Chapter 7

I've been so excited since the first day he came that I've had little sense. But my natural little is coming back, and I'm trying not to talk too much. Of course, I had to say a good deal, because everybody had to know how it happened that Doctor Alden came back to Yorkburg so suddenly after thirteen years' being away. And why he hadn't been before, and what he came for and when he was going away, and if he were going to take me with him.

And then everybody remembered how he and Miss Katherine used to be sweethearts when they were young. I tell you, the talking that's been going on in Yorkburg in the last few days would fill a barrel of books. By the end of the week a whole lot more will be known about Uncle Parke than he knows about himself. If Yorkburg had a coat of arms it ought to be a question-mark.

They've had time to talk over everything that ever happened since Adam and Eve left Paradise, in the long walks they take, and in the evenings when he calls, which he does as regular as night comes. And now I'm waiting for the news. I'll have to be so surprised. And I guess I will be. Love does very surprising things.

Miss Katherine knew where Uncle Parke was all the time. She knew who I was, too; that is, she found out after she nursed me at the hospital. But what that fuss was about I don't know. Nothing much, I reckon; but the more you love a person the madder you can get with them. And from foolishness they've wasted years and years of together-ness.

But it's all explained now, and I don't think there's going to be any more nonsense. They are going to be married as sure as my name isn't in a bank-book; and if signs are anything, it's going to be soon.

Miss Bray is better, though she looks pretty bad still. She's been awfully excited about Uncle Parke's coming, and she says she hears he's very distinguished and real rich. Isn't it strange how quick some people hear about riches? I don't know anything of his having any. He hasn't mentioned money to me; but oh, I feel so safe with him! He's so strong and quiet and easy in his manners, and he's been so splendid and beautiful to me. He don't use many words. Just makes you understand.

I wonder what a man says to a lady when he wants her to marry him? I know Dr. Parke Alden isn't the kind to get down on his knees. If he were, Miss Katherine would certainly tell him to get up and say what he had to say standing, or sitting, if it took long. But I'll never know what he said. They're not the kind to tell; but they can't hide Love. It's just like the sun. It can't help shining.

* * * * *

Land of Nippon, I'm excited! I believe he's said it!

The reason I think so is, I saw them late yesterday evening coming in from a long walk down the Calverton road, where there's a beautiful place for courters. When they got to the gate they stopped and talked and talked. Then he walked to the door with her, still holding his hat in his hand, and though it was dark I could feel something different. I was so nervous you would have thought I was the one.

I was over by the lilacs; but they didn't see me. I didn't like to move. It might have been ruinous, so I held my breath and waited.

When they got to the door they stopped again, and presently he held out his hand to say good-bye. The way he did it, the way he looked at her made me just know, and I got right down on my knees under the lilac-bush, and when he'd gone I sang, "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow." Sang it loud.

I didn't care who heard. I wasn't telling why I was thankful. Just telling I was. Oh, Mary Martha Cary, to think of her being your really, truly Aunt! The very next thing to a mother!

XIV

THE HURT OF HAPPINESS

I wouldn't like to put on paper how I feel to-day. Uncle Parke has gone. Gone back to Michigan. I'm such a mixture of feelings that I don't know which I've got the most of, gladness or sadness or happiness or miserableness, and I'd rather cry as much as I want than have as much ice-cream as I could hold.

But I'm not going to cry. I don't like cryers, and, besides, I haven't a place to do it in private. I wouldn't let Miss Katherine see me, not if I died of choking. I ought to be rejoicing, and I am; but the female heart is beyond understanding, Miss Becky Cole says, and it is. Mine is. I could die of thankfulness, but I'd like first to cry as much as I could if I let go.

They are engaged. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine are, and they are to be married on the twenty-seventh of June. That's my birthday. I will be thirteen on the twenty-seventh of June.

