Bessie's Fortune Part 42

yes--Mrs. Archibald McPherson. Why is she in black?"

Then followed the story of the telegram received on the Celtic, and the terrible shock it was to Daisy, who was for a time wholly overcome.

"Seems pretty brisk now," Miss Betsey said, glancing sharply toward the airy figure now walking up and down the piazza with Allen at its side.

"Why didn't she go home at once to her daughter?"

"She did talk of it," Mrs. Browne replied, uneasily for she detected disapprobation of her guest in Miss McPherson's tone. "I think she would of went, but it seemed a pity not to see a little of America first. She will not stay long, and I hope you'll call soon. I b'lieve you have never been in my new house."

"No, I have not. Who, may I ask, is that tow-headed man, with his hair parted in the middle?"

"Oh, excuse me," and Mrs. Browne brightened at once. "That is Lord Hardy. We met him in Nice. He is going West, and we persuaded him to stop here first. He is very nice, and not at all stuck up."

"Yes, an Irishman. I've seen him before. If he is poor, my advice is, look out for Augusta, and, anyway, have a care for your boy. Good-night.

It's growing late. Get up, Whitey," and with a jerk at the reins the old lady drove on, while Mrs. Browne, rather crestfallen and disappointed, went slowly back to the house, wondering why she was to have a care for her _boy_, her Allen, still walking up and down at Daisy's side, and talking eagerly to her.

"I suppose I am meaner than dirt, but I cannot help it, I will not notice that woman--no, not a woman, but a gambler, an adventuress, a flirt, who, if she cannot capture that Irishman, will try her luck with Allen! I hate her, but I pity the girl, and I'll send her a hundred pounds at once," Miss Betsey soliloquized, as she went home through the gathering twilight.

And before she slept she wrote to her bankers in London, bidding them forward to Bessie's address another hundred pounds, and charge it to her account.

The next morning Miss Betsey was sitting in her hop-vine-covered porch, sh.e.l.ling peas for her early dinner, and thinking of Archie and the painted Jezebel, as she designated Daisy, when a shadow fell upon the floor, and looking up she saw the subject of her thoughts standing before her, with her yellow hair arranged low in her neck, and a round black hat set coquettishly upon her head. Miss Betsey did not manifest the least surprise, but adjusting her spectacles from her forehead to her eyes, looked up inquiringly at her visitor, who, seating herself upon the threshold of the door, took off her hat, and in the silvery tones she could a.s.sume so well, said:

"You must excuse me, dear auntie. I could not wait for you to call, I wanted to see you so badly, and, as Allen Browne was going to the post-office, I rode down with him, I am Daisy--Archie's wife, or widow, for Archie is dead, you know."

She said this very sadly and low, and there were great tears in the blue eyes lifted timidly and appealingly to the little sharp, bead like eyes confronting her so steadily through the spectacles. How very lovely and youthful-looking she was as she sat there in the doorway, and Miss Betsey acknowledged the youth and the loveliness, but did not unbend one whit.

"Ahem!" she began, and the tone was not very rea.s.suring "I knew you were here. Mrs. Browne told me, and I saw you there with Allen yesterday. I saw you years ago on the terrace at Aberystwyth, and remembered you well. Was Archie very sick when you left him?"

"Yes--no," Daisy said, stammeringly; "that is, he had been sick a long time, but I did not think him so bad or I should never have left him.

Oh, auntie, it almost killed me when I heard he was dead, and there is a moan for him in my heart all the time."

She adopted this form of speech because it had sounded prettily to herself when she said it to Mrs. Browne, who had believed in the moan, but Miss Betsey did not.

"Ahem!" she said; "how much time have you spent with Archie the last ten years or so?"

"Not as much as I wish I had now. I was obliged to be away from him,"

Daisy replied, and the spinster continued:

"Why?"

"My health was poor, and I was so much better out of England; and so, when people invited me, I went with them--it saved expense at home, and we are so poor, oh! you cannot know how poor;" and Daisy clasped her hands together despairingly as she gazed up at the stern face above her, which did not relax in its sternness, but remained so hard and stony that Daisy burst out impetuously: "Oh, auntie, why are you so cold to me. Why do you hate me so? I have never harmed you. I want you for my friend--mine and Bessie's; and we need a friend so much in our loneliness and poverty. Bessie is the sweetest, truest girl you ever knew."

