“That is what I want. So I have this moment decided that I will not wait for you to send me a new letter of credit, but will find somebody here to lend me enough money to go home on. In the meantime I’m going to begin being the old, frank, truthful Dorothy, by writing you, by the next steamer, all that I have learned about myself.”
XXXIV
DOROTHY’S DISCOVERY
DOROTHY’S next letter came at the beginning of the spring. There were mail steamers at that time only once a fortnight and the passage occupied a fortnight more—or perhaps a longer time as the sea and the west wind might determine.
“I hope this letter will reach you before I do, Cousin Arthur,” Dorothy began. “But I’m not quite sure of that, for we hope to sail by the Asia on her next trip and she is a much faster ship they say than the one that is to carry this. The money things arranged themselves easily and without effort. For when I asked Mr. Livingston,—Mildred’s husband, you know—to go with me to the bankers to see if they wouldn’t lend me a few hundred dollars, he laughed and said:
‘You needn’t bother, you little spendthrift. I provided for all that before we started. I knew you women would spend all your money, so I gave myself a heavy credit with my bankers here, and of course you can have all the money you want.’ I didn’t like it for him to think we’d spent our money foolishly, but I couldn’t explain, so I just thanked him and said, with all the dignity I could command: ‘I’ll give you a letter of credit on my guardian Dr. Brent.’ I suppose I got the terms wrong, for he laughed in his careless way—he always laughs at things as if nothing in the world mattered. He even laughed at his own seasickness on the ship. Anyhow, he told me I needn’t give him any kind of papers—that you would settle the bill when the time came, and that I could have all the money I needed. So at first we thought we should get off by the ship that is to carry this letter. But something got the matter with Mildred’s teeth, so we had to wait over for the Asia. Why do things get the matter with people’s teeth? Nothing ever got the matter with mine, and I never heard of anything getting the matter with yours or Edmonia’s. Mr. Livingston says that’s because we eat corn bread. How I wish I had some at this moment!
“But that isn’t what I want to write to you about. I have much more serious things to tell you—things that alter my whole life, and make it sadder than I ever expected it to be.
“I have seen my mother, and she has told me the whole terrible story. She wouldn’t have told me now or ever, but that she thought she was going to die under a surgical operation.
“You remember I wrote to you about Madame Le Sud, whom I met on shipboard and learned to love so much. I’m glad I learned to love her, because she is my mother. She calls herself Madame Le Sud, because that is only the French way of calling herself Mrs. South, you know.
“The way of it was this: When we parted at Liverpool I told her what our trip was to be. She was coming direct to Paris, and I made her promise to let me visit her here if she did not leave before our arrival, as she thought she probably would. When we got here I rather hoped to hear from her, for somehow, though I did not dream of the relationship between us, I had formed a very tender attachment to her, and I longed to see her again.
“As the weeks passed and I heard nothing, I made up my mind that she had gone back to New York before we reached Paris, and I was not undeceived until a few weeks ago, when she sent me a sad little note, telling me she was ill and asking me to call upon her in her apartments in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs.