“Certainly it is your duty to go,” Mrs. Hallam said, when Bertha handed her the telegram, while Mrs. Haynes also warmly approved of the plan, and both expressed surprise that Bertha had never told them of her relationship to Mrs. Fred Thurston.
They knew Mrs. Fred was a power in society, and Mrs. Haynes had met her once or twice and through a friend had managed to attend a reception at her house, which she described as magnificent. To be Mrs. Fred Thurston’s cousin was to be somebody, and both Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Haynes became suddenly interested in Bertha, the latter offering her advice with regard to the journey, while the former suggested the propriety of sending Browne as an escort. But Bertha declined the offer. She could speak the language fluently and would have no difficulty whatever in finding her way to Ouchy, she said, but she thanked the ladies for their solicitude and parted with them, apparently, on the most amicable terms. Grace accompanied her to the station, and while waiting for the train said to her confidentially, “I expect there will be a bigger earthquake bye-and-bye than Rex got up on your account. Jack and I are engaged. I made up my mind last night to take the great, good-natured, awkward fellow and run my chance on seven hundred dollars a year. It will come off early in the autumn, and we shall go to Florida and see what we can do with that orange grove. Jack will have to work, and so shall I, and I shall like it and he won’t, but I shall keep him at it, trust me. Can you imagine mother’s disgust when I tell her? She really thinks that I have a chance with Rex. But that is folly. Play your cards well. I think you hold a lore hand. There’s your train. Write when you get there, Good-bye.”
There was a friendly parting, a rush through the gate for the carriages, a slamming of doors, and then the train sped on its way, bearing Bertha to a new phase of life in Ouchy.
Thurston had been sick all the voyage, and instead of resting in Paris, as Rex had advised him and Louie had entreated him to do, he had started at once for Geneva and taken a severe cold on the night train. Arrived at the Beau-Rivage in Ouchy, he refused to see a physician until his wife came down with nervous prostration and one was called for her. Louie had had rather a hard time after Rex left her in Paris, for, as if to make amends for his Jekyll mood on the ship, her husband was unusually unreasonable, and worried her so with sarcasm and taunts and ridicule that her heart was very sore when she reached Ouchy. The excitement of the voyage, with Reginald as her constant companion, was over, and she must again take up the old life, which seemed drearier than ever because everything and everybody were so strange, and she found herself constantly longing for somebody to speak a kind and sympathetic word to her. In this condition of things it was not strange that she succumbed at last to the extreme nervous depression which had affected her in Boston, and which was now so intensified that she could scarcely lift her head from the pillow.
“I am only tired,” she said to the physician, a kind, fatherly old man, who asked her what was the matter. “Only tired of life, which is not worth the living.” And her sad blue eyes looked up so pathetically into his face that the doctor felt moved with a great pity for this young, beautiful woman, surrounded with every luxury money could buy, but whose face and words told a story he could not understand until called to prescribe for her husband; and then he knew.
Thurston had made a fight against the illness which was stealing over him and which he swore he would defy. Drugs and doctors were for silly women like Louie, who must be amused, he said, but he would have none of them. “Only exert your will and you can cheat Death himself,” was his favorite saying, and he exerted his will, and went to Chillon, rowed on the lake in the moonlight, took a Turkish bath, and next day had a chill, which lasted so long and left him so weak that he consented to see the doctor, but raved like a madman when told that he must go to bed and stay there if he wished to save his life.
“I don’t know that I care particularly about it. I haven’t found it so very jolly,” he said; then, after a moment, he added, with a bitter laugh, “Tell my wife I am likely to shuffle off this mortal coil, and see how it affects her.”
He was either crazy, or a brute, or both, the doctor thought, but he made him go to bed, secured the best nurse he could find, and was there early the next morning to see how his patient fared. He found him so much worse that when he went to Louie he asked if she had any friends near who could come to her, saying, “If you have, send for them at once.”
Louie was in a state where nothing startled her, and without opening her eyes she said, “Am I going to die?”
“No,” was the doctor’s reply, and she continued, “Is my husband?”