V
"HERE COMES THE BRIDE!"
I knew when Miss Katherine left I'd be nothing but Martha. That's what
I've been--Martha.
She hadn't been gone two days when Mary gave up, and as prompt as
possible Martha invented trouble.
It was this way. In the summer we have much more time than in the
winter, and the children kept coming to me asking me to make up
something, and all of a sudden a play came in my mind. I just love
acting. The play was to be the marriage of Dr. Rudd and Miss Bray.
You see, Miss Bray is dead in love with Dr. Rudd--really addled about
him. And whenever he comes to see any of the children who are sick she
is so solicitous and sweet and smiley that we call her, to ourselves,
Ipecac Mollie. Other days, plain Mollie Cottontail. It seemed to me if
we could just think him into marrying her, it would be the best work
we'd ever done, and I thought it was worth trying.
They say if you just think and think and think about a thing you can
make somebody else think about it, too. And not liking Dr. Rudd, we
didn't mind thinking her on him, and so we began. Every day we'd meet
for an hour and think together, and each one promised to think single,
and in between times we got ready.
Becky Drake says love goes hard late in life, and sometimes touches the
brain. Maybe that accounts for Miss Bray.
She is fifty-three years old, and all frazzled out and done up with
adjuncts. But Dr. Rudd, being a man with not even usual sense, and awful
conceited, don't see what we see, and swallows easy. Men are
funny--funny as some women.
I don't think he's ever thought of courting Miss Bray. But she's thought
of it, and for once we truly tried to help her.
Well, we got ready, beginning two days after Miss Katherine left, and
the play came off Friday night, the third of July. In consequence of
that play I have been in a retreat, and on the Fourth of July I made a
New-Year resolution.
I resolved I would do those things I should not do, and leave undone the
things I should. I would not disappoint Miss Bray. She looked for things
in me to worry her. She should find them.
Well, I was in that top-story summer-resort for ten days. Put there for
reflection. I reflected. And on the difference between Miss Katherine
and Miss Bray.
But the play was a corker; it certainly was. We chose Friday night
because Miss Jones always takes tea with her aunt that night, and Miss
Bray goes to choir practising. I wish everybody could hear her sing!
Gabriel ought to engage her to wake the dead, only they'd want to die
again.
Dr. Rudd is in the choir, and she just lives on having Friday nights to
look forward to.
The ceremony took place in the basement-room where we play in bad
weather. It's across from the dining-room, the kitchen being between,
and it's a right nice place to march in, being long and narrow.
I was the preacher, and Prudence Arch and Nita Polley, Emma Clark and
Margaret Witherspoon were the bridesmaids.
Lizzie Wyatt was the bride, and Katie Freeman, who is the tallest girl
in the house, though only fourteen, was the groom.
Katie is so thin she would do as well for one thing in this life as
another, so we made her Dr. Rudd.
We didn't have but two men. Miss Webb says they're really not necessary
at weddings, except the groom and the minister. Nobody notices them,
and, besides, we couldn't get the pants.
I was an Episcopal minister, so I wouldn't need any. Mrs. Blamire's
raincoat was the gown, and I cut up an old petticoat into strips, and
made bands to go down the front and around my neck. Loulie Prentiss
painted some crosses and marks on them with gilt, so as to make me look
like a Bishop. I did. A little cent one.
There wasn't any trouble about my costume, because I could soap my hair
and make it lie flat, and put on the robe, and there I was. But how to
get a pair of pants for Katie Freeman was a puzzle.
Nothing male lives in the Humane. Not even a billy-goat. We couldn't
borrow pants, knowing it wouldn't be safe; and what to do I couldn't
guess.
Well, the day came, and, still wondering where those pants were to come
from, I went out in the yard where a man was painting a window-shutter
that had blown off a back window. Right before my eyes was the woodhouse
door wide open, and something said to me:
"Walk in."
I walked in; and there in a corner on a woodpile was a real nice pair of
pants, and a collar and cravat, and a coat and a tin lunch-bucket, which
had been eaten--the lunch had. And when I saw those pants I knew Katie
Freeman was fixed.
They belonged to the man who was painting the shutter.
It was an awful hot day, and he had taken them off in the woodhouse and
put on his overalls, and when he wasn't looking I slipped out with them,
and went up to Miss Bray's room. She was down-stairs talking to Miss
Jones, and I hid them under the mattress of her bed.
I knew when she found they were missing she'd turn to me to know where
they were. No matter what went wrong, from the cat having kittens or the
chimney smoking, she looked to me as the cause. And if there was to be
any searching, No. 4--I sleep in No. 4 when Miss Katherine is
away--would be the first thing searched. So I put them under her bed.
I wish Miss Katherine could have seen that man about six o'clock, when
the time came for him to go home. She would have laughed, too. She
couldn't have helped it.
