Chapter XXIV: Wedding Bells

I SUPPOSE a girl is never so humble as when she knows that she has won the love of a noble-minded man, far above herself in every way. Certainly I felt very conscious of my own unworthiness on the morning that followed Alan Faulkner's return. Yet I was strangely proud too, but it was of another.

Alan found an early opportunity of saying a few words to Aunt Patty, after which she called me aside and, kissing me tenderly, said how glad she was and how she hoped I should be as happy as she had been with her dear husband. I privately hoped that I should be a great deal happier. It seemed strange to me that she should think for a moment of comparing Alan to Uncle George, with his fidgets and gout and uncertainty of temper. I forgot that he was the husband of her youth, and, presumably, had not suffered from gout when she married him.

When we had talked a little, Aunt Patty asked me if I had seen Paulina since breakfast, and I was shocked to realise that I had hardly given a thought since I rose to the trouble that overhung my friend.

"I saw her father taking her off for a walk," said Aunt Patty, "so I suppose he was going to tell her the bad news. I am glad he kept it to himself last night."

I watched anxiously for Paulina's return. Alan was busy in his room; he was going up to town in the afternoon in order to see father and mother. I turned hot and cold whenever I thought of what mother would think or say when she learned the object of his visit. Of one thing I felt certain: she could not fail to like Alan Faulkner.

I had accomplished most of my morning tasks and was watering my plants on the top of the porch, when I saw Paulina and her father enter the garden. Josiah Dicks looked a much happier man than he had appeared on the previous evening. He had lost, perhaps for ever, his air of elation and self-complacency; but apparently a load had been lifted from his heart since I last saw him. Paulina had a sober air, yet did not appear so cast down as I had expected she would be. She nodded and smiled when she caught sight of me in my observatory, and a few minutes later she was up there beside me.

"Well, Nan," she said, dropping into my chair, "poppa says you know that we have lost all our money and become paupers."

"Not quite that, I think," was my reply, and I could not help smiling at her desperate way of putting it.

"You should not smile, Nan," she said gravely; "it's an awful thing to be poor, isn't it? Every one seems to think so. Still, I suppose it might be worse. Anyway, we have money enough to keep us here till the end of the month, and then take us back to America. And we need not travel as steerage passengers, either."

"Dear Pollie, I am glad you can take it so bravely," I said: "but I knew you would."

"Well, I guess I've had a good time while the money lasted, so I won't grumble now it's gone," she remarked philosophically. "And I'll allow there may be compensations. Poppa can't expect to marry me to a prince now, anyway."

"A prince!" I repeated.

"Well, a duke, then, or some very exalted person," she said calmly. "You must know that poppa is ambitious, and as his wealth increased, so did his ideas of what would be his daughter's fitting destiny."

"And your ideas were different," I suggested, beginning to see a possible explanation of the equanimity with which Paulina was facing their misfortune.

"Just so," she replied: "with your usual sagacity you have hit the point exactly. Poppa and I could never agree with regard to my settlement in life. There were rather serious ructions before we started for Europe. As I say, he wanted me to marry a duke or some one only a few degrees lower in the social scale, and I desired no one but Charlie, and would have been content in a cottage with him."

"Charlie!" I cried. "You mentioned him once before, Pollie, and I guessed you took a deep interest in him. Do tell me who he is!"

"Charlie is my first cousin once removed," said Paulina, "and he occupies no higher position than that of clerk in the stores of a linen company at Indianapolis. But I don't care what he is—he is just Charlie."

"Oh, I understand," I said.

"Of course you do, Nan; you can't help understanding," said Paulina. "And you can easily see how this ill wind may blow me good, for now my dowry has taken to itself wings, no duke will want to make me a duchess. Charles becomes eligible, therefore my cloud has a silver lining."

"Then your father has no dislike to him personally," I said.

"He cannot have, really, though he's been rather ugly in trying to find fault with him," she replied. "Charlie's only fault is that he has poor relations. Poppa is fond of boasting that he began life with a dollar, but he has no very kindly feeling for those who began in a similar way and have not made much of the dollar. But we're all poor relations now, so I hope he will be more sensible. What are you smiling at, Nan?"

I was amused to think how this secret attachment to 'Charlie' had lain behind the open, unblushing flirtations which had startled me till I discovered how harmless they were.

