I wouldn't like to put on paper how I feel to-day. Uncle Parke has gone.
Gone back to Michigan. I'm such a mixture of feelings that I don't know
which I've got the most of, gladness or sadness or happiness or
miserableness, and I'd rather cry as much as I want than have as much
ice-cream as I could hold.
But I'm not going to cry. I don't like cryers, and, besides, I haven't a
place to do it in private. I wouldn't let Miss Katherine see me, not if
I died of choking. I ought to be rejoicing, and I am; but the female
heart is beyond understanding, Miss Becky Cole says, and it is. Mine is.
I could die of thankfulness, but I'd like first to cry as much as I
could if I let go.
They are engaged. Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine are, and they are to be
married on the twenty-seventh of June. That's my birthday. I will be
thirteen on the twenty-seventh of June.
They told me about it night before last. I was out on the porch, and
Miss Katherine called me and told me she and Doctor Alden wanted me to
go to walk with them. I knew what was coming. Knew in a flash. But I
pretended not to, and thanked her ever so much, and told her I'd just
love to go.
We walked on down to the Calverton road, talking about nothing, and
making out it was our usual night walk, but when we got to the seven
maples Uncle Parke stopped.
"Suppose we sit down," he said. "It's too warm to walk far to-night."
And after we sat he threw his hat on the ground, then leaned over and
took my hands in his.
"Mary Cary," he began. And though his eyes were smiling, his voice was
real quivering. I was noticing, and it was. "Mary Cary, Katherine and I
have brought you with us to-night to ask if you have any objection to
our being married. We would like to do so as soon as possible--if you do
not object."
He turned my face to his, and the look in his eyes was grand. It meant
no matter who objected, marry her he would; but it was a way to tell
me--the way he was asking, and I understood.
"It depends," I said, and, as I am always playing parts to myself, right
on the spot I was a chaperon lady. "It depends on whether you love
enough. Do you?"
"I do. For myself I am entirely sure. As to Katherine--Suppose she tells
you what she thinks."
I turned toward her. "Do you, Miss Katherine? It takes--I guess it takes
a lot of love to stand marriage. Do you think you have enough?"
In the moonlight her face changed like her opal ring when the cream
becomes pink and the pink red.
"I think there is," she said. Then: "Oh, Mary Cary, why are you such a
strange, strange child?" And she threw her arms around me and kissed me
twenty times.
After a while, after we'd talked and talked, and they'd told me things
and I'd told them things, I said I'd consent.
"But if the love ever gives out, I'm not going to stay with you," I
said. "I'm never going to be fashionable and not care for love. A home
without it is hell."
"Mercy, Mary!" Uncle Parke jumped. "Don't use such strong language. It
isn't nice."
"But it's true. I read it in a book, and I've watched the Rices. When
there's love enough you can stand anything. When there isn't, you can
stand nothing. Living together every day you find out a lot you didn't
know, and love can't keep still. It's got to grow or die."
Then I jumped up. "I always could talk a lot about things I didn't
understand," I said. "But I consent." And I flew down the road and left
them.
I've written it out on a piece of paper, about their being engaged, and
looked at it by night and by day since they told me about it. I've said
it low, and I've said it loud, but I can't realize it, and the little
sense the Lord gave me He has taken away.
They say I did it. Say I'm responsible for every bit of it, and that I
will have to look after them all the rest of their lives to see that I
didn't make a mistake in writing that letter. And that I'm to go to
Europe with them on their wedding tour and live with them always and
always. And--oh!--I believe my heart is going to burst with miserable
happiness and happy miserableness, and my head feels like it's in a
bag.
Dr. Parke Alden and Miss Katherine Trent are the two nicest people on
earth, and the two I love best. But I don't think they know all the time
what they are doing and saying. They are that in love they don't see but
one side--the happy side--and they think I am going to leave this place
with a skip and a jump and run along by them, third person, single
number, and not know I'm in the way.
They won't even listen when I tell them I don't know what I'm going to
do. I know what I want to do! Everything in me gets into shivering
trembleness when I think I could go to Europe with them on their wedding
trip. Think of it! Mary Cary could go to E-U-R-O-P-E!
