CHAPTER XXIIIN PARIS
With renewed health Louie began to be impatient to begin her life work, as she called it. Miss Percy and the Lansings would like to have spent the late spring among the Italian lakes, and the summer in Switzerland; but they yielded to Louie’s wishes, and the last of April found them again in Paris, occupying what, during the empire, had been a palace, but was now let to anyone with money enough to rent and keep it up, with the grounds around it. Both Miss Percy and the Lansings had the money, and no princess was ever more luxuriously lodged and cared for than Louie, who for a few days abandoned herself to the pleasure of seeing the city, sometimes with Mrs. Lansing and Miss Percy, but oftener with Fred, who knew every point of interest, and made it doubly interesting by his own enthusiasm. For the gay shops Louie cared nothing. She should never wear anything but black, she said, and she looked so pure and sweet in her simple mourning, which so effectively brought out the brilliancy of her complexion and the brightness of her eyes, that strangers turned to look ather as she walked through the picture galleries, or drove in the Bois de Boulogne. The French called her La Belle Americaine, and the English and Germans called her Fred Lansing’s fiancée, the young men envying him the prize he had won, and the young women envying her her beauty, of which she seemed wholly unconscious.
Her looks were of small moment to her. Nothing mattered much but her voice, which was soon to be tested—not to see if it were worth cultivation, she thought, but to see how much it was worth and how long it would take before she could try her wings. If occasionally a spasm of pain contracted her throat, or something rose up and choked her when she tried a high note, it caused her no fear. She had experienced the like before, and it had passed away. She was a little nervous, that was all, she said, and did not guess how anxious Mrs. Lansing and Miss Percy and Fred were when the day of trial came. She only thought how very kind and gentle and tender they were towards her, as a mother is towards her child when a painful ordeal is in store for it. She had no real fear. She was eager for the trial, hoping that in a year she could begin to earn something to send home, to show the people she was keeping faith with them. She had a list of all the debts, and knew just how much was owing still, and to whom, and which ones she should pay first. It looked like a heavyload, and as she went over the amounts with Fred, who was quite as much interested as herself, her lips quivered a little as she said, “It is a big lot, but I can do it in time. Don’t you think so?”
Fred pretended not to hear her, as he was writing down the names of the creditors and the amount of indebtedness; but he pitied her, for with Miss Percy, who was a better judge than himself, a suspicion had been growing in his mind which boded no good for poor little Louie; and when the voice which was to do so much was tried and found wanting, because the quality which had made it so rich and musical, and the power to raise the higher notes, without huskiness or breaking, were gone, it was Fred’s arms which encircled the half fainting girl, and Fred who first tried to comfort her.
“Please don’t speak to me now; go away,” she said to him when, after their return home, he found her in a little recess off from the salon, lying upon a couch in an abandonment of grief. “I can’t cry, and my throat feels like bursting. It is worse than death,” she said, at last, as he did not go away. “Everything has failed me. Father and mother dead—my home gone, and now my voice, with which I meant to do so much. It may come back, they said, but I know it never will. Something gave way in my throat when they told me, and I don’t believe I could sing a note now if my life depended upon it. I wish I had died with mother!”
It was hard, and for a time nothing they could say or do comforted her, or availed to rouse her from the state of apathy into which she had fallen. It was in vain that Miss Percy said to her, “I have adopted you as my young sister. You will live with me always. I want you.” Louie only answered, “It isn’t that. It isn’t myself I care for. I can earn my own living somehow. It is the people—father’s creditors. I promised to pay them, and I never can.”
She did not cry. If she had, it would have been better, and her eyes would not have looked so dry and red and unnaturally bright as they did, or her smile have been so rare and sad.
As there was no longer any necessity for staying in Paris, they went to Switzerland, where, in the exhilarating atmosphere and among the grand scenery, her spirits rallied a little, and occasionally her merry laugh was heard in the châlet which they occupied, near Geneva.
It was here that a pile of papers came to Fred one morning, together with two or three letters for Louie, one of them in Nancy Sharp’s unmistakable handwriting. Nancy had written at intervals, feeling it her duty to keep Louie posted with regard to the house and the news of the town, every little item of which she wrote in her own peculiar style. These letters had usually interested Louie greatly, Nancy’s descriptions were so graphic and to thepoint. Sometimes there was a fling at Judge White, who “grew more fussy and big feelin’ all the time,” she wrote, “but hadn’t a dollar of her money in his bank. That was safe—some in a sugar-bowl, some in a tea-pot, and some in—she guessed she wouldn’t tell where, for fear it might leak out.” Godfrey Sheldon, too, came in for a share of sarcasm. “A nobody and an upstart, ridin’ with liver on the box; but she must say he kept Jack and Jill lookin’ well; if he didn’t, she would complain’ to the humanes and have him ‘rested.” Such and similar items were the substance of Nancy’s letters; and when Fred saw her handwriting on the last one received, he knew there was a budget of home news for Louie such as no one else could write, and knew, too, that in all human probability there was one item which would startle her, and he meant to be present when the blow fell.
