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.

“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.”

“You be! Well, I’m glad on’t; but I do want to see Lucy Ann’s house, and I sha’n’t make an atom of trouble. She expects me,” Phineas said, and Rex replied, “I hardly think she does. Indeed, I know she doesn’t, and I wouldn’t go if I were you.”

Gradually the truth began to dawn upon Phineas, and there was a pathos in his voice and a moisture in his eyes as he said, “Is Lucy Ann ashamed of _me_? I wouldn’t have believed it, and she my only kin. I’d go through fire and water to serve her. Tell her so, and God bless her.”

Rex felt a great pity for the simple-hearted man to whom the glories of a dinner at the Waldorf did not quite atone for the loss of Lucy Ann, whom he spoke of again when after dinner Rex went with him to the hotel, where he was to spend the night.

“I’m an awkward critter, I know,” he said, “and not used to the ways of high society, but I’m respectable, and my heart is as big as an ox.”

Nothing, however, rested long on Phineas’s mind, and the next morning he was cheerful as ever when he met his friends at the station, and committed the unwonted extravagance of taking a chair with them in a parlor car, saying as he seated himself that he’d never been in one before, and that he found it tip-top.