“Everything bad,—nothing good. May God forgive it all!” she whispered more than once, as she lay waiting for the end and shuddering as she thought of the dark, cold waters so soon to engulf her.
In this state of mind she became conscious that some one was standing so close to her that his boots held down a portion of her dress, but she did not mind it, for at that moment Phineas began his prayer, to which she listened intently. She knew it was an illiterate man, that his boots were coarse, that his clothes were saturated with an odor of cheap tobacco, and that he belonged to a class which she despised because she had once been of it. But as he prayed she felt, as she had never felt before, the Presence he said was there with him, and thought nothing of his class, or his tobacco, or his boots. He was a saint, until he spoke of Sturbridge and his blood kin who was old and stricken in years. Then she knew who the saint was, and as soon as it was possible to do so she escaped to her state-room, where Rex found her in a state of great nervous excitement. She could not and would not see Phineas that night, she said. Possibly she might be equal to it in the morning. With that message Phineas, who was hovering around her door, was obliged to be content, but before he retired, every one with whom he talked knew that Mrs. Hallam was his cousin Lucy Ann, whom he used to know in Sturbridge when she was a girl.
CHAPTER XVIII.
ON SEA AND LAND.
Naturally the captain and officers made light of the storm after it was over, citing, as a proof that it was not so very severe, the fact that within four hours after it began to subside the ship was sailing smoothly over a comparatively calm sea, on which the moon and stars were shining as brightly as if it had not so recently been stirred to its depths. The deck had been cleared, and, after seeing Louie in her berth, Bertha went up to join Rex, who was waiting for her. All the past peril was forgotten in the joy of their perfect love, and they had so much to talk about and so many plans for the future to discuss that the midnight bells sounded before they separated.
“It is not very long till morning, when I shall see you again, nor long before you will be all my own,” Rex said, holding her in his arms and kissing her many times before he let her go.
She found Louie asleep, and when next morning Bertha arose as the first gong sounded, Louie was still sleeping, exhausted with the excitement of the previous day. She was evidently dreaming, for there was a smile on her lips which moved once with some word Bertha could not catch, although it sounded like “Rex.”
“I wonder if she cares very much for him,” Bertha thought, with a twinge of pain. “If she does, I cannot give him up, for he is mine,—my Rex.”
She repeated the name aloud, lingering over it as if the sound were very pleasant to her, and just then Louie’s blue eyes opened and looked inquiringly at her.
“What is it about Rex?” she asked, smiling up at Bertha in that pretty, innocent way which children have of smiling when waking from sleep. “Has he been to inquire for me?” she continued; and, feeling that she could no longer put it off, Bertha knelt beside her and told her a story which made the bright color fade from Louie’s face and her lips quiver in a grieved kind of way as she listened to it.
When it was finished she did not say a word, except to ask if it was not very cold.