Chapter 10

The exclamation exploded like the groan of a shell. For while Winslow's bicycling was all that could be wished, and he flung himself in the path of the on-coming wheel with marvellous celerity and precision, he had not the power to withstand the never yet revealed number of pounds carried by Miss Lorania, impelled by the rapid descent and gathering momentum at every whirl. They met; he caught her; but instantly he was rolling down the steep incline and she was doubled up on the grass. He crashed sickeningly against the stone wall; she lay stunned and still on the sod; and their friends, with beating hearts, slid down to them. Mrs. Winslow was on the brow of the hill. She blesses Shuey to this day for the shout he sent up, "Nobody killed, and I guess no bones broken."

When Margaret went home that evening, having seen her friend safely in bed, not much the worse for her fall, she was told that Cardigan wished to see her. Shuey produced something from his pocket, saying: "I picked this up on the hill, ma'am, after the accident. It maybe belongs to him, or it maybe belongs to her; I'm thinking the safest way is to just give it to you." He handed Mrs. Ellis a tiny gold-framed miniature of Lorania in a red leather case.

* * * * *

The morning was a sparkling June morning, dewy and fragrant, and the sunlight burnished handle and pedal of the friends' bicycles standing on the piazza unheeded. It was the hour for morning practice, but Miss Hopkins slept in her chamber, and Mrs. Ellis sat in the little parlor adjoining, and thought.

She did not look surprised at the maid's announcement that Mrs. Winslow begged to see her for a few moments. Mrs. Winslow was pale. She was a good sketch of discomfort on the very edge of her chair, clad in the black silk which she wore Sundays, her head crowned with her bonnet of state, and her hands stiff in a pair of new gloves.

"I hope you'll excuse me not sending up a card," she began. "Cyril got me some going on a year ago, and I _thought_ I could lay my hand right on 'em, but I'm so nervous this morning I hunted all over, and they wasn't anywhere. I won't keep you. I just wanted to ask if you picked up anything--a little red Russia-leather case--"

"Was it a miniature--a miniature of my friend Miss Hopkins?"

"I thought it all over, and I came to explain. You no doubt think it strange; and I can assure you that my son never let any human being look at that picture. I never knew about it myself till it was lost and he got out of his bed--he ain't hardly able to walk--and staggered over here to look for it, and I followed him; and so he _had_ to tell me. He had it painted from a picture that came out in the papers. He felt it was an awful liberty. But--you don't know how my boy feels, Mrs. Ellis; he has worshipped that woman for years. He 'ain't never had a thought of anybody but her since they was children in school; and yet he's been so modest and so shy of pushing himself forward that he didn't do a thing until I put him on to help you with this bicycle."

Margaret Ellis did not know what to say. She thought of the marquis; and Mrs. Winslow poured out her story: "He 'ain't never said a word to me till this morning. But don't I _know_? Don't I know who looked out so careful for her investments? Don't I know who was always looking out for her interest, silent, and always keeping himself in the background? Why, she couldn't even buy a cow that he wa'n't looking round to see that she got a good one! 'Twas him saw the gardener, and kept him from buying that cow with tuberculosis, 'cause he knew about the herd. He knew by finding out. He worshipped the very cows she owned, you may say, and I've seen him patting and feeding up her dogs; it's to our house that big mastiff always goes every night. Mrs. Ellis, it ain't often that a woman gits love such as my son is offering, only he da'sn't offer it, and it ain't often a woman is loved by such a good man as my son. He 'ain't got any bad habits; he'll die before he wrongs anybody; and he has got the sweetest temper you ever see; and he's the tidiest man about the house you could ask, and the promptest about meals."

Mrs. Ellis looked at her flushed face, and sent another flood of color into it, for she said, "Mrs. Winslow, I don't know how much good I may be able to do, but I am on your side."

Her eyes followed the little black figure when it crossed the lawn. She wondered whether her advice was good, for she had counselled that Winslow come over in the evening.

"Maggie," said a voice. Lorania was in the doorway. "Maggie," she said, "I ought to tell you that I heard every word."

