Before Louise had risen on the following morning Laura entered her
bedroom and handed her an unopened cablegram. Louise tore open the
envelope with trembling hands. She had no means of surmising the
character of the message. Blythe had been purposely evasive in replying
to Louise's questions as to whether her mother had looked ill when he
had last seen her, for he disliked to be the bearer of disquieting news.
His private report to Laura, however, as to the obvious state of Mrs.
Treharne's health had been sufficiently alarming to cause Laura to lie
awake a good part of the night, meditating as to whether she should tell
Louise. Laura had read Mrs. Treharne's letter to Louise, announcing her
departure from the house on the Drive for an undetermined destination;
and this complicated the situation and was the reason why Laura withheld
from Louise what Blythe had told her about her mother's
gravely-declining health. Since the receipt of that letter no message
had reached Louise from her mother, giving her address; and Laura had
not elected to alarm the girl needlessly while Mrs. Treharne's address
remained unknown.
The cablegram took the problem out of Laura's hands. It was dated from
Saranac, in the Adirondacks, and read:
"Am ill. Come immediately. MOTHER."
Louise handed the message to Laura and rose at once. She found it very
natural that, at such a moment, she should lean upon the resourcefulness
of John Blythe.
"I suppose John can arrange for our passage?" she said to Laura.
"John," replied Laura, confidently, "can do anything, I think, even to
obtaining accommodations on a New-York-bound steamer in July, which is
next to impossible."
Laura immediately telephoned to Blythe at the Carlton, telling him of
the summons Louise had received from her mother.
"Of course I am to go with her," said Laura, "and equally of course we
shall have a dreadful time getting steamer accommodations at this
season."
"Probably I can manage," was Blythe's prompt reply. "The _Mauretania_,
which brought me over, is returning day after tomorrow. I know she is
booked to the gun'ls--but I'll see what can be done. Of course I am
going, too. I'll see you by noon and let you know."
Jermyn Scammel and his two companions who had been witnesses of Blythe's
meeting with Jesse at the Curzon Street house were staying at the
Carlton, and Blythe knew that they had reserved accommodations on the
_Mauretania_. Blythe found them at breakfast in Scammel's rooms and he
told them of the quandary in which two American ladies found themselves
owing to the extreme difficulty of securing passage on board West-bound
steamers at that season.
"Anybody I know, Blythe?" Scammel asked him.
"I think so," said Blythe. "Mrs. Laura Stedham is--"
"Laura Stedham? Known her all my life--tried my infernallest to marry
her when I was a cub, but she wouldn't so much as look at me," said
Scammel, cheerily. "She can have my cabin if I have to stay over here
for the remainder of my natural life. How about you fellows?" addressing
his companions.
It was all one to them, it appeared. If Scammel was willing to remain in
London for a while longer, why--
"But I haven't the least idea of remaining in London," put in Scammel
when they had got that far. "The night train for Paris for mine, now
that I can't get away on the _Mauretania_. No use talking, Blythe, fate
is against me. I want to be good, but I'm not allowed to be. I'll leave
it to you or anybody else if I had the slightest idea of making Paris
this trip. I've been fighting the temptation to hit up Paris ever since
I've been over this time. Now, you see, I'm positively driven to it. Man
comes along and grabs my homeward-bound cabin away from me. What else is
there for it but Paris? Are you cubs going along with me?" turning to
the two younger men.
The "cubs," it appeared, were quite willing to defer their meditated
repentance until such time as Scammel might be ready to repent with
them, and they proclaimed that Paris sounded good to them. Thus it was
that Blythe was able to appear at the Savoy long before noon with the
announcement that he had contrived to obtain three highly-desirable
staterooms on the _Mauretania_.
"What should we ever have done without him?" said Laura to Louise, while
Blythe lounged about--making occasional discreet exits--during their
packing operations.
"Without Jerry Scammel and the two apt and obliging young New York
pupils he is breaking in over here, you should say," observed Blythe.
