I knew when Miss Katherine left I'd be nothing but Martha. That's what I've been—Martha.
She hadn't been gone two days when Mary gave up, and as prompt as possible Martha invented trouble.
It was this way. In the summer we have much more time than in the winter, and the children kept coming to me asking me to make up something, and all of a sudden a play came in my mind. I just love acting. The play was to be the marriage of Dr. Rudd and Miss Bray.
You see, Miss Bray is dead in love with Dr. Rudd—really addled about him. And whenever he comes to see any of the children who are sick she is so solicitous and sweet and smiley that we call her, to ourselves, Ipecac Mollie. Other days, plain Mollie Cottontail. It seemed to me if we could just think him into marrying her, it would be the best work we'd ever done, and I thought it was worth trying.
They say if you just think and think and think about a thing you can make somebody else think about it, too. And not liking Dr. Rudd, we didn't mind thinking her on him, and so we began. Every day we'd meet for an hour and think together, and each one promised to think single, and in between times we got ready.
Becky Drake says love goes hard late in life, and sometimes touches the brain. Maybe that accounts for Miss Bray.
She is fifty-three years old, and all frazzled out and done up with adjuncts. But Dr. Rudd, being a man with not even usual sense, and awful conceited, don't see what we see, and swallows easy. Men are funny—funny as some women.
I don't think he's ever thought of courting Miss Bray. But she's thought of it, and for once we truly tried to help her.
Well, we got ready, beginning two days after Miss Katherine left, and the play came off Friday night, the third of July. In consequence of that play I have been in a retreat, and on the Fourth of July I made a New-Year resolution.
I resolved I would do those things I should not do, and leave undone the things I should. I would not disappoint Miss Bray. She looked for things in me to worry her. She should find them.
Well, I was in that top-story summer-resort for ten days. Put there for reflection. I reflected. And on the difference between Miss Katherine and Miss Bray.
But the play was a corker; it certainly was. We chose Friday night because Miss Jones always takes tea with her aunt that night, and Miss Bray goes to choir practising. I wish everybody could hear her sing! Gabriel ought to engage her to wake the dead, only they'd want to die again.
Dr. Rudd is in the choir, and she just lives on having Friday nights to look forward to.
The ceremony took place in the basement-room where we play in bad weather. It's across from the dining-room, the kitchen being between, and it's a right nice place to march in, being long and narrow.
I was the preacher, and Prudence Arch and Nita Polley, Emma Clark and Margaret Witherspoon were the bridesmaids.
Lizzie Wyatt was the bride, and Katie Freeman, who is the tallest girl in the house, though only fourteen, was the groom.
Katie is so thin she would do as well for one thing in this life as another, so we made her Dr. Rudd.
We didn't have but two men. Miss Webb says they're really not necessary at weddings, except the groom and the minister. Nobody notices them, and, besides, we couldn't get the pants.
I was an Episcopal minister, so I wouldn't need any. Mrs. Blamire's raincoat was the gown, and I cut up an old petticoat into strips, and made bands to go down the front and around my neck. Loulie Prentiss painted some crosses and marks on them with gilt, so as to make me look like a Bishop. I did. A little cent one.
There wasn't any trouble about my costume, because I could soap my hair and make it lie flat, and put on the robe, and there I was. But how to get a pair of pants for Katie Freeman was a puzzle.
Nothing male lives in the Humane. Not even a billy-goat. We couldn't borrow pants, knowing it wouldn't be safe; and what to do I couldn't guess.
Well, the day came, and, still wondering where those pants were to come from, I went out in the yard where a man was painting a window-shutter that had blown off a back window. Right before my eyes was the woodhouse door wide open, and something said to me:
"Walk in."
I walked in; and there in a corner on a woodpile was a real nice pair of pants, and a collar and cravat, and a coat and a tin lunch-bucket, which had been eaten—the lunch had. And when I saw those pants I knew Katie Freeman was fixed.
They belonged to the man who was painting the shutter.
It was an awful hot day, and he had taken them off in the woodhouse and put on his overalls, and when he wasn't looking I slipped out with them, and went up to Miss Bray's room. She was down-stairs talking to Miss Jones, and I hid them under the mattress of her bed.
I knew when she found they were missing she'd turn to me to know where they were. No matter what went wrong, from the cat having kittens or the chimney smoking, she looked to me as the cause. And if there was to be any searching, No. 4—I sleep in No. 4 when Miss Katherine is away—would be the first thing searched. So I put them under her bed.
I wish Miss Katherine could have seen that man about six o'clock, when the time came for him to go home. She would have laughed, too. She couldn't have helped it.