They've invited me and say I'm to go, because I'm never to leave them
any more, and they want me. But it isn't so. Mary tries to believe it's
so, but Martha knows it isn't. They think they think they want me, but
they don't; nobody wants an outsider on a wedding tour, and I'm not
going. I can't help it. Come on, tears! Even angels sometimes cry aloud;
and, not being a step-relation to one, I'm going to let Mary cry if she
wants to. Sometimes Martha is real hard on Mary.
There is no use studying Human Nature. You can't study a thing that
changes by day and by night, and is so uncertain you never know what it
is going to do. Now, here is Mary Cary, mostly Martha, who would rather
get on a train or a boat and go somewhere--she don't care where--than to
do any other thing on earth. Who has never seen anything and wants to
see everything, and who, if anyone had told her a year ago she could go
to New York, and then to Europe, would have slid down every flight of
stairs head foremost from pure joy. And now she has the chance, she is
not going. She is Not.
She hasn't much sense, Mary Cary hasn't, but enough to know wedding
trips are personal, and, besides, the girls have turned into regular
weepers. Every time anything is said about going away their eyes water
up, and Martha feels like a yellow dog with no tail. I know they hate
Miss Katherine's going; but why do they cry about my going? Lord, this
is a strange place to live in, this world is! I wonder what heaven will
be like?
Miss Bray is much better. She says Uncle Parke has cured her. I don't
believe it. I believe it was Relief of the Mind.
* * * * *
I wasn't meant to be a sad person. I was silly sad the other day; but
I've found out when anything bothers you very much, it helps to take it
out and look at it. Walk all around it, poke it and see if it's sure
enough, and, if it isn't, tell it you'll see it dead before you'll let
it do you that way.
That's what I did with what was making me doleful, and now I'm all right
again. It was because I did want to go to Europe awful, and it twisted
my heart like a machine had it when I turned my back on the chance. And
then, too, it was because the girls begged me so not to go away for good
that I got so worried.
They said it wouldn't be the same if I wasn't here, and though they
didn't blame me, they begged me so not to go that I got as addled as the
old black hen that hatched ducks.
Now, did you ever hear of such a thing? As if it really mattered where
Mary Cary lived! I didn't know anybody truly cared, and finding out made
me light in the head. But I know that's just passing--their caring, I
mean. I'm much obliged; but they'll forget it in a little while, and I
will be just a memory.
I hope it will be bright. There's so much dark you can't help that a
brightness is real enjoyable. They say what you look for you see, and
what you want to forget you mustn't remember. There are a lot of things
about my Orphan life I'm going to try to forget. But there are some that
for the sake of sense, and in case of airs, I had better bear in mind. I
guess Martha will see to those. Whenever Mary gives signs of soaring,
Martha brings her straight back to earth. Martha doesn't care for
soarers, and she has a terrible bad habit of letting them know she
don't.
Yorkburg hasn't settled down yet, and is still hanging on to the last
remnants of the surprise about Uncle Parke's coming, and about his
marriage to Miss Katherine and my going away.
Of course, Miss Amelia Cokeland wanted to know if he'd made the Asylum a
present, and how much. At first nobody would tell her. She's got such a
ripping curiosity that there isn't a sneeze sneezed in Yorkburg, or a
cake baked, or a door shut that she doesn't want to know why. But maybe
she can't help it. Some people are natural inquirers, and that's the
way she makes her living, telling the news.
She used to work buttonholes, but since she can't see good she just
spends the day out and tells all she hears. Nobody really likes her, but
her tongue is too sharp to fool with. To keep from being talked about,
everybody pretends to be friendly.
I don't. She shook her finger at me once because I wouldn't tell her
what was in Miss Katherine's letter the first time she went away, and
since then she's never noticed me until Uncle Parke came. Now every time
I see her she's awful pleasant, and tries to make me talk. But a finger
once shook is shook. I don't talk.
But Uncle Parke did make the Asylum a present. He didn't tell me,
neither did Miss Katherine, and I don't think he wanted anybody but the
Board ladies to know. But, of course, they couldn't keep it secret. They
told their husbands, and that meant the town. Nothing but a dead man
could keep from talking about money.
It must have been a lot he gave, for Peelie Duke told me she heard Mrs.
Carr and Mrs. Dent talking about it the day she took some apple-jelly
for Miss Jones over to little Jessie Carr, who was sick.
