Part 21 (1/2)
Miles Bradford had made a hurried trip to the city that morning, to attend to a matter of business, going in on the ten o'clock trolley and coming back in time for lunch. On his return, he laid a package in Mary's lap, and handed one to each of the other girls. Joyce's was a pile of new July magazines to read on the train. Lloyd's was a copy of ”Abdallah, or the Four-leaved Shamrock,” which had led to so much discussion the morning of the wedding, when they hunted clovers for the dream-cake boxes.
Mary's eyes grew round with surprise and delight when she opened her package and found inside the white paper and gilt cord a big box of Huyler's candies. ”With the compliments of the Pilgrim Father,” was pencilled on the engraved card stuck under the string.
There was layer after layer of chocolate creams and caramels, marshmallows and candied violets, burnt almonds and nougat, besides a score of other things--specimens of the confectioner's art for which she knew no name. She had seen the outside of such boxes in the show-cases in Phoenix, but never before had such a tempting display met her eyes as these delicious sweets in their tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of lace paper and tinfoil and ribbons, crowned by a pair of little gilt tongs, with which one might make dainty choice.
Betty's gift was not so sightly. It looked like an old dried sponge, for it was only a ball of matted roots. But she held it up with an exclamation of pleasure. ”Oh, it is one of those fern-b.a.l.l.s we were talking about this morning! I've been wanting one all year. You see,”
she explained to Mary, when she had finished thanking Doctor Bradford, ”you hang it up in a window and keep it wet, and it turns into a perfect little hanging garden, so fine and green and feathery it's fit for fairy-land. It will grow as long as you remember to water it. Gay Melville had one last year in her window at school, and I envied her every time I saw it.”
”Now what does that make me think of?” said Mary, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her forehead into a network of wrinkles and squinting her eyes half-shut in her effort to remember. ”Oh, I know! It's something I read in a paper a few days ago. It's in China or j.a.pan, I don't know which, but in one of those heathen countries. When a young man wants to find out if a girl really likes him, he goes to her house early in the dawn, and leaves a growing plant on the balcony for her. If she spurns him, she tears it up by the roots and throws it out in the street to wither, and I believe breaks the pot; but if she likes him, she takes it in and keeps it green, to show that he lives in her memory.”
A shout of laughter from Rob and Phil had made her turn to stare at them uneasily. ”What are you laughing at?” she asked, innocently. ”I _did_ read it. I can show you the paper it is in, and I thought it was a right bright way for a person to find out what he wanted to know without asking.”
It was very evident that she hadn't the remotest idea she had said anything personal, and her ignorance of the cause of their mirth made her speech all the funnier. Doctor Bradford laughed, too, as he said with a formal bow: ”I hope you will take the suggestion to heart, Miss Betty, and let my memory and the fern-ball grow green together.”
Then, Mary, realizing what she had said when it was too late to unsay it, clapped her hands over her mouth and groaned. Apologies could only make the matter worse, so she tried to hide her confusion by pa.s.sing around the box of candy. It pa.s.sed around so many times during the course of the afternoon that the box was almost empty by train-time.
Mary returned to it with unabated interest after the guests were gone.
It was the first box of candy she had ever owned, and she wondered if she would ever have another.
”I believe I'll save it for a keepsake box,” she thought, gathering it up in her arms to follow Betty up-stairs. Rob had come back with them from the station, and, taking the story of ”Abdallah,” he and Lloyd had gone to the library to read it together.
Betty was going to her room to put the fern-ball to soak, according to directions. Feeling just a trifle lonely since her parting from Joyce, Mary wandered off to the room that seemed to miss her, too, now that all her personal belongings had disappeared from wardrobe and dressing-table. But she was soon absorbed in arranging her keepsake box.
Emptying the few remaining sc.r.a.ps of candy into a paper bag, she smoothed out the lace paper, the ribbons, and the tinfoil to save to show to Hazel Lee. These she put in her trunk, but the gilt tongs seemed worthy of a place in the box. The Pilgrim Father's card was dropped in beside it, then the heart-shaped dream-cake box, holding one of the white icing roses that had ornamented the bride's cake. Last and most precious was the silver s.h.i.+lling, which she polished carefully with her chamois-skin pen-wiper before putting away.
”I don't need to look at _you_ to make me think of the Best Man,” she said to the Philip on the coin. ”There's more things than you that remind me of him. I certainly would like to know what sort of a fate you are going to bring me. There's about as much chance of my being an heiress as there is of that nightmare coming true.”
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR
It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr. Sherman:
”I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever met. It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that G.o.d-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew.
Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it in her to make herself not only an honor to her s.e.x, but one of the most interesting women of her generation.”
Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library, hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her hearing. Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one, coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe, agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its point. The last time it p.r.i.c.ked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.
”See how stuck-up that made me,” she said, with an embarra.s.sed laugh, shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished floor. ”It's so seldom I hear a compliment that I haven't learned to take them gracefully.”
”G.o.dmother is waiting in the carriage for me,” said Betty, pinning on her hat as she spoke, ”or I'd help you pick them up. I just hurried in to tell you while it was fresh in my mind, and I could remember the exact words. I had no idea it would upset you so,” she added, mischievously.
Left to herself, Mary soon gathered the beads back into the box and resumed her task. She was making a pair of moccasins for Girlie Dinsmore's doll. Her conscience still troubled her for playing stork, and she had resolved to spend some of her abundant leisure in making amends in this way. But only her fingers took up the same work that had occupied her before Betty's interruption. Her thoughts started off in an entirely different direction.
A most romantic little day-dream had been keeping pace with her bead-stringing. A day-dream through which walked a prince with eyes like Rob's and a voice like Phil's, and the wealth of a Croesus in his pockets. And he wrote sonnets to her and called her his ladye fair, and gave her not only one turquoise, but a bracelet-ful.
Now every vestige of sentiment was gone, and she was sitting up straight and eager, repeating the old Colonel's words. They were making her unspeakably happy. ”She has it in her to make herself not only an honor to her s.e.x, but one of the most interesting women of her generation.”
”To make herself an honor,”--why, that would be winning the third leaf of the magic shamrock--the _golden_ one! Betty had said that she believed that every one who earned those first three leaves was sure to find the fourth one waiting somewhere in the world. It wouldn't make any difference then whether she was an old maid or not. She need not be dependent on any prince to bring her the diamond leaf, and that was a good thing, for down in her heart she had her doubts about one ever coming to her. She loved to make up foolish little day-dreams about them, but it would be too late for him to come when she was a grandmother, and she wouldn't be beautiful till then, so she really had no reason to expect one. It would be much safer for her to depend on herself, and earn the first three in plain, practical ways.