“I am all in a shiver. I think I will not get up. Tell Martha not to come to me. I do not want any breakfast,” she said, as she turned her face to the wall.
For a moment Bertha lingered, perplexed and pained,—then started to leave the room.
“Wait,” Louie called, faintly, and when Bertha went to her she flung her arms around her neck and said, with a sob, “I am glad for you, and I know you will be happy. Tell Rex I congratulate him. And now go and don’t come back for ever so long. I am tired and want to sleep.”
When she was alone, the little woman buried her face in the pillows and cried like a child, trying to believe she was crying for her husband, but failing dismally. It was for Rex, whom she had held dearer than she knew, and whom she had lost. But with all her weakness Louie had a good deal of common sense, which soon came to her aid. “This is absurd,—crying for one who does not care for me except as a friend. I’ll be a woman, and not a baby,” she thought, as she rung for Martha to come and dress her. An hour later she surprised Bertha and Rex, who were sitting on a seat at the head of the stairs, with a rug thrown across their laps, concealing the hands clasped so tightly beneath it. Nothing could have been sweeter than her manner as she congratulated Rex verbally, and then, sitting down by them, began to plan the grand wedding she would give them if they would wait until poor Fred had been dead a little longer, say a year.
Rex had his own ideas about the wedding and waiting, but he did not express them then. He had settled in his own mind when he should take Bertha, and that it would be from the old house in which he began to have a feeling of ownership.
Meanwhile Mrs. Hallam had consented to see Phineas, whom Rex took to her state-room. What passed at the interview no one knew. It did not last long, and at its close Mrs. Hallam had a nervous headache and Phineas’s face wore a troubled and puzzled expression. He would never have known Lucy Ann, she had altered so, he said. Not grown old, as he supposed she would, but different somehow. He guessed she was tuckered out with fright and the storm. She’d be better when she got home, and then they’d have a good set-to, talking of the old times. He was going to visit her a few days.
This accounted for her headache which lasted the rest of the voyage, so that she did not appear again until they were at the dock in New York. Handing her keys to Rex, she said, “See to my trunks, and for heaven’s sake—keep that man from coming to the house, if you have to strangle him.”
She was among the first to leave the ship, and was driving rapidly home, while Phineas was squabbling with a custom-house officer over some jewelry he had bought in Edinburgh as a present for Dorcas, and an overcoat in London for Mr. Leighton, and which he had conscientiously declared.
“I’m a class-leader,” he said, “and I’d smile to see me lie, and when they asked me if I had any presents I told ’m yes, a coat for the ’Square, and some cangorms for Dorcas, and I swan if they didn’t make me trot ’em out and pay duty, too; and they let more’n fifty trunks full of women’s clothes go through for nothin’. I seen ’m. Where’s Lucy Ann? I was goin’ with her,” he said to Rex, who could have enlightened him with regard to the women’s clothes which “went through for nothin’,” but didn’t.
“Mr. Jones,” he said, buttonholing him familiarly as they walked out of the custom-house, “my aunt has gone home. She is not feeling well at all, and, as the house is not quite in running order, I do not think you’d better go there now. I’ll take you to dine at my club, or, better yet, to the Waldorf, where Mrs. Thurston and Miss Leighton are to stop, and to-morrow we will all go on together, for I’m to see Mrs. Thurston home to Boston, and on my way back shall stop at the Homestead. I am to marry Miss Bertha.”