Two days after Jimmie, too, died in Jessie’s lap, and as she gave him into his father’s arms the weeping man blessed her silently for all she had been to him and his, and felt how doubly desolate he should be without her.
CHAPTER XXVI.
GIVING IN MARRIAGE.
There were two little graves now by Margaret’s, and in the house two vacant chairs, and two voices hushed, while Squire Russell counted four children where he had numbered six, and yet the unselfish man would hear of no delay to Dora’s marriage.
“Let it go on the same,” he said. “It will make me feel better to know that there are around me some perfectly happy ones.”
And so the day was appointed, and Bell and Mattie were summoned again from Morrisville, whither the latter had gone during the children’s illness. Judge Verner was lonely with both of his daughters absent, and as of the two he was most accustomed to Bell, he would have been quite content with having her back again if she had not told him how Jessie had turned nurse to Squire Russell’s children, and was consequently in danger of taking the disease. This roused him, and in a characteristic letter to Jessie he bade her “not make a fool of herself any longer by tending children with canker-rash and feeding them with sweetened water, but to pack up her traps and come home.”
To this the saucy Jessie replied that “she should not come home till she was ready; that the Judge could shut up, and what he called sweetened water was quite as strong as the medicine which once cured his colic so soon.” Then, in the coaxing tone the Judge could never resist, she added, “You know I’m just in fun, father, when I talk like that, but really I must stay till after Dora is married, and you must let me, that’s a dear, good old soul,” and so the “good old soul” was cajoled into writing that Jessie might stay, adding in postscript, “Bell tells me you say all sorts of extravagant things about that widower, and this is well enough as long as they mean nothing, but for thunder’s sake don’t go to offering yourself to him in a streak of pity. A nice wife you would make for a widower with six children,—you who don’t know how to darn a pair of stockings, nor make a bed so that the one who sleeps the back side won’t roll out of the front. Mind, now, don’t be a fool.”
“I wonder what put that idea into father’s head,” Jessie said, as she read the letter. “I would not have Squire Russell, let alone offering myself to him. And I do know how to darn socks. Any way, I can pull the holes together, which is just as well as to put in a ball and peek and poke and weave back and forth, and make lacework of it just as Bell does. It’s a real old-maidish trick, and I won’t be an old maid anyhow, if I have to marry Squire Russell,” and crushing the letter into her pocket Jessie went dancing down the stairs, whistling softly for fear of disturbing the sick children.
That afternoon Dora found her, with her face very red and anxious, bending over a basket of stockings and socks, which she was trying to darn after the method most approved by Bell. “Clem had so much to do that day,” she said, “that she had offered to help by taking the darning off her hands.” But it was a greater task than Jessie had anticipated, and Johnnie’s aid was called in before it was finished, the boy proving quite as efficient as the girl, and as Clem secretly thought, succeeding even better. This was before Letitia and Jimmie died, and since their death the Judge had made no effort to call her home, but suffered her to take her own course, which she did by remaining in Beechwood, where they would have missed her so much, and where, if she could not darn socks neatly, she made herself generally useful as the day for the wedding approached. It was arranged to take place on Christmas Eve, and it was Jessie who first suggested that the house should be trimmed even more elaborately than the little church upon the common, where the ceremony was to be performed. With Johnnie as her prime minister, Jessie could accomplish almost anything, and when their work was done, every one joined heartily in praise of the green festoons and wreaths, on which were twined the scarlet berries of the mountain ash, with here and there a blossom of purest white, purloined from the costly flowers which Squire Russell ordered in such profusion from the nearest hothouse. Dora took but little part in the preparations. She was very happy, but her joy was of that quiet kind, which made her content to be still and rest, after the turmoil and wretchedness through which she had passed. The doctor was with her constantly, and to Jessie, who saw the look of perfect peace upon his face and Dora’s, they seemed the impersonation of bliss, while even Bertie noted the change in Dora, saying to her once as she sat with the doctor:
“You don’t look now, Auntie, as you did when you was married to pa.”