“Lost her, Mr. Everard! Lost me! No, you haven’t,” Rosamond said, her eyes filling with tears, which shone like stars, as Everard went on:
“Yes, I have. I lost her when you put on those long dresses and began to meet me in such a formal way, with that prim, old duenna always present, as if she was afraid I was going to eat you up. Mrs. Markham is very nice, no doubt, but I don’t like that in her. It may be English propriety, but it is not American. I’m not going to hurt you, and I want sometimes to see you here alone and talk freely and cozily, as we used to talk,—about your cats, if you like, I don’t care what, if it brings you back to me, for you don’t know how I long for the child whom I used to tease so much.”
He stopped talking, and Rossie was almost beautiful, with the bright color in her cheeks and the soft light in her eyes, which were full of tears, as she said, impulsively, “You shall have the child Rossie again, Mr. Everard. I am glad you have told me what you have. It will make it so much easier now to see you. I was always thinking of that, and feeling that you were thinking of it, too, and I am happy to know you are not. I don’t wish to be stiff and distant with you, and you may come as often as you choose, and Mrs. Markham need not always be present,—that was as much my idea as hers; but the long dress I must wear now; it suits me better than the short clothes which showed my feet so much. You know how you used to tease me.” She was beginning to seem like herself again, and Everard enjoyed himself so well that he staid until Mrs. Markham returned, and when at last he left, it was with a feeling that he liked the graceful, dignified young girl almost as well as he had once liked the child Rossie.
CHAPTER XXIII.
BEE’S FAMILY.
A few days after Everard’s interview with Rossie, Beatrice went to New York, where she spent the winter, returning home early in April, and bringing with her a dark-eyed, dark-haired, elfish-looking little girl, whom she called Trixey, and whose real name was Beatrice Belknap Morton. She was the daughter of a missionary to the Feejee Islands, who had brought his invalid wife home to America, hoping the air of the Vermont hills might restore life and health to her worn-out, wasted frame. Bee did not know of his return, and saw him first at a missionary meeting which she attended with the friend at whose house she was stopping.
“The Rev. Theodore Morton will now tell us something of his labors among the Feejees,” the presiding clergyman said, and Bee, who was sitting far back near the door, rose involuntarily to her feet in order to see more distinctly the man who was just rising to address the audience, and who stood before them, tall, erect, and perfectly self-possessed, as if addressing a crowded New York house had been the business of his life.
Was it her Theo, whom she had sent from her to the woman in Vermont, more willing than herself to share his toils and privations in a heathen land. That Theo had been spare and thin, with light beard and sandy hair; this man was broad-shouldered, with well-developed physique, and the hair, which lay in curls around his massive brow, was a rich chestnut brown, as was the heavy beard upon his cheek. It could not be Theo, she though, as she sank back into her seat; but the moment she heard the deep, musical tones of the voice which had once a power to thrill her, she knew that it was he, and listened breathlessly while he told of his work in those islands of the sea, and by his burning eloquence and powers of speech stirred up his hearers to greater interest in the cause. He loved his work because it was his Master’s, and loved the poor, benighted heathen, and he only came home because of the sick wife and little ones, who needed change of scene and air.
Where was his wife, Bee wondered, and when the meeting was over she drove to the house of a clergyman who she knew kept a kind of missionary hotel, and from him learned the address of the Rev. Theodore Morton. It was not at an uptown hotel, but at a second-rate boarding-house on Eighth street, where rooms and board were cheap, and there, on the third floor back, she found Mrs. Theodore Morton, the school-mistress from Vermont, who had so offended her taste with spectacles and a brown alpaca dress. The landlady had bidden her go directly to the room, where she knocked at the door, and then stood listening to a sweet, childish voice singing a lullaby to a baby. Again she knocked, and this time the voice said “Come in,” and she went in, and found a little girl of five years old, with black hair and eyes, and a dark, saucy, piquant face, seated in a low rocking-chair, and holding in her short, fat arms a pale, sickly baby of four months or thereabouts, which she was trying to hush to sleep. Near her, in an arm-chair, sat a round, rosy-cheeked little girl, who might have been three years old, though her height indicated a child much younger than that. On the bed, with her face to the wall, and apparently asleep, lay a woman, emaciated and thin, with streaks of gray in the long, black hair floating in masses over the pillow. Bee thought she must have made a mistake, but something in the blue eyes of the chubby girl in the chair arrested her attention, and she said to the elf with the baby in her arms:
“Is Mrs. Morton here,—Mrs. Theodore Morton?”