For a moment Miss Betsey's hands moved rapidly among the pea-pods; then removing her spectacles and wiping them with the corner of her ap.r.o.n, she began:

"I mean to treat everybody civilly in my own house, but if I say anything I must tell the naked truth. I believe Bessie is a true girl, as you say; but I have my doubts of you. I have heard much of your career; have talked with those who have seen you in that h.e.l.l at Monte Carlo, bandying jests with young profligates and blear-eyed old men, more dangerous than the younger ones because better skilled in evil. I saw you myself on the terrace at Aberystwyth, flirting as no married woman should flirt with that whiffet, Lord Hardy, who, it seems, is here with you, and whom perhaps you think to capture now that you are free.

But let me tell you that men seldom pick up and wear a soiled garment, particularly when they have helped to soil it. Lord Hardy will never marry you, and my advice is that you go home, as you ought to have done at once. Go back to your child and be a mother to her; but, as you hope for heaven, never try to drag her down where you are. You talk of poverty. You do not show it. Those diamonds in your ears never cost a small sum, nor that solitaire upon your finger."

"They were given to me," Daisy sobbed, as she rose to her feet and put on her hat preparatory to leaving, while Miss Betsey continued:

"Given to you! The more shame for you to take them. Better throw them away than wear them as a badge of degradation. Yes, throw them away, or send them back whence they came. Wash that paint off your face. Get rid of that made-up smirk around your mouth. Remember that you are going on toward forty."

"Oh-h!" Daisy groaned; "I am not quite thirty-six."

"Well, thirty-six, then," the spinster rejoined. "There's a wide difference between thirty-six and sixteen. You are a widow; you have a grown-up daughter. You are no longer young, though you are good enough looking, but good looks will not support you honestly. Go home and go to work, if it is only to be a bar-maid at the George Hotel; and when I see you have reformed, I do not say I will not do something for you, but just so long as you go round sponging your living and making eyes at men--and boys, too, for that matter--not a penny of my money shall you ever touch. I've said my say, and there comes the boy Allen for you.

Good-morning."

She arose to take her peas to the kitchen. The conference was ended, and with a flushed face and wet eyes Daisy went out to the phaeton, into which Allen handed her very carefully, and then took his seat beside her. He noticed her agitation, but did not guess its cause, until she said, with a little gasping sob:

"I was never so insulted in my life as by that horrid old woman. Had I been the vilest creature in the world she could not have talked worse to me. She said I was living upon your people--sponging she called it; that I was after Lord Hardy--and--and--oh, Allen--even you--the _boy_ she called you, and she bade me go home and hire out as bar-maid at the George Hotel in Bangor."

"The wretch! Boy, indeed!" Allen said, bristling with indignation at this fling at his youth, but feeling a strange stir in his young blood at the thought of this fair creature being after him.

Arrived at the Ridge House, Daisy went directly to her room and had the headache all day; and gave Mrs. Browne a most exaggerated account of her interview with her aunt, but omitted the part pertaining to Lord Hardy and Allen, the latter of whom hovered disconsolately near the door of her room and sent her messages and a bouquet, and was radiant with delight when after tea-time she was so far restored as to be able to join the family upon the piazza. It was Allen who brought a pillow for her, and a footstool, and asked if she was in a draught, and when she said she was, moved her chair at her request nearer to Lord Hardy, who scarcely looked at her, and did not manifest the slightest interest in her headache, or in her. Nothing which Daisy could do was of any avail to attract him to her, and she tried every wile and art upon him during the next few days, but to no purpose. At last, when she had been at the Ridge House a week, and she had an opportunity of seeing him alone, she said, in a half playful, half complaining voice:

"What is it, Teddy? What has come between us that you are so cold to me?

Has the fair Gusty, as her mother calls her, driven from your mind all thoughts of your old friend? You used to care for me, Teddy, in the good old days when we were all so happy together. Don't you like me a little now, and I so lonely and sad, and all the more so that I have to keep up and smile before these people, who, kind as they are, bore me with their vulgarities? Say, Teddy, are you angry with me?"

