And so they seized every opportunity for a tête-à-tête.
Wynnette and Elva hovered around their mother, in their delight at seeing her again.
The invalid earl sat for a while alone and forgotten, until little Rosemary Hedge, who was also overlooked in the family reunion, drew a hassock to the side of his easy chair, sat down and laid her little, curly black head on his knee. The action was full of pathos and confiding tenderness. The earl laid his hand on the little head and ran his thin, white fingers through the black curls. But neither spoke, or needed to speak—so well the man and the child understood each other.
“Leonidas, my boy!” called Abel Force from his corner, “I wish you would go and see if we can get rooms for us all here. This should have been seen to sooner.”
“You need not stir, young sir,” said the earl; and turning to his brother-in-law, he added: “Your apartments are secured, Force. As soon as I received your telegram saying that you would join me here, I sent off a dispatch to secure them for you. I hardly need to remind you that you are all my guests while we are together. But you traveled by the night express. You must have done so to reach this place so early in the day; so you will want to go to your rooms. After you have refreshed yourselves, join me here at breakfast.”
Le arose at the earl’s request, and pulled at the bell knob with a vigor lent by his impatience at being called from the side of his beloved, and which soon brought a servant to the room.
“Show these ladies and gentlemen to the apartments prepared for them,” said the earl.
The man, with many bows, preceded the party from the room and conducted them to a large family suit of rooms on the third floor, overlooking the New Promenade.
The travelers remained some weeks at Baden-Baden. The baths were doing the earl much good. Mr. Force also needed their healing powers. Somewhere on his travels with the young people, not having his wife to look after him, he had contracted rheumatism; he could not exactly tell when or where or how, whether from exposure or rain and mist on the mountains, or from fishing on the lakes, or from sleeping in damp sheets, and drinking the sour wine of the country, or from all these causes put together, he could not say, so gradually and insidiously had the malady crept upon him, taking its chronic and least curable form. He had not mentioned one word of this in any of his letters, nor had he spoken of it on his arrival.
“Indeed,” as he afterward explained, “never having had any experience to guide me, I did not recognize the malady at first, but merely took the feeling of heaviness in all my frame for over-fatigue, and even when that heaviness, being increased, became a general aching, I still thought it to be the effect of excessive fatigue. I was slow to learn and slower to confess that I had the special malady of age—rheumatism. However, I thank Heaven it is not acute. It has never laid me up for a day,” he added, laughing at his misfortune.