CHAPTER XXIAT THE SAVOY
It had been Fred’s intention to hurry on to Paris and the pleasant house near the Arch of Triumph, occupied by his mother and Miss Percy. But when he saw how weak Mrs. Grey was, he gave up that idea, and wired to Miss Percy to meet him, if possible, at the Savoy, in London, and have rooms ready for Mrs. Grey and Louie. It was her answer received on the train, which made him so glad by relieving him from a load of anxiety. He felt that Mrs. Grey was seriously ill, and needed the support of some woman besides the nurse. Something, too, in Louie’s face warned him that the excitement of the last few months, and the fatigue of the voyage were telling upon her. He might nurse her himself. He would rather like the job; but somebody must care for Mrs. Grey, and no one could be better than Miss Percy, who had hurried to London, and secured the best accommodations possible for the party.
“Don’t say a word. You are to keep quiet,” she said, when Louie began to protest and try to explain. “I know everything from Mr. Blake, to whom I wrote, asking for particulars, and only wish I hadbeen there to help you. I have long wanted something to do—something to care for and divert my mind. I have you at last, and am glad. So sit still and take the good the gods provide.”
And Louie took the good. In fact, she was too tired and worn to do much else than sit still and let others care for her and her mother. The latter did not improve as they hoped she might. It was more than nervous exhaustion. It was a general breaking up of all the life centers of her being, and she could not rally. For the most of the time she thought herself at home, but nearly always seemed to know that her husband was dead. Sometimes she talked to him, and told him she was coming to join him and that everything he had left in a tangle would be straightened by Louie and Mr. Lansing. She frequently coupled their names together; and Louie’s cheeks would burn as she heard it, and then turn white, with the fear gathering strength day by day as she sat by her mother’s side, and watched the flickering flame brightening at intervals and then dying down until it went out forever: and Louie was alone so far as her mother was concerned, but surrounded with everything which love and sympathy could devise to comfort her.
For weeks a chilly fog had hung over the great city, but it cleared at last, and the wintry sun shone bright and warm upon the grave in Kensal Green where Mrs. Grey was buried, while Miss Percy andFred Lansing stood on either side of Louie, whose face was white as that of the corpse the coffin covered from her sight.
“I know you are trying to comfort me,” she said, as they were driving back to the hotel, “and by and by I shall thank you, but I can’t talk now, I am so sorry, and so tired and so sick.”
They knew she was sick, and the physician and nurse who had attended her mother were retained for her during the weeks which followed, when she hovered between life and death, battling with exhaustion and brain fever in its worst form, and cared for with all the sympathy of a sister by Miss Percy, and all the devotion of a lover by Fred Lansing, who watched by her constantly, with a terrible fear in his heart that the treasure he coveted might be snatched from him just as its possession seemed possible. Mrs. Lansing, too, who seldom evinced much interest in anyone outside her family, was interested in this young girl, who she felt intuitively would some day be her daughter-in-law, and she sat by the bedside many an hour when she would otherwise have been resting in her own room.
A cablegram announcing Mrs. Grey’s death and Louie’s illness had gone to Merivale, where Herbert was spending his Christmas vacation. Prayers were said for the sick in the little stone church, where the judge’s amen was louder, if possible, than it had been when Mr. Grey died; while the book Herbertheld was wet with tears for the girl who was to have been his wife, and for whom his heart was aching with a dull, heavy pain. He knew she could never be his. If she lived Fred Lansing would claim her, and “he ought to have her,” he said to himself; and that day he wrote to Fred, telling him of the broken engagement and saying:
“I am human, and sometimes feel that I would rather know she was dead than the wife of another than myself. But that is selfish and mean, and I give her to you, knowing how worthy you are of her, and how happy she will be with you.”
Other letters came from Merivale, and among them one from Nancy Sharp, wonderful in composition and spelling. She had heard, she said, that the Grey house was to be closed for the winter, so far as a genteel family was concerned, but that some honest, respectable person, or persons were wanted to live in the rear, and take charge of it until the owner claimed it; and as she was both respectable and honest, she had applied for the situation and got it, and was, as she expressed it, “happy as a clam,” with stationary tubs and plenty of room for her clothes to dry in the back yard. She did not suppose the Almighty cared for the prayers of an old scrub like her, but she prayed, just the same, three times a day—on her knees, too—that Louie might get well, and she felt it in her bones that she would, and come back some day to the old home which she would find in apple-pie order.
“I don’t use the drawin’, nor sittin’, nor dinin’, nor best sleepin’ rooms, of course,” she wrote. “I keep ’em swep’ and dusted and aired, and live in the kitchen and but’ry, and bedroom off, and am happy as the day is long, for it’s quite a hist from White’s Row to this grand house.”
