Rafael shrugged his shoulders. “Good ting for me. I come here. I learn how to be ’Merican man in two, tree weeks. I come here silly lil foreign boy. I look roun’. I listen hard. I see how you do here in your gran’ country. And now,” Rafael snuggled into his pillows with a beatific smile, “I find why all dose wheel go roun’. I maka fine machine, mebbe. I swear off carry a dagger. And I tank you alla my life.”
So Eleanor could return to Jim, the bull pup, the suitors, and the diversions of New York, with the happy assurance that in the end Rafael’s devotion to her might be the making of him, and at the least its untoward climax would do him more good than harm. Having nothing now to worry about, she devoted the journey back to New York to planning a ravishing new gown for Babe’s wedding. It was to be yellow, because Dick Blake (who would not be at the wedding) liked yellow gowns on her best; and very plain, because Dick liked simple lines and no furbelows. Details might safely be left to Madame Celeste. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that Eleanor devoted the journey back to New York to thinking about Dick Blake.
Babe’s wedding was to be a grand society function.
“To please John’s father and my mother,” Babe wrote to her friends of 19—; “John and I are resigned, because a wedding only lasts for one evening, and after that we can shut ourselves up in our regular castle of a house, with only the people we want, and everything you can think of in your wildest dreams to amuse ourselves with. So one little evening isn’t much to sacrifice. Mother says we owe it to our social position. She doesn’t know that we have decided not to have any social position. We’re just going to have a good time and try to make some good times for other people. An impromptu wedding would have been lots more fun, but you must all come, just the same.”
Babe’s sister was to be maid of honor, Bob and Babbie, Betty and Roberta Lewis were to be bridesmaids, and the other “Merry Hearts” would sit together in a front pew, and be considered just as much in the wedding party as if they were bridesmaids also. Jasper J. Morton was coming up the night of the wedding in his private car. He had meant to come the day before “to help you entertain Miss B. A. and her friends,” he wrote Babe, but there were important directors’ meetings to keep him at the last minute. He wrote Babe not to worry about him. “I shall charter a special train if necessary—and don’t I always arrive on time as a matter of principle?”
But when Babe left the house for the church he had not appeared, and after they had kept people waiting and wondering half an hour, and Babe was so nervous that she declared she should cry in one more minute it was decided to go on without him.
The reception was half over when he appeared, looking very meek and sheepish. He kissed Babe on both cheeks, shook John’s hand till it ached, and despatched Babbie to “find those reporter fellows and tell ’em I’m not smashed up anywhere between here and New York, and I don’t withhold my blessing from the happy couple. Tell ’em I was accidentally detained, and if they want to know how say it was on a private matter that is none of their business.”
“And add some characteristic remarks about the ridiculous apes who try to run our railroads,” put in John with a chuckle.
“No, sir,” said Jasper J. Morton, with emphasis, “not this trip. Pretty nearly every mile was a record, and I’ve recommended that engineer to run the road’s Lightning Limited at a big increase over his present pay. The reason I didn’t get here was personal—purely personal.”
Later in the evening he got Babe and John and Betty into a corner, and told them all about it. “Miss B. A.’s to blame, as usual,” he began. “You see my train went out just ten minutes behind the Lightning Limited, with no stop till Albany and the track clear all the way west. I was hurrying through the station to get on, when I nearly ran down a pretty little woman who was crying so hard she didn’t see me coming. She’d lost the Lightning Limited, and her husband was dying in a little place just beyond Albany where he’d gone on business and been taken suddenly sick. There was a slow train in an hour, but that would be too late, she said.