Beauty From Ashes by Eugenia Price Read Free Book Online Page B

Fraser? One thing about which Jock Couper felt absolutely certain was the plain fact that Anne’s youngest, Selina of the long, dark curls, had been born to fall in love and mother young ones. And Fanny? How old was Fanny now? Seventeen, he thought, and like his own late daughter, sweet Isabella, not precisely what a mon would term lovely to look upon. Never one to settle for mere hoping when he could pray, Jock Couper prayed often that there would be another lad, as perceptive and kind as was Isabella’s Theodore Bartow, ready to marry Fanny despite her shy plainness and because of her deep-down inner worth.
    Any minute now, he should, even if his old ears did feel much of the time as though they were stopped up, hear laughter and good talk from outside. If Anne and her girls had boarded the Lady Love early this morning as James Hamilton had instructed them to do, they should be nearing
    Hopeton by now unless the same sunny, 65 clear skies that hung here above the mainland had thickened closer to the shore where they embarked from his large Cannon’s Point dock. The Lady Love drew too much water for Anne’s little Lawrence Creek. He sighed heavily. Lawrence. What dreams he’d held for Anne and John, living in the well-remodeled little Lawrence cottage on their return from London with blessed little Annie and Anne carrying Pete, their second child. He’d seen some of his dreams come true, too. Tall, restless young John Fraser had worked so hard trying to learn how to become a successful planter—had worked and sweated and turned his fine mind to what must always have seemed to John the rather dull lessons every prosperous planter needed to know. The lad had succeeded, too, despite his love of travel and adventure, despite his sense of failure because his old regiment no longer needed his brilliant military skills.
    My advanced age, Couper thought, when again he felt his eyes sting with tears as they did with almost every memory of the son-in-law who had left them in his late forties. “I loved John Fraser like a
    son,” he said aloud. “And I’m talking too much aloud to myself these days. My beloved Rebecca would be teasing me unmercifully were she not gone from us. One good thing,” he went on conversing with himself: “I won’t have to wait much longer to see Becca again.” He reached for the corner of a lamp table in order to pull his stiff body up from the hard, wooden chair. “Aye, it’s been too long now without her. Four lonely years come April.”
    Anne and the children couldn’t get there soon enough. Waiting tired him. His hands shook, his breath came harder. But dread seemed to wear him away more than did any other emotion. Dread today when Anne could arrive at any moment? Aye, he deeply dreaded what he’d be forced to tell Anne face-to-face.
    “Lord, how many contradictory feelings can this old ram contain?” He was speaking aloud again— to God, his most frequent conversationalist. “Somehow I thought only You could find a way to encompass two such different emotions, Lord. When you look down in love and see us in cruelty, we expect You to know exactly how to deal with both contradictions at once. But I? Teach me how to manage the joy over the arrival
    of my beloved visitors from St. 67 Simons along with the downright dread I feel at having to tell precious Anne the bad news about Lawrence. She loves that place so much, Lord, but You know my choices have been taken away—all gone with my money. All gone with James Hamilton’s money.”
    Couper stopped for a moment before the tall, ornate mirror in the Hopeton entrance hall and studied his long, lined face, flicked at the gray in his still-red sideburns, and tried to laugh at the image he saw. “St-rather-raighten your shoulders, old goat! I vow you’ve shrunk a foot in height. Do you want to startle your adored Anne, who’s gone through her life believing her father has still-rather-rength for any vicissitude? Stand straight! Walk