sez I, ‘do you think you’ll ever get all those girls married off?’ Well, a man is nothing but trouble as I sees it and of all the uncertain things marriage is the uncertainest, but what else is there for a woman in this world? That’s what I’ve just been saying to poor Nora. ‘Mark my words, Nora,’ I said to her, ‘there isn’t much fun in being an old maid. What’s Jim Wilcox thinking of?’ I said to her.”
“Oh, Aunt Grace, I wish you hadn’t! Jim and Nora had some sort of a quarrel last January and he’s never been round since.”
“I believe in saying what I think. Things is better said. I’d heard of that quarrel. That’s why I asked her about him. ‘It’s only right,’ I told her, ‘that you should know they say he’s driving Eleanor Pringle.’ She got red and mad and flounced off. What’s Vera Johnson doing here? She ain’t any relation.”
“Vera’s always been a great friend of mine, Aunt Grace. She’s going to play the wedding-march.”
“Oh, she is, is she? Well, all I hope is she won’t make a mistake and play the Dead March like Mrs. Tom Scott did at Dora Best’s wedding. Such a bad omen. I don’t know where you’re going to put the mob you’ve got here for the night. Some of us will have to sleep on the clothesline I reckon.”
“Oh, we’ll find a place for every one, Aunt Grace.”
“Well, Sally, all I hope is you won’t change your mind at the last moment like Helen Summers did. It clutters things up so. Your father is in terrible high spirits. I never was one to go looking for trouble but all I hope is it ain’t the forerunner of a stroke. I’ve seen it happen that way.”
“Oh, Dad’s fine, Aunt Mouser. He’s just a bit excited.”
“Ah, you’re too young, Sally, to know all that can happen. Your mother tells me the ceremony is at high noon tomorrow. The fashions in weddings are changing like everything else and not for the better. When I was married it was in the evening and my father laid in twenty gallons of liquor for the wedding. Ah, dear me, times ain’t what they used to be. What’s the matter with Mercy Daniels? I met her on the stairs and her complexion has got terrible muddy.”
“‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’” giggled Sally, wriggling into her dinner-dress.
“Don’t quote the Bible flippantly,” rebuked Aunt Mouser. “You must excuse her, Miss Shirley. She just ain’t used to getting married. Well, all I hope is the groom won’t have a hunted look like so many of them do. I s’pose they do feel that way, but they needn’t show it so plain. And I hope he won’t forget the ring. Upton Hardy did. Him and Flora had to be married with a ring off one of the curtain poles. Well, I’ll be taking another look at the wedding-presents. You’ve got a lot of nice things, Sally. All I hope is it won’t be as hard to keep the handles of them spoons polished as I think likely.”
Dinner that night in the big, glassed-in porch was a gay affair. Chinese lanterns had been hung all about it, shedding mellow-tinted lights on the pretty dresses and glossy hair and white, unlined brows of girls. Barnabas and Saul sat like ebony statues on the broad arms of the Doctor’s chair, where he fed them tidbits alternately.
“Just about as bad as Parker Pringle,” said Aunt Mouser. “He has his dog sit at the table with a chair and napkin of his own. Well, sooner or later there’ll be a judgment.”
It was a large party, for all the married Nelson girls and their husbands were there, besides ushers and bridesmaids; and it was a merry one, in spite of Aunt Mouser’s “felicities” … or perhaps because of them. Nobody took Aunt Mouser very seriously; she was evidently a joke among the young fry. When she said, on being introduced to Gordon Hill, “Well, well, you ain’t a bit like I expected. I always thought Sally would pick out a tall handsome man,” ripples of laughter ran through the porch. Gordon Hill, who was on the short side and called no more than “pleasant-faced” by his best friends, knew he would never hear the last of it. When she said to Dot Fraser, “Well, well, a new dress every time I see you! All I hope is your father’s purse will be able to stand it for a few years yet,” Dot could, of course, have boiled her in oil, but some of the other girls found it amusing. And when Aunt Mouser mournfully remarked, apropos of the preparations of the wedding-dinner, “All I hope is everybody will get her teaspoons afterwards. Five were missing after Gertie Paul’s wedding. They never turned up,” Mrs. Nelson, who had borrowed three dozen and the sisters-in-law she had borrowed them from all looked harried. But Dr. Nelson hawhawed cheerfully.
“We’ll make everyone turn out their pockets before they go, Aunt Grace.”
“Ah, you may laugh, Samuel. It is no joking-matter to have anything like that happen in the family. Some one must have those teaspoons. I never go anywhere but I keep my eyes open for them. I’d know them wherever I saw them, though it was twenty-eight years ago. Poor Nora was just a baby then. You remember you had her there, Jane, in a little white embroidered dress? Twenty-eight years! Ah, Nora, you’re getting on, though in this light you don’t show your age so much.”
Nora did not join in the laugh that followed. She looked as if she might flash lightning at any moment. In spite of her daffodil-hued dress and the pearls in her dark hair, she made Anne think of a black moth. In direct contrast with Sally, who was a cool, snowy blonde, Nora Nelson had magnificent black hair, dusky eyes, heavy black brows and velvety red cheeks. Her nose was beginning to look a trifle hawk-like and she had never been accounted pretty, but Anne felt an odd attraction to her in spite of her sulky, smoldering expression. She felt that she would prefer Nora as a friend to the popular Sally.
They had a dance after dinner and music and laughter came tumbling out of the broad low windows of the old stone house in a flood. At ten Nora had disappeared. Anne was a little tired of the noise and merriment. She slipped through the hall to a back door that opened almost on the bay, and flitted down a flight of rocky steps to the shore, past a little grove of pointed firs. How divine the cool salt air was after the sultry evening! How exquisite the silver patterns of moonlight on the bay! How dreamlike that ship which had sailed at the rising of the moon and was now approaching the harbor bar! It was a night when you might expect to stray into a dance of mermaids.
Nora was hunched up in the grim black shadow of a rock by the water’s edge, looking more like a thunderstorm than ever.
“May I sit with you for a while?” asked Anne. “I’m a little tired of dancing and it’s a shame to miss this wonderful night. I envy you with the whole harbor for a back yard like this.”
“What would you feel like at a time like this if you had no beau?” asked Nora abruptly and sullenly. “Or any likelihood of one,” she added still more sullenly.
“I think it must be your own fault if you haven’t,” said Anne, sitting down beside her. Nora found herself telling Anne her troubles. There was always something about Anne that made people tell her their troubles.
“You’re saying that to be polite of course. You needn’t. You know as well as I do that I’m not a girl men are likely to fall in love with … I’m ‘the plain Miss Nelson.’ It isn’t my fault that I haven’t anybody. I couldn’t stand it in there any longer. I had to come down here and just let myself be unhappy. I’m tired of smiling and being agreeable to every one and pretending not to care when they give me digs about not being married. I’m not going to pretend any longer. I do care … I care horribly. I’m the only one of the Nelson girls left. Five of us are married or will be tomorrow. You heard Aunt Mouser casting my age up to me at the dinnertable. And I heard her telling Mother before dinner that I had ‘aged quite a bit’ since last summer.