"What a fraud you have been, Paulina!" I remarked. "Do you know that Miss Cottrell credited you with being attracted by Mr. Faulkner."

"No, really! What a joke! Me and the Professor! What an ill-matched couple we should have been!" And Paulina leaned back in her chair and laughed heartily.

"But you know," she continued after a moment, "in spite of her love of research, Miss Cottrell is not gifted with keen penetration. But she is a good creature, and I really believe—"

She stopped, her words arrested by the appearance of a telegraph-boy riding up to the gate on a bicycle.

"Oh, look, Nan—a telegram! For whom, I wonder!"

She leaned over the side of the porch and caught the name of "Dicks" as the boy handed in the telegram. She turned and ran downstairs. A moment later I saw her tearing across the garden in search of her father. I wondered what the message might be, but presently I forgot all about it as my thoughts gathered again around the thrilling interest of my own life.

There was so much to dream about—what father would think, what mother would feel, Olive's sympathetic interest, and the comments Peggy was likely to make—that an hour slipped by without my knowing it. I had taken up some needlework, but I had accomplished very little when I was roused from my reverie by a tap at the door. Almost before I could bid her enter, Paulina burst into the room. Her face was radiant. She threw herself on her knees beside me, hugging me as she said:

"Oh, Nan, Nan, you will never believe what has happened!"

"Ah! The telegram brought good news!" I exclaimed. "Is it all right with the money after all?"

"Oh, nothing to do with the money!" she cried, impatient with the suggestion. "It was a cablegram, Nan—a cablegram from Charlie! He has heard of poppa's loss, and he cables that there is a home for me—and for poppa, too, of course-with him, and he will meet us at New York. And poppa thought—or pretended to think—that Charlie only wanted me because of the money!"

"Then it is a proposal by cablegram," I said. "What a novel idea!"

"Yes, it was clever of Charlie to think of it," Paulina said with sparkling eyes. "Rather extravagant, perhaps, but it did not take many words to make us understand. Oh, Nan, can't you guess how happy I am!"

"Then your father consents?" I said eagerly.

"Rather!" said Paulina. "And he has the grace to own up that he's ashamed of himself, and has never done Charlie justice. We are going to drive into Chelmsford with the Professor after luncheon in order to send a reply to Charlie. Now, Nan, don't imagine that I am so wooden-headed that I can't guess why he is going up to London to-day when he only arrived here yesterday."

"Indeed, Pollie, I am far from thinking you that," I replied in some confusion. "I know that I owe a good deal to your keenness of perception, and you have shown yourself one of the best and truest of friends. I can't tell you how glad I am that this happiness has come to you."

"And I am just as glad that you are going to be happy," she said. "Isn't it wonderful how things come round? I calculate that the next happening will be a wedding at 'Gay Bowers.'"

"Pollie, what do you mean?"

"Just that. I guess there will be a wedding here before the end of the month. Miss Cottrell is a brick, Nan. She has made up her mind that she will never desert Mr. Micawber—in other words, she is just as ready to share poppa's poverty as she was to share his wealth, so I presume we'll travel to America as a family party, and Mr. Upsher will tie the knot in Greentree church before we leave."

Here was news indeed! Life at "Gay Bowers" was no longer monotonous. Its current had begun to move swiftly, and was destined to flow still more rapidly ere the summer was over.

Father and mother did not withhold their consent to my engagement. The following day brought them both to "Gay Bowers," to my great delight. I was not surprised, but it afforded me complete satisfaction to see that Alan had won mother's heart. She said she felt it hard that she must part with both her grown-up girls; but, as father had stipulated that I should not be married till I was twenty-one, she would not lose me for some time yet.

After this, our engagement was made public, and seemed to give every one pleasure. People said such kind things of me that I was quite ashamed to think how little they knew me.

Paulina's prediction came true, and we were soon busy preparing for her father's marriage with Miss Cottrell. It took place in our beautiful old church on the thirty-first of July. The happy pair spent a week at Felixstowe and then came back to "Gay Bowers" to fetch Pollie. It was with genuine regret that Aunt Patty and I watched Mr. and Mrs. Dicks and Paulina take their departure. How different were our feelings now from those with which we had received the Americans and Miss Cottrell! The paying guests had become our friends.

