CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ITS FIRST WEDDING

All winter Wythie had hemmed damask and stitched linen, like the old-fashioned little soul that she was. Not Oswyth Grey, the first, in her generation could have burned with more housewifely zeal for home-and-hand-made furnishings for the home to which she was never to go from the little grey house than did this Oswyth, set down, a sweet anachronism, amid the age of sewing-machines and ready-madeness. The long winter days were too short for the dear little woman, expert needlewoman though she was, in which to prepare for the home to which she was to go in June when Basil was graduated.

The Caldwell place--now the Rutherford place--was going through thorough renovations. The Greys had always known that the Rutherford boys were provided with enough money to remove them beyond anxiety as to the future. It was precisely like their unworldliness to accept this fact vaguely, and it gave Wythie something approaching a shock to discover that Basil was rich, measured by her simple standards.

"It won't matter in the least how poor are the books which he writes, Wythie; he will be able to live while they are writing, and then publish them himself and buy up the entire edition. So aren't you glad that his mother left Basil such a pretty little fortune?" asked Rob, energetically creasing the hem of the napkin for which she had offered her help.

"I think Basil will write nothing but poetry for twelve months," added Prue. "So he will need every penny. I don't consider the Rutherford boys' fortune riches."

"It is enough to keep up that big Caldwell place with two women and a man servant, and to live tastefully and other-fully; I call that rich, Prudence. What would you have?" said Rob.

Prue arose, tall and graceful in her eighteenth year, as a young goddess, and walked to the window where she stood looking out, her hands clasped at the back of her head with its crown of golden hair. The sunshine lit her up into a splendour that had nothing to fear from its most illuminating ray, and Wythie's busy hands paused, with her needle held at the full length of its thread, to look at her anew with an overwhelming sense of her fitness for a brilliant setting.

"I would have," said Prue slowly, without turning around, "I would have an income that was equal to these boys' principal. I would have great spacious rooms, filled with the most charming, exquisitely costumed people. I would have a retinue of well-trained servants that would keep me from feeling one jar of the wheels of living. I would have a life full of big interests, not a little, limited life like ours here. I would have the world, my sisters." And Prue extended her arms with a regal gesture that seemed at once to hunger for it and to seize it.

"Oh, Prue, Prudy!" expostulated Wythie in genuine distress. "After all our happy years in this dear little house! After all our blessed mother has taught us of the beauty of simplicity and unworldliness!"

Prue turned then to look at her elder with a tolerant smile. "Don't be so shocked, my dear, little, contented Mouse," she said. "You look as though I had announced my desire for something criminal. I don't want the world that we renounce in baptism; I don't want it in a sordid, vulgar, mean way. I want a big stage and on it I'd like to play a big part, and I'd like to use the power it gave me for glorious things. There are more ways of being good than humdrum ones."

"You are ambitious, Prudence, and Mardy says that ambitious women are not likely to be happy ones," insisted Wythie.

"Then I must be unhappy. I can't make myself like you, Wythie, satisfied to live, like Kiku-san, purring by the fire, nor like Rob, throwing herself into whatever lies at hand, and spending herself for a tiny circle," said Prue. "I'm going out into the world and it shall not be the worse for having me. I'm going to be part of a great scene, and I don't mean to be a blot on it."

Rob had let her napkin fall and was watching Prue as closely as Wythie was, sharing her presentiment of misfortune for their beautiful youngest, but seeing farther.

"Don't look so troubled, Wythiekins," she said. "Prue must dree her wierd, like the rest of humanity. She never was the wren we were; she wants to be an eagle and soar against the sun. I can understand her better than you do. I have my restless moments, but I think there is an instinct in me that is prescient; I know without having tasted, that the fruit of ambition does not nourish. Prudy will flash out into her bigger world, and she will learn that nothing matters, nothing counts but love and the inner things. I'm not two years older than you, my little tall sister, but I'm right, as you will see. It isn't only that Mardy thinks this; I feel it, or nobody knows what mad things I might do, for I'm fearfully impatient at times. It won't harm her, Wythie; the only difference is that what you and I know Prue must be taught by experience and disappointment."

"You talk like all the prophets melted into one," said Prue, impressed in spite of herself, for Rob's flashing dark eyes saw far, as her family well knew.