"He could have kept her at a fashionable boarding-school from the day
she was born until now for the sum he's turned over to the Board," said
Mrs. Carr, and her eyes, which are the beaming kind, just danced, Peelie
said.
"Well, he ought to," grunted Mrs. Dent, who talks like her tongue was
down her throat. "He ought to! We've been taking care of the child for
almost ten years. I hear he wants the house put in good condition, a new
dining-room and kitchen built and four bath-rooms. The rest is to go to
the endowment. I think more ought to go to the endowment and less for
these luxuries. I don't approve of them. An Orphan Asylum is not a
hotel."
"No, but it ought to be a home, if possible," said Mrs. Carr, and Peelie
said she looked at Mrs. Dent like she wondered how under heaven her
husband stood her all the time.
I certainly am glad to know I'm paid for. Some day, when I'm grown and
earning my own living, before I marry my children's father, I am going
to give as much as I can of that money back to Uncle Parke. Of course
that will be some time off, and until then I'll just have to try to be
a nice person.
Miss Katherine says a whole lot of people would pay a big price to have
a nice person in the house with them--one of those cheerful, sunshiny
kind that helps and is encouraging, and gets up again when they fall
down. As I can't earn money yet, I'm going to try to be something like
that, so they won't be sorry I ever was born. Uncle Parke and Miss
Katherine won't.
But isn't it strange, when the time comes for you to do a thing you are
crazy to do, you wish it hadn't come?
There have been days when I hated this Asylum. I've felt at times that I
was just one of the numbers of the multiplication table, and in all my
life I'd never be anything else. And I'd almost sweep the bricks up out
of the yard, I'd be so mad to think I was nothing and nobody.
I wanted to be something and somebody. I didn't want to die and be
forgotten. I would have liked to sit on St. John's Church steeple and
have everybody look at me and say:
"That's Mary Cary! She's great and rich, and gives away lots of money
and sings like an angel." That's what I once would have liked, but I've
learned a few things since I didn't know then.
One is that high places are lonely and hard and uncomfortable, and
people who have sat on them have sometimes wished they didn't. Miss
Katherine told me that herself, also that the place you're in is pretty
near what you're fitted to fill. Otherwise you'd get out and fill
another.
I've given up steeples and superiorities. But I'm glad I'm not going to
be an orphan, just an orphan, all my life. I'm glad; still, when I think
of going away and leaving everybody and everything: the old pump, where
I drowned my first little chicken washing it; and the old mulberry-tree,
where my first doll was buried; and the garret, where I made up
ghost-stories for the girls on rainy days; and the school-room; and even
No. 4--when I think of these things, I could be like that man in the
Bible (I believe it was David, but it might have been Jonah), I could
lift up my voice and weep.
But I'm not going to. Weepers are a nuisance.
I guess that's the way with life, though. When things are going, you
try to hold them back. And if you got them, you'd maybe wish you hadn't.
That's the way Mrs. Gaines did when her husband died. I mean when he
didn't die that first time. She thought he was going to, and so did
everybody else. He had Fright's disease, and it affected his heart,
being liable to take him off any time, and Mrs. Gaines just carried on
terrible.
She had faintings and hysterics, and said she couldn't live without him,
though everybody in Yorkburg knew she could, and easy enough. He without
her, too, had she gone first. She had asthma and an outbreaking temper,
and he drank.
Mrs. Mosby--she's the doctor's wife--said she didn't blame him. No man
could stand Mrs. Gaines all the time without something to help, and
everybody hoped when he got so ill that he'd die and have a little rest.
But he didn't. He got better.
Mrs. Gaines was so surprised she was downright disagreeable about it,
and how he stood it was a wonder. He didn't long, for the next summer he
was dead sure enough, and Mrs. Gaines put on the longest crêpe veil ever
seen in the South, she said. It touched the hem of her skirt in front
and behind; but she cut it in half after everybody had seen it often
enough to know how long it was.
If Augustus Gaines thought she was going to ruin her eyes and choke her
lungs by wearing unhealthy crêpe over her face he thought wrong, she
said, and in a few months it was gone and she was as gay as a girl.
She's what they call a character, Mrs. Gaines is.
I don't want to be like her, and I don't expect to do any groaning over
leaving Yorkburg. I want to live with Uncle Parke and Miss Katherine,
and I'm going to. But it's strange how many happy things hurt.