They told me about it night before last. I was out on the porch, and Miss Katherine called me and told me she and Doctor Alden wanted me to go to walk with them. I knew what was coming. Knew in a flash. But I pretended not to, and thanked her ever so much, and told her I'd just love to go.

We walked on down to the Calverton road, talking about nothing, and making out it was our usual night walk, but when we got to the seven maples Uncle Parke stopped.

"Suppose we sit down," he said. "It's too warm to walk far to-night." And after we sat he threw his hat on the ground, then leaned over and took my hands in his.

"Mary Cary," he began. And though his eyes were smiling, his voice was real quivering. I was noticing, and it was. "Mary Cary, Katherine and I have brought you with us to-night to ask if you have any objection to our being married. We would like to do so as soon as possible--if you do not object."

He turned my face to his, and the look in his eyes was grand. It meant no matter who objected, marry her he would; but it was a way to tell me--the way he was asking, and I understood.

"It depends," I said, and, as I am always playing parts to myself, right on the spot I was a chaperon lady. "It depends on whether you love enough. Do you?"

"I do. For myself I am entirely sure. As to Katherine--Suppose she tells you what she thinks."

I turned toward her. "Do you, Miss Katherine? It takes--I guess it takes a lot of love to stand marriage. Do you think you have enough?"

In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream becomes pink and the pink red.

"I think there is," she said. Then: "Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a strange, strange child?" And she threw her arms around me and kissed me twenty times.

After a while, after we'd talked and talked, and they'd told me things and I'd told them things, I said I'd consent.

"But if the love ever gives out, I'm not going to stay with you," I said. "I'm never going to be fashionable and not care for love. A home without it is hell."

"Mercy, Mary!" Uncle Parke jumped. "Don't use such strong language. It isn't nice."

"But it's true. I read it in a book, and I've watched the Rices. When there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die."

Then I jumped up. "I always could talk a lot about things I didn't understand," I said. "But I consent." And I flew down the road and left them.

I've written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it. I've said it low, and I've said it loud, but I can't realize it, and the little sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.

They say I did it. Say I'm responsible for every bit of it, and that I will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I didn't make a mistake in writing that letter. And that I'm to go to Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and always. And--oh!--I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it's in a bag.

Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine Trent are the two nicest people on earth, and the two I love best. But I don't think they know all the time what they are doing and saying. They are that in love they don't see but one side--the happy side--and they think I am going to leave this place with a skip and a jump and run along by them, third person, single number, and not know I'm in the way.

They won't even listen when I tell them I don't know what I'm going to do. I know what I want to do! Everything in me gets into shivering trembleness when I think I could go to Europe with them on their wedding trip. Think of it! Mary Cary could go to E-U-R-O-P-E!

They've invited me and say I'm to go, because I'm never to leave them any more, and they want me. But it isn't so. Mary tries to believe it's so, but Martha knows it isn't. They think they think they want me, but they don't; nobody wants an outsider on a wedding tour, and I'm not going. I can't help it. Come on, tears! Even angels sometimes cry aloud; and, not being a step-relation to one, I'm going to let Mary cry if she wants to. Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.

There is no use studying Human Nature. You can't study a thing that changes by day and by night, and is so uncertain you never know what it is going to do. Now, here is Mary Cary, mostly Martha, who would rather get on a train or a boat and go somewhere--she don't care where--than to do any other thing on earth. Who has never seen anything and wants to see everything, and who, if anyone had told her a year ago she could go to New York, and then to Europe, would have slid down every flight of stairs head foremost from pure joy. And now she has the chance, she is not going. She is Not.

She hasn't much sense, Mary Cary hasn't, but enough to know wedding trips are personal, and, besides, the girls have turned into regular weepers. Every time anything is said about going away their eyes water up, and Martha feels like a yellow dog with no tail. I know they hate Miss Katherine's going; but why do they cry about my going? Lord, this is a strange place to live in, this world is! I wonder what heaven will be like?