He is young, and Bermuda Ray says he is in love with Callie Payne, who lives just down the street. He has to pass her house going home, and I guess that's the reason he wore his good clothes and took them off so carefully. But whether that was it or not, he was the rippenest, maddest man I ever saw in my life when he went to put on his pants and there were none to put.
I almost rolled off the porch up-stairs, where I was watching. I never did know before how much a man thinks of his pants.
He soon had Miss Bray and Miss Jones and a lot of the girls out in the yard, and everybody was talking at once; and then I heard him say:
"But I tell you, Miss Bray, I put 'em here, right on this woodpile. And where are they? You run this place, and you are responsible for—"
"Not for pants." And Miss Bray's voice was so shrill it sounded like a broken whistle. "I'm responsible for no man's pants. When a man can't take care of his pants, he shouldn't have them. Besides, you shouldn't have left yours in the woodhouse when working in a Female Orphan Asylum." And she glared so at him that the poor male thing withered, and blushed real beautiful.
He's a pretty young man, and I felt sorry for him when Miss Bray snapped so. I certainly did.
"My overalls are my working-pants," he said, real meek-like, and his voice was trembling so I thought he was going to cry. "It's very strange that in a place like this a man's clothes are not safe. I thought—"
"Well, you had no business thinking. Next time keep your pants on." And Miss Bray, who's good on a bluff, pretended like she had been truly injured, and the poor little painter sat down.
Presently his face changed, as if a thought had come into his mind from a long way off, and he said, in another kind of voice:
"I beg your pardon, Miss Bray. I believe I know who done it. It's a friend of mine who tries to be funny every now and then, and calls it joking. I'll choke his liver out of him!" And he settled himself on the woodpile to wait until dark before he went home.
If anybody thinks that wedding was slumpy, they think wrong. It was thrilly. When the bride and groom and the bridesmaids came in, all the girls were standing in rows on either side of the walk, making an aisle in between, and they sang a wedding-song I had invented from my heart.
It was to the Lohengrin tune, which is a little wobbly for words, but they got them in all right, keeping time with their hands. These are the words:
1
Here comes the Bride,
God save the Groom!
And please don't let any chil-i-il-dren come,
For they don't know
How children feel,
Nor do they know how with chil-dren to deal.
2
She's still an old maid,
Though she would not have been
Could she have mar-ri-ed any kind of man.
But she could not.
So to the Humane
She came, and caus-ed a good deal of pain.
3
But now she's here
To be married, and go
Away with her red-headed, red-bearded beau.
Have mercy, Lord,
And help him to bear
What we've been doing this many a year!
And such singing! We'd been practising in the back part of the yard, and humming in bed, so as to get the words into the tune; but we hadn't let out until that night. That night we let go.
There's nothing like singing from your heart, and, though I was the minister and stood on a box which was shaky, I sang, too. I led.
The bride didn't think it was modest to hold up her head, and she was the only silent one. But the bridegroom and bridesmaids sang, and it sounded like the revivals at the Methodist church. It was grand.
And that bride! She was Miss Bray. A graven image of her couldn't have been more like her.
She was stuffed in the right places, and her hair was frizzed just like Miss Bray's. Frizzed in front, and slick and tight in the back; and her face was a purple pink, and powdered all over, with a piece of dough just above her mouth on the left side to correspond with Miss Bray's mole.
And she held herself so like her, shoulders back, and making that little nervous sniffle with her nose, like Miss Bray makes when she's excited, that once I had to wink at her to stop.
The groom didn't look like Dr. Rudd. But she wore men's clothes, and that's the only way you'd know some men were men, and almost anything will do for a groom. Nobody noticed him.
We were getting on just grand, and I was marrying away, telling them what they must do and what they mustn't. Particularly that they mustn't get mad and leave each other, for Yorkburg was very old-fashioned and didn't like changes, and would rather stick to its mistakes than go back on its word. And then I turned to the bride.
"Miss Bray," I said, "have you told this man you are marrying that you are two-faced and underhand, and can't be trusted to tell the truth? Have you told him that nobody loves you, and that for years you have tried to pass for a lamb, when you are an old sheep? And does he know that though you're a good manager on little and are not lazy, that your temper's been ruined by economizing, and that at times, if you were dead, there'd be no place for you? Peter wouldn't pass you, and the devil wouldn't stand you. And does he know he's buying a pig in a bag, and that the best wedding present he could give you would be a set of new teeth? And will you promise to stop pink powder and clean your finger-nails every day? And—"
But I got no further, for something made me look up, and there, standing in the door, was the real Miss Bray.
All I said was—"Let us pray!"