TANGLED THREADS.
As Thurston had predicted, there was a great deal of trouble and no end
of expense; but Rex attended to everything, while Bertha devoted herself
to Louie, who had gone from one hysterical paroxysm into another until
she was weaker and more helpless than she had ever been, but not too
weak to talk continually of Fred, who, one would suppose, had been the
tenderest of husbands. All she had suffered at his hands was forgotten,
wiped out by the message he had left for her and by knowing that his
last thoughts had been of her. But she spurned the idea of not wearing
black, and insisted that boxes of mourning dresses and bonnets and caps
should be sent to her on approbation from Geneva and Lausanne, until her
room looked like a bazaar of crape, and not only Bertha and Martha, the
maid, but Rex was more than once called in for an opinion as to what
would be most suitable. It was rather a peculiar position in which Rex
found himself,—two young ladies on his hands, with one of whom he was in
love, while the other would unquestionably be in love with him as soon
as her first burst of grief was over and she had settled the details of
her wardrobe. But he did not mind it; in fact, he found it delightful to
be associated daily with Bertha, and to be constantly applied to for
sympathy and advice by Louie, who treated him with the freedom and
confidence of a sister, and he would not have thought of a change, if
Bertha had not suggested it. She had been told of the bequest which
secured the Homestead from sale and made it no longer necessary for her
to return to Mrs. Hallam, and she wrote at once asking to be released
from her engagement, but saying she would keep it if her services were
still desired.
It was a very gracious reply which Mrs. Hallam returned to her, freeing
her from all obligations to herself, while something in the tone of the
letter made Bertha suspect that all was not as rose-colored at Aix as it
had been, and that Mrs. Hallam would be glad to make one of the party at
Ouchy. This she said to Rex, suggesting that he should invite his aunt
to join them, and urging so strongly the propriety of either bringing
her to him, or going himself to her, that he finally wrote to his aunt
to come to him, and immediately received a reply that she would be with
him the next day. Rex met her at the station in Lausanne, and Bertha
received her at the hotel as deferentially and respectfully as if she
were still her hired companion, a condition which Mrs. Hallam had made
up her mind to ignore, especially as it no longer existed between them.
Taking both Bertha’s hands in hers, she kissed her effusively and told
her how much better she was looking since she left Aix.
“And no wonder,” she said. “The air there was not good, and either that
or something made me very nervous, so that I did things for which I am
sorry, and which I hope you will forget.”
This was a great concession which Bertha received graciously, and the
two were on the best of terms when they entered Louie’s room. Louie had
improved rapidly during the week, and was sitting in an easy-chair by
the window, clad in a most becoming tea-gown fashioned at Worth’s for
the first stages of deep mourning, and looking more like a girl of
eighteen than a widow of twenty-five. Notwithstanding her husband’s
assertion that black would not become her, she had never been half so
lovely as she was in her weeds, and her face was never so fair as when
framed in her little crêpe bonnet and widow’s cap, which sat so jauntily
on her golden hair. “Dazzlingly beautiful and altogether irresistible,”
was Mrs. Hallam’s opinion as the days went by, and Louie grew more and
more cheerful and sometimes forgot to put Fred’s photograph under her
pillow, and began to talk less of him and more to Rex, whose attentions
she claimed with an air of ownership which would have amused Bertha if
she could have put from her the harrowing thought of what might be a
year hence, when the grave at Mount Auburn was not as new, or Louie’s
loss as fresh, as they were now.
“He cannot help loving her,” she would say to herself, “and I ought to
be glad to have her happy with him.”
But she was not glad, and it showed in her face, whose expression Rex
could not understand. Louie’s was one of those natures which, without
meaning to be selfish, make everything subservient to them. She was
always the centre about which others revolved, and Rex was her willing
slave, partly because of Thurston’s dying charge, and partly because he
could not resist her pretty appealing ways, and would not if he could.