He is young, and Bermuda Ray says he is in love with Callie Payne, who
lives just down the street. He has to pass her house going home, and I
guess that's the reason he wore his good clothes and took them off so
carefully. But whether that was it or not, he was the rippenest, maddest
man I ever saw in my life when he went to put on his pants and there
were none to put.
I almost rolled off the porch up-stairs, where I was watching. I never
did know before how much a man thinks of his pants.
He soon had Miss Bray and Miss Jones and a lot of the girls out in the
yard, and everybody was talking at once; and then I heard him say:
"But I tell you, Miss Bray, I put 'em here, right on this woodpile. And
where are they? You run this place, and you are responsible for--"
"Not for pants." And Miss Bray's voice was so shrill it sounded like a
broken whistle. "I'm responsible for no man's pants. When a man can't
take care of his pants, he shouldn't have them. Besides, you shouldn't
have left yours in the woodhouse when working in a Female Orphan
Asylum." And she glared so at him that the poor male thing withered, and
blushed real beautiful.
He's a pretty young man, and I felt sorry for him when Miss Bray snapped
so. I certainly did.
"My overalls are my working-pants," he said, real meek-like, and his
voice was trembling so I thought he was going to cry. "It's very strange
that in a place like this a man's clothes are not safe. I thought--"
"Well, you had no business thinking. Next time keep your pants on." And
Miss Bray, who's good on a bluff, pretended like she had been truly
injured, and the poor little painter sat down.
Presently his face changed, as if a thought had come into his mind from
a long way off, and he said, in another kind of voice:
"I beg your pardon, Miss Bray. I believe I know who done it. It's a
friend of mine who tries to be funny every now and then, and calls it
joking. I'll choke his liver out of him!" And he settled himself on the
woodpile to wait until dark before he went home.
If anybody thinks that wedding was slumpy, they think wrong. It was
thrilly. When the bride and groom and the bridesmaids came in, all the
girls were standing in rows on either side of the walk, making an aisle
in between, and they sang a wedding-song I had invented from my heart.
It was to the Lohengrin tune, which is a little wobbly for words, but
they got them in all right, keeping time with their hands. These are the
words:
1
Here comes the Bride,
God save the Groom!
And please don't let any chil-i-il-dren come,
For they don't know
How children feel,
Nor do they know how with chil-dren to deal.
2
She's still an old maid,
Though she would not have been
Could she have mar-ri-ed any kind of man.
But she could not.
So to the Humane
She came, and caus-ed a good deal of pain.
3
But now she's here
To be married, and go
Away with her red-headed, red-bearded beau.
Have mercy, Lord,
And help him to bear
What we've been doing this many a year!
And such singing! We'd been practising in the back part of the yard, and
humming in bed, so as to get the words into the tune; but we hadn't let
out until that night. That night we let go.
There's nothing like singing from your heart, and, though I was the
minister and stood on a box which was shaky, I sang, too. I led.
The bride didn't think it was modest to hold up her head, and she was
the only silent one. But the bridegroom and bridesmaids sang, and it
sounded like the revivals at the Methodist church. It was grand.
And that bride! She was Miss Bray. A graven image of her couldn't have
been more like her.
She was stuffed in the right places, and her hair was frizzed just like
Miss Bray's. Frizzed in front, and slick and tight in the back; and her
face was a purple pink, and powdered all over, with a piece of dough
just above her mouth on the left side to correspond with Miss Bray's
mole.
And she held herself so like her, shoulders back, and making that little
nervous sniffle with her nose, like Miss Bray makes when she's excited,
that once I had to wink at her to stop.
The groom didn't look like Dr. Rudd. But she wore men's clothes, and
that's the only way you'd know some men were men, and almost anything
will do for a groom. Nobody noticed him.
We were getting on just grand, and I was marrying away, telling them
what they must do and what they mustn't. Particularly that they mustn't
get mad and leave each other, for Yorkburg was very old-fashioned and
didn't like changes, and would rather stick to its mistakes than go back
on its word. And then I turned to the bride.
"Miss Bray," I said, "have you told this man you are marrying that you
are two-faced and underhand, and can't be trusted to tell the truth?
Have you told him that nobody loves you, and that for years you have
tried to pass for a lamb, when you are an old sheep? And does he know
that though you're a good manager on little and are not lazy, that your
temper's been ruined by economizing, and that at times, if you were
dead, there'd be no place for you? Peter wouldn't pass you, and the
devil wouldn't stand you. And does he know he's buying a pig in a bag,
and that the best wedding present he could give you would be a set of
new teeth? And will you promise to stop pink powder and clean your
finger-nails every day? And--"
But I got no further, for something made me look up, and there, standing
in the door, was the real Miss Bray.