We Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (the gingerbread man read aloud .txt) 📗

the mallet and wedge,--

"Stephen," said she, "I'm going to do something on my own responsibility."

"I should think you had."

"O, that was nothing. I had to do that. I had to make sure before I said anything. But now,--I'm going to ask Uncle and Aunt Roderick to come over. They ought to be here, you know."

"Why! don't you suppose they will believe, _now_?"

"Stephen Holabird! you're a bad boy! No; of course it isn't _that_." Ruth kept right on from the barn, across the field, into the "old place."

Mrs. Roderick Holabird was out in the east piazza, watering her house plants, that stood in a row against the wall. Her cats always had their milk, and her plants their water, before she had her own breakfast. It was a good thing about Mrs. Roderick Holabird, and it was a good time to take her.

"Aunt Roderick," said Ruth, coming up, "I want you and Uncle to come over right after breakfast; or before, if you like; if you please."

It was rather sudden, but for the repeated "ifs."

"_You_ want!" said Mrs. Roderick in surprise. "Who sent you?"

"Nobody. Nobody knows but Stephen and me. Something is going to happen." Ruth smiled, as one who has a pleasant astonishment in store. She smiled right up out of her heart-faith in Aunt Roderick and everybody.

"On the whole, I guess you'd better come right off,--_to_ breakfast!" How boldly little Ruth took the responsibility! Mr. and Mrs. Roderick had not been over to our house for at least two months. It had seemed to happen so. Father always went there to attend to the "business." The "papers" were all at grandfather's. All but this one, that the "gale" had taken care of.

Uncle Roderick, hearing the voices, came out into the piazza.

"We want you over at our house," repeated Ruth. "Right off, now; there's something you ought to see about."

"I don't like mysteries," said Mrs. Roderick, severely, covering her curiosity; "especially when children get them up. And it's no matter about the breakfast, either way. We can walk across, I suppose, Mr. Holabird, and see what it is all about. Kittens, I dare say."

"Yes," said Ruth, laughing out; "it _is_ kittens, partly. Or was."

So we saw them, from mother's room window, all coming along down the side-hill path together.

We always went out at the front door to look at the morning. Arctura had set the table, and baked the biscuits; we could breathe a little first breath of life, nowadays, that did not come out of the oven.

Father was in the door-way. Stephen stood, as if he had been put there, over the loose board, that we did not know was loose.

Ruth brought Uncle and Aunt Roderick up the long steps, and so around.

"Good morning," said father, surprised. "Why, Ruth, what is it?" And he met them right on that very loose board; and Stephen stood stock still, pertinaciously in the way, so that they dodged and blundered about him.

"Yes, Ruth; what is it?" said Mrs. Roderick Holabird.

Then Ruth, after she had got the family solemnly together, began to be struck with the solemnity. Her voice trembled.

"I didn't mean to make a fuss about it; only I knew you would all care, and I wanted--Stephen and I have found something, mother!" She turned to Mrs. Stephen Holabird, and took her hand, and held it hard.

Stephen stooped down, and drew out the loose board. "Under there," said he; and pointed in.

They could all see the folded paper, with the drifts of dust upon it, just as it had lain for almost a year.

"It has been there ever since the day of the September Gale, father," he said. "The day, you know, that grandfather was here."

"Don't you remember the wind and the papers?" said Ruth. "It was remembering that, that put it into our heads. I never thought of the cracks and--" with a little, low, excited laugh--"the 'total depravity of inanimate things,' till--just a little while ago."

She did not say a word about that bright boy at West Point, now, before them all.

Uncle Roderick reached in with the crook of his cane, and drew forward the packet, and stooped down and lifted it up. He shook off the dust and opened it. He glanced along the lines, and at the signature. Not a single witnessing name. No matter. Uncle Roderick is an honest man. He turned round and held it out to father.

"It is your deed of gift," said he; and then they two shook hands.

"There!" said Ruth, tremulous with gladness. "I knew they would. That was it. That was why. I told you, Stephen!"

"No, you didn't," said Stephen. "You never told me anything--but cats."

"Well! I'm sure I am glad it is all settled," said Mrs. Roderick Holabird, after a pause; "and nobody has any hard thoughts to lay up."

They would not stop to breakfast; they said they would come another time.

But Aunt Roderick, just before she went away, turned round and kissed Ruth. She is a supervising, regulating kind of a woman, and very strict about--well, other people's--expenditures; but she was glad that the "hard thoughts" were lifted off from her.

* * * * *

"I knew," said Ruth, again, "that we were all good people, and that it must come right."

"Don't tell _me!_" says Miss Trixie, intolerantly. "She couldn't help herself."


