CHAPTER XV
"AS IT WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS" AND BETTY'S DIARY
"The lights are out and gone are all the guests." It is very late, but I must sit up and write the full account of it while it is all fresh and clear in my mind. Besides I am too wide awake to sleep even if I should try. It was a beautiful, beautiful wedding; but I must go back ever so far if I am to have no gaps in this record.
It is three years now since I went away to Warwick Hall to teach; full, hard years, but so rich in experiences and so helpful in my work that I'd gladly go on with them if I were not needed here at home. But they do need me now that Lloyd is married and gone, and although she has not gone far and will be in and out every day, and her room is just as she left it, and her place will always be hers, still I am the daughter of the house in many ways, and can in a measure make up to godmother and Papa Jack all they have done for me. I think they do feel repaid to a great extent by my little successes and the prospect of more to follow by and by. It made me so glad and proud when I heard Papa Jack telling the doctor to-day about the essays the Atlantic had accepted of mine, and how pleased he was over the series of sketches that the New York publishers are going to bring out in book form in time for the holidays. The same publishers that refused my poor old novel too.
It does not seem possible that two years and a half have gone by since Lloyd wrote to me of her engagement, but it seemed a long time to look forward to then. Her father and mother would not have consented to give her up any sooner even if Rob had been in a position to ask it. Now he has been a member of his grandfather's firm for a full year, and everybody says he is one of the most promising young lawyers ever admitted to the Louisville bar. He has gone into his life work as he went into all his games—to win! And he is so big and strong and dependable, I know that godmother and Papa Jack feel perfectly safe in giving Lloyd up to him. I think that even the old Colonel finds it a little easier to be reconciled to the idea of her leaving because he is so fond and proud of Rob. But he seems to take it to heart more than any one else.
Lloyd thought he did, too, and when she first began to plan her wedding she asked her father if he would feel hurt if she asked her grandfather instead of him to go with her to the altar and give her away. "You know, Papa Jack," she said in that saucy way of hers that no one about the place can resist, "you cut him off from the one chance he should have had to perform that ceremony, by running away with mothah. So it's only fair you should make it up to him now by giving him the honah of escorting me. Besides you and she have each othah, and he feels so left out and lonely and is making such a deadly serious affair of my going away."
Papa Jack saw it from her point of view and was entirely willing to do as she wished. When the old Colonel found out what Lloyd wanted, he was so touched and pleased and complimented that I think he must have lain awake nights trying to think of things to show his appreciation. This last week she called presentation week, because every single day he surprised her with some lovely present.
The first day he gave her the little silver sugar-bowl with butterfly handles and the cream-pitcher shaped like a lily that he had promised her the first time she had a "pink party" up in his room, when she was a tiny little girl. The next day it was a purse full of bright new gold pieces, and the next a locket that had been his mother's, all set round with sapphires, and with sapphires strung at intervals on the slender chain that held it. One day the gift was a treasure of a rosewood chair and writing-desk that had belonged to Lloyd's grandmother Amanthis, with all the little mother-of-pearl articles that go with a desk, just as she had used them. She was too surprised for anything the day he gave her the harp. It had been called hers since she started to learn to play on it, but she never for a moment supposed he would allow it taken away from The Locusts. The sixth present had no intrinsic value, but he had treasured it for years, a medal bestowed on one of his Virginia ancestors by the king, as a reward for his services to the crown in those early days of struggle and stress in the colonies.