“Here is a letter from Nancy,” he said, giving it to her. “I am always interested in what the old lady says.”
Louie was alone in the salon, as Mrs. Lansing and Miss Percy had gone that day to Coppet with a party. Taking the letter, she broke the seal and began to read, her eyes growing larger and darker and her face whiter as she read,
“I must tell you fust of the hullabelloo there was in town when word come that the dets was awl tobe pade, as soon as the clames was bro’t to Mr. Blake. Such a runnin’ of wimmen tellin’ the nuse was never seen since the run and the failure. One woman stood on her steps and yelled to the fokes passin’ up and down, four men rung the bell to call the fokes together, and Godfrey Sheldon come ni’ havin’ a fit, he was so tickled to get his money agin. Awl pade, every scent, by Mr. Lansing, they say, for of course you hain’t sung long enuff to git all that money, and fokes do say they’s somethin’ betwixt you an’ him. I hope to the land there is. He’s ’nuff site better’n that white-livered Herbert, who’s got to partin’ his hare in the middle and carryin’ a cain.”
Louie read no further than this before she burst into a paroxysm of weeping such as she had not known for weeks.
“Oh, this is too much! How could he?” she said aloud, and in a moment the he referred to had his arm around her, holding her so fast that she could not get away.
“Louie,” he said, “I think I know what Nancy has written, and I want you to listen to me a moment.”
She would not listen at first, but kept saying, “How could you? How could you?”
“Louie,” he persisted, “which would you rather do—owe a great many people, some of whom need the money, or, owe one who does not need it, and, if necessary, can wait forever? Try and consider yourself my debtor.”
His arm had tightened round her, and he washolding her very close to him as he talked, till gradually she grew calm and said:
“I know it is very kind in you, and few would have done it. But it will be so long before I can pay you, if I ever do, and that is very humiliating. I owe you so much already.”
Herbert had once said of Fred that if he were ever in love he would leap over the precipice without a thought of the consequences, and that was just what he did do. Without stopping to consider whether it were the time or the place, or Louie in a condition to hear him, he got both her hands in his, and held them while he told her how she could pay him, and that he believed he had loved her ever since the day when she worked so bravely to save his uncle’s bank.
“It certainly began then,” he said, “and has gone on increasing ever since, until now it will be very hard to give you up.”
He did not speak of the worn napkin he had kept because her hands had hemmed it, and that it always brought to his mind the picture of a little girl in a bib apron and white sun-bonnet, whom his aunt had described. To tell her that would remind her of a time he would have her forget, and he dwelt most upon his present feelings and his great love for her.
When Herbert proposed to her, she fell asleep, and she seemed to do so now, she sat so still, withher head bent so low that Fred could not see her face. During her illness, and the excitement which had preceded and followed it, she had not had time to ask herself what her real feelings were for Fred Lansing, or what his were for her. His attentions had been so delicate and unobtrusive, and she had received them without questioning until now, when it came to her that she loved him as she had never loved Herbert White, and that it would be such bliss to put her tired head upon his breast and lay all her care upon his broad shoulders.
“Speak to me, Louie,” he said at last, trying to look in her face. “Say you will be my wife, and cancel that debt.”
“Oh, if I only could,” she said; “but I can’t, because of my family history, and then—” She hesitated a moment and went on, “I once thought I loved Herbert; I was engaged to him.”
“Yes, I know,” Fred answered, succeeding in getting her face where he could see the side of it. “He told me at the time, or I should have proposed to you myself. It gave me an awful pang, which I covered as well as I could, though I think Herbert half suspected it. He has been man enough to write and tell me that you had severed the tie, and he said some things not very complimentary to himself for his cowardice in keeping his engagement a secret. I think he expects this finale to our acquaintance. I know Miss Percy does, and my mother, and both will be glad.”
“But,” Louie said, “my debt, and my voice, and my career?”
“The debt is paid when you give yourself to me,” Fred answered. “Your voice will come back in time, and be all my own; and, as for the career, I have not the prejudice against the stage which Herbert has, but I always hoped you would be saved from it in some way. I would rather not have my wife before the footlights, for a promiscuous crowd to admire and applaud, and you are to be my wife.”
He spoke both interrogatively and affirmatively, and stooped to kiss her; but she drew back from him, as she had from Herbert, and said:
“I have not promised yet. I must have time to think. I must talk with Miss Percy.”
Fred knew his cause was safe in that direction, and did not urge his suit further then. He felt so sure that he could wait, and when his mother and Miss Percy came from Coppet, he told them what he had done, and that he depended upon them as coadjutors, with no misgivings as to the result.