CHAPTER XI.

BARBARA'S BUZZ.

Leslie Goldthwaite's world of friendship is not a circle. Or if it is, it is the far-off, immeasurable horizon that holds all of life and possibility.

"You must draw the line somewhere," people say. "You cannot be acquainted with everybody."

But Leslie's lines are only radii. They reach out to wherever there is a sympathy; they hold fast wherever they have once been joined. Consequently, she moves to laws that seem erratic to those for whom a pair of compasses can lay down the limit. Consequently, her wedding was "odd."

If Olivia Marchbanks had been going to be married there would have been a "circle" invited. Nobody would have been left out; nobody would have been let in. She had lived in this necromantic ring; she would be married in it; she would die and be buried in it; and of all the wide, rich, beautiful champaign of life beyond,--of all its noble heights, and hidden, tender hollows,--its gracious harvest fields, and its deep, grand, forest glooms,--she would be content, elegantly and exclusively, to know nothing. To her wedding people might come, indeed, from a distance,--geographically; but they would come out of a precisely corresponding little sphere in some other place, and fit right into this one, for the time being, with the most edifying sameness.

From the east and the west, the north and the south, they began to come, days beforehand,--the people who could not let Leslie Goldthwaite be married without being there. There were no proclamation cards issued, bearing in imposing characters the announcement of "Their Daughter's Marriage," by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Goldthwaite, after the like of which one almost looks to see, and somewhat feels the need of, the regular final invocation,--"God save the Commonwealth!"

There had been loving letters sent here and there; old Miss Craydocke, up in the mountains, got one, and came down a month earlier in consequence, and by the way of Boston. She stayed there at Mrs. Frank Scherman's; and Frank and his wife and little Sinsie, the baby,--"she isn't Original Sin, as I was," says her mother,--came up to Z---- together, and stopped at the hotel. Martha Josselyn came from New York, and stayed, of course, with the Inglesides.

Martha is a horrible thing, girls; how do you suppose I dare to put her in here as I do? She is a milliner. And this is how it happens. Her father is a comparatively poor man,--a book-keeper with a salary. There are ever so many little Josselyns; and Martha has always felt bound to help. She is not very likely to marry, and she is not one to take it into her calculation, if she were; but she is of the sort who are said to be "cut out for old maids," and she knows it. She could not teach music, nor keep a school, her own schooling--not her education; God never lets that be cut short--was abridged by the need of her at home. But she could do anything in the world with scissors and needle; and she can make just the loveliest bonnets that ever were put together.

So, as she can help more by making two bonnets in a day, and getting six dollars for them beside the materials, she lets her step-mother put out her impossible sewing, and has turned a little second-story room in her father's house into a private millinery establishment. She will only take the three dollars apiece, beyond the actual cost, for her bonnets, although she might make a fortune if she would be rapacious; for she says that pays her fairly for her time, and she has made up her mind to get through the world fairly, if there is any breathing-space left for fairness in it. If not, she can stop breathing, and go where there is.

She gets as much to do as she can take. "Miss Josselyn" is one of the little unadvertised resources of New York, which it is very knowing, and rather elegant, to know about. But it would not be at all elegant to have her at a party. Hence, Mrs. Van Alstyne, who had a little bonnet, of black lace and nasturtiums, at this very time, that Martha Josselyn had made for her, was astonished to find that she was Mrs. Ingleside's sister and had come on to the marriage.

General and Mrs. Ingleside--Leslie's cousin Delight--had come from their away-off, beautiful Wisconsin home, and brought little three-year-old Rob and Rob's nurse with them. Sam Goldthwaite was at home from Philadelphia, where he is just finishing his medical course,--and Harry was just back again from the Mediterranean; so that Mrs. Goldthwaite's house was full too. Jack could not be here; they all grieved over that. Jack is out in Japan. But there came a wonderful "solid silk" dress, and a lovely inlaid cabinet, for Leslie's wedding present,--the first present that arrived from anybody; sent the day he got the news;--and Leslie cried over them, and kissed them, and put the beautiful silk away, to be made up in the fashion next year, when Jack comes home; and set his picture on the cabinet, and put his letters into it, and says she does not know what other things she shall find quite dear enough to keep them company.

Last of all, the very day before the wedding, came old Mr. Marmaduke Wharne. And of all things in the world, he brought her a telescope. "To look out at creation with, and keep her soul wide," he says, and "to put her in mind of that night when he first found her out, among the Hivites and the Hittites and the Amalekites, up in Jefferson, and took her away among the planets, out of the snarl."

Miss Craydocke has been all summer making a fernery for Leslie; and she took two tickets in the cars, and brought it down beside her, on the seat, all