Part 24 (1/2)

”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 n.o.body 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 compa.s.ses 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. n.o.body would have been left out; n.o.body 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 n.o.ble 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,--”G.o.d save the Commonwealth!”