“What do you mean, you impudent boy?” screamed Betty, red and furious, while the Colonel laughed. “How dare you ask such things? I have a great mind to give you a good slap.”
“Hi, Miss Betty, Aunt Tulip, she tole me so,” replied Kettle, deeply injured. “An’ I jes’ thought I’d arsk you.”
Betty could not help laughing, and when Fortescue came for his afternoon visit—for two visits a day were the least he could get along with, so he swore—Betty told him of Kettle’s iniquity. Instead of denouncing Kettle, Fortescue laughed uproariously, and, calling the boy out of the kitchen, where he was peeling potatoes for Aunt Tulip, handed him what Kettle described as “a whole round silver dollar,” and said, still laughing:
“Kettle, I am dead stuck on Miss Betty, and she has got a kind of a shine for me.”
“There, now, Miss Betty,” said the aggrieved Kettle. “An’ you was a-gwine ter slap me fur axin’ you!”
After a week or two, Fortescue mustered up courage to ask the Colonel, since he had said that he would not stand in the way of Betty’s happiness, if Betty and himself could be married, and, if so, would the Colonel come to Rosehill to live for the present. The Colonel shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Holly Lodge and Cesar and Aunt Tulip and this little black Kettle will see me out my time. It is a part of a true philosophy to take short views of life. You are at Rosehill for another year, anyhow, and I shall remain at Holly Lodge. You and Betty will come over to see me occasionally, I dare say.”
Armed with this information, Fortescue went to Betty, and promptly repudiated his promise to wait until Betty was ready before he mentioned marriage.
On a bright December day, mild for the season, Betty and Fortescue were married in the old Colonial church. Betty, who loved show, insisted that there should be a real military wedding, and so from the great fortress forty miles away came a dozen dashing young officers. There was a great train of bridesmaids, Sally Carteret leading them in beauty as well as precedence. Never had the old church seen such a blaze of gold lace and glittering epaulets and gilt sword-hilts and splendid chapeaux. Everybody in the county came to Betty’s wedding, and waited breathlessly for the entrance of the bridal party. Fortescue, with his best man, both in gorgeous new full-dress uniforms, were waiting smiling in the chancel. Before the bridal train entered, came Uncle Cesar and Aunt Tulip, Uncle Cesar in a new suit of clothes and carrying in his hand a superannuated silk hat of the Colonel’s. Aunt Tulip wore a large red and green plaid gown and a black hat with pink roses, and both wore large wedding favors of white satin. Behind them, with great solemnity, marched Kettle. He was arrayed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, made by Aunt Tulip with the aid of a paper pattern, out of an old green riding habit of Betty’s. A large collar of cotton lace adorned Kettle’s shoulders, and he, too, wore a wedding favor as large as a cabbage, with ends that hung below his knees. In dignity and importance, Kettle considered that he ranked next the bride, and enjoyed hugely being the cynosure of all eyes as he strutted up the aisle. Then came the dozen stalwart young officers in splendid uniforms, and, after them, the rosebud garden of girls in fluttering gauzes and chiffons. When they had all reached the chancel, the officers drew their swords and made an archway of the shining blue blades over the heads of the Colonel, and Betty in her bridal veil. Never was there a more smiling bride in the old church. Fortescue shouted his responses in what Betty called his “parade ground voice,” while Betty’s answers, though soft, were clear.