These were Bell’s terms, and Frank winced a little and hesitated, and when she had told him to take time to consider, he took it and did consider, and decided that it would not pay, and went for a few weeks to New York, where at the Fifth Avenue Hotel he came again upon the Burleighs. Bell knew just how to manage him, and ere he had been there three days he was as much in love with her as ever, and madly jealous of every one who paid her marked attentions. The price she asked seemed as nothing compared with herself, and one evening after she had been unusually fascinating and brilliant, and had snubbed him dreadfully, he wrote a note accepting her terms, and begging her to name an early day and put him out of torture. In her dressing-gown, with her own hair falling about her shoulders and her braids and curls of false hair lying on the bureau, Bell read the note, and felt for a moment that she despised and hated the man who wrote it, just because he had acceded to her unreasonable demands.
“I wish he had decided otherwise. I would almost rather die than marry him,” she thought, while her eyes put on a darker look and her face a paler hue.
Then she thought of the home on Beacon Street, of the pinching poverty, the efforts to keep up appearances, of her father growing so old, and of herself, not so young as she was once,—twenty-eight, the Bible said, though she passed for twenty-five; then she thought of Charlie, her young brother, and glanced at Grace, her only sister, who lay sleeping so quietly before her. All the love Bell Burleigh had was centred in her father, her brother, and in Grace, the fair young girl, with soft blue eyes and golden hair, who was as unlike her sister as possible, and who was awakened by Bell’s tears on her face, and Bell’s kisses on her brow.
“What is it, Bell?” she asked, sitting up in bed, and rubbing her eyes in a sleepy kind of way.
Bell did not say, “I have sold myself for you.” But—“Rejoice, Grace, that we are never again to know what poverty means; never to pinch and contrive and save and do things we are ashamed of in order to keep up. I am going to marry Mr. Irving, and you are all to live with me at Millbank.”
Grace was wide awake now, and looking earnestly in her sister’s face for a moment, said:
“You marry that Mr. Irving, you, Bell? There is not a thing in common between you, unless you love him. Do you?”
“Hush, Grace; don’t speak of love to me,” and Bell’s voice had in it a hard, bitter tone. “I parted company with that sentiment years ago, before you could understand. You have heard—of—Dr. Patterson, missionary to India? I would once have gone with him to the ends of the earth, but mother said I was too young, too giddy, and the Board thought so, too. I was not quite seventeen, and I defied those old fogy ministers to their faces, and when they asked me so coldly if I supposed myself good enough to be a missionary, I answered that I was going for the love I bore to Fred, and not to be a missionary, or because I thought myself good as they termed goodness. And so it was broken off, and Fred went without me, and as they said he must have a wife, he took a tall, red-haired woman many years his senior, but who, to her other qualifications, added the fact that she was a professor, and believed herself called to a missionary life. She is dead now, and her grave is on the banks of the Ganges. But Fred’s life and mine have drifted widely apart; I am no wife for him now. I have grown too hard, and reckless, and selfish, and too fond of the world, to share his home in India. And so all I have to remind me of the past as connected with him is one letter, the last he ever wrote me, and a lock of his hair,—black hair, not tow color,” and Bell smiled derisively, while Grace knew that she was thinking of Frank, whose hair, though not exactly tow color, was far from being black.
Bell paused a moment, and then went on:
“You know how poor we are, and how we struggle to keep up, and how much father owes. Our home is mortgaged for more than it is worth, and so is every article of any value in it. I should like brains if I could get them set off with money, but as I cannot, I have concluded to take the money. I have counted the cost. I know what I am about. I shall be Mrs. Franklin Irving, and pay our debts, and keep you all with me,—and—be—happy.”