"Then _I_ can tell _you_," cried Mrs. Ellis, "that he is fifty times more of a man than the marquis, and loves you fifty thousand times better!"

Lorania made no answer, not even by a look. What she felt, Mrs. Ellis could not guess. Nor was she any wiser when Winslow appeared at her gate, just as the sun was setting.

"I didn't think I would better intrude on Miss Hopkins," said he, "but perhaps you could tell me how she is this evening. My mother told me how kind you were, and perhaps you--you would advise if I might venture to send Miss Hopkins some flowers."

Out of the kindness of her heart Mrs. Ellis averted her eyes from his face; thus she was able to perceive Lorania saunter out of the Hopkins gate. So changed was she by the bicycle practice that, wrapped in her niece's shawl, she made Margaret think of the girl. An inspiration flashed to her; she knew the cashier's dependence on his eye-glasses, and he was not wearing them.

"If you want to know how Miss Hopkins is, why not speak to her niece now?" said she.

He started. He saw Miss Sibyl, as he supposed, and he went swiftly down the street. "Miss Sibyl!" he began, "may I ask how is your aunt?"--and then she turned.

She blushed, then she laughed aloud. "Has the bicycle done so much for me?" said she.

"The bicycle didn't need to do _anything_ for you!" he cried, warmly.

Mrs. Ellis, a little distance in the rear, heard, turned, and walked thoughtfully away. "They're off," said she--she had acquired a sporting tinge of thought from Shuey Cardigan. "If with that start he can't make the running, it's a wonder."

"I have invited Mr. Winslow and his mother to dinner," said Miss Hopkins, in the morning. "Will you come too, Maggie?"

"I'll back him against the marquis," thought Margaret, gleefully.

A week later Lorania said: "I really think I must be getting thinner. Fancy Mr. Winslow, who is so clear-sighted, mistaking me for Sibyl! He says--I told him how I had suffered from my figure--he says it can't be what he has suffered from his. Do you think him so very short, Maggie? Of course he isn't tall, but he has an elegant figure, I think, and I never saw anywhere such a rider!"

Mrs. Ellis answered, heartily, "He isn't very small, and he is a beautiful figure on the wheel!" And added to herself, "I know what was in that letter she sent yesterday to the marquis! But to think of its all being due to the bicycle!"

The Marrying of Esther

BY MARY M. MEARS

"Set there and cry; it's so sensible; and I 'ain't said that a June weddin' wouldn't be a little nicer. But what you goin' to live on? Joe can't git his money that soon."

"He--said he thought he could manage. But I won't be married at all if I can't have it--right."

"Well, you can have it right. All is, there are some folks in this town that if they don't calculate doin' real well by you, I don't feel called upon to invite."

"I don't know what you mean," sobbed the girl. She sat by the kitchen table, her face hidden in her arms. Her mother stood looking at her tenderly, and yet with a certain anger.

"I mean about the presents. You've worked in the church, you've sung in the choir for years, and now it's a chance for folks to show that they appreciate it, and without they're goin' to--Boxes of cake would be plenty if they wa'n't goin' to serve you any better than they did Ella Plummet."

Esther Robinson lifted her head. She was quite large, in a soft young way, and her skin was as pure as a baby's. "But you can't know beforehand how they're going to treat me!"

"Yes, I can know beforehand, too, and if you're set on next month, it's none too soon to be seein' about it. I've a good mind to step over to Mis' Lawrence's and Mis' Stetson's this afternoon."

"Mother! You--wouldn't ask 'em anything?"

Mrs. Robinson hung away her dishtowel; then she faced Esther. "Of course I wouldn't _ask_ 'em; there's other ways of findin' out besides _asking_. I'd bring the subject round by saying I hoped there wouldn't be many duplicates, and I'd git out of 'em what they intended givin' without seemin' to." Esther looked at her mother with a sort of fascination. "Then we could give some idea about the refreshments; for I ain't a-goin' to have no elaborate layout without I _do_ know; and it ain't because I grudge the money, either," she added, in swift self-defence.

