"DEAR MADAM, OR SIR, whichever you may be," she began, "I wish I could tell you how much joy and gladness, and relief, too, your generous gift of one hundred pounds brought to both father and me.
G.o.d bless you for it, and may you never know the want and actual need which made your gift so very welcome that instead of shrinking from it we could only cry over it, and be glad that somewhere in the world there was somebody thinking and caring for us. Every night of my life I shall pray for you, and if I ever know who you are, and meet you face to face, I will try and thank you better than I feel that I am doing on paper. Yours gratefully and sincerely,"
BESSIE McPHERSON,
"P.S.--If, as papa half suspects, you are his Aunt Betsey, I am doubly glad, because it shows that you sometimes think of us in the old home at Stoneleigh, and I wish you would write a few words to father. It will do him so much good, and he is so sick and helpless, and lonely, and--I dare not tell you what I fear, only he sometimes forgets my name and his own, too, and calls things different from what they are. Oh, if he should die, I should die, too!"
This was sent to Messrs. Blank & Blank with instructions to forward it to the donor. But Messrs. Blank & Blank were very busy with other matters than forwarding letters of thanks. They had just written to Miss McPherson that her orders had been obeyed and the money paid, and so Bessie"s letter was put aside and forgotten, for weeks and even months, when an incident occurred which brought it to their minds and it was forwarded to Miss McPherson.
CHAPTER XVI.
FROM MARCH TO JUNE.
When Bessie knew that the money was really theirs, when she had it in her hand and counted the bank-notes, her happiness knew no bounds, and she felt richer than Blanche Trevellian ever had with fifty times that sum. To her that hundred pounds represented so much actual good and comfort for her father, for whom she would use nearly all of it. But first she must pay Jack Trevellian, and she said to her father:
"May I have ten pounds of this to do with as I like? I promise to make good use of it."
"Yes, child," he answered, "it is all yours to do with as you please."
So she sent ten pounds to Jack, and wrote:
"I return the money you were so good as to loan mother. Ten pounds she said it was. It was very kind in you to let her have it, and I know you meant it well. You could not mean otherwise; but please, Mr. Trevellian, for my sake don"t do it again.
"Yours truly,
"BESSIE McPHERSON."
This done, Bessie paid the butcher and the baker and the grocer, and a part of what they were owing Anthony and Dorothy, and bought herself a pair of shoes, and then religiously put by what was left to buy the medicines and dainties, the beef tea and wine and jellies and fruit, which were to nurse her father back to health physically and mentally.
But it would take more than fruit or jelly to repair a const.i.tution never strong and now greatly weakened by disease. Every day Archie grew weaker, while Bessie watched over and tended him with anguish in her heart and a terrible shrinking from the future when he would be gone forever. From Neil she heard often, but his letters did not do her much good they were so full of regret for the poverty which was keeping her from him and would keep her indefinitely for aught he knew. From her mother she seldom heard. That frivolous b.u.t.terfly was too busy and gay to give much time or thought to her dying husband and overburdened child. She was still at Nice and still devoted to her American friends, the Rossiter-Brownes, as they called themselves, to the great amus.e.m.e.nt of their neighbors, who had known them when they were plain Mr. and Mrs.
Isaac R. Brown, of Ma.s.sachusetts, or, as they were familiarly called, Miss Brown and Ike. But they were rich people now; a turn in the wheel had made Ike a millionaire and transformed him into Mr. Rossiter-Browne, and with his wife and his two children, Augusta and Allen, he was doing Europe on a grand scale, and Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, an ambitious but well-meaning woman, had taken a violent fancy to Daisy, and had even invited her to go home with her in June, offering to defray all her expenses out and back if she would do so.
"And I half made up my mind to go," Daisy wrote to Bessie in May. "I have often wished to see America, and shall never have a better chance than this. Though not the most refined people in the world, the Rossiter-Brownes are very nice and very kind to me. Lady June, I dare say, would call them vulgar and second-cla.s.s, and I am inclined to think they are what their own countrymen call _shoddy_. They have not always been rich as they are now. Indeed, Mrs. Rossiter-Browne makes no secret of the fact that she was once poor and did her own washing, which is very commendable in her, I am sure. By some means or other--either oil, or pork, or the war--they have made a fortune and have come abroad to spend it in a most princely manner. Mrs. Rossiter-Browne is good-looking, and wears the finest diamonds at Nice, if I except some of the Russian ladies, but her grammar is dreadful, her style of dress very conspicuous, and her voice loud and coa.r.s.e. Augusta, the daughter, is twenty, and much better educated than her mother. She is rather pretty and stylish, but indolent and proud. Allen, the son, is twenty-two, tall, light-haired, good-natured, and dandified, kisses his mother night and morning, calls her _ma_ and his father _pa_, and his sister _sis_; drives fast horses, wears an eye-gla.s.s, carries a cane, and affects the English drawl. _Pere_ Rossiter-Browne is a little dapper man, with a face like a squirrel. At breakfast, which is served in their parlor, he eats with his knife, and pours his tea into his saucer in spite of Augusta"s disgust and his wife"s open protestations.
