How wonderfully beautiful her face was, beaming everywhere and always with that smile, the brightest I have ever seen. Poor Fan! I pitied her the next morning when she said good-bye to me. The roses were gone from her cheeks, and her eyes were so sad as she kissed me and said “God bless you, Annie, and bring you safely back.” Then she turned to Jack and involuntarily put up her lips. He kissed her and I was glad. There can be no jealousy of her now. Jack is mine, and I say it over and over to myself so many times. Mine,—my Jack, who grows dearer to me every day. If there are storms on the sea I do not know it from experience, for the ocean was like a lake and our crossing like a dream. We had the same stateroom where Fanny suffered so much, but although Jack’s eyes were on me a good share of the time when I was awake they did not trouble me, and I always smiled back at them when I met their gaze.
We did not go to Morley’s, but to the Langham instead, although the former is the more central of the two. I think the fact that Col. Errington stopped there decided Jack against it. He never speaks of the man and very seldom of Fanny, who has left The Plateau and gone back to Washington. I think we saw everything in London, even to the Queen and the Princess; and we went everywhere,—not to dinners and receptions as Fanny did, for we knew no one, but to every place of interest of which I had ever heard. And it was such a delight to see things with Jack, although I think I tired him out, as I used occasionally to hear him groan and see him put his hand on his back as if it ached when I suggested Mad. Tussaud’s, or the theatre, in the evening after we had been out all day. In the museum he was specially listless, saying life was not long enough to see all there was there, and he used frequently to sit down and tell me he would rest while I examined the coins and stones and things for which he did not care a red. But at the Tower and the Abbey and St. Paul’s he was wide-awake, and knew so much more about the old dead kings and queens and people buried there that I felt myself quite an ignoramus beside him.
We staid in London two weeks, and with the exception of the first few days the weather was as clear and fine as it is at home in November. We had letters of congratulation from Miss Errington and Katy, who were in Berlin, and were to join us later in southern France or Italy. Katy had sung twice at parlor concerts and had received overtures for a public engagement at a high price if she would take it. But she declined, actuated, as I afterwards learned, by the remembrance of Carl’s last words to her, implying that she must choose between his good opinion and her Career. She had an aptitude for foreign languages, and before going abroad had studied French, Italian and German, and had applied herself so assiduously to them since that she could render almost any song in the language of the country, her English accent only adding piquancy to her singing. Had she been sure of Carl she might have gone upon the stage, knowing that with her innate purity and sense of propriety she could have maintained her integrity of character against all odds and resisted temptation in every form. But Carl’s “Then good-bye” was always present with her, much as she tried to put it from her and to tell herself that he was nothing to her, and she nothing to him, and might, if she chose, be a law unto herself.
Carl had staid in Paris until Paul’s cure was assured, if care were exercised for the next few years. Then he started suddenly for Switzerland, where, in Lucerne, he met Katy, who, with Miss Errington, was at the same hotel, the Schweitzerhof. She was undeniably glad to see him, and her eyes told him so and brought back all the love he had ever felt for her. There were walks under the chestnuts which skirt the lovely lake,—trips up the Rigi and Pilatus, with excursions into the country. Katy’s loveliness had expanded and deepened like the rose when the morning dew lies upon it. And Carl had drank in her beauty and sweetness eagerly, like one thirsting for something pure and good and a better life than he had known, but as often as he opened his lips to say the words he wanted to, she seemed to know it and either managed to withdraw herself from him, or to talk of something else until a third party joined them. She had never forgotten the summer which meant so much to her and so little to him, and had also heard rumors of the French widow, which she resented, and held herself from him in such a manner that love-making was impossible. She had given up her Career for him, or thought she had, and his record must be as spotless as her own and he as single-hearted as herself, if she ever accepted him, and when at last she left Lucerne his words of love were still unspoken and she seemed as far from him as ever.
Chapter II.—Author’s Story.
MADAME.
By some chance the train which took Katy and Miss Errington away brought Madame Felix, greatly surprised and delighted to meet Monsieur Haverleigh and le petit garçon, who she had no idea were in Lucerne. All this she said in very broken English for the benefit of Sam Slayton, who confided to Paul that Madame was an infernal liar and more dangerous than ever. Possibly Carl thought so too. It was such a change from Katy to this woman who, by her delicate flattery and tacit appeal for sympathy, had fascinated and controlled him against his better judgment. He had left Paris without letting her know where he was going, and had breathed freer when the Jura mountains divided him from her. When with her she absorbed him entirely and held him with cords he could neither understand nor loosen. Away from her, he could rebel against her influence and the ownership of him which her manner implied. He was her good American friend,—her adviser,—her brother, since she lost her dear Felix, whose name she never mentioned without her handkerchief going to her eyes in token of her sorrow.
At the Grand Hotel where she had spent much of her time since her husband’s death she had been sitting one evening with Carl in the court near some English people, a part of whose conversation they overheard as it related to themselves. “She has him sure,—more’s the pity;—her husband hasn’t been dead so very long;—he don’t look quite the chap to be roped in by a widow older than himself,” were the disjointed sentences Carl caught, and which Madame with all her ignorance of English understood. Carl flushed angrily and was about to move away when, with a shrug of her shoulders, Madame laid her hand on his arm and detained him, saying, “Stay where you are. I will go, if either; it is I they aim at, these nasty English. I hate them;—not to understand that we are friends, nothing more. Absurd to think different, and I so much older than you;—many years,—two, three, four perhaps. I am twenty-seven, and you? You are quite a boy compared to me.”
Carl did not reply. He knew she would never see thirty again, and he did not fancy being called a boy.
“I will go to Passy and bury myself, if it annoys you to be friends with me. Shall I?” she continued.
Carl told her he didn’t care a sou for the English or what they thought, and she was not to go to Passy on his account. She did go, however, the next day,—called there suddenly on business which took her to Marseilles. Left to himself Carl began to think, and as a result of the thinking he packed his trunks and left Paris without leaving his address at the hotel, an act for which Sam gave special thanksgiving and dropped a piece of money on the plate at St. Eustace’s, where he was in the habit of going to hear the music. If Carl hoped to be rid of Madame in this way he was mistaken, for she found his address at his banker’s and started at once for Lucerne.