Bubbles and Troubles

By Ruth Moench Bell

(Previous chapter)

Chapter 7

It was wonderful how little Betty responded to wholesome meals and regular hours. In a few weeks she was a round, rosy adorable baby.

“As if any one could resist loving her,” Marjory exclaimed, “She isn’t common with her love. Once she admits you to her heart she loves so beautifully.”

“And such a choice, happy little soul she seems,” Mrs. Collins smiled almost sadly.

Evenings she nestled in her papa Collins’ arms while he read the paper. And the picture brought back memories to Edith Collins. Suddenly she got to her feet, one evening, and cried: “We have no right to her, dear.”

“I’d like to know who has a better right,” Mr. Collins, observed. “You saved her life. But for you she would not be the plump, red-cheeked baby she is now. Who has a better right, I’d like to know !”

“Some one with a broken life that her love might mend! Betty’s grandmother is alone in the little cottage in which she was once so happy with Mitchell Leslie. He is living with his mother.”

“And the first thing Ethel would say, if you brought the baby to her to care for, would be, “Oh, I’d be so tied,”

“I know she’d say that at first. Ethel doesn’t realize yet that she is through chasing bubbles. She doesn’t realize yet that they were bubbles. Betty, so real and loving, may seem at first a trouble but she will soon warm Ethel’s heart again.”

“Perhaps! But I don’t just see yet how Leslie is to profit by the plan.”

“That part of the plan may fail. I dare not mention it now. But, Oh, I shall pray it will not fail !”

Papa Collins was right in his prognostication.

“But I shall be so tied !” Ethel Leslie protested when her sister arrived with the beautiful, smiling Betty. “She is a lovely child. But I can’t forgive Barney Graham for marrying my little girl. And I don’t feel kindly toward Rhea for marrying him. And whatever would I do with a baby? I’ve forgotten everything I knew about babies.”

“Rhea’s marriage can’t be changed, now,” Ethel said practically. “And they seem very happy. I brought a bundle of bulletins on the care of babies along with her little clothes. Poor little darling she hasn’t many clothes.”

“I can’t clothe her,” Ethel declared. “It’s all I can do to clothe myself. And I can’t do that decently.”

Nevertheless, Edith left the baby, knowing she would miss for days to come the little arms around her neck and the many baby caresses. Looking back on the picture the two made, Edith decided she had done right.

Ethel seemed so much more approachable and womanly in the small cozy cottage which seemed to have grown up around her an emanation of her personality. It fitted her as if it had grown and matured till it was an intimate part of herself.

The magnificence of the big home with its entire lower floor one big room divided slightly by portiers, made Ethel seem cold and formal and distant. It may also have contributed to make her so. There she was the proud princess, the lady of quality, gracious and charming dispensing favors or hospitality.

Here she seemed a home woman, gentle and sympathetic. She had made the place so artistically cozy that once one opened it’s outer door, one naturally accepted a comfortable chair and settled down to rest and relax and visit, leaving with visible reluctance. Betty completed the picture.

Edith stood for a minute at the door before she left. Ethel was in her big, roomy chair with Betty cuddled in her arms, already she had won a welcome. As Marjorie said, “there were babies one could resist but Betty was not one of them.” Then Edith left abruptly. She would miss Betty so!

“I must find the other actor in this little comedy of errors,” she said to herself. “They may not pick up their cues at once and be word-perfect at the first rehearsal. But little Betty will be a wonderful stage manager. They are bound to rehearse several times and sometime when Betty warms Ethel’s heart into womanly sympathy and love and unselfishness and softens Leslie’s heart and sweetens his bitter feelings, perhaps it will be possible for them to come together again.”

“Oh, here you are,” Ethel cried gaily as she ran into Leslie, not entirely by accident. “I just took a surprise up to your house.”

“Up to my mother’s,” he answered meaningly.

“No, to Ethel’s,” Edith ignored his meaning. “It was such a warm loving bundle. I imagine she would like to see her grandfather.”

“Rhea’s baby!” A joyous red over-spread Leslie’s features. “What is she doing here ?”

Edith told him all as he went with her to the train.

“But what would people say if I went up there now?” he demanded.

“In the first place whose business is it ? In the second place, who is going to care? She is the sweetest little spirit I ever associated with. And I’ve had two darling daughters myself,” Edith cried enthusiastically as she boarded her train.

Mitchell Leslie happened into an even more appealing scene than Edith had left. It took him till nightfall to make the dare — men are curious creatures of conventions, protesting all the time it is women who make and follow the conventions.

Ethel had forgotten to draw the shades and Leslie could see through the window little Miss Betty’s preparations for bed. Recalling Rhea’s babyhood, Ethel was playing “this little pig went to market” with Betty’s toes. After which she remembered to “shoe the old horse and shoe the old mare” before arraying Betty in her long, white night gown.

Betty crowed with delight and Ethel never seemed more lovely. As Betty still seemed to expect something more, Ethel cuddled her close and sang “Papa’s gone a hunting.” The song somehow made Ethel’s eyes smart and her throat contract. So she blundered onto another of Rhea’s favorites, “I’m going to write to papa.” That was clearly impossible.

Oh, memories! Memories! If we could only forget! How early, then, we might grow hard and cold! Perhaps it is well that we are most of us akin to the Irish woman who would forgive and forget but she always remembered.

Mitchell Leslie did not go in that night. Perhaps memories were tugging at his heart also. The picture was so faithful a reproduction of his early married life . He could have vowed that Babe Betty was his baby. Rhea, whom a mere man, a stranger, had robbed him of and had sworn she should never return to them lest they make a “Mormon” of her once more.

“It is hard enough,” Leslie reflected as he moved away from the window, “It is hard enough when a stranger robs one of his baby girl but when that stranger sets himself up as judge and supreme dictator and attempts to cancel that baby’s past and presumes to cast it’s future clean out of the groove it’s parent’s shaped, then it is hard, indeed.”

“That’s all I have against him” had been Leslie’s comments to Rhea. “When he robs you of parents and religion (Leslie was beginning, then, to see that religion meant something to him) and robs us of our daughter and her future, don’t you think it is a bit rough ?”

“You don’t understand, papa,” Rhea had defended, “his only objection to our religion is his objection to all religions. He says we go to church and pray and sing and think we are good and noble saints merely because we have been to church. Then the next day we get angry, uncharitable, selfish, and unfair in our relations with each other.”

“And human,” her father had finished. “But our songs and prayers lift us nearer to God even by so much we are better. If they lift us a bit nearer, so we are, as a result of them, a little less given to anger, a little more open-hearted and open-handed, a little more fair and just and charitable towards our fellow men, then the songs and the prayers have not been wholly in vain. And if our songs and prayers will not lift us into a mood of benevolence, what is to save us from the down grade. (Rhea reflecting, wondered if her papa realized that this might have saved her papa and mamma from the breach in their lives.) “Maybe, if he went more often to church, he might see this notion of his in a broader, more tolerant, light.”

(To be continued)