Mrs. Robinson was a good manager of the moderate means her husband had left her, but she was not parsimonious or inhospitable. Now she was actuated by a fierce maternal jealousy. Esther, despite her pleasant ways and her helpfulness, was often overlooked in a social way. This was due to her mother. The more pretentious laughed about Mrs. Robinson, and though the thrifty, contented housewife never missed the amenities which might have been extended to her, she was keenly alive to any slights put upon her daughter. And so it was now.

Mrs. Lawrence, a rich, childless old lady, lived next door, and about four o'clock she went over there. The girl watched her departure doubtfully, but the possibility of not having a large wedding kept her from giving a full expression to her feelings.

Esther had always dreamed of her wedding; she had looked forward to it just as definitely before she met Joe Elsworth as after her engagement to him. There would be flowers and guests and feasting, and she would be the centre of it all in a white dress and veil.

She had never thought about there being any presents. Now for the first time she thought of them as an added glory, but her imagination did not extend to the separate articles or to their givers. Esther never pictured her uncle Jonas at the wedding, yet he would surely be in attendance in his rough farmer clothes, his grizzled, keen old face towering above the other guests. She did not picture her friends as she really knew them; the young men would be fine gentlemen, and the girls ladies in wonderful toilets. As for herself and Joe, hidden away in a bureau drawer Esther had a poster of one of Frohman's plays. It represented a bride and groom standing together in a drift of orange blossoms.

Mrs. Robinson did not return at supper-time, and Esther ate alone. At eight o'clock Joe Elsworth came. She met him at the door, and they kissed in the entry. Then Joe preceded her in, and hung up his cap on a projecting knob of the what-not--that was where he always put it. He glanced into the dining-room and took in the waiting table.

"Haven't you had supper yet!"

"Mother isn't home."

He came towards her swiftly; his eyes shone with a sudden elated tenderness. She raised her arms and turned away her face, but he swept aside the ineffectual barrier. When he let her go she seated herself on the farther side of the room. Her glance was full of a soft rebuke. He met it, then looked down smilingly and awkwardly at his shoes.

"Where did you say your ma had gone?"

"She's gone to Mis' Lawrence's, and a few other places."

"Oh, calling. Old Mis' Norton goes about twice a year, and I ask her what it amounts to."

"I guess you'll find ma's calls'll amount to something."

"How's that?" he demanded.

"She's--going to try and find out what they intend giving."

"What they intend giving?"

"Yes. And without they intend giving something worth while, she says she won't invite 'em, and maybe we won't have a big wedding at all," she finished, pathetically.

Joe did not answer. Esther stole an appealing glance at him.

"Does it seem a queer thing to do?"

"Well, yes, rather."

Her face quivered. "She said I'd done so much for Mis' Lawrence--"

"Well, you have, and I've wished a good many times that you wouldn't. I'm sure I never knuckled to her, though she is my great-aunt."

"I never knuckled to her, either," protested Esther.

"You've done a sight more for her than I would have done, fixin' her dresses and things, and she with more money than anybody else in town. But your mother ain't going to call on everybody, is she?" he asked, anxiously.

"Of course she ain't. Only she said, if it was going to be in June--but I don't want it to be ever," she added, covering her face.

"Oh, it's all right," said Joe, penitently. He went over and put his arm around her. Nevertheless, his eyes held a worried look.

Joe's father had bound him out to a farmer by the name of Norton until his majority, when the sum of seven hundred dollars, all the little fortune the father had left, together with three hundred more from Norton, was to be turned over to him. But Joe would not be twenty-one until October. It was going to be difficult for him to arrange for the June wedding Esther desired. He was very much in love, however, and presently he lifted his boyish cheek from her hair.

"I think I'll take that cottage of Lanham's; it's the only vacant house in the village, and he's promised to wait for the rent, so that confounded old Norton needn't advance me a cent."

Esther flushed. "What do you suppose makes him act so?" she questioned, though she knew.

Joe blushed too. "He don't like it because I'm going to work in the factory when it opens. But Mis' Norton and Sarah have done everything for me," he added, decidedly.

