“Father! Thunder, Katy! Why don’t you say we shall be glad? You know we shall,” Jack exclaimed.
“We, then,” Katy answered, with a second smile which took Ivan with them across the ferry to their train, and we did not see him again, as before his return we had left for Ridgefield.
CHAPTER XX.
MRS. SCHOLASKIE.
Just how Ivan’s wooing of Katy sped I had no means of knowing except through Jack, who wrote:
“Ivan has been here and gone. I tell you he is the right kind. I took him everywhere and introduced him to everybody, and told them he was an escaped nihilist, and had been disguised as a lady in satins and silks, and as an old woman with a hump on her back and a gray wig. That made him a lion at once and folks stared at him till he got tired and said: ‘Please drop Alex and Sophie and the escaped nihilist. It sounds too much like “escaped convict.” I am an American citizen, or going to be as soon as I can be naturalized.’ So I dropped ’em. What a handsome fellow he is, with manners which take you right off your feet! Where did he get ’em? I wonder. Father likes him. Katy was stiff as a ramrod at first, but she—I did not mean to listen, but I got in a trap where I could not help myself and heard something about a letter she wrote and he never got. After that they made up. Oh, my! I just doubled up to hear the silly talk—and—kisses! Yes, sir! kisses! loud as firecrackers! and Katy such a modest little girl. I wouldn’t have believed it of her!”
After Ivan’s return to New York he made the acquaintance of some influential Russians through whom he secured a tolerably lucrative position and was able to keep his grandmother’s gift intact. He came once to Ridgefield during the summer, and I was struck anew with his appearance as a polished gentleman, with the qualities of a splendid man, and when he said “Katy has promised to be my wife,” I congratulated him most sincerely and felt that Katy had chosen well. Sometime in October there was a quiet wedding at my brother’s. Among the wedding presents was a box within a box sent by Ivan’s grandmother and containing all her diamonds except one ring and a small stick pin. She wrote:
“I am getting too old to wear them. My neck is too wrinkled and my hands too full of veins. They will look better on your bride. Give her my love and an old, cranky woman’s blessing. I’m not pleased with the match. Don’t think I am. You ought to have married in your own sphere and not have turned clerk, or something. What have you done with the money I gave you? There is more where that came from. God bless you and your wife.
Your Grandmother.”
The diamonds were a fortune in themselves, and Katy said she should never wear them, but the next winter, when Ivan and Katy spent several weeks in Washington, I read notes of the beautiful Mrs. Scholaskie and her exquisite diamonds, “heirlooms of her husband’s family,” and concluded Katy had changed her mind.