This letter, with others directed to Louie, from Merivale, Fred put away, waiting for the time when she would understand their contents, if that time ever came. She was very ill, and every day seemed going lower down into the shadow of death. From the first she was delirious and talked of the failure, and the hours passed with her father in the bank listening to the angry roar of the crowd outside; of the wild, rainy night when she faced the Session alone, while Herbert sat on the dry-goods box in the hall. Once she spoke of a young man with a bullet in his brain and his half-open eyes staring at her as they did at her father, but only Fred heard her, and he did not understand. From her ravings he learned more of what she had passed through than Mr. Blake had told them, and his great, kind heart yearned with sympathy and pity for the young girl who seemed so crushed and broken and ashamed. She dwelt a great deal upon that, as if she in some way were to blame for what had happened. “We didn’t suspect the truth or we would have lived differently,” she said, “but I shall pay it all.” Sometimes it seemed to dawn upon her that she mightnever be able to pay the debts; then she would wring her hands and cry piteously, “Who will do it, if I can’t?”
Once, when alone with her, and her plaintive cry, “Who will do it?” was repeated again and again, Fred bent so close to her that her hot, feverish breath stirred his hair, and said, “Louie! Louie!”
He had always called her Miss Grey, and now, at the sound of her old familiar name, she opened her eyes, bright with delirium, and asked, “Who is calling me Louie, as they used to do so long ago?”
“I,” Fred answered her, “Fred Lansing. Don’t you know me?”
“I don’t quite think I do,” she said, with her eyes still fixed upon him. “You seem a little like Herbert. I knew him long ago, in the woods and on the river, and everywhere. But that is all over, and I gave him back the ring, which I never wore, for fear of his father, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Fred said, taking the hot hands which were beating the air. “I know; and, Louie, don’t be troubled about those debts. I will pay them all if you never can. Be quiet now and get well.”
“Yes, get well, so as to sing. That’s what I must do; and I am so tired, and the keys in my throat are all out of tune. Listen,” and she tried a few notes of her famous bird-song on which so much depended.
At first her voice was clear as a canary’s, andsome like it, and then it broke and died away in a faint, gurgling sound pitiful to hear.
“What a discord!” she said, with a laugh which was half a cry; “and hark! how the people hiss and jeer, when I expected applause. I can’t do it. I can’t.”
This was her cry many times a day, as she tried to sing, and always broke down with the sobbing words, “I can’t, I can’t! There is something choking me, and they hiss me so for my father. I didn’t know it. I was not to blame, and he was so sorry for it all.”
At last the effort to sing ceased, and she was so still that the stillness was worse than the singing; it was so much like death, as she lay with her eyes closed, and the hands which had beaten the air so restlessly lying just where they were put, with no appearance of life in them.
It was better so, the doctor said, as she was not wearing her strength away. She was young. She had strong recuperative powers, and would recover with close care and nursing.
There was no lack of these. The best nurses London could afford were called to her aid, while either Miss Percy, or Fred, or his mother, who had joined them, was with her constantly. Fred’s voice she always knew, and it was Fred who, when she seemed drifting far out on the tide which has no turning, brought her back to a semblance of life and consciousness.
“Louie! Louie!” he cried in an agony, when the pallor settled around her mouth and the pinched look came upon her face, which made the trained nurse throw up her hands in despair, “Louie! Louie, come back to us! You must not die!” he said, and something in his voice penetrated through the films of darkness settling upon her.
There was a slight movement of her head, as if listening, and the doctor, who was watching, said,
“Speak to her again. Call her name.”
“Louie! Louie! come back. I want you,” Fred said, his voice trembling with the intensity of his feelings.
There was a movement of suspense, a long, gasping sigh like a sob of relief, and Louie whispered,
“I am trying to come, but it is so dark, and I am so tired, and the river runs so fast. Somebody must meet me on the way. I cannot come alone!”
Whether Fred or any one met her on the way, none could tell, but from that time she rallied, and within a few days the joyful message went across the water to Merivale:
“The crisis is passed; she will live.”
As the physician had said, she had youth and strength and great recuperative powers, and her recovery was rapid when once it commenced; and after a week or two the family returned to Paris, and then went by easy stages to Florence, where the remainder of the winter was passed, and whereLouie’s health and strength and beauty came back to her, the latter enhanced by the tinge of sadness her face always wore when she thought of the two graves, one in America and one in Kensal Green, where Fred told her he had ordered a stone erected in memory of her mother, but did not add that he had ordered a similar one to be placed at her father’s grave in Merivale.