"Au revoir!" cried Pollie as they drove away. "We are coming back some day. And, Mr. Faulkner, please don't forget that you are going to bring Nan to Indianapolis some time."

We watched them pass out of our sight with the sadness most partings inevitably bring, for who could say whether we should all meet again?

Two days later, Alan's sisters came to spend their holidays at "Gay Bowers." They were such nice, bright girls that I had no difficulty in making friends of them, and I am thankful to say they seemed to take to me at once. The brother, who was their guardian, was so great a hero in their eyes, that I wonder they thought me good enough for him. It must have been, because they thought he could not make a wrong choice.

Peggy joined us ere August was far advanced, and we became a very lively party. By this time Jack had returned to the vicarage. I had the satisfaction of seeing that Aunt Patty had rightly gauged the depth of his wound. If the news of my engagement to Alan Faulkner hurt him, the blow was one from which he quickly recovered. He and Peggy became good comrades; she wanted to practise sketching during her stay in the country and he helped her to find suitable "bits," and was her attendant squire on many of her expeditions.

I had heard nothing from Agneta since her return to Manchester, but the news of my engagement brought me a kind though rather sad letter from her. She said she thought that I and Professor Faulkner were exactly suited to each other and she was glad I was going to be happy, for I deserved happiness and she supposed she never had. She knew now that she had been utterly deluded when she imagined that Ralph Marshman would make her happy. She wanted me to know that she was convinced of his worthless character and of what an escape she had had. She thanked me for the efforts I had made to save her from her own folly, and she begged me to forgive her for being so ungrateful at the time. She said she was sick of her life at home. She wanted her parents to let her adopt a career of her own and live a more useful life, but her mother refused to entertain the idea for a moment.

"I am trying to be patient," Agneta wrote; "You know you were always preaching patience to me, Nan; and I mean to do some 'solid' reading every day. Do send me a list of books you think I ought to read. I know, although you never said so, that you thought me very ignorant when I was with you. I don't forget either how you once said that I never should be happy as long as I made myself the centre of my life. So I try to be unselfish and to think of other people, but there is really very little I can do for others in the life I lead here. I almost envy girls who have to work for themselves."

I felt very sorry for Agneta as I read her letter, and yet I should have been glad, for, if her words were sincere, they augured for her happier days than she had yet known. For what hope of happiness is there for any one who is shut up in the prison-house of self? It was good for Agneta, as it had been for me and for Paulina, to suffer, if her trouble had led her into a larger, fuller, and more blessed life.

But the story of Aunt Patty's guests, as far as I have known them intimately, must be brought to a close. After all, I did not stay quite twelve months at "Gay Bowers." I went home for Christmas and I did not return. There was no longer any thought of my going up for Matriculation. Even now I regret that I never did so, but mother was bent upon my entering on a course of domestic economy, and the value of that study I am daily proving.

Early in the New Year, Olive was married. It was a very pretty wedding and everything went off charmingly; but her departure for India six weeks later left us all with very sore hearts. Alan was duly appointed to the professorship at Edinburgh, and now my home is in that beautiful old city, for in the following year, at the beginning of the summer vacation, we were married.

I should like to write about that wedding, but Alan thinks I had better not begin. My three sisters, Alan's two, and Cousin Agneta were my bridesmaids. Mr. Upsher assisted at the ceremony, and Jack, such a handsome young soldier, was one of the guests. He still showed himself devoted to Peggy, but I hope he is not seriously attracted by her, for Peggy declares that she is wedded to her art and is quite angry if any one suggests that she may marry. She is now working hard in Paris and promises to develop into a first-rate artist in "black and white."

Agneta made a very pretty bridesmaid and looked as happy as one could wish. I say this on mother's authority, for really I cannot remember how any one looked except Alan. The sun must have been in my eyes all the time, for my recollection of everything is so vague and hazy. So it was wise of Alan to advise me not to attempt to describe our wedding. Soon afterwards we heard of Agneta's engagement, with her parents' approval, to a young medical man, so I dare say she did look happy.

Alan and I always agree that "Gay Bowers" is the most delightful old country house we have ever known. Apparently many are of the same opinion, for aunt seldom has a room to spare in it.

THE END

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London and Bungay.