"John! Was it dear old Jerry Scammel who did this for us?" asked Laura,
blushing. "Well, I shall certainly bake him a cake or crochet him a pair
of pulse-warmers or ear-laps or something as soon as he gets back to New
York. He's a dear, and always was, and I always fight tooth and nail
for him when the catty old dowagers call him the most dissipated man in
New York. Jerry, to this day, declares to me, every time I meet him,
that he holds the world's record for proposals to the same girl within a
given time. I was the girl. I believe I was somewhat under sixteen and
Jerry was not yet nineteen. He swears that he proposed to me forty-four
times within one month. Of course he is wrong. It was only
twenty-three."
Laura and Blythe purposely kept up this sort of small talk to divert
Louise's thoughts from her mother's illness. Louise, heavy-hearted as
she was, quite understood their kindly purpose, and successfully strove
to appear entertained by their banter. But her foreboding was not easy
to dispel. She knew that her mother would not have summoned her if her
illness had not been of the gravest character; for in her last
letter--the one she wrote on the night before leaving New York--she had
insisted upon Louise having her London visit out. The girl had been
filled with an intense happiness upon reading her mother's announcement
of her departure from the house on the Drive. She had pictured a happy
reunion with her mother and had begun immediately to make plans for the
home which they should have together upon her return to New York. So
that her mother's summons and Louise's certainty that the summons would
never have been made had her mother's condition not been very serious,
bore heavily upon her.
"I begin to fear that I have found my mother only to lose her again,"
she had said to Laura in talking over the cable message; and Laura,
while professing to be shocked at Louise's premonition, had turned away
to hide her tears; for the same premonition, better-grounded than
Louise's on account of what she had heard from Blythe as to the visible
decline into which Mrs. Treharne had seemed to be falling, was
depressing Laura.
* * * * *
The steamer made an unseasonably squally and heavy passage of it, and
Laura, who had never been intended for a Vikingess, as she expressed it,
kept to her stateroom almost throughout the voyage. Louise and Blythe
were among the few on board the crowded steamer who did not shrink even
once from mess call, which is the test of the born voyager. They kept
pace with the most hardened constitutional-takers on deck every day, and
were together almost constantly.
Louise Treharne and John Blythe already knew that they loved each other.
On board the steamer, and for five days running, rarely out of each
other's company, both found that, humanly speaking, they also genuinely
liked each other. Even men and women entirely devoted to each other
quite commonly develop a certain pettishness often verging upon actual
irascibility when they find themselves incessantly in each other's
company on board a steamer. Louise and Blythe, despite the
unfriendliness of the elements and the consequent discomforts of the
passage, both felt quite lost and miserable when they were separated
from each other even for short periods during the voyage. Louise, in her
inexperience, did not seek to analyze this phenomenon. But Blythe did.
"She is as fine-grained as she is beautiful, Laura," he said to that
ever-receptive confidante, when he found himself alone with her for a
moment one day toward the end of the voyage. "I have, as of course you
know, no particular amount of sweetness of disposition at sea or
anywhere else. But, somehow, I have been a marvel of beatific mildness
and contentment ever since we left England. There's only one way to
account for that. Louise is temperamentally perfect."
"Charming, but wholly wrong," replied Laura. "Louise is magnificently
deficient in the thing called 'temperament'--thank Heaven! Did you ever
happen to encounter a female who delighted in calling herself a 'woman
of temperament,' John Blythe? Then you know how hopelessly impossible a
woman of that sort is, considered as a companion for any normal human
being of either sex. If Louise had been temperamental--_any_ kind of
temperamental--I am certain that you two would be passing each other on
deck without even nodding by this time. But the dear is just a sweet
girl-woman with a wholesome imagination and human impulses, and I
myself, a woman (and a fussy one, too, sometimes!), could live with her
forever without a symptom of friction. You are a very lucky rising young
legal person. I don't know what I shall do without her."
"Without her--when?" said Blythe, his surprise genuine. "You are going
up to the Adirondacks with her, aren't you?"
"To be sure," replied Laura. "I mean that I don't know what I shall do
without her when--" She broke off in momentary confusion. "Oh, you are
impossibly opaque today, John," she finished, smiling illuminatingly.