Miss Bray is much better. She says Uncle Parke has cured her. I don't believe it. I believe it was Relief of the Mind.

* * * * *

I wasn't meant to be a sad person. I was silly sad the other day; but I've found out when anything bothers you very much, it helps to take it out and look at it. Walk all around it, poke it and see if it's sure enough, and, if it isn't, tell it you'll see it dead before you'll let it do you that way.

That's what I did with what was making me doleful, and now I'm all right again. It was because I did want to go to Europe awful, and it twisted my heart like a machine had it when I turned my back on the chance. And then, too, it was because the girls begged me so not to go away for good that I got so worried.

They said it wouldn't be the same if I wasn't here, and though they didn't blame me, they begged me so not to go that I got as addled as the old black hen that hatched ducks.

Now, did you ever hear of such a thing? As if it really mattered where Mary Cary lived! I didn't know anybody truly cared, and finding out made me light in the head. But I know that's just passing--their caring, I mean. I'm much obliged; but they'll forget it in a little while, and I will be just a memory.

I hope it will be bright. There's so much dark you can't help that a brightness is real enjoyable. They say what you look for you see, and what you want to forget you mustn't remember. There are a lot of things about my Orphan life I'm going to try to forget. But there are some that for the sake of sense, and in case of airs, I had better bear in mind. I guess Martha will see to those. Whenever Mary gives signs of soaring, Martha brings her straight back to earth. Martha doesn't care for soarers, and she has a terrible bad habit of letting them know she don't.

Yorkburg hasn't settled down yet, and is still hanging on to the last remnants of the surprise about Uncle Parke's coming, and about his marriage to Miss Katherine and my going away.

Of course, Miss Amelia Cokeland wanted to know if he'd made the Asylum a present, and how much. At first nobody would tell her. She's got such a ripping curiosity that there isn't a sneeze sneezed in Yorkburg, or a cake baked, or a door shut that she doesn't want to know why. But maybe she can't help it. Some people are natural inquirers, and that's the way she makes her living, telling the news.

She used to work buttonholes, but since she can't see good she just spends the day out and tells all she hears. Nobody really likes her, but her tongue is too sharp to fool with. To keep from being talked about, everybody pretends to be friendly.

I don't. She shook her finger at me once because I wouldn't tell her what was in Miss Katherine's letter the first time she went away, and since then she's never noticed me until Uncle Parke came. Now every time I see her she's awful pleasant, and tries to make me talk. But a finger once shook is shook. I don't talk.

But Uncle Parke did make the Asylum a present. He didn't tell me, neither did Miss Katherine, and I don't think he wanted anybody but the Board ladies to know. But, of course, they couldn't keep it secret. They told their husbands, and that meant the town. Nothing but a dead man could keep from talking about money.

It must have been a lot he gave, for Peelie Duke told me she heard Mrs. Carr and Mrs. Dent talking about it the day she took some apple-jelly for Miss Jones over to little Jessie Carr, who was sick.

"He could have kept her at a fashionable boarding-school from the day she was born until now for the sum he's turned over to the Board," said Mrs. Carr, and her eyes, which are the beaming kind, just danced, Peelie said.

"Well, he ought to," grunted Mrs. Dent, who talks like her tongue was down her throat. "He ought to! We've been taking care of the child for almost ten years. I hear he wants the house put in good condition, a new dining-room and kitchen built and four bath-rooms. The rest is to go to the endowment. I think more ought to go to the endowment and less for these luxuries. I don't approve of them. An Orphan Asylum is not a hotel."

"No, but it ought to be a home, if possible," said Mrs. Carr, and Peelie said she looked at Mrs. Dent like she wondered how under heaven her husband stood her all the time.

I certainly am glad to know I'm paid for. Some day, when I'm grown and earning my own living, before I marry my children's father, I am going to give as much as I can of that money back to Uncle Parke. Of course that will be some time off, and until then I'll just have to try to be a nice person.