As she talked Daisy had put her hand on that of Lord Hardy, who once would have thrilled at its touch, but who now shrank from it as something poisonous. He knew the woman so thoroughly that nothing she could do or say would in the least affect him now, and when she asked if he were angry with her, he replied:

"Not angry, no--but, Mrs. McPherson--"

"Oh, Teddy, now I know you hate me when you call me Mrs. McPherson,"

Daisy sobbed, and he continued:

"Well, Daisy, then, if that suits you better, I am not angry, but you must know that we can never again be to each other what we were in the days when I was foolish enough to follow where you led, even to my ruin.

All that is past, and I will not reproach you more; but, Daisy, I must speak one word of warning. I owe so much to these kind people, whose vulgarities bore you, but do not prevent you from accepting their hospitality. I am not blind to what you are doing."

"And what am I doing?" Daisy asked, and he replied: "Making a fool of a boy, for mercenary purposes of your own. I have seen it ever since we left Liverpool and I tell you I will not allow it, and if you persist in luring Allen to your side on all occasions, and throw over him the glamour of your charms, the family shall know all I know of your past life, even if it compromises me with you. They think you pure and good.

What would they say if they knew you to be a professional gambler, an adventuress about whom men jest and smile derisively, even while they flatter and admire you in a certain way? Bad, in the common acceptation of the word, you may not be, but your womanhood is certainly soiled, and you are not a fit a.s.sociate for a young, susceptible man, or for an innocent girl. If you were a true woman you would have gone home at once, to your daughter, who, rumor says, is as sweet and lovely as an angel. Go back now to her, and by fulfilling the duties of a mother try to retrieve the past. It is not impossible. I do not mean to be harsh, and hardly know why I have said all this to you, except it were to save Allen Browne, who is each day becoming more and more in love with you."

"In love with me! A woman old enough to be his mother! Absurd!" Daisy exclaimed, adding scornfully: "Thanks for your lecture, which shall not be lost on me. I have no wish to prolong my stay in this stupid place, and only wish I had never come here; and since my presence is so distastful to you, I will go at once and leave you to prosecute your suit with the fair Augusta, wishing you joy with your Yankee bride and her refined family. Shall you invite them to your home in Ireland? If so, may I be there to see! _Addio!_" and with a mocking courtsey she left the room, and going to her chamber wrote to Bessie that she was coming home immediately. Daisy had lost her game, and she knew it. She had nothing to expect from Miss McPherson, nothing from Lord Hardy, and as her deep mourning prevented Mrs. Browne from giving the party she had talked about so much, she might better be in Europe, she thought, and accordingly she acquainted her hostess with her decision. There was a faint protest on the part of Mrs. Browne, but only a faint one, for she was beginning to be a little afraid of her fair visitor, whom Augusta disliked thoroughly. Only Allen was sorry, for the wily woman had stirred his boyish heart to its very depths, and when at last he said good-by to her, and stood until the train which bore her away was out of sight, he felt, perhaps, as keen a pang of regret as a young man of twenty-two ever felt for a woman many years his senior.

Mr. Browne accompanied her to New York, and saw her on board the ship, and on his return home reported that he had left her in the cabin "a smellin' of and admirin' a basket of flowers most as big as herself, which she said a very dear friend had ordered sent to her with his love."

"She didn't say who 'twas," he continued, "and I didn't ask her, but I thought 'fool and his money soon parted,' for they'd smell awful in a day or two, and be flung into the sea. She giv' me one of the posies for Allen. I guess it's pretty well jammed, for I chucked it into my vest pocket; here it is," and he handed a faded rosebud to Allen, whose face was very red, and whose eyes, as they met those of Lord Hardy, betrayed the fact that he was the very dear friend who had ordered the flowers as his farewell to Daisy.

PART III.

CHAPTER I.

IN ROME.

The carnival was raging through the streets of Rome, and the Corso was thronged with masqueraders and lined with spectators--Italians, English, and Americans--all eager for the sight. Upon the balcony of a private dwelling, for which an enormous price had been paid because it commanded a fine view of the street below, sat Miss Lucy Grey, with Grey Jerrold and a party of friends. Lucy had been in Rome three or four weeks, staying at a pension, in the Via Nazzionale, which she preferred to the fashionable and noisy hotels.