"Nothing that ends can satisfy any one with a mind, and much more with a soul, Prue. It is simple enough to understand, if once you realize that. Your world is too brief, dear Prudy. If you go forth to conquer it you will turn back some day to the narrow field you had here, and see that it was intrinsically a wider one, reaching farther, than that which you mistake for greater," said Rob.

"You talk like an old woman, and you are as inexperienced a girl as I am," said Prue.

"She talks like what she is; a creature of insights, and that is not a matter of years; Rob has always known," said Wythie, warmly. "'Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.'"

"Mercy upon us, Wythie, you and Rob ought to go about like Dinah Morris in 'Adam Bede,' in a cap and kerchief preaching unworldliness," cried Prue petulantly. "I shall take the world into my hands, not into my heart, and I'm going to make it give me its best gifts." She tossed her head as she spoke, and Wythie and Rob felt that her beauty made hers no idle boast.

Rob arose and, putting both arms around her, kissed Prue as her mother might have done. "Go your ways, dear," she said. "We fear nothing for you but that they will be harder ways than ours, and that in the end its youngest child will look back longingly at these peaceful years in the little grey house."

Prue broke away and quickly left the room, annoyed, moved, excited.

Rob went back to her seat and picked up her napkin, absently, examining it closely, as if the future lay folded in its hem.

"This means the death knell to poor Bartlemy's hopes, Wythie," she said. "This means Arthur Stanhope and his million."

"Ah, yes, I know that," sighed Wythie. "But, of course, it doesn't mean that Prue will marry for money!"

"No, but--well, we can't be sure, but I'm afraid that she doesn't realize the influence it has had on her mind," said Rob.

"Arthur Stanhope is very nice," suggested Wythie.

"How often have we assured each other of that?" laughed Rob. "We don't seem at ease about it. But he is, really, very nice, only he doesn't strike me as particularly forceful--and then he isn't, Bartlemy!"

"Oh, that's really the whole trouble," mourned Wythie. "Our dear, big Bartlemy! And I was so sure that not a link of the triple alliance would fail!"

Rob looked up quickly, but Wythie had not the most remote intention of teasing, so she resumed her creasing with heightened colour, and Wythie hemmed on, lost in thought.

The Grey girls went to the commencement, and saw their Battalion B dismissed from their beloved Mother Yale with honours for which all three, each in his way, had worked hard. The last train brought them back to Fayre: Wythie tucked under Basil's father's arm, who seemed hardly less fond of his little almost-daughter than Basil, while Basil looked after Hester; Lester Baldwin devoted himself to Frances, and Rob and Prue fell to Bruce and Bartlemy's share, just as they had always done.

"Mother Grey, here are our alumni!" cried Commodore Rutherford, his voice resounding through the stillness of Fayre at midnight as the party came up the flagged walk.

"I think it sounds pretty bad to say: 'I am an alumnus,'" said Bartlemy. "Much as I coveted the title it sounds zöological to me."

"Dear boys, I congratulate you with all my heart," said Mrs. Grey. "I feel a little of Mr. Peggotty's wonder when he found Davy 'a gentleman growed.'"

"I hope you are not struck by finding us gentlemen? We've been tolerably growed ever since you've known us," said Bruce.

"It was a delightful day? Not a blemish in it?" asked Cousin Charlotte, who had come up with Polly for the night to pay tribute to the alumni.

"It was the most beautiful, faultless day one could imagine," said Hester.

Basil began to count on his fingers. "Ten days from to-day I can easily imagine far more beautiful," he said, with a rapturous look at Wythie.

"Rhoda has made us chocolate, dear Alumni," said the Grey mother. "And we're going to drink your health from the cup from which Washington pledged the Grey of that day."

She did not care to discuss that ten days distant celebration, glad as she was that Wythie was to be so safely happy.

It was such a very short time to keep the circle in the little grey house unbroken, and those ten days sped like swallows over the old roof.

There had been stirring discussions as to the manner of Oswyth's marrying; only one thing had been settled from the first: Wythie insisted on a perfectly simple wedding, and on being married in her beloved little home.

When it came to inviting and omitting, the matter grew difficult. The Greys suddenly realized how long was their list of friends with a claim, once they admitted the claim of any outside the most strictly limited circle of relatives and intimate friends. Hester and Frances must be present, yet why not with them the Fayre girls and young men with whom Wythie had played from the day when her shoes were guiltless of heels and more than liable to bend around the ankles?

