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.’”

There was much more in the same strain, and Bertha laughed over it, but felt a pang for which she hated herself every time she looked at Louie, whose beauty and grace drew about her many admirers besides Rex, in spite of her black dress and her frequent allusions to “dear Fred, whose grave was so far away.” She was growing stronger every day, and when in December Rex received a letter from his partner saying that his presence in New York was rather necessary, she declared herself equal to the journey, and said that if Rex went she should go too. Consequently the 1st of January found them all in London, where they were to spend a few days, and where Rex brought his aunt a letter, addressed, bottom side up, to “Mrs. Lucy Ann Hallam, Care of Brown, Shipley & Co., London. _Post Restant._”

There was a gleam of humor in Rex’s eyes as he handed the missive to his aunt, whose face grew dark as she studied the outside, and darker still at the inside, which was wonderful in composition and orthography. Phineas Jones had been sent out to Scotland by an old man who had some property there and who knew he could trust Phineas to look after it and bring him back the rental, which he had found it hard to collect. After transacting his business, Phineas had decided to travel a little and “get cultivated up, so that his cousin Lucy Ann shouldn’t be ashamed of him.” Had he known where she was, he would have joined her, but, as he did not he wrote her a letter, which had in it a great deal about Sturbridge and the old yellow house and the huckleberry pasture and the circus and the spelling-school, all of which filled Mrs. Hallam with disgust. She was his only blood kin extant, he said, and he yearned to see her, but supposed he must wait till she was back in New York, when he should pay his respects to her at once. And she wouldn’t be ashamed of him, either. He knew what was what, and had hob-a-nobbed with nobility, who took a sight of notice of him. He was going to sail the 10th in the Germanic, he said, and if she’d let him know when she was coming home he’d be in New York on the wharf to meet her.

As it chanced, the Germanic was the boat in which the Hallam party had taken passage for the 10th, but Mrs. Hallam suddenly discovered that she had not seen enough of London; Rex could go, if he must, but she should wait for the next boat of the same line. Rex had no suspicion as to the real reason for her change of mind, and, as a week or two could make but little difference in the business calling him home, he stayed, and when the next boat of the White Star line sailed out of the docks of Liverpool it carried the party of four: Louie, limp and tearful as she thought of her husband who had been with her when she crossed before; Mrs. Hallam, excited and nervous, half expecting to see Phineas pounce upon her, and haunted with a presentiment that he was somewhere on the ship; and Rex, with Bertha, hunting for the spot where he had first seen her and knocked her down.