Up to the time of his engagement Joe had been in the habit of showing Sarah Norton an occasional brotherly attention, and he would have continued to do so had not Esther and Mrs. Robinson interfered--Esther from girlish jealousy, and her mother because she did not approve of the family, she said. She could not say she did not approve of Sarah, for there was not a more upright, self-respecting girl in the village. But Sarah, because of her father's miserliness, often went out for extra work when the neighbors needed help, and this was the real cause of Mrs. Robinson's feeling. Unconsciously she made the same distinction between Sarah Norton and Esther that some of the more ambitious of the village mothers made between their girls and her own daughter. Then it was common talk that old Jim Norton, for obvious reasons, was displeased with Joe's matrimonial plans, but Mrs. Robinson professed to believe that the wife and daughter were really the ones disappointed. Now Esther began twisting a button of Joe's coat.

"I don't believe mother'll ask either of 'em to the wedding," said she.

When Mrs. Robinson entered, Esther stood expectant and fearful by the table. Her mother drew up a chair and reached for the bread.

"I didn't stop anywhere for supper. You've had yours, 'ain't you?"

The girl nodded.

"Joe come?"

"He just left."

But Mrs. Robinson was not to be hurried into divulging the result of her calls. She remained massively mysterious. Esther began to wish she had not hurried Joe off so unceremoniously. After her first cup of tea, however, her mother asked for a slip of paper and a pencil. "I want that pencil in my machine drawer, that writes black, and any kind of paper'll do," she said.

Esther brought them; then she took up her sewing. She was not without a certain self-restraint. Mrs. Robinson, between her sips of tea, wrote. The soft gurgle of her drinking annoyed Esther, and she had a tingling desire to snatch the paper. After a last misdirected placing of her cup in her plate, however, her mother looked up and smiled triumphantly.

"I guess we'll have to plan something different than boxes of cake. Listen to this; Mis' Lawrence--No, I won't read that yet. Mis' Manning--I went in there because I thought about her not inviting you when she gave that library party--one salt and pepper with rose-buds painted on 'em."

Esther leaned forward; her face was crimson.

"You needn't look so," remonstrated her mother. "It was all I could do to keep from laughing at the way she acted. I just mentioned that we were only goin' to invite those you were indebted to, and she went and fetched out that salt and pepper. I believe she said they was intended in the first place for some relative that didn't git married in the end."

The girl made an inarticulate noise in her throat. Her mother continued, in a loud, impressive tone:

"Mis' Stetson--something worked. She hasn't quite decided what, but she's goin' to let me know about it. Jane Watson--"

"You didn't go _there_, mother!"

Mrs. Robinson treated her daughter to a contemptuous look. "I guess I've got sense. Jane was at Mis' Stetson's, and when I came away she went along with me, and insisted that I should stop and see some lamp-lighters she'd got to copy from--those paper balls. She seemed afraid a string of those wouldn't be enough, but I told her how pretty they was, and how much you'd be pleased."

"I guess I'll think a good deal more of 'em than I will of Mis' Manning's salt and pepper." Esther was very near tears.

"Next I went to the Rogerses, and they've about concluded to give you a lamp; and they can afford to. Then that's all the places I've been, except to Mis' Lawrence's, and she"--Mrs. Robinson paused for emphasis--"she's goin' to give you a silver _tea-set_!"

Esther looked at her mother, her red lips apart.

"That was the first place I called, and I said pretty plain what I was gittin' at; but after I knew about the water-set, that settled what kind of weddin' we'd have."

* * * * *

But the next morning the world looked different. Her rheumatic foot ached, and that always affected her temper; but when they sat down to sew, the real cause of her irascibleness came out.

"Mis' Lawrence wa'n't any more civil than she need be," she remarked. "I guess she'd decided she'd got to do something, being related to Joe. She said she supposed you were expecting a good many presents; and I said no, you didn't look for many, and there were some that you'd done a good deal for that you knew better than to expect anything from. I was mad. Then she turned kind of red, and mentioned about the water-set."

And in the afternoon a young girl acquaintance added to Esther's perturbation. "I just met Susan Rogers," she confided to the other, "and she said they hated to give that lamp, but they supposed they were in for it."