""Now, Angeline, you shet up with your folderol," he will say, with the most imperturbable good humor. "At _table dote_ I can behave with the best of "em, but in my own room I"m goin" to be comfortable and take things easy like, and if I want to cool my tea in my _sa.s.ser_ I shall.
Miss McPherson don"t think no less of me for that, you bet."
"They have given me a standing invitation to breakfast with them when I like.
""It don"t cost no more for five than for four," Mr. Rossiter-Browne says, and as juicy beefsteaks and mutton chops and real cream have a better relish than rolls and tea, I accept their hospitality in this as in many other things.
"They take me everywhere, and I am really quite useful to them in various ways. None of them speak French at all except Augusta, and she very badly. But she is improving rapidly, for I hear her read both French and Italian every day, and help her with her p.r.o.nunciation. Then I have introduced them to a great many people, among whom are some English lords and ladies and German barons and baronesses; and, as all Americans dote on t.i.tles, notwithstanding their boasted democracy, so Mrs. Rossiter-Browne is not an exception, but almost bursts with dignity when she speaks to her Yankee friends of what Lady So-and-so said to her and what she said to Baron Blank. She nearly fell on her face when I introduced her to Lord Hardy, who has returned from Egypt and was here for a few days. He took to her wonderfully, or pretended that he did, and she was weak enough to think he had an eye to Augusta"s charms, and asked if I supposed him serious in his attentions to her daughter, and what kind of a husband he would make. What an absurd idea! Lord Hardy and Augusta Browne! I laughed till I cried when I told Ted about it and asked him what he thought of it.
""I might do worse," he said, and then walked away, and that afternoon took Mrs. Browne and Augusta over to Villefranche.
"Ted is very much changed from the boy whom I smuggled into the play-room at Monte Carlo as my Cousin Susan, and I can"t get him near there now. It seems that he lost a great deal of money one night, and actually left the Casino with the intention to kill himself. But he had not the courage to do it, though he told me he put the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead, when a thought of his mother stayed his hand and the suicide was prevented. She was in heaven, he said, and he wanted to see her again. If he killed himself he knew he should not, and so he concluded to live, but made a vow never to play again, and he has kept it and become almost as big a spoony as Jack Trevellian. By the way, I saw Trevellian the other day, and when I said something about hoping to pay him his ten pounds soon, he told me _you_ had paid it. Very kind in you, I am sure, but I don"t see where you got the money. You might have kept it, as he would never have pressed me for it, and I could not pay it if he did. My rooms cost me so much that I never have a shilling to spare, and I do not go to Monte Carlo often, for these Rossiter-Brownes profess to be very religious people--Baptists, I believe--and hold gambling in great abhorrence, so, as I wish to stand well with them I have to play on the sly, or not at all. They have a house in New York and another in the country somewhere, and a cottage at the sea-side; and they have a maid and a courier, and Mrs. Rossiter-Browne talks as familiarly with both of them as she does with me, and I think feels more at ease in their society than in mine. But she is a good woman, and since commencing this letter I have decided to accept her invitation and accompany her to America. They sail the last week in June, and I shall manage to spend a few days at Stoneleigh before I go. How is your father? Write me soon, and if you can do so please send me a pound or two. I have so very little; and I had to borrow of Ted, who, I must say, loaned me rather unwillingly, I thought, while Trevellian, whom I tried cautiously, never took the hint at all. It must be I am going off and have not the same power over the men which I once had; and yet Mrs.
Rossiter-Browne told me the other day that I was called the prettiest woman in Nice, and said she was very proud to have me of her party. What a fool she is, to be sure!"
This letter filled Bessie with disgust and anxiety, too, while for a moment there arose within her a feeling of rebellion and bitter resentment against the woman who got so much from life and left her to bear its burdens alone.
"But I would far rather be what I am than what she is," she thought, as she wiped her tears away and stole softly to her father"s room to see if he were still sleeping.
He was usually in a half-unconscious condition now, seldom rousing except to take his meals, or when Bessie made a great effort to interest him, and she did not guess how fast he was failing. The second week in June Daisy came, fresh and bright and eager, and looking almost as young as Bessie, who knew no rest day or night, and was pale and thin and worn, with a look on her face and in her eyes very sad to see in a young girl.
