Читать книгу Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering - Mary Jane Holmes - Страница 26

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"Why did you invite him to Linwood?" Helen began. "I am sure we have had city guests enough. Oh, if Wilford Cameron had only never come, we should have had Katy now," and the sister-love overcame every other feeling, making Helen cry bitterly as they drove back to the farmhouse.

Morris could not comfort her then, for he needed it the most, and so in silence he left her and went on his way to Linwood, which seemed as if a funeral train had left it, bearing away all Morris' life and love, and leaving only a cheerless blank. It was well for him that there were many sick ones on his list, for in attending to them he forgot himself in part so that the day with him passed faster than at the farmhouse, where life and its interests seemed suddenly to have stopped. Nothing had power to rouse Helen, who never realized how much she loved her young sister until now, when, with swelling heart she listlessly put to rights the room which had been theirs so long, but which was now hers alone. It was a sad task picking up that disordered chamber bearing so many traces of Katy, and Helen's heart ached terribly as she hung away the little pink calico dressing gown in which Katy had looked so pretty, and picked up from the floor the pile of skirts lying just where they had been left the previous night; but when it came to the little half-worn slippers which had been thrown one here and another there as Katy danced out of them, she could control herself no longer, and stopping in her work sobbed bitterly: "Oh, Katy, Katy, how can I live without you?" But tears could not bring Katy back, and knowing this, Helen dried her eyes ere long and joined the family below, who like herself were spiritless and sad.

It was some little solace to them all that day to follow Katy in her journey, saying, she is at Worcester, or Framingham, or Newtown, and when at noon they sat down to their dinner in the tidy kitchen, they said: "She is in Boston," and the saying so made the time which had elapsed since the morning seem interminable. Slowly the hours dragged, and at last, before the sunsetting, Helen, who could bear the loneliness of home no longer, stole across the fields to Linwood, hoping in Morris' companionship to forget her own grief in part. But Morris was a sorry comforter then. If the day had been sad to Helen, it had been doubly so to him. He had ministered as usual to his patients, listening to their complaints and answering patiently their inquiries; but amid it all he walked as in a maze, hearing nothing except the words: "I, Katy, take thee, Wilford, to be my wedded husband," and seeing nothing but the airy little figure which stood up on tiptoe for him to kiss its lips at parting. His work for the day was over now, and he sat alone in his library when Helen came hurriedly in, staring at sight of his face, and asking if he was ill.

"I have had a hard day's work," he said. "I am always tired at night," and he tried to smile and appear natural. "Are you very lonely at the farmhouse?" he asked, and then Helen broke out afresh, mourning sometimes for Katy, and again denouncing Wilford as proud and heartless.

"Positively, Cousin Morris," and Helen's eye flashed as she said it, "he acted all the while he was in the church as if he were doing something of which he was ashamed; and then did you notice how impatient he seemed when the neighbors were shaking hands with Katy at the depot and bidding her good-by? He looked as if he thought they had no right to touch her, she was so much their superior, just because she had married him, and he even hurried her away before Aunt Betsy had time to kiss her. And yet the people think it such a splendid match for Katy, because he is so rich and generous. Gave the clergyman fifty dollars and the sexton five, so I heard; but that does not help him with me. I know it's wicked, Morris, as well as you, but somehow I find myself taking real comfort in hating Wilford Cameron."

"That is wrong, Helen, all wrong," and Morris tried to reason with her; but his arguments this time were not very strong, and he finally said to her, inadvertently: "If I can forgive Wilford Cameron for marrying our Katy, you surely ought to do so, for he has hurt me the most."

"You, Morris! you, you!" Helen kept repeating, standing back still further and further front him, while strange, overwhelming thoughts passed like lightning through her mind as she marked the pallid face, where was written since the morning more than one line of suffering, and saw in the brown eyes a look such as they were not wont to wear. "Morris, tell me—tell me truly—did you love my Sister Katy?" and with an impetuous rush Helen knelt beside him, as, laying his head upon the table he answered:

"Yes, Helen. God forgive me if it were wrong. I did love your Sister Katy, and love her yet, and that is the hardest to bear."

All the tender, pitying woman was roused in Helen, and like a sister she smoothed the locks of damp, dark hair, keeping a perfect silence as the strong man, no longer able to bear up, wept like a very child. For a time Helen felt as if bereft of reason, while earth and sky seemed blended in one wild chaos as she thought: "Oh, why couldn't it have been? Why didn't you tell her in time?" and at last she said to him; "If Katy had known it! Oh, Morris, why didn't you tell her? She never guessed it, never! If she had—if she had," Helen's breath came chokingly: "I am very sure—yes, I know it might have been!"

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these—it might have been."

Morris involuntarily thought of these lines, but they only mocked his sorrow as he answered Helen: "I doubt if you are right; I hope you are not; hope that it might not have been, as it is not now. Katy loved me as her brother, nothing more, I am confident. Had she waited till she was older, God only knows what might have been, but now she is gone and our Father will help me to bear, will help us both, if we ask him, as we must."

And then as only he could do, Morris talked with Helen until she felt her hardness toward Wilford giving way, while she wondered how Morris could speak thus kindly of one who was his rival.

"Not of myself could I do it," Morris said; "but I trust in One who says: 'As thy day shall thy strength be,' and He, you know, never fails."

There was a fresh bond of sympathy now between Morris and Helen, and the latter needed no caution against repeating what she had discovered. The secret was safe with her, and by dwelling on what "might have been" she forgot to think so much of what was, and so the first days after Katy's departure were more tolerable than she had thought it possible for them to be. At the close of the fourth there came a short note from Katy, who was still in Boston at the Revere, and perfectly happy, she said, going into ecstasies over her husband, the best in the world, and certainty the most generous and indulgent. "Such beautiful things as I am having made," she wrote, "when I already had more than I needed, and so I told him, but he only smiled a queer kind of smile as he said: 'Very true; you do not need them.' I wonder then why he gets me more. Oh, I forgot to tell you how much I liked his cousin, Mrs. Harvey, who boards at the Revere, and whom Wilford consults about my dress. I am somewhat afraid of her, too, she is so grand, but she pets me a great deal and laughs at my speeches. Mr. Ray is here too, and I think him splendid.

"By the way, Helen, I heard him tell Wilford that you had one of the best shaped heads he ever saw, and that he thought you decidedly good looking. I must tell you now of the only thing which troubles me in the least, and I shall get used to that, I suppose. It is so strange Wilford never told me a word until she came, my waiting maid. Think of that! little Katy Lennox with a waiting maid, who jabbers French half the time, for she speaks that language as well as her own, having been abroad with the family once before. That is why they sent her to me; they knew her services would be invaluable in Paris. Her name is Esther, and she came the day after we did and brought me such a beautiful mantilla from Wilford's mother, and the loveliest dress. Just the pattern was fifty dollars, she said.

"The steamer sails in three days, and I will write again before that time, sending it by Mr. Ray, who is to stop over one train at Linwood. Wilford has just come in and says I have written enough for now, but I will tell you how he has bought me a diamond pin and earrings, which Esther, who knows the value of everything, says never cost less than five hundred dollars.