Miss Katherine says a whole lot of people would pay a big price to have a nice person in the house with them--one of those cheerful, sunshiny kind that helps and is encouraging, and gets up again when they fall down. As I can't earn money yet, I'm going to try to be something like that, so they won't be sorry I ever was born. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine won't.

But isn't it strange, when the time comes for you to do a thing you are crazy to do, you wish it hadn't come?

There have been days when I hated this Asylum. I've felt at times that I was just one of the numbers of the multiplication table, and in all my life I'd never be anything else. And I'd almost sweep the bricks up out of the yard, I'd be so mad to think I was nothing and nobody.

I wanted to be something and somebody. I didn't want to die and be forgotten. I would have liked to sit on St. John's Church steeple and have everybody look at me and say:

"That's Mary Cary! She's great and rich, and gives away lots of money and sings like an angel." That's what I once would have liked, but I've learned a few things since I didn't know then.

One is that high places are lonely and hard and uncomfortable, and people who have sat on them have sometimes wished they didn't. Miss Katherine told me that herself, also that the place you're in is pretty near what you're fitted to fill. Otherwise you'd get out and fill another.

I've given up steeples and superiorities. But I'm glad I'm not going to be an orphan, just an orphan, all my life. I'm glad; still, when I think of going away and leaving everybody and everything: the old pump, where I drowned my first little chicken washing it; and the old mulberry-tree, where my first doll was buried; and the garret, where I made up ghost-stories for the girls on rainy days; and the school-room; and even No. 4--when I think of these things, I could be like that man in the Bible (I believe it was David, but it might have been Jonah), I could lift up my voice and weep.

But I'm not going to. Weepers are a nuisance.

I guess that's the way with life, though. When things are going, you try to hold them back. And if you got them, you'd maybe wish you hadn't.

That's the way Mrs. Gaines did when her husband died. I mean when he didn't die that first time. She thought he was going to, and so did everybody else. He had Fright's disease, and it affected his heart, being liable to take him off any time, and Mrs. Gaines just carried on terrible.

She had faintings and hysterics, and said she couldn't live without him, though everybody in Yorkburg knew she could, and easy enough. He without her, too, had she gone first. She had asthma and an outbreaking temper, and he drank.

Mrs. Mosby--she's the doctor's wife--said she didn't blame him. No man could stand Mrs. Gaines all the time without something to help, and everybody hoped when he got so ill that he'd die and have a little rest. But he didn't. He got better.

Mrs. Gaines was so surprised she was downright disagreeable about it, and how he stood it was a wonder. He didn't long, for the next summer he was dead sure enough, and Mrs. Gaines put on the longest crêpe veil ever seen in the South, she said. It touched the hem of her skirt in front and behind; but she cut it in half after everybody had seen it often enough to know how long it was.

If Augustus Gaines thought she was going to ruin her eyes and choke her lungs by wearing unhealthy crêpe over her face he thought wrong, she said, and in a few months it was gone and she was as gay as a girl. She's what they call a character, Mrs. Gaines is.

I don't want to be like her, and I don't expect to do any groaning over leaving Yorkburg. I want to live with Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine, and I'm going to. But it's strange how many happy things hurt.

XV

A REAL WEDDING

It looks as if everybody who knows Miss Katherine wants her to be married from their house. Her brothers want her to be married from theirs. Her aunt, Mrs. Powhatan Bloodgood, who lives in Loudon County, and whose husband is as rich as a real lord, begs her to be married in hers; and everybody in Yorkburg--I mean the coat-of-arms everybodies--has invited her to have the wedding in their home.

But she just smiles and says no to them all. Says she is going to be married from her house, which is the Orphan Asylum, though the ceremony will be at the church. It's going to be in the morning at twelve o'clock, so they can take the two-o'clock train for Richmond and go on to New York.

Miss Katherine wants it to be quiet, but it can't be quiet. There's nothing on human legs that can use them who won't be at the church to see that wedding take place.

