AT 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 had been 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 and Fred 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 Herbert held 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 might never 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, and some 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 where Louie’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.