Miss McDonald Part 5

"I think it is my heart, but I a.s.sure you there is no danger--the worst is over. I am a great deal better."

And he was better with that fair girl beside him, her face glowing with excitement and her soft hands pressing his. Perfectly healthy herself, she must have imparted some life and vigor to him, for he felt his pulse grow steadier beneath her touch, and the blood flow more easily through his veins.

If only he could forget that crumpled letter which lay in his vest pocket and seemed to burn into his flesh; forget that and the young girl across the sea, watching for an answer and the one word "Come!" he might be happy yet, for Julia was one whom any man could love and be proud to call his wife. And Guy said to himself that he did love her, though not as he once loved Daisy, or as he could love her again were he free to do so, and because of that full love withheld he made a mental vow that his whole life should be given to her happiness, so that she might never know any care or sorrow from which he could shield her.

"And Daisy?" something whispered in his ear.

"I must and will forget her," he sternly answered, and the arm he had thrown around Julia, who was sitting with him upon the sofa, tightened its grasp until she winced and moved a little from him.

He was very talkative that evening, and asked his wife many questions about her friends and the shopping she wished to do, and the places they were to visit; and Julia, who had hitherto regarded him as a great, silent man, given to few words, wondered at the change, and watched the bright red spots on his cheeks, and thought how she would manage to have medical advice for that dreadful heart disease which had come like a nightmare to haunt her bridal days.

Next morning there came a Boston paper containing a notice of the marriage, and this Guy sent to Daisy, with only the faint tracing of a pencil to indicate the paragraph. "Better so than to write," he thought; though he longed to add the words, "Forgive me, Daisy; your letter came too late."

And so the paper was sent, and after a week or two Guy went back to his home in Cuylerville, and the blue rooms which Julia had fitted up for Daisy five years before became her own by right. And f.a.n.n.y Thornton welcomed her warmly to the house, and by many little acts of thoughtfulness showed how glad she was to have her there. And Julia was very happy save when she remembered the heart disease, which she was sure Guy had, and for which he would not seek advice. "There was nothing the matter with his heart unless it were too full of love," he told her laughingly, and wondered to himself if in saying this to her he was guilty of a lie, inasmuch as his words misled her so completely.

After a time, however, there came a change, and thoughts of Daisy ceased to disturb him as they once had done. No one ever mentioned her to him, and since the receipt of her letter he had heard no tidings of her until six months after his marriage, when there came to him the ten thousand dollars, with all the interest which had accrued since the settlement first was made. There was no word from Daisy herself, but a letter from a lawyer in Berlin, who said all there was to say with regard to the business, but did not tell where Miss McDonald, as he called her, was.

Then Guy wrote to Daisy a letter of thanks, to which there came no reply, and as time went on the old wound began to heal, the grave to close again; and when, at last, one year after his marriage, they brought him a beautiful little baby girl and laid it in his arms, and then a few moments later let him into the room where the pale mother lay, he stooped over her and, kissing her fondly, said:

"I never loved you half as well as I do now."

It was a pretty child, with dark blue eyes, and hair in which there was a gleam of gold, and Guy, when asked what he would call her, said:

"Would you object to Margaret?"

Julia knew what he meant, and, like the true, n.o.ble woman she was, offered no objection to Guy's choice, knowing well who Margaret had been; and herself first gave the pet name of Daisy to her child, on whom Guy settled the ten thousand dollars sent to him by the Daisy over the sea.

CHAPTER IX

DAISY, TOM, AND THAT OTHER ONE

Watching, waiting, hoping, saying to herself in the morning, "It will come before night," and saying to herself at night, "It will be here to-morrow morning." Such was Daisy's life, even before she had a right to expect an answer to her letter.

Of the nature of Guy's reply she had no doubt. He had loved her once, he loved her still, and he would take her back of course. There was no truth in that rumor of another marriage. Possibly her father, whom she understood now better than she once had, had gotten the story up for the sake of inducing her through pique to marry Tom; but if so his plan would fail. Guy would write to her, "Come!" and she would go, and more than once she counted the contents of her purse and added to it the sum due her from Madame Lafarcade, and wondered if she would dare venture on the journey with so small a sum.

"You so happy and white, too, _ce matin_," her little pupil, Pauline, said to her one day, when they sat together in the garden, and Daisy was indulging in a fanciful picture of her meeting with Guy.

"Yes, I am happy," Daisy said, rousing from her reverie; "but I did not know I was pale--or white, as you term it--though, now I think of it, I do feel sick and faint. It's the heat, I guess. Oh! there is Max with the mail! He is coming this way! He has--he certainly has something for me!"

Daisy's cheeks were scarlet now, and her eyes were bright as stars as she went forward to meet the man who brought the letters to the house.

