“I doubt if you remember me, Mrs. Morton, as you only saw me once, and that for a few moments, before the Guide sailed from here six years ago. I am an old friend of your husband’s. I met him in Paris first and many times after in America. Perhaps you have heard him speak of Miss Beatrice Belknap?”
“Yes, Trixey was named for you. It was kind in you to call,” Mrs. Morton said, and now she sat upon the side of the bed and began to bind up her long black hair, which had fallen in her neck.
“Let me do that,” Bee said, as she saw how the exertion of raising her arms made the invalid cough; and drawing off her gloves, her white hands, on which so many costly jewels were shining, were soon arranging and twisting the long hair which, though mixed with gray, was very glossy and luxuriant. “You have nice hair, and so much of it,” she said, and Mrs. Morton replied:
“Yes, it is very heavy even yet, and is all I have left of my youth, though I am not so very old, only thirty; but the life of a missionary’s wife is not conducive to the retaining of one’s good looks.”
“Was it so very dreadful?” Bee asked, a little curious about the life which might have been her own.
“Not dreadful, but hard; that is, it was very hard on me, who was never strong, though I seemed so to strangers. I could not endure much, and was sick all the way out, so sick that I used to wish I might die and be buried in the sea. Then Trixey came so soon, and the care of her, and the food, and the climate, and the manner of living there, and the terrible homesickness! Oh, I was so homesick, at first, that I should surely have died, if Theo had not been so good. He was always kind, and tried to spare me every way.”
“Yes, I am sure he did,” Bee said; feeling at the same time a kind of pity for Theo, who, for six years, had spared and been kind to this woman, after having known and loved her, Beatrice Belknap.
There was a great difference between these two women; one, bright, gay, sparkling, full of life and health, with wealth showing itself in every part of her elegant dress, from the India shawl which she had thrown across the chair, to the sable muff which had fallen on the floor; the other, sick, tired, disheartened, old before her time; and, alas, habited in the same brown alpaca in which she had sailed away, and which had been so obnoxious to Beatrice. The material had been the best of the kind, and after various turnings and fixings, had been made at last into a kind of wrapper, which was trimmed with a part of another old brown dress of a different shade. Nothing could be more unbecoming to that thin, sallow face, and those dark, hollow eyes, than that dress, and never was contrast greater between two women than that revealed by the mirror which hung just opposite the bed where Mrs. Morton was sitting, with Beatrice standing by her. Both looked in it together, and met each other’s eyes, and must have thought of the same thing, for Mrs. Morton at once changed her seat where she could not see herself, and as the hair was put up Beatrice also sat down, and, without seeming to do so, inspected very minutely the woman who was Theodore Morton’s wife.
She was well educated,—and she was well born, too, being the daughter, and granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of clergymen, while on her mother’s side she came from merchants and lawyers, and very far back boasted a lieutenant-governor. But she lacked that softness, and delicacy, and refinement of manner which was Bee’s great charm. She had angles and points, and was painfully frank and outspoken, and never practiced a deception in her life, or kept back anything she thought she ought to say, or flinched from any duty. In short, she was New England to the back-bone, and showed it in everything. Vermont, or rather the little town of Bronson, where she was born, was placarded all over her, just as Paris and New York were written all over Bee, and she rejoiced in it and was proud of her birthplace. Beatrice’s presence there was evidently a trouble and an embarrassment. When Theodore Morton went to her and asked her to be his wife he had told her frankly that he had loved another and been refused, and she had accepted him, and asked no question about her rival. On board the ship in the harbor she had been so occupied with her own personal friends who were there to say good-by, that, though introduced to Miss Belknap, she had paid no attention to her, or noticed her in any way. When her first child was born, ten months after her marriage, she had wished to name it Sarah, for her mother, but her husband said to her: “I would like to call it Beatrice Belknap, if you do not mind.”
She did mind, for she knew now that Beatrice Belknap was her husband’s first choice, but she held it every wife’s duty to obey her husband so far as it was right, and as there was nothing wrong in this proposition she consented without a word, and the baby was named for Beatrice, but familiarly called Trixey, as that pet name suited her better. Of the Beatrice over the sea Theodore never spoke, and his wife never questioned him, and so she knew nothing of her until she woke from sleep and found her there in all her fresh beauty and bright plumage, which seemed so out of place in that humble room. Of course she was embarrassed and confused, but she would not apologize, except as she spoke of the life of privation they had led in that heathen land.