Apple Blossoms
Of course Ben wanted to be married at once, and whatever he wanted Geraldine wanted, but Mrs. Barry overruled this.
"I hope you will go back to school, Ben, and get your sheepskin," she said. "I want you to live in the city, too, and leave Geraldine with me. I would like to have some happiness with a daughter before she is engrossed in being your wife. Wait for your wedding until the orchard blooms again."
Ecstatic as Ben was, he could see sense in this; but vacation came first and Geraldine was a belle at Keefeport that summer. Her beauty blossomed, and all the repressed vivacity of her nature came to the surface. Her room at Rockcrest commanded the ocean, and every night before she slept she knelt before her window and gave thanks for a happiness which seemed as illimitable as the waters rolling to the horizon. She yachted, and danced, and canoed, and flew, all that summer. She gained the hearts of the women by her unspoiled modesty and consideration, while Ben was the envy of every bachelor at the resort. Nor did Geraldine forget Miss Upton. Every few days she called at the shop, and the two women there were never tired of admiring and exclaiming over the charming costumes in which Mrs. Barry dressed her child, and many a gift the girl brought to them, never forgetting what she owed to her good fairy.
Pete was a happy general utility man and Miss Upton borrowed him at times; but he liked best working on the yacht, where he was never through polishing and cleaning, keeping it spick and span. He was given a blue suit and a yachting cap and rolled around the deck the jolliest of jolly little tars.
When autumn came, Ben Barry took rooms in the city, coming to Keefe for the week-ends. Geraldine, who had had the usual school-girl fragments of music and languages, studied hard, and Mrs. Barry took her to town for one month instead of the three which she usually spent there. It was best not to divert Ben too much.
So the winter wore away, and the snow melted and the crocuses peeped up again. The robins returned, and Ben understood at last why their insistent, joyous cry was always of Geraldine, Geraldine, Geraldine!
The orchard was under solicitous surveillance this spring, and though it takes the watched pot so long to boil, at last the rosy clouds drifting in the sky seemed to catch in the apple boughs and rest there, and then the wedding day was set.
The spacious rooms of the old house were cleared for dancing, for the ceremony was to take place out under the trees at noon. Miss Upton had a new black silk dress given her by the bridegroom with a note over which she wept, for it acknowledged so affectionately all that he owed to his bride's good fairy from the day when she so effectively waved her umbrella wand in the city. One of her gowns was made over for Mrs. Whipp, who on the great day stood with the maids and watched the wedding party as it filed out over the lawn to the rosy bower of the orchard. The six bridesmaids wore pale-green and white, and, as Miss Upton viewed with satisfaction, "droopy hats." She scanned the half-dozen of Ben's men friends who supported him on the occasion and mentally noted their inferiority to her hero.
Geraldine—but who could describe Geraldine in her beautiful happiness and her happy beauty! Look over your fairy tales and find a princess in clinging, lacy robes, her veil fastened with apple blossoms, and the golden sheen of her hair shining through. Her bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley showered down before her and clung to her filmy gown as she stepped, and the sweet gravity of her eyes never left the face of the good old minister who had baptized Ben in his babyhood, until he came to the words: "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" Mrs. Barry stepped forward, took the hands of her children and placed them together. Mehitable Upton was not the only one in the large gathering who dissolved at the look on those three faces.