CHAPTER XXXIV.
BITTER MEMORIES.
It was two weeks later that the bride-elect got the promised letter from Senator Bonair, saying that he would follow the letter home, and hoped to greet her by the first of December.
Further on in the letter, the senator mentioned he hoped she was not sorry he had made up his quarrel with Charley and his charming wife. He was getting on in years, now, and it was such a comfort to have a son for a staff to his declining years. Not that he expected to see much of them, though, because the happy pair intended to make their home abroad. Then, too, Marie and Lucile had declined to meet or forgive their brother and Berry, so it was best they should dwell apart.
It rejoiced Rosalind’s heart to hear that her friends, Marie and Lucile, had stood loyally by her and refused to be reconciled to Charley and his humble bride.
“It is well that they oppose their father in this, else the foolish old man would be wanting them to come and live with us, and I am determined they shall never cross the threshold of my home when I am married,” she vowed to her mother, who approved the declaration, saying that no one could ever expect Rosalind to forgive the injury received at Charley Bonair’s hands.
“Speaking of Charley’s wife reminds me, Rosalind, that we must try to get that old woman, Mrs. Vining, to come up and help at the hall for a week, finishing up the sewing, as the seamstress says she must have more help or she can never get through in time,” continued her mother.
“Very well, I will stop at the cottage as I drive down and see about it, mamma. I suppose she will be glad to get the work, as I don’t think Berry’s grand match has improved her mother’s fortunes. Indeed, I wonder if she even knows that Charley married her hateful actress daughter?” cried Rosalind.
“Oh, yes, I think she has written home of her grand match, for all the village seems to know of it. I have heard our servants talking of it when they did not know that I overheard their silly gossip. But, as you say, it can do her no good. She has not apparently benefited by it, as she still lives in the old weather-beaten cottage.”
“Yes, I will employ her,” declared Rosalind, “if only to have the triumph of seeing Charley Bonair’s poor old mother-in-law toiling for me. Ha, ha! what a spectacle!” She ended with a harsh, grating laugh of smothered rage.
When she drove out with Adrian Vance that afternoon, she got him to wait at the cottage door, in the automobile, while she went to see Mrs. Vining.
The woman’s youngest son, a boy of sixteen, met her at the cottage door, and led her into the small, neat sitting room, saying he would call his mother.
He disappeared, and Rosalind looked, superciliously, about the small apartment with its dingy furnishings, muttering:
“I would rather die than be poor and shabby. I declare I don’t see how very poor folks endure such an existence. Ah, what——” the sentence ended abruptly, and getting up with a swish of trailing silk and flutter of rich laces, she swept across the room to a new easel standing in a corner with a good-sized picture upon it, representing a group of two—a picturesque group of two lovers, a handsome man, a lovely white-gowned girl, standing, hand in hand, amid tropical shrubbery.
Rosalind gazed with idle curiosity a moment, then her eyes flashed, and a keen, bitter pain stabbed her jealous heart like the point of a dagger.
The picture was a large, framed photograph of Charley Bonair and Berry that they had sent to Mrs. Vining months before.
The beauty and the happiness of the handsome pair struck Rosalind’s heart with bitterness, but while she gazed the mother’s voice said, just behind her:
“Ah, Miss Montague, you’re admiring the picture of my little girl and her husband. It’s the image of Berry, bless her dear heart, don’t you think so, miss? She sent it to me a while ago, and oh, how glad I am the dear girl is happily married! But I beg pardon, can I do anything for you, Miss Montague?”
“I am to be married soon, you know, Mrs. Vining, to Senator Bonair, and some of my simpler things are being done at home by seamstresses. Mamma sent me to ask if you will come and help finish up, next week? She will pay you more than you can earn at the tailor shop.”
“But I am not at the tailor shop now, Miss Montague.”
“Indeed? Have they discharged you, then?” insolently.
“Oh, no, miss; I left of my own accord. I’m getting to be an old woman now, and must rest for the balance of my life.”
Rosalind looked more closely, and noted a more prosperous air about Berry’s mother than she had ever seen before.
“I do not understand how you expect to live without work,” she said sharply.
“It does seem strange to you, doesn’t it now, Miss Montague, seeing how I have been working and toiling here all my life? My son-in-law, out of his good heart, has sent me a present of a thousand dollars to take my ease on, and says there’s more to come when I have spent it all.”
“So then you will not come to sew?” Rosalind exclaimed sneeringly.
“No, Miss Montague. I’d rather not, thank you all the same for giving me the chance if I needed it, but Berry wrote I mustn’t work any more.”
“I’ll go, then,” Rosalind cried, with an angry flirt of her skirts that tumbled the picture off the easel and splintered the glass over it; while with a smothered, malicious laugh at what she had done through pure spitefulness, she swept from the house, leaving the old woman busy gathering up the fragments.
“I’m cross; I don’t care to drive to-day. We will go back home,” she said to Adrian Vance sharply.
Mrs. Montague spied her coming, and came to meet her, saying:
“You got back sooner than I looked for, Rosalind, but none too soon, for a cablegram has just come to you, saying Senator Bonair cannot sail as soon as he expected, but hopes not to be delayed much longer.”
“He cannot come? Why? Is this another scheme to postpone the wedding?” Rosalind cried, in a loud, angry voice.
“Hush, Rosalind, don’t fly off into a rage so fast, and I’ll tell you the rest. The senator explains his disappointment by saying that Charley and his wife had a wreck while coming on their automobile from Trouville to Paris, and that both are so terribly injured they may not survive the day.”