"Oh, mother, I am so glad you have come," she cried, and laying her head in her mother"s lap, she sobbed pa.s.sionately for a moment, while she said: "And you will not go away; will not leave me here alone, with no one to speak to all day long but Dorothy. Oh, mother, the loneliness is so terrible and life is so dreary to me."
For a moment Daisy"s heart was stirred with pity for the tired, worn girl, and she half resolved to give up America and stay at home where she was needed. But as the days went on and she saw just what life at Stoneleigh meant, she felt that she could not endure it, and, fondly stroking Bessie"s hair and smoothing her pale cheek, she told her she would not be gone long. She should return in September and would positively remain at home all winter and take the care from Bessie.
"Your father will not die," she said. "People live years with his disease; he is better than when I first came home; at least he is more quiet, which is a gain."
And so Bessie gave it up and entered at last into her mother"s antic.i.p.ations of her journey, and listened with some interest to what she had to say of the Rossiter-Brownes, the best and most generous people in the world, for they were not only to bear all her expenses to and from America, but Mrs. Browne had given her a twenty-pound note for any little expenditures necessary for her journey.
"I am sure I don"t know why they fancy me as they seem to," Daisy said, "unless they have an idea that I am a much more important personage than I am, and that to take me home as their guest will raise them in the estimation of their friends. They know the McPherson blood is good, and they know about Lady Jane, who Mrs. Browne persists in thinking is my sister-in-law. Did I tell you that the Rossiter-Brownes" old home is near Allington, where your father"s aunt is living?"
"No," Bessie replied, looking up with more interest in her manner.
"Well, it is," Daisy continued, "and I mean to beard the old woman in her den and conquer a peace. She has heaps of money, the Brownes say, and is greatly respected in spite of her oddities, and is quite an aristocrat in the little place; and, as I suspect, is far above Mrs.
Rossiter-Browne, who wishes to show me to her. She does not guess how the old woman hates us all."
And so Daisy rattled on with her small, tiresome talk, to which Bessie sometimes listened and sometimes did not. The Rossiter-Brownes were in Leamington now, but were coming through Wales on their way to Liverpool, and Mrs. Browne and Augusta were to stop for a day or two at the "George" and take Daisy with them when they left.
"I wish we could show them some attention," Daisy said to her daughter.
"Don"t you think we might manage a French tea in the garden at four o"clock? We have some rare old china and some solid silver and Dresden linen, and we could get Lucy Jones to wait upon us. Do you think we can do it?"
"Perhaps we can," Bessie replied, reflecting that a French tea in the garden at four o"clock meant only thin slices of bread and b.u.t.ter, with biscuits and possibly some little sponge cakes which would not cost much. She could go without a pair of gloves and make the old ones do.
All extras came out of poor little Bessie, but she was accustomed to it, and did not mind, and just now she was so glad to have her mother with her, for Daisy, as if a little remorseful for what she was about to do, was unusually sweet and affectionate and kind, and devoted herself to her husband as she had never done since Bessie could remember. She washed his face and hands and brushed his hair, and wheeled him out into the garden under the old yew tree, where he once slept on the summer morning while she kept the sun and the flies from him. And stooping over him, she asked if he remembered the little girl who used to come to him there when he was a boy.
"Yes; that was Daisy," he said, "but I have not seen her in many a year.
Where is she now?" and he looked at her in a strange, bewildered way.
Then, as the brain fog lifted a little and cleared away, his chin quivered and he went on: "Oh, Daisy, Daisy; it comes back to me now, the years that are gone, and you as you were then. I loved you so much."
"And don"t you love me now, Archie?" she asked, kneeling beside him with her white arms across his knees, while she looked into his face with the old look she could a.s.sume so easily, and which moved even this weak man.
Laying his thin, pale hands upon her head, he burst into tears and said;
"Yes, Daisy, I have always loved you, though you have made no part of my life these many years."
"And have you missed me? Have you been unhappy without me?" she asked, and he replied:
"Missed you? Yes; but I have not been unhappy, for I have had Bessie. No man could be unhappy with Bessie, I think I will go in now and find her.
I am better with her; and the birds are not singing here."
"What birds?" Daisy asked, looking curiously at him, as, with closed eyes, he leaned wearily back in his chair and replied:
"The birds which sing to me so often; birds of the future, and the past, too, I think they are, for they sing sometimes of you, but oftener of Bessie and a journey far away where she is going to be happy when we are both gone and the winds are blowing across our graves--over there," and he pointed toward the little yard where his father and mother were lying side by side, and where he soon would lie.