"Only a paper!--is there nothing more?" she asked in an unsteady voice, as she took the paper in her hand, and, recognizing Guy's handwriting, knew almost to a certainty what was before her.

"Oh, mon Dieu! vous etes malade! J'apporterai un verre d'eau!" Pauline exclaimed, forgetting her English and adopting her mother tongue in her alarm at Daisy's white face and the peculiar tone of her voice.

"No, Pauline, stay; open the paper for me," Daisy said, feeling that it would be easier so than to read it herself, for she knew it was there, else he would never have sent her a paper and nothing more.

Delighted to be of some use, and a little gratified to open a foreign paper, Pauline tore off the wrapper, starting a little at Daisy's quick, sharp cry as she made a rent across the handwriting.

"Look, you are tearing into my name, which he wrote," Daisy said, and then remembering herself, she sank back into her seat in the garden chair, while Pauline wondered what harm there was in tearing an old soiled wrapper, and why her governess should take it so carefully in her hand and roll it up as if it had been a living thing.

There were notices of new books, and a runaway match in high life, and a suicide on Summer Street, and a golden wedding in Roxbury, and the latest fashions from Paris, into which Pauline plunged with avidity while Daisy listened like one in a dream, asking when the fashions were exhausted: "Is that all? Are there no deaths or marriages?"

Pauline had not thought of that--she would see, and she hunted through the columns till she found Guy's pencil mark, and read:

"Married, this morning, at St. Paul's Church, by the Rev. Dr. ----, a.s.sisted by the rector, Guy Thornton, Esq., of Cuylerville, to Miss Julia Hamilton, of this city."

"Yes, yes; it's very hot here, isn't it? I think I will go in," Daisy said, her fingers working nervously with the bit of paper she held.

But Pauline was too intent on the name of Thornton to hear what Daisy said, and she asked: "Is Mr. Thornton your friend?"

It was a natural enough question, and Daisy roused herself to answer it, and said quickly: "He is the son of my husband's father."

"Oh, oui," Pauline rejoined, a little mystified as to the exact relationship existing between Guy Thornton and her teacher's husband, whom she supposed was dead, as Daisy had only confided to madame the fact of a divorce.

"What date is the paper?" Daisy asked, and on being told she said softly to herself: "I see, it was too late."

There was in her mind no doubt as to what the result would have been had her letter been in time; no doubt of Guy's preference for her; no regret that she had written to him, except that the knowledge that she loved him at last might make him wretched with thinking "what might have been," and with the bitter pain which cut her heart like a knife there was mingled a pity for Guy, who would perhaps suffer more than she did, if that were possible. She never once thought of retribution, or of murmuring against her fate, but accepted it meekly, albeit she staggered under the load and grew faint as she thought of the lonely life before her, and she so young.

Slowly she went back to her room, while Pauline walked up and down the garden trying to make out the relationship between the newly married Thornton and her teacher.

"The son of her husband's father?" she repeated, until at last a meaning dawned upon her, and she said: "Then he must be her brother-in-law; but why didn't she say so? Maybe, though, that is the English way of putting it," and, having thus settled the matter, Pauline joined her mother, who was asking for Mrs. Thornton.

"Gone to her room, and her brother-in-law is married. It was marked in a paper and I read it to her, and she's sick," Pauline said, without, however, in the least connecting the sickness with the marriage.

Daisy did not come down to dinner that night, and the maid who called her the next morning reported her as ill and acting very strangely.

Through the summer a malarial fever had prevailed to some extent in and about Rouen, and the physician whom Madame Lafarcade summoned to the sick girl expressed a fear that she was coming down with it, and ordered her kept as quiet as possible.

"She seems to have something weighing on her mind. Has she heard any bad news from home?" he asked, as in reply to his question where her pain was the worst Daisy always answered:

"It reached him too late--too late, and I am so sorry."

Madame knew of no bad news, she said, and then as she saw the foreign paper lying on the table, she took it up, and, guided by the pencil marks, read the notice of Guy Thornton's marriage, and that gave her the key at once to Daisy's mental agitation. Daisy had been frank with her and told her as much of her story as was necessary, and she knew that the Guy Thornton married to Julia Hamilton had once called Daisy his wife.

"Excuse me, she is, or she has something on her mind, I suspect," she said to the physician, who was still holding Daisy's hand and looking anxiously at her flushed cheeks and bright, restless eyes.

"I thought so," he rejoined, "and it aggravates all the symptoms of her fever. I shall call again to-night."

He did call and found his patient worse, and the next day he asked Madame Lafarcade:

"Has she friends in this country? If so, they ought to know."

A few hours later, and in his lodgings at Berlin, Tom read the following dispatch:

"Mrs. Thornton is dangerously ill. Come at once."