Chapter XXXI: Bertha’s First Ball

“Mother, will that do?”

Bertha Canfield came into her mothers room fresh from the most elaborate toilet she had ever made in her life. Her dress of amber-colored silk, softened and subdued by an over-cloud of tulle, swept the floor with the rustle of ripe wheat ears. Scarlet cactus flowers burned in her hair, and looped back the tulle over-dress. A necklace of large coral beads fell low upon her bosom, and coral buttons fastened her cream-colored gloves. She came into the room blushing with a shy consciousness of beauty, half ashamed of her own glowing delight.

“Will it do, child?” repeated the mother, and, for once, her features brightened all over. “Come and kiss me, darling! Who will dare to say that you are not beautiful?”

“Am I really, really, mother?”

“Do you care so much about it, Bertha? If so, I am foolish and wrong to say yes.”

“I wonder if any one else will think so? Do I look as if it were my first party? Isn’t it strange, mother, that people should have taken such a fancy to me all at once? Monday night, at the opera, with Mrs. Forbes and her brother; then this invitation. Wasn’t it good of Mrs. Farnsworth to search me out, and get madame to come here and introduce her? She had heard me sing, and had a fancy that my voice would match hers, which is splendid, mother; so took all that pains to know us. Isn’t it singular?”

Bertha sat down at her mother’s feet as she said all this, and half buried the gentle lady in an amber cloud.

“Isn’t it all like fairy work?” she added, holding up her lips to be kissed.

A delicate hand was laid on that white shoulder, and a soft kiss touched the red mouth offered for it. The very warmth and brilliancy of that young creature seemed to startle the mother.

“It is all like fairy-land,” she said. “Sometimes I cannot realize that you are really mine, Bertha.”

“Everything seems like fairy work since we came back to New York, I think,” said Bertha, blushing without seeming cause. “This invitation to Mrs. Farnsworth’s party among the rest. How did it happen, I wonder, that she took the trouble to call on us? Then Mrs. Boyd—was ever any one so kind? We might have been the intimate friends of her family all our lives. I only wish they would be half as generous to Clara Anderson, poor girl. Why do they hate her so, I wonder?”

“Judge Lane was always a proud man,” said Mrs. Canfield, thoughtfully; “but he may come round in time now that his son is behaving so well.”

“I fear not, mamma. Mrs. Forbes will not hear Clara’s name mentioned. She forbids her brother to speak of it in her presence.”

“Have you written to Clara explaining why we came back to the city so suddenly, and were obliged to send for Lydia without warning?”

“Oh, yes, mamma, I wrote all about that by the man who went after Lydia.”

“What did she say in her answer?”

“She did not send a line.”

“Nor a message?”

“No. I thought it very strange; but Clara has been strange ever since that day when the bridge went down.”

Mrs. Canfield shuddered.

“No wonder, no wonder,” she said, whispering out the words.

“You cannot think how strangely she acted that day when we failed to meet at the falls. She looked like death, if anything dead could have such eyes.”

“She was frightened by your fall, I suppose, Bertha?”

“No, it could not have been that. I did not feel the shock half so much myself. She questioned me as if I had done her some wrong.”

“Perhaps she thought you had taken a great liberty in bringing her face to face with a man she had once rejected?”

“No, mamma, it was not that. Clara did not know that Mr. Lane was in search of her till after she left me. Still she must be angry about something, or my note would have been answered.”

“She may feel hurt because we sent for Lydia in such haste,” said Mrs. Canfield. “Indeed I have noticed that the girl herself seems more restless than usual. Two or three times she has asked if we have heard from Miss Clara, as if she, too, felt that her silence was remarkable.”

“Lydia may know why she acts so strangely. Would there be any harm in asking her?” replied Bertha, seizing eagerly on the suggestion.

Before Mrs. Canfield could reply, Lydia pushed the door open, and came into the chamber where this conversation was held.

“Oh, my! Isn’t that scrumptious?” cried the girl, walking around Bertha and examining her dress. “Silk as yeller as if it was wove out of wet buttercups, cobwebs hanging round yer arms, and that hot-red flower in your hair! Why, Miss Bertha, the Queen of Shebee would just have to step out if she was here! Queens are nothing to that!”

Bertha laughed, and allowed the girl to spread out the silken length of her train, while she watched the process over her shoulder with smiling eyes.

“You think the dress pretty then?” she said.

“The dress? Well, I never saw anything like it in my whole life!”

“So you only praise the dress, Lydia?” said Mrs. Canfield, jealous as mothers will be that the beauty of her child had been overlooked.

“I never saw anything that could come up to it before—but as to her face and all the rest of it—well, I have!”

A queer, sad expression came over the girl’s face as she said this, and she turned her head away.

“You are thinking of Miss Clara?” said Bertha, with a gentle touch of sympathy. “Yes, Lydia, she is far handsomer.”

“Handsomer! Her face is enough to break one’s heart. Oh, my! what a sorrowful angel she will make.”

“I hope it will be a long time first,” said Mrs. Canfield, forgetting to be jealous that any one could be deemed more beautiful than her child.

Lydia shook her head.

“I don’t know—I don’t know.”

“Is Miss Clara ill?” questioned the lady, seriously interested.