But he never dreamed of associating his devotion to her with Bertha’s
growing reserve. She was his real queen, without whom his life at Ouchy
would have been very irksome, and when she suggested going home, as
Dorcas had written urging her to do, he protested against it almost as
strenuously as Louie. She must stay, both said, until she had seen
something of Europe besides Aix and Ouchy. So she stayed, and they spent
September at Interlaken and Lucerne, October in Paris, and November at
the Italian lakes, where she received a letter from Grace, written in
New York and signed “Grace Haynes Travis.”
“We were married yesterday,” she wrote, “and to-morrow we start for our
Florida cabin and orange grove, near Orlando, where so many English
people have settled. Mother gave in handsomely at the last, when she
found there was no help for it, and I actually won over Lady Gresham,
who used to think me a Hottentot, and always spoke of me as ‘that
dreadful American girl.’ She invited mother and me to her country house,
The Limes, near London, and suggested that Jack and I be married there.
But I preferred New York; so she gave us her blessing and a thousand
pounds, and mother, Jack, and I sailed three weeks ago in the Umbria.
When are you coming home? and how is that pretty little Mrs. Thurston? I
saw her once, and thought her very lovely, with that sweet, clinging,
helpless manner which takes with men wonderfully. I have heard that she
was an old flame of Rex Hallam’s, or rather a young one, but I’ll trust
you to win him, although as a widow she is dangerous; so, in the words
of the immortal Weller, I warn you, ‘Bevare of vidders.’”
There was much more in the same strain, and Bertha laughed over it, but
felt a pang for which she hated herself every time she looked at Louie,
whose beauty and grace drew about her many admirers besides Rex, in
spite of her black dress and her frequent allusions to “dear Fred, whose
grave was so far away.” She was growing stronger every day, and when in
December Rex received a letter from his partner saying that his presence
in New York was rather necessary, she declared herself equal to the
journey, and said that if Rex went she should go too. Consequently the
1st of January found them all in London, where they were to spend a few
days, and where Rex brought his aunt a letter, addressed, bottom side
up, to “Mrs. Lucy Ann Hallam, Care of Brown, Shipley & Co., London.
_Post Restant._”
There was a gleam of humor in Rex’s eyes as he handed the missive to his
aunt, whose face grew dark as she studied the outside, and darker still
at the inside, which was wonderful in composition and orthography.
Phineas Jones had been sent out to Scotland by an old man who had some
property there and who knew he could trust Phineas to look after it and
bring him back the rental, which he had found it hard to collect. After
transacting his business, Phineas had decided to travel a little and
“get cultivated up, so that his cousin Lucy Ann shouldn’t be ashamed of
him.” Had he known where she was, he would have joined her, but, as he
did not he wrote her a letter, which had in it a great deal about
Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the huckleberry pasture and the
circus and the spelling-school, all of which filled Mrs. Hallam with
disgust. She was his only blood kin extant, he said, and he yearned to
see her, but supposed he must wait till she was back in New York, when
he should pay his respects to her at once. And she wouldn’t be ashamed
of him, either. He knew what was what, and had hob-a-nobbed with
nobility, who took a sight of notice of him. He was going to sail the
10th in the Germanic, he said, and if she’d let him know when she was
coming home he’d be in New York on the wharf to meet her.
As it chanced, the Germanic was the boat in which the Hallam party had
taken passage for the 10th, but Mrs. Hallam suddenly discovered that she
had not seen enough of London; Rex could go, if he must, but she should
wait for the next boat of the same line. Rex had no suspicion as to the
real reason for her change of mind, and, as a week or two could make but
little difference in the business calling him home, he stayed, and when
the next boat of the White Star line sailed out of the docks of
Liverpool it carried the party of four: Louie, limp and tearful as she
thought of her husband who had been with her when she crossed before;
Mrs. Hallam, excited and nervous, half expecting to see Phineas pounce
upon her, and haunted with a presentiment that he was somewhere on the
ship; and Rex, with Bertha, hunting for the spot where he had first seen
her and knocked her down.