"Oh--that!" said Blythe, enlightened, yet a bit rueful.
It was precisely "that" which, as the steamer drew near New York was
causing Blythe no little disquietude. He knew that he would miss Louise
acutely after the delightful intimacies of the voyage. No word as to
their tacit relationship had been spoken by Blythe since they had thus
been thrown almost constantly together. A natural delicacy had deterred
him from touching upon that subject at a time when Louise was hurrying
to the bedside of her mother. But, now that the steamer was less than
half a day from New York, he began to draw a desolate picture of his
lonesome state when he should bid goodbye to Louise at the station. Her
vigil at her mother's bedside might be a protracted one. He remembered,
not without a shock of astonishment, that he had never asked Louise to
be his wife. When he mentally retraced the path, he found it easy enough
to understand why he had not put this question to her. Nevertheless, the
fact that she was by no means plighted to him had caused him a vague
uneasiness since the beginning of the voyage; and, now that their
separation, for an indeterminate period, impended, he found himself
swept by a desire to make their mutual understanding--if such, indeed,
he thought nervously, Louise really took it to be--more explicit, if not
more binding.
It chanced that Louise herself furnished him his opportunity to speak.
She had written a wireless message of greeting to her mother, to be
transmitted from New York to Saranac, and they watched the operator as
he flared the message over the waste of tumbling waters.
"I told her in the message that you are with us," Louise said to him.
"And of course she shall know, when I see her, that Laura and I might
have had to remain in England indefinitely had it not been for you."
"There is something that I want your sanction to tell your mother when
I see her," said Blythe as they set out for a stroll on the long deck.
"Yes?" she said, with a quick sidewise glance at him. She understood
perfectly well what he meant; had, indeed, been waiting for him to
assume that direction; but women are not expected to make such
admissions.
"I think you will be ready to admit that I have striven to practise
self-restraint," said Blythe, with a smile in which there was a touch of
nervousness. "But there is a point beyond which I cannot go. Are you to
tell your mother that I have asked you to marry me, or am I to tell her
when I see her?"
"Have you asked me that?" inquired Louise, a little mischievously; but
she asked the question in order to gain time.
Blythe laughed in self-deprecation.
"If I have been guilty of so stupid an omission, I can rectify it by
asking you now?" he said; and Louise noticed the flush that overspread
his features. "I have, I know, a habit of taking too much for granted.
But I really supposed you knew that my life is bound up in yours,
Louise."
"And mine in yours," she replied with a perfect candor that thrilled
him. "If I did not love you dearly--and I do--perhaps I should not so
keenly feel that I would be doing you an injustice to marry you."
Blythe could scarcely credit his ears. Her first words had set him to
soaring, but, when she had finished, he was conscious of as stunned a
feeling as if he had received a physical blow. Involuntarily he stood
stock still and faced her; but the need to keep moving in order not to
block the progress of the other deck pedestrians quickly flashed upon
him. When he moved forward again at her side, however, listening to her
quiet, earnest words, he was conscious, for a while, of a certain
numbness, almost approaching languor, which he found it difficult to
throw off.
Louise, more reservedly but with no lack of clearness, touched upon the
points which she had made in going over the same ground with Laura.
Surprised as he was, Blythe, whose mind had never been visited by any of
the considerations which she named, nevertheless had an immediate and
acute understanding of the ordeal through which the girl must be passing
in thus presenting her analysis of the situation to him.
"It would be the logical thing for me to say that you have wholly
misjudged me, Louise," he said to her when she had finished. "But
I am not going to do that, because I know that you have done nothing
of the sort. You are simply the victim of a perfectly natural
supersensitiveness. I know how difficult you have found it to say such
things. I blame myself for having pressed you to the point where you
considered it necessary to say them. It is scarcely less hard for me to
talk of such a matter--harder still because nothing that you have
touched upon has even once occurred to me. I know that you are the woman
my heart craves for. Nothing that you have said, or ever can say, will
change that. And if you care for me--"
"I do," Louise interrupted him. "You are never out of my thoughts. I
find it hard to believe that there ever was a time when I did not know
you and love you."