It ended in asking so many people that it was "a question as to how they could be nearer present than under the apple-trees," Prue said, and her remark solved the problem. It was June, and all the doors and windows of the little grey house could be thrown open to its warmth. Like all early houses the grey house had many doors, letting its guests step forth under its trees with but a brief delay upon broad flagstone steps. Wythie was to be married in the big wainscotted room in which her father had spent most of his dreaming days. Hester, Frances, Rob, and Prue, with the help of Bruce and Bartlemy, with Lester, had covered the walls between wainscotting and low ceiling with mountain laurel, and the effect was most beautiful.

The old clergyman who had baptised and catechised Wythie was to marry her, and Dr. Fairbairn was to give her away. Rob and Prue, in pale green gowns, were to be Wythie's bridesmaids, the other two Rutherfords supporting Basil. Wythie had begged that Polly might be flower maid, not in a bridal procession, since there was to be none, but carpeting with rose leaves the place where she and Basil were to stand while the Fayre young people sang the Lohengrin march without accompaniment.

Wythie had stood out for sentiment, and her wedding-gown was a frail muslin of the first Oswyth's, wrought with that other Oswyth's needlework, made, so tradition had it, for her own bridal which was never to be. Over it fell from the crown of Wythie's fair head to her little feet a priceless old veil worn for three generations by many brides of the Winslow race. Her only ornament was Basil's gift of his mother's pearls, on the back of whose clasp he had had engraved the poem which he and Wythie had read in the garret on the day of their betrothal, the stanza written to the Oswyth of long ago.

Wythie, ready for her bridal, stood for the last time before the mirror of the room which she and Rob had for so long shared through their happy childhood, their anxious, yet happy young girlhood, and through the perfect sympathy of their dawning womanhood and grown-up love. It seemed to Wythie, as her hands smoothed her frail old gown, that in some mystical way her dream had been fulfilled, and that in her that earlier romance was perfected.

Then she turned to her dear ones. Prue stood tall and beautiful in her mermaid-tint of robe, smiling, glad of Wythie's joy, yet moved. But Rob's cheeks were crimson in her effort for self-control. Say what one would, this was separation, and though the new home was so near she was giving up her Wythie. Mrs. Grey smiled at Wythie bravely, saying as she met her imploring eyes: "My darling, you have been all that a girl could be to her mother; I am glad to give you to Basil to be all that a woman can be to her husband."

But Wythie threw herself into her arms, crying: "Don't give me, Mardy; I can't be given. I must still be a daughter of the little grey house."

"Now, Wythiekins, don't be a goose! We couldn't get rid of you if we would," said Rob sternly. "It's lovely to have a brother. There's the chorus, the wedding march. Trot along Wythie!" And she hurried the little bride from the room, imploring all the powers that be to help her to drive back the sob then choking her and all succeeding sobs.

There was not a formal entrance. Before the guests realized that they were coming, Oswyth and Basil stood in their places on Polly's fragrant carpet, with Rob and Prue and Bruce and Bartlemy on either hand, and with Mrs. Grey, Commodore Rutherford and Cousin Peace as near as they could get, and with Polly looking up into the clergyman's eyes with such a solemn face that those who were not too deeply interested to notice her, wondered if she were going to forbid the bans.

A few words, the promises asked and given, and Oswyth Grey was Oswyth Grey no more. Young Basil Rutherford, carrying himself proudly, humbly erect, turned to lead down among his friends his little wife.

Rob did not know how the next half hour passed; she helped Wythie into her travelling gown and for one, long moment, the sisters clung to each other. For whatever happiness the future held, this was a sort of parting, and the little grey house had given up its eldest daughter.

Mrs. Grey followed Basil and Wythie out on the steps, tears in her eyes and smiles on the lips which kissed and blessed Wythie clingingly. A crack of a whip, Myrtilla Hasbrook's baby Betty upset a basket of rice, and Wythie was gone.

Rob, seeking for a spot in which to hide till she could be sure of herself, came upon Polly crying her eyes out in the hall closet, with Bruce trying to comfort her.

"Oh, Rob, oh Rob!" sobbed Polly. "The only thing that I can think of to make me bear it is that I'm so thankful it isn't you!"