“I reckon she never feels like doing much in that old house,” answered the girl; “but what of her? she isn’t going to the party, and Miss Bertha is. There’s a ring at the door.”

Down the girl went, leaping halfway down the stairs, and completing her descent with a slide on the balusters. In less than a minute she came back with a small bouquet of rose-buds in her hand, richly red, and, as it seemed, only kept from bursting into bloom by the moss that fluttered around them.

“It isn’t the carriage—only this!” she said, thrusting the bouquet into Bertha’s hand, under a volley of cross glances at the mother, intended to draw off that lady’s attention until a folded paper attached to the flowers was properly disposed of. “But you had better be on hand down in the parlor. High-furluten ladies don’t like to be kept waiting, if I know anything about ’em.”

Bertha fastened the rose-buds among the lace over her bosom, blushing and trembling: she had no wish to deceive her mother; but the note, held tightly in her hand, was too precious for anything but secrecy.

“Who could have sent them?” questioned Mrs. Canfield, turning faint as the odor of the roses floated by her, for she was delicately sensitive to perfumes.

“Ah, yes, who indeed?” said Bertha, snatching up her fan and feeling like a guilty wretch for having kept the note out of her mother’s sight till the last moment, when she huddled it under the lace of her handkerchief, and floated away like a sunset cloud, leaving a soft fragrance behind her.

Mrs. Canfield followed the fair vision with her eyes till it disappeared. Then she lay back wearily in her chair.

“Now is the time of my peril,” she thought. “This very night she may take the first step that leads her from me. Ah, me, where shall I find strength to meet all that may come?”

“She’s bound to take the shine off any girl in the crowd, she is. Oh, marm, isn’t she a beauty?”

Tears were swelling under the mother’s closed eyelids. Lydia saw them, and stole out of the room a little conscience stricken, and went down-stairs. No one in that house ever attempted to restrict the girl, so she passed directly into the parlor where Bertha stood under the chandelier reading the note.

“Into her own hands it was,” said the girl, with a look, which was distorted into something grotesque and comical by the habitual squint of her eyes, “and into her hands it is; but not to cheat her own mother in earnest—no, not for all the handsome fellows with cockades on their hats that ever was born.”

“Hush! hush!” said Bertha, putting the girl back with her hand without lifting her eyes from the sheet of note paper, covered with unequal lines, at which the little girl rubbed her hands gleefully, and cried out:

“My! how ragged the lines are, and what a grist on ’em!”

“Hush! hush!”

Lydia was more than silent in an instant. That creamy-white paper, the delicately shaded monogram, the faint perfume, struck her dumb. She had seen exactly such paper, such uneven writing before.

“Miss Bertha! Miss Bertha!” she said, in a spasm of distress. “Don’t read it! don’t read it! There is pison in the paper, rank pison, the essence of henbane. Give it to me, and let me send it back where it came from.”

Bertha tore her eyes from the paper, with a sigh, and turned upon the girl.

“Go away, Lydia; how can you be so rude?”

“Just one word; is them ragged lines poetry?”

“Yes—yes!”

“Is there any name to it?”

“No—no!”

“Miss Bertha, will you let me look at it close, just once?”

“There, there; now go away!”

Lydia bent her cross-eyes close down to the paper, scanned it keenly a moment, then lifted her appealing face to the young creature who held it.

“Miss Bertha, I say again and again it is pison; snakes ain’t more so.”

“Foolish girl. There, there, you shall not touch it again. Go up to mamma, she will be lonesome.”

“Let me take that paper—she ought to read it. Let me take it to her, and I will. You and I have no business to be a cheating of her.”

“Not now, Lydia; not now: I have not read it myself.”

“But you will give it to her?”

“What is it to you, child?”

“A good deal; when I took it from that fellow with the cockade, and says to him: Peraps there’ll be an answer, and peraps there won’t: who knows, without reading? and after that sneaked the thing into your hand without winking. In course, it’s a good deal to me.”

“Well, go away, Lydia, and I promise that mamma shall see it at the proper time.”

“That’s a promise,” said Lydia, fluttering out of the room like a moth.

Bertha drew a deep breath, and fell to perusing her treasure again. It was a poem such as few men ever write in a lifetime—delicate, full of sensitive thought, with an underswell of passionate feeling, shadowed but not expressed. This poem, written that very day, was addressed to herself. Who could have written it? Who _could_ have written it?

The girl knew well enough in her heart of hearts; but she chose to question her own sweet consciousness.

Does love ever come to a human heart, as an arrow flies, without reason and without warning? Who can answer? This much is certain: Bertha Canfield threw herself down, with her face buried on the cushions of a sofa, after she had read this poem, and murmured over whole lines of poetry, in a voice that was soft and mellow as the summer wind which ripens our peaches.

Before that carriage drove up which was to bear her to the party, Bertha Canfield had the poem by heart, and she knew, in the depths of that heart, who wrote it.

God help her!

A carriage stopped in front of the house; a footman ran up the steps, but before a servant could answer the bell, Bertha appeared.

Out from the carriage window looked forth a bright dark face, crowned with purplish-black hair, in which diamonds gleamed like stars, and the voice of Mrs. Forbes called out gayly, as her brother was mounting the steps to meet Bertha,

“I am glad you are ready, for we are late.”