CHAPTER XXIIILOUIE AND MISS PERCY
It was a rather wakeful night which Louie passed, but a happy one. With Fred Lansing’s love, life, which had seemed so black and dreary, looked very bright to her, although there was a feeling of humility in her heart that her father’s debts should be paid by him. And yet the thought that it was his great love which prompted it robbed the humility of much of its bitterness, and it was a very happy young girl who went to Miss Percy the next morning as she was taking her coffee in her room.
“I think I know what you have come to tell me,” Miss Percy said. “I saw Fred last night, and I am very glad. I knew it was coming long ago. You have won a noble man with, I may almost say, no faults, unless it be that he is a little too chary of his real feelings, which make him seem cold and proud when he is neither.”
“But it hurts me that he should pay the debts for me when I wanted to do it myself,” Louie said.
“Yes, dear, I know,” Miss Percy replied; “but God has willed it otherwise. He has taken away your voice for a time, and in its place has given youthis friend to do your work for you. He often opens one door when he shuts another. He does not forget us when we feel the most alone. The mother who leaves her little child in one room while she goes into another, does not forget it. She hears its cry, and in time goes back to it full of tenderness and love for the disquiet she has caused it. So with God, he comes back to us when we have been shut in the darkest of rooms, groping blindly for a ray of light. I found it so once, when the darkness was so thick that I felt it covering me like a pall, and in the whole world there seemed nothing worth living for, because my twin-brother Brant was dead.”
Louie had never seen her in such a mood before, or heard her talk in this way. She was very pale, and said her head ached; but when Louie arose to leave her she bade her stay, and said:
“I am not myself this morning, but I want to talk to some one. I have taken you for my sister. I will have no secrets from you. This is the anniversary of my brother’s death. You know I had one, and lost him.”
Louie nodded, and Miss Percy continued: “Let me tell you about him, and you will know better why I always wear black, and am sometimes so sad. He was all the world to me, for we were orphans, and wards of Fred’s father. Although my twin, he seemed younger than myself, with his fair, boyishface, and I watched over him as if I had been his mother. Somehow and somewhere—possibly at Monte Carlo, where we spent some weeks, he acquired a taste for play. Perhaps it was born with him and he could not help it, although he tried at times. It was a mania, stronger than his will, and nothing could win him from it. I am afraid he was weak in some respects, for he fancied himself an expert, able to cope with the most experienced gamblers, and success turned his head. Some years ago he made a trip West, promising me before he left that he would not touch a card. But he broke his word; and at Butte, in Montana, he fell in with a professional, who tempted him to play, letting him win at first, they said, so as to lure him on, and then wiping him out. I believe that is the term they used when telling me of it. He lost thousands and then took his own life—shot himself through the temple—my fair-faced brother whom I idolized. That was six years ago, when the dreadful news flashed across the wires to Washington, ‘Brant Percy shot himself early this morning. We await orders.’
“I could have died for him, I think, and in my first bitter anguish I cursed the man who lured him to ruin. Cursed him and his. I don’t know who he was, except that his name wasTom Crary, and he was well known in that region as an accomplished gambler. Where he is now, if still livingand carrying on his nefarious work, I do not know, but I have learned to pray for him since the bitterness is gone, and I hope my curse has not followed him.”
“It has! It has!” Louie cried, stretching out her hands for something to keep herself from falling, everything around her was so dark, and there was such a buzzing in her head and nausea at her stomach.
Miss Percy was alarmed at the whiteness of her face and the strained look in her eyes, and put out her hand to steady her as she saw her falling in her chair.
“Don’t touch me,” Louie said, “I am only worthy to kneel in the dust at your feet and beg your pardon for my father’s sin. It was he who played with the young man in Butte. I didn’t know it till just before he died, when he told me the story, but not the young man’s name, and I never dreamed who it was. But, oh, Miss Percy, listen to me. Father didn’t want to play at first, but the young man insisted; and when all was lost, father offered to refund a part. He told me so, and he would not lie with death resting on his pillow, and that young man’s face always before him, as he said it was. He never gambled that way again, and he repented bitterly and was so sorry, and died a good man. I know he did. But your curse followed him, and has fallen so heavily on me, towhom you have been so kind, but can never be again. I know it, and I must go away from you all into the world alone and do the best I can. I wish I could die as mother did! Oh, oh, this is worse than all the rest—that father’s sin should confront me now, just as I was beginning to be happy. I remember he never seemed to want to see you in Merivale, or hear about you. He must have known who you were, and why didn’t he tell me and save me from this humiliation. You can never want to speak to me again, or look at me. But I didn’t know, and I could go down on my face at your feet, but it would do no good. It would not bring your brother back. Truly the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and I can’t bear it.”
She had talked steadily until now, when she broke down and cried bitterly, while Miss Percy sat for a moment immovable. The blow had fallen heavily upon her, taking away all her strength and filling her with dismay that the girl she had loved and cared for was the daughter of the man whom, in her anguish, she had cursed as the cause of her brother’s death. Then her strong principle and sense of justice came to her aid. Louie was not to blame, and something in the girl’s distress touched every chord of pity in her heart.