The beautiful spontaneity and frankness of the avowal sent the blood
pounding at Blythe's temples.
"Then do you suppose, Louise," he said to her, in a vibrant voice of
enthrallment, "that anything in this world of God can ever keep us
apart? Everything gives way--must give way--to the love of a man for a
woman, of a woman for a man. You speak of my ambition, my career. What
would they be worth to me without you? Vain things--things that I would
thrust away from me! I tell you it has come to pass that my life is
inseparably bound up in yours. All the rest would be a futile striving
without you. The great miracle of life has come upon me. There was a
time when I feared that it would pass me by. You are the woman of all my
dreams--the dreams of boy and man. How can anything stand between us?"
"I have thought that, too, often," said Louise, no less moved by his
fervor than he had been by her avowal. "But the thought that I might be
the means of throwing a shadow upon your path--"
"Shadow!" broke out Blythe. "There would be no _path_ for me without
you!"
"But, dear," said Louise, conscious that her ground was giving way
beneath her, "we cannot always do that which we want to do, can we? We
owe each other unselfishness at least, if only on account of our love?
And if you were to be swept by a regret in the time that is to come,
how--"
"Don't say that, Louise," said Blythe. "It is too impossible. It is too
inconceivable."
They came to a pause in their stroll and stood, hands on rail, gazing
over the billowing expanse of sun-sparkling sea.
"You will give me time to think it all out, dear, won't you?" said
Louise. "My experience has been so small that I do not often presume to
feel very sure of my ground."
"When you speak of how small your experience has been, Louise," said
Blythe, a symptom of a smile flickering around his eyes, "I am revisited
by a kind of self-condemnation that I have known ever since I became
aware that I loved you. Even now I wonder if I am really guilty of
having pounced upon you, when you were barely out of school, and before
you had your rightful chance to enslave and then appraise your cluster
of suitors--"
Louise, smiling, placed a hand upon his arm.
"Please don't continue that," she said. "All the 'clusters of suitors'
in the world would have made no difference to me. Always, I think, John,
I should have been gazing beyond them--if they had appeared, which of
course is merely your polite assumption--to see your face. And then the
poor 'enslaved' ones would have disappeared in a sudden mist, and I
should have seen only you."
Hands resting upon steamer rails may be furtively pressed, no matter how
many deck strollers there may be.
"How royally you grant absolution!" said Blythe. "But, for all that, it
is not as a sister confessor alone that I need you. If now you have made
the path so clear for me, then it is your own fault, heart of dreams. It
is as wife, mate of me, that I need you--and shall have you."
Wife and mate of the man beloved! They were new words--even expressing a
new thought--to Louise, and they sang tumultuously in her heart.
* * * * *
Mrs. Treharne, very white and with the spiritual delicacy of an illness
already far-advanced upon her features, was propped up in bed, gazing
with a sort of vacant wonderment at her almost transparent hands, which
she held up to the light, when the faithful Heloise entered the room
with Louise's wireless message from the _Mauretania_. She read it
eagerly and then suffered the message to flutter from her fingers to
the coverlet.
"My little girl will be here day after tomorrow morning," she said to
the maid, smiling wanly with the happiness of it. "Do you think she will
know her mother, Heloise?"
"Know you, madame?" said the maid, half grumblingly, half soothingly, as
she raised her mistress and patted the pillows. "Madame must not be
morbid. The doctor said that. I, too, say it. Why should not
Mademoiselle Louise know her mother?"
"Because, good Heloise, her mother is a spectre, a wraith, a lingering
ghost," said Mrs. Treharne, taking the maid's hand in both her own and
patting it; whereupon Heloise promptly produced a handkerchief from the
pocket of her tiny apron with her free hand and began to dab at her
eyes. The mistress studied the maid with surprise. "Why, Heloise, I did
not know you cared so much," she said. "But I have noticed that you do
not scold me any more. That is because you do care, then, Heloise?"
"Madame does not need to be scolded any more," said Heloise, brokenly.