Everybody has been paying her a lot of attention of late. It's real strange what a difference a man makes in a marriage, even if he isn't noticed much in person at the time. If he's rich and prominent, everybody is so pleasant and sociable you'd think they were real intimate. If he's just good and poor, few take notice.

When Miss Vickie Toones married Mr. Joe Blake they didn't get hardly any presents. They had a lot of dead relations who used to be rich and haughty, but their living ones are as poor as the people they didn't used to know, and hardly anybody gave them anything handsome.

Miss Katherine's presents are just amazing, and my eyes are blistered by the shine of them. I didn't know before such things were in the world. People say Uncle Parke has made a lot of money in some mines out West, besides being a doctor, and that he doesn't have to work. "But a man who doesn't work hasn't any excuse for living," I heard him tell somebody, and maybe it's so, though I don't know.

I don't know anything these days. I'm the shape and size of Mary Cary, but I see and hear so many things I never saw and heard before that I'd like to borrow a dog to see if he knows whether I am myself or somebody else. And another thing I'd like to find out is, How do other people know so much?

Mrs. Philip Creekmore has a cousin whose wife's brother lives in the same place Uncle Parke does, and Miss Amelia Cokeland wrote out there and found out all about him. But it doesn't matter whether she truly knows anything or not. Miss Webb says she is like those fish scientists. Give her one bone, and she can tell you all the rest. She's had a grand time telling more things about Uncle Parke than Miss Katherine will ever learn in this world.

My dress is finished. I'm to be Maiden of Honor. There are no bridesmaids. Think of it! Me, Mary Cary, once just flesh and blood mechanical, now a living creature who is to wear a white Swiss dress and a sash with pink rosebuds on it, and walk up the church aisle with my arms full of roses. And--magnificent gloriousness! most beautiful of all!--every girl in this Asylum is to have a white dress and a sash the color she likes best to wear to the wedding. That's my wedding gift to the girls. Uncle Parke gave it to me.

Miss Katherine's California brother and his wife have come. I don't like them. He looks bored to death, and chews the end of his mustache till you wonder there's any left. As for her, she's the limit. Maybe that's what's the matter with him.

She seems to be afraid some of us might touch her, and she stares as if we were figures in a china-shop. No more says good-morning than if we were.

She wears seven rings on one hand and four on another, and rustles so when she walks she sounds like a churner out of order. If she isn't a bulgarian born, she's bought herself into being one, for she oozes money. It's the only thing you think of when she's around. You can actually smell it. I think Miss Katherine is sorry they came. She don't say it, of course, but plenty of things don't have to be said.

Uncle Parke came last night, bringing his best friend and some others. The best one is Doctor Willwood. He's fine. He and I are going to come down the aisle together. I reach up to his elbow, and he says he may put me in his pocket. I wish he would. I know I will be that frightened I'd be glad to get in it.

He wants to know all about Yorkburg and the people, and to-day Miss Bray let me take him all around the town and show him the antiquities. He asked her. I had on the white dress Miss Katherine gave me last summer, and I looked real nice, for I had on my company manners, too.

You see, he was from the West, and had never been to Virginia before; and when a man comes such a long way, one ought to put on company manners and be extra polite. It wouldn't be right not to. I put mine on, and I guess I did do a lot of talking. I'm by nature a talker, just like I can't help skipping when my heart is happy and nothing hurts.

I told him about all the places we came to, and about who lived in them, except the Alden house which the Reagans now possess. When we got there he stopped in front of it.

"My!" he said, "that's a beautiful old place! Whose is it?"

"Some people by the name of Reagan live there," I said. "I don't know them." And I started on.

I came near forgetting, and saying, "That is Alden house, where my grandfather used to live," but I remembered in time. I don't acknowledge my grandfather, and I knew somebody else would tell him Uncle Parke was born and lived there until he went West.