Esther was not herself for some days. All her pretty dreams were blotted out, and a morbid embarrassment took hold of her; but she was roused to something like her old interest when the presents began to come in and she saw her mother's active preparations for the wedding--the more so as over the village seemed to have spread a pleasant excitement concerning the event. Presents arrived from unexpected sources, so that invitations had to be sent afterwards to the givers. Women who had never crossed the Robinson threshold came now like Hindoo gift-bearers before some deity whom they wished to propitiate. Meeting there, they exchanged droll, half-deprecating glances. Mrs. Robinson's calls had formed the subject of much laughing comment; but weddings were not common in Marshfield, and the desire to be bidden to this one was universal; it spread like an epidemic.

Mrs. Robinson was at first elated. She overlooked the matter of duplicates, and accepted graciously every article that was tendered--from a patch-work quilt to a hem-stitched handkerchief. "You can't have too many of some things," she remarked to Esther. But later she reversed this statement. Match-safes, photograph-frames, and pretty nothings accumulated to an alarming extent.

"Now that's the last pin-cushion you're goin' to take," she declared, as she returned from answering a call at the door one evening. "There's fourteen in the parlor now. Some folks seem to have gone crazy on pin-cushions."

She grew confused, and the next day she went into the parlor, which, owing to the nature of the display, resembled a booth at a church fair, and made an accurate list of the articles received. When she emerged, her large, handsome face was quite flushed.

"Little wabbly, fall-down things, most of 'em. It'll take you a week to dust your house if you have all those things standin' round."

"Well, I ain't goin' to put none of 'em away," declared Esther. "I like ornaments."

"Glad you do; you've got enough of 'em, land knows. _Ornaments!_" The very word seemed to incense her. "I guess you'll find there's something needed besides _ornaments_ when you come right down to livin'. For one thing, you're awful short of dishes and bedding, and you can't ever have no company--unless," she added, with withering sarcasm, "you give 'em little vases to drink out of, and put 'em to bed under a picture-drape, with a pin-cushion or a scent-bag for a piller."

And from that time Mrs. Robinson accepted no gift without first consulting her list. It became known that she looked upon useful articles with favor, and brooms and flat-irons and bright tinware arrived constantly. Then it was that the heterogeneous collection began to pall upon Esther. The water-set had not yet been presented, but its magnificence grew upon her, and she persuaded Joe to get a spindle-legged stand on which to place it, although he could not furnish the cottage until October, and had gone in debt for the few necessary things. She pictured the combination first in one corner of the little parlor, then another, finally in a window where it could be seen, from the road.

Esther's standards did not vary greatly from her mother's, but she had a bewildered sense that they were somehow stepping from the beaten track of custom. On one or two points, however, she was firm. The few novels that had come within her reach she had conned faithfully. Thus, even before she had a lover, she had decided that the most impressive hour for a wedding was sunrise, and had arranged the procession which was to wend its way towards the church. And in these matters her mother, respecting her superior judgment, stood stanchly by her.

Nevertheless, when the eventful morning arrived she was bitterly disappointed. She had set her heart on having the church bell rung, and overlooked the fact that the meeting-house bell was cracked, till Joe reminded her. Then the weather was unexpectedly chilly. A damp fog, not yet dispersed by the sun, hung over the barely awakened village, and the little flower-girl shivered. She had a shawl pinned about her, and when the procession was fairly started she tripped over it, and there was a halt while she gathered up the roses and geraniums in her little trembling hands and thrust them back into the basket. Celia Smith tittered. Celia was the bridesmaid, and was accompanied by Joe's friend, red-headed Harry Baker; and Mrs. Robinson and Uncle Jonas, who were far behind, made the most of the delay. Mrs. Robinson often explained that she was not a "good walker," and her brother-in-law tried jocularly to help her along, although he used a cane himself. His weather-beaten old face was beaming, but it was as though the smiles were set between the wrinkles, for he kept his mouth sober. He had a flower in his button-hole, which gave him a festive air, despite the fact that his clothes were distinctly untidy. Several buttons were off: he had no wife to keep them sewed on.