"Before, one was obliged to scold her; that is, one thought so." The
girl turned away her face and gazed blankly out of the window at the
swaying trees. "But now, madame, one is sorry ever to have scolded at
all."
They occupied a pretty hotel cottage on the outskirts of the bright
little town of Saranac in the Adirondacks. It is a town transiently
inhabited mainly by victims of pulmonary affections. But Mrs. Treharne's
illness was not of that character. She had been obliged to take to bed a
few days after reaching Saranac. Her medical men had told her that she
was suffering from a gradual disintegration of the vital forces.
"I quite understood that before I came here," Mrs. Treharne had said to
them. "You express in terms of politeness a fact that I have been
perfectly familiar with for a long time: that I am simply worn out.
There are reasons, aside from any consideration of myself, why I should
like to have you gentlemen inform me as to one point at once."
"And that is?" the physicians had asked her.
"Am I to get well, or am I to die?" Mrs. Treharne had asked them out of
hand.
Very naturally the medical men had paused under the impact of so
unusually direct a question. Then they had begun to tell her that her
case presented certain complications of a somewhat grave character, and
that--
"I understand," Mrs. Treharne had interrupted, smiling up at them with a
bravery which the physicians later commented upon glowingly. But they
had not sought to disabuse her of the inference which their halting
words and manner had caused her to derive.
Mrs. Treharne had turned the matter over in her mind for days before
cabling to Louise. Before sending that message she had, in her
perplexity, turned to her maid for advice.
"Heloise," she had said to the devoted French girl, "tell me something,
won't you? The doctors have given me to understand that--oh, well, that
I am not to be here very long. Do you think it would be well for me to
send for my daughter?"
Heloise, thus hearing of the physicians' pronouncement for the first
time, had given way to a torrent of tears; but, upon becoming calm under
her mistress's cheerful words, she had replied that it would be an
everlasting pity if Louise were not sent for in any case.
"I am not so sure about that," Mrs. Treharne had replied. "I recall very
easily how I myself, when I was of Louise's age, recoiled from the
thought of death--though I do not at all now, oddly enough. I should
have hated to be at the bedside of my mother when she died--I was only a
child in arms and did not know anything about it. Louise, I think, must
feel the same way. Why should she not? She is my daughter. Would it not
be quite as well for her to return to this country and find me gone, as
it would be to send for her now and subject her to the distress of
seeing me pass? I am not considering myself, Heloise. Every minute I am
longing to see her. But I want to be fair now, at least, and do what is
best."
Heloise had found no difficulty at all in withstanding this sort of
reasoning.
"If madame does not send for her daughter," Heloise had replied, "I
myself shall do so, in my own name."
"Very well," Mrs. Treharne had replied, "I shall cable her at once, and
God speed her over the sea to me!"
* * * * *
On the second morning--sunny and beautiful--after Mrs. Treharne had
received Louise's wireless message, she and Heloise heard the grinding
of carriage wheels on the short gravel road leading to the cottage
porch. The doctor already had paid his visit and departed, so they knew
that the sound was not that of his buggy. Heloise raced on tiptoes to
the window and looked down. Then she turned a delighted face upon her
mistress, whose hair she had been arranging with unusual care in
expectation of Louise.
"It is mademoiselle!" cried the maid.
There was a sound of hurried tripping up the stairs; and Louise, flushed
from the drive, regally beautiful, swept softly into the room and,
kneeling by the bed, took her mother in her arms and held her tight,
rocking back and forth on the pillows, and restraining her tears by
sheer effort of will. Laura found an excuse to remain on the porch for a
moment, giving directions to the driver of the carriage, while mother
and daughter met.
Louise had schooled herself to withstand the shock of finding her mother
looking badly. But her first glance at the white-faced invalid had
caused her heart to beat with agonized trepidation. It would have been
obvious to an uninterested stranger that Mrs. Treharne was fast
approaching the end of her days. Louise perceived it at a glance. But
she would not yield to her almost overwhelming woman's impulse to weep.
Her mother's penetrating mind quickly sensed the girl's struggle and the
victory; and she raised Louise's head from where it nestled on her
shoulder and held her face in her hands and looked at her with a smile.
