CHAPTER XXIII
LOUIE AND MISS PERCY
It was a rather wakeful night which Louie passed, but a happy one. With Fred Lansing’s love, life, which had seemed so black and dreary, looked very bright to her, although there was a feeling of humility in her heart that her father’s debts should be paid by him. And yet the thought that it was his great love which prompted it robbed the humility of much of its bitterness, and it was a very happy young girl who went to Miss Percy the next morning as she was taking her coffee in her room.
“I think I know what you have come to tell me,” Miss Percy said. “I saw Fred last night, and I am very glad. I knew it was coming long ago. You have won a noble man with, I may almost say, no faults, unless it be that he is a little too chary of his real feelings, which make him seem cold and proud when he is neither.”
“But it hurts me that he should pay the debts for me when I wanted to do it myself,” Louie said.
“Yes, dear, I know,” Miss Percy replied; “but God has willed it otherwise. He has taken away your voice for a time, and in its place has given you this friend to do your work for you. He often opens one door when he shuts another. He does not forget us when we feel the most alone. The mother who leaves her little child in one room while she goes into another, does not forget it. She hears its cry, and in time goes back to it full of tenderness and love for the disquiet she has caused it. So with God, he comes back to us when we have been shut in the darkest of rooms, groping blindly for a ray of light. I found it so once, when the darkness was so thick that I felt it covering me like a pall, and in the whole world there seemed nothing worth living for, because my twin-brother Brant was dead.”
Louie had never seen her in such a mood before, or heard her talk in this way. She was very pale, and said her head ached; but when Louie arose to leave her she bade her stay, and said:
“I am not myself this morning, but I want to talk to some one. I have taken you for my sister. I will have no secrets from you. This is the anniversary of my brother’s death. You know I had one, and lost him.”
Louie nodded, and Miss Percy continued: “Let me tell you about him, and you will know better why I always wear black, and am sometimes so sad. He was all the world to me, for we were orphans, and wards of Fred’s father. Although my twin, he seemed younger than myself, with his fair, boyish face, and I watched over him as if I had been his mother. Somehow and somewhere—possibly at Monte Carlo, where we spent some weeks, he acquired a taste for play. Perhaps it was born with him and he could not help it, although he tried at times. It was a mania, stronger than his will, and nothing could win him from it. I am afraid he was weak in some respects, for he fancied himself an expert, able to cope with the most experienced gamblers, and success turned his head. Some years ago he made a trip West, promising me before he left that he would not touch a card. But he broke his word; and at Butte, in Montana, he fell in with a professional, who tempted him to play, letting him win at first, they said, so as to lure him on, and then wiping him out. I believe that is the term they used when telling me of it. He lost thousands and then took his own life—shot himself through the temple—my fair-faced brother whom I idolized. That was six years ago, when the dreadful news flashed across the wires to Washington, ‘Brant Percy shot himself early this morning. We await orders.’
“I could have died for him, I think, and in my first bitter anguish I cursed the man who lured him to ruin. Cursed him and his. I don’t know who he was, except that his name was Tom Crary, and he was well known in that region as an accomplished gambler. Where he is now, if still living and carrying on his nefarious work, I do not know, but I have learned to pray for him since the bitterness is gone, and I hope my curse has not followed him.”
“It has! It has!” Louie cried, stretching out her hands for something to keep herself from falling, everything around her was so dark, and there was such a buzzing in her head and nausea at her stomach.