Mary Ware's Promised Land

by Annie F. Johnston

Ever since the arrival of the first gift, a little silver vase from Miss Allison McIntyre, which would always suggest the donor's love of flowers and her garden which she shared lavishly with the whole Valley, Betty had been in a beatific state of mind over the loving favor showed her by her friends. Her pleasure reached high tide, however, when the last one arrived, a box marked from Warwick Hall. It was from Madam Chartley. The box was so big that they made all sorts of wild guesses as to its contents. Layer after layer of paper and excelsior were lifted out, and all they could find was more wrappings. At last, from the very centre, Alec lifted out a fragile cup and saucer, which Betty recognized with a cry of astonishment and delight.

"One of the ancestral teacups! I didn't suppose Madam would part with one of them for anybody!"

She turned the bit of delicate china so that Mrs. Sherman could see the crest, and the motto, "I keep tryste." The note folded inside brought happy tears to her eyes, for it said that she was the only one to whom one of these treasured heirlooms had been given. Madam felt deeply that a spiritual kinship existed between her old ancestor Edryn and the little friend who had kept tryst so faithfully in all things.

Jack came at five o'clock. He was to be the guest of Oaklea, but most of his time was spent at The Locusts. That night, when moonlight and springtime filled the valley with ethereal whiteness and sweetness, he and Betty sat out on the porch. Three generations of Romance made enchanted ground of the whole place. In the library an older Jack and Elizabeth sat recalling the night like this when they had entered their Arcady. Outside, under the arching locusts, up and down, up and down, paced the old Colonel in the moonlight. But not alone; for every lilac-laden breeze that stirred the branches whispered softly, "Amanthis! Amanthis!"

Once Jack looked at Betty, sitting beside him in the broad shaft of moonlight, its glory streaming across her white dress and fair face and said, "It's like that song, 'Oh, fair and sweet and holy,' out here. Why couldn't we have the wedding on the porch, where I first saw you, instead of in the house? Right here in this moonlight that makes you look like a snowdrop."

"Would you really like to have it out here?" asked Betty, pleased by the idea herself and pleased because he suggested it. "It would be a very simple matter to have it so, and there'll be nobody critical enough among our few guests to call us sentimental if we do."

So it came about that the wedding next night was the simplest and most beautiful that any one there had ever witnessed. Besides the two families, Miss Allison and Alex Shelby were the only guests; Alex, because of the part he had played in restoring Jack to health, and Miss Allison, because no occasion in the Valley seemed quite complete without her. She had been too closely bound up with all the good times of Betty's little girl days and her happy maidenhood, not to be present at this time.

Betty had said, "I want my last evening at The Locusts to be just like the first one that I ever spent here, in one way. Then Lloyd sang and played on her harp. I've missed it so much since she took it over to Oaklea. I'd love to have the memory of her music one of the last that I carry away with me."

So that night, when she stepped out on the porch all dressed for her bridal, she found the harp standing in one corner, gleaming in the moonlight like burnished gold. Fair and tall, it impressed her as it had done when it first struck her childish fancy, that its strings had just been swept by some one of the Shining Ones beyond, who were a part of the Pilgrim's dream. She was standing beside it when Lloyd and Rob and Jack walked over from Oaklea. Her filmy white dress, exquisitely cloud-like and dainty, was as simple and girlish as the one she had worn the night before; but this time Jack did not compare her to a snowdrop. The moonlight gave such an unearthly whiteness to her gown, such a radiance to her upturned face, that he, too, thought of the Pilgrim's dream, and likened her to one of the Shining Ones herself.

With that thought came the memory of a beloved voice as he had heard it for the last time at the end of a perfect Sabbath, singing of those "Angels of Light," that had been so very real to him since they first trailed comfort through his earliest lullabies. Man as he was, something like a poignant ache seemed to grip his throat till he could not speak for a moment, because "the little mother" was having no part in this, the crowning happiness of his life.