"It is fine of you not to cry, dear," she said, stroking the girl's
face. "It means a good deal to me to know that my daughter is a
thoroughbred--and you are always that, sweetheart. And how superb you
have become! What a commotion you and Laura must have made in London!
Where is Laura--she is with you, of course?"
"Here I am, Tony dear, as unlosable as the proverbial bad penny," said
Laura, entering the room just then and bending over from the other side
of the bed and taking her old friend in her arms. "Isn't Louise looking
superb? I can say it before her, because the child hasn't a groat's
worth of vanity. And she has behaved extraordinarily well. I haven't had
to tie her to the bedpost once."
"You are looking dazzling yourself, Laura," said Mrs. Treharne with a
little sigh. "Did you know that I always was just a little jealous of
you, dear?" and she laughed more merrily than she had for a long time.
"Not that I ever had any reason to be, for it was the design of
Providence that you should outshine me. You and Louise are to spend
hours with me, are you not, telling me of your conquests in Europe? And
where is John Blythe?" turning to Louise. "Is he not with you? I judged
from your wireless message that--"
"Oh, yes, he returned with us on the steamer, but he remained in New
York, mother," Louise put in, a quick flush overspreading her features.
"Did you wish to see him? I know he would come if I were to--"
Mrs. Treharne glanced, smiling, at Laura, who returned the smile.
"Would he, dear?" asked Mrs. Treharne. "I haven't the least doubt of it.
But there will be time. Later I should like to see him. He has a
compelling way." She paused, then added with a smile at Louise: "But he
is very lucky, all the same."
Louise, marveling at her mother's penetration in discerning, with so
little to go upon, the bond between Blythe and herself, nevertheless was
glad that the relationship had thus been read; for there still remained
enough of her habitual shyness with her mother to have caused her to
shrink slightly from making even so natural and simple a revelation.
Laura left the room presently to attend to the disposal of the arriving
baggage, and Louise, removing her hat and travelling wrap, arranged her
mother's pillows and then sat beside her on the bed.
"I do not ask you, you see, dear, to try to conceal the fact that you
find me so greatly altered," said her mother, holding the girl's hand.
"I am ashamed to recall how petulant it used to make me when you seemed
to be tracing, with your big, wide eyes, my new wrinkles--which you were
not doing at all; I know that now, dear heart."
"When does your doctor come today, mother?" asked Louise, a little
haltingly.
"He has been here and gone," replied her mother, discerning what was in
Louise's mind. "But there is no need for you to see him privately,
daughter. Your little mother will tell you, for you have shown how brave
you can be. I am quite as ill as you suppose me to be, Louise, and
entirely beyond the help of medical men. Cry, dear, if you feel like it;
I shall not mind; and there are times when tears do help one."
Louise, yielding at last, knelt beside the bed and buried her face on
her mother's shoulder in an agony of quiet weeping, while her mother
stroked her hair and murmured phrases of endearment that had not
visited her lips since Louise had been a child.
"Take heart, girl of mine," she said after a while, when she observed
that Louise's sobs were gradually abating. "I am resigned. It was to
be--but I shall not distract you with phrases of that kind, which, after
all, are not so consoling as they are supposed to be. I am glad that I
have lived to know and to understand and to appreciate so fine and sweet
a daughter as I have. And, Louise: listen."
"Yes, mother: I am listening."
"It is a gift of God, I know, that I have a daughter who, when my very
soul was in peril, regenerated, recreated me. You have done that for me.
I confess it without shame. My little girl summoned me, raised me from
the depths. Thank God I answered the summons before I knew that my life
was slipping away from me, so that I am at least open to no charge of
hypocrisy or of repenting in mere grovelling fear of the judgment. My
little Louise, grown to sweet, serene, pure womanhood, did this thing
for me. It is something to have brought your mother to the foot of the
Cross, my dear; and that knowledge, I know, will ennoble and exalt you
during all the years that are to come."
When Heloise entered the room, hours later, she found her mistress
asleep, and Louise's head still pillowed upon her mother's breast.