IN 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 at her 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 heavy load, 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 the point. 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 to be 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 was holding 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, with her 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.