“Louie,” she said, winding her arm around her, “don’t give way like this and blame yourself forwhat you could not help. It is a strange Providence which has brought us together and drawn me so to you. God’s hand is surely in it; and if you were my sister before, you are doubly so now—taken in the place of my poor brother. Don’t cry so hard; you frighten me.”
“I must, I must cry,” Louie said. “Please let me go to think it out and decide what to do.”
She wrested herself from Miss Percy and left the room, meeting in the corridor Fred, who was looking for her.
“Louie,” he said, “I want to take you to mother. I have told her, and she is so glad.”
At sight of him Louie’s tears burst out afresh, but she did not repel him. Something in his voice drew her to him, and with a great cry she threw herself into his arms and sobbed:
“Just this once let me lean on you, and it shall be the last. I cannot be your wife. I must not. Miss Percy will tell you why. Oh, Fred, I do not mind telling you, now that it is all over, that I do love you and always shall; but it cannot be.”
He did not at all understand her. He only knew she had called him Fred and declared her love for him. Nothing else mattered, even if the heavens fell. Neither Miss Percy nor mortal man should take her from him; and he kissed her passionately again and again, while he tried to find what had affected her so strangely.
She managed to tell him at last, while he listened, surprised and shocked, but with his love in no sense abated for the girl, who, while telling him all was over between them, clung to him as a drowning man clings to a straw. Brant Percy had been his best boy friend. They had been in school together for two years in Germany. They had travelled over Europe, and been together at Yale until Brant, who never cared much for books, left college and gave himself to the life which ended in his tragic death. The last letter he ever wrote was addressed to Fred from Butte.
“The gamest place out,” he said, “and no end of fun with the fellows who think they know something about play. You must not tell Blanche that I have backslidden. I promised her I would not touch a card while I was gone, and I have not till I came here, where there is so much of it that I caught the infection again, and itisa disease which comes upon me with such force that I cannot resist the temptation. I have been pretty lucky, and last night tried my hand with an expert, Tom Crary, who is looked upon as a champion player. Some say that the devil helps him; others, that he is Satan himself, capable of seeing what his opponent holds, and playing accordingly. But if so he is a very fascinating Satan; in short, a perfect gentleman, with a face like a saint and manners as winsome as a woman’s. I challenged him last night, and the look of surprise he gave me was much like the look Goliath must have given David when he saw the stripling coming out to fight with him. He didn’t seem to want to play with me—evidently thought me too small fry for his net. But I insisted, and won, too, much more than I lost. Hedid not appear to care, and said to me, ‘Well, my boy, we are quits now. I hope you are satisfied. Better let cards alone while you are in luck.’ That just fired my blood. I am not a boy, and I was not satisfied. It was something to beat Tom Crary as I had done, and to-night we try it again. He held off and said he’d had enough, till I hinted that he was afraid because I knew some points of which he was ignorant. Then he consented, and if I am not richer to-morrow by at least a thousand, and maybe more, my name is not Brant Percy.”
Before this letter was received news came to Washington of poor Brant’s death. His boasted skill had not prevailed against his experienced adversary, and he had played the coward’s part by taking his own life. With Miss Percy Fred had felt indignant at the man who had been indirectly the cause of Brant’s death, and although he did not curse him as she had done, he never thought of him without a feeling of horror. And now it was proven that he was the father of the girl he loved more than his life, and with his recollection of Mr. Grey he knew that he was not the unprincipled man he had imagined Brant’s adversary to be. He, like Brant, was infected with a disease he had not the strength to resist, and his life had paid the penalty of his misdeeds. Louie was his daughter, and he felt all his animosity against her father slipping from him, and thought of him only as the courteous, gentlemanly man whom he had known in Merivale.
“Louie,” he said, “you must not think I will give you up for anything your father did. From what Brant wrote I can understand how headstrong he was, and can see that your father tried to dissuade him from his folly. Don’t cry so, you frighten me—and don’t talk of going away. Where can you go. Your place is here with me,” and he folded her more closely in his arms until her sobbing ceased and she lay very quiet, listening to his words of love, with only an occasional long-drawn sigh and great hot tears on her cheek.
She knew he meant all he said, but did not understand how he or anyone could care for her now, and it was days before Miss Percy’s unchanged kindness and Fred’s persistent love-making could win her back to anything like herself.
“If anything more comes to me I shall die; and I should want to die now but for you,” she said to Fred one day; and he knew then that the state of morbid depression into which she had fallen was passing, and he watched over her with all the care of a fond mother for the child which has been hurt and is slowly recovering.
For this recovery Miss Percy did much, while Mrs. Lansing treated her as if she were already her daughter.
In this manner the summer was passed in Switzerland, at different points; and in September Italy was talked of as a place where to spend the winter.Fred was anxious for the marriage to take place at once, but Louie refused.
“So much has happened to me and so fast,” she said, “that I feel as if I were weak in mind as well as body, and I must have time to rally and know what I am doing.
“And then,” she added, with a quaver in her voice, “when I am married, if I ever am, I want to go to Merivale and see the old place once more, and the people, and father’s grave. Then I will go wherever you like, and try to forget the past, which makes me sad.”
She put up her lips to be kissed, for she had learned Fred’s habit when talking with her; and so the matter was settled for the present, and the marriage deferred until some time in the spring, when it was to take place in London, and the party was to sail at once for America.