit down.
A few days later Dorcas and her father, with Louie, started for Chicago to join the Hallams. For four weeks they reveled in the wonders of the beautiful White City. After that Mrs. Hallam returned to her lonely house in New York, while Rex and Bertha and Louie went back to the old Homestead. There they spent the remainder of the summer, and there Bertha lingered until the hazy light of October was beginning to hang over the New England hills and the autumnal tints to show in the woods. Then Rex, who had spent every Sunday there, took her to her new home, where her reception was very different from what it had been on her first arrival. Then she was only a hired companion, dining with the housekeeper and waiting on the fourth floor back for her employer to give her anaudience. Now she was a petted bride, the daughter of the house, with full authority to go where she pleased, do what she pleased, and make any change she pleased, from the drawing-room to the handsome suite which had been fitted up for her. But she made no change, except in Rex’s sleeping-apartment, where she did take the pictures of ballet-dancers, rope-walkers, and sporting men from the mirror-frame, and substituted in their place those of her father, Dorcas, and Grace. She would have liked to remove her own picture, with “Rose Arabella Jefferson” written upon it, but Rex interfered. It seemed to him, he said, a connecting link between his bachelor life and the great joy which had come to him, and it should stay there, Rose Arabella and all.
Mr. Leighton and Dorcas have twice visited Bertha in her home, and been happy there because she was so happy. But both were glad to go back to the old house under the apple-trees and the country life which they like best. Bertha, on the contrary, takes readily to the ways of the great city, although she cares but little for the fashionable society that is so eager to take her up, and prefers the companionship of her husband and the quiet of her home to the gayest assemblage in New York. Occasionally however, she may be seen at some afternoon tea, or dinner, or reception, where Mrs. Hallam is proud to introduce her as “my nephew’s wife,” while Mrs. Walker Haynes, always politic and persistent, speaks of her as “my friend, that charming Mrs. Reginald Hallam.”