“Amen! So be it! Finis! I guess that makes it about square. Tell Louie I prayed,” he whispered, faintly, and never spoke again until the early morning sunlight was shining on the lake and the hills of Savoy, when he started suddenly and called, “Louie, Louie! Where are you? I can’t find you. Oh, Louie, come to me.”
But Louie was asleep in her room across the long salon, and when, an hour later, she awoke, Bertha told her that her husband was dead.
CHAPTER XVI.
TANGLED THREADS.
As Thurston had predicted, there was a great deal of trouble and no end of expense; but Rex attended to everything, while Bertha devoted herself to Louie, who had gone from one hysterical paroxysm into another until she was weaker and more helpless than she had ever been, but not too weak to talk continually of Fred, who, one would suppose, had been the tenderest of husbands. All she had suffered at his hands was forgotten, wiped out by the message he had left for her and by knowing that his last thoughts had been of her. But she spurned the idea of not wearing black, and insisted that boxes of mourning dresses and bonnets and caps should be sent to her on approbation from Geneva and Lausanne, until her room looked like a bazaar of crape, and not only Bertha and Martha, the maid, but Rex was more than once called in for an opinion as to what would be most suitable. It was rather a peculiar position in which Rex found himself,—two young ladies on his hands, with one of whom he was in love, while the other would unquestionably be in love with him as soon as her first burst of grief was over and she had settled the details of her wardrobe. But he did not mind it; in fact, he found it delightful to be associated daily with Bertha, and to be constantly applied to for sympathy and advice by Louie, who treated him with the freedom and confidence of a sister, and he would not have thought of a change, if Bertha had not suggested it. She had been told of the bequest which secured the Homestead from sale and made it no longer necessary for her to return to Mrs. Hallam, and she wrote at once asking to be released from her engagement, but saying she would keep it if her services were still desired.
It was a very gracious reply which Mrs. Hallam returned to her, freeing her from all obligations to herself, while something in the tone of the letter made Bertha suspect that all was not as rose-colored at Aix as it had been, and that Mrs. Hallam would be glad to make one of the party at Ouchy. This she said to Rex, suggesting that he should invite his aunt to join them, and urging so strongly the propriety of either bringing her to him, or going himself to her, that he finally wrote to his aunt to come to him, and immediately received a reply that she would be with him the next day. Rex met her at the station in Lausanne, and Bertha received her at the hotel as deferentially and respectfully as if she were still her hired companion, a condition which Mrs. Hallam had made up her mind to ignore, especially as it no longer existed between them. Taking both Bertha’s hands in hers, she kissed her effusively and told her how much better she was looking since she left Aix.
“And no wonder,” she said. “The air there was not good, and either that or something made me very nervous, so that I did things for which I am sorry, and which I hope you will forget.”
This was a great concession which Bertha received graciously, and the two were on the best of terms when they entered Louie’s room. Louie had improved rapidly during the week, and was sitting in an easy-chair by the window, clad in a most becoming tea-gown fashioned at Worth’s for the first stages of deep mourning, and looking more like a girl of eighteen than a widow of twenty-five. Notwithstanding her husband’s assertion that black would not become her, she had never been half so lovely as she was in her weeds, and her face was never so fair as when framed in her little crêpe bonnet and widow’s cap, which sat so jauntily on her golden hair. “Dazzlingly beautiful and altogether irresistible,” was Mrs. Hallam’s opinion as the days went by, and Louie grew more and more cheerful and sometimes forgot to put Fred’s photograph under her pillow, and began to talk less of him and more to Rex, whose attentions she claimed with an air of ownership which would have amused Bertha if she could have put from her the harrowing thought of what might be a year hence, when the grave at Mount Auburn was not as new, or Louie’s loss as fresh, as they were now.
“He cannot help loving her,” she would say to herself, “and I ought to be glad to have her happy with him.”
But she was not glad, and it showed in her face, whose expression Rex could not understand. Louie’s was one of those natures which, without meaning to be selfish, make everything subservient to them. She was always the centre about which others revolved, and Rex was her willing slave, partly because of Thurston’s dying charge, and partly because he could not resist her pretty appealing ways, and would not if he could. But he never dreamed of associating his devotion to her with Bertha’s growing reserve. She was his real queen, without whom his life at Ouchy would have been very irksome, and when she suggested going home, as Dorcas had written urging her to do, he protested against it almost as strenuously as Louie. She must stay, both said, until she had seen something of Europe besides Aix and Ouchy. So she stayed, and they spent September at Interlaken and Lucerne, October in Paris, and November at the Italian lakes, where she received a letter from Grace, written in New York and signed “Grace Haynes Travis.”
“We were married yesterday,” she wrote, “and to-morrow we start for our Florida cabin and orange grove, near Orlando, where so many English people have settled. Mother gave in handsomely at the last, when she found there was no help for it, and I actually won over Lady Gresham, who used to think me a Hottentot, and always spoke of me as ‘that dreadful American girl.’ She invited mother and me to her country house, The Limes, near London, and suggested that Jack and I be married there. But I preferred New York; so she gave us her blessing and a thousand pounds, and mother, Jack, and I sailed three weeks ago in the Umbria. When are you coming home? and how is that pretty little Mrs. Thurston? I saw her once, and thought her very lovely, with that sweet, clinging, helpless manner which takes with men wonderfully. I have heard that she was an old flame of Rex Hallam’s, or rather a young one, but I’ll trust you to win him, although as a widow she is dangerous; so, in the words of the immortal Weller, I warn you, ‘Bevare of vidders.’”