"Do you want me now, Ann?" he asked me; gently as he pressed his cheek against my hair.
"If you want me, take me and help me find that dog to-morrow," I answered as I again reached out my hand and put it for the last time on the pathetic little woolly head. I couldn"t hold back the sob.
"Go in the house to bed, dear, for you are completely worn out. I"ll bury the lamb and look for any traces that may help us to find the savage," said Matthew as he drew me to my feet and with quiet authority led me to the back door and opened it for me. For a second I let him take me again into his strong arms, but I wilted there and I simply could not raise my lips to his. The first time I remember kissing Matthew Berry was at his own tenth birthday party, and he had dropped a handkerchief behind me that I had failed to see as all of the budding flower and chivalry of Hayesville stood in a ring in his mother"s drawing-room.
"Dear old Matt," I murmured to myself as I again fell dead between the posts of the ancestral bed.
The next morning I awoke to a new world--or rather I turned straight about and went back into my own proper scheme of existence. At the crack of dawn I wakened and set my muscles for the spring from my pillows, then I stretched my arms, yawned, snuggled my cheek into those same pillows, and deliberately went to sleep, covering up my head with the old embroidered counter-pane to shut out from my ears a clarion crow from beyond my windows. When I next became conscious old Rufus" woolly head was peering anxiously into my room door, and I judged from the length of the shadows that the sun cast from the windows that it must be after ten o"clock.
"Am you sick?" he inquired with belligerent solicitude.
"No, Rufus, and I"m going back to sleep. Call me in time to have dinner with father and Uncle Cradd," I answered as I again burrowed into the pillows.
"I give that there rooster and family a bucket of feed," said Rufus begrudgingly, and he stood as if waiting to be praised for thus burying the hatchet that he had been mentally brandishing over the neck of the enemy.
I made no response, but stretched my tired limbs out between the silky old sheets and again lost consciousness.
The next time I became intelligent it was when Polly"s soft arm was slid under my neck and her red lips applied to my cheek.
"Miss Ann, are you ill?" she questioned frantically. "Mr. Matthew and I have been here for hours and have fed and attended to everything. He made me come up because he was afraid you might be dead."
"I am, Polly, and now watch me come back to life," I said as I sat up and blinked at the sun coming in through the western window, thus proclaiming the time as full afternoon.
"We found Mr. G. Bird and all of the other--" Polly was beginning to say when I cut her short.
"Polly, dear, please go tell Matthew to ride down to the bank and telephone Bess that I"m coming in to stay a week with her and to invite Belle and Owen and the rest to dinner. By the time he gets back I"ll be ready to go."
As I spoke I threw the sheet from me and started to arise, take up my life, and walk.
"But who"ll attend to the chickens and--" Polly fairly gasped.
"I don"t know and I don"t care, and if you want to go in to dinner with us, Polly, you had better hurry on, for you"ll have to beg your mother hard," I said, and at the suggestion Polly fairly flew.
I don"t exactly know what Polly told Matthew about me, but his face was a study as I descended elegantly clad and ready to go to town with him.
"Good, dear!" he said as I raised my lips to his and gave him a second edition of that ring-around-rosy kiss. "I knew you would wear yourself out.
I have telephoned Owen to motor out that young Belgian that Baldwin got down to run my farm, and he"ll take charge of everything while you rest."
"I don"t care whether he comes or not," I said as I walked towards the library door to say good-by to my parent twins, who hardly noticed me at all on account of a knotty disagreement in some old Greek text they were digging over.
"Well, you needn"t worry about--" Matthew was continuing to say, with the deepest uncertainty in his face and voice.
"I won"t," I answered. "Did Bess say she could get enough people together to dance to-night?"
"We"ll all go out to the country club and have a great fling," said Matthew, with the soothing tone of voice that one would use to a friend temporarily mentally deranged. "Hope Mother Corn-ta.s.sel lets Polly go."
"There she is waiting at the gate for us with her frills in a bundle. Swoop her up, Matt, and fly for fear she is getting off without Aunt Mary"s seeing her. Aunt Mary is so bent on keeping Polly"s milking hand in."
"That young Belgian says he"s a good milker, and you needn"t worry about--"
"I won"t," I again answered Matthew, and there was snap enough in my eyes and voice to make him whistle under his breath as he literally swooped up Polly, and they both had the good sense to begin to talk about town affairs and leave unmentioned all rural matters.
Half-way into town Matthew swapped me for his Belgian in Owen"s car, and Polly and I went on in with Owen and Bess, while Matthew returned out the Riverfield ribbon to install the rescuer of Elmnest.
"Oh, Ann, this is delicious," said Bess as she came back with me to cuddle me and ask questions. "But what are--"
"Bess," I said, looking her straight in the face with determination, "I am going to marry Matt two days before you marry Owen, though he doesn"t know it yet, and if you talk about Elmnest to me I"ll go and stay with Belle this week."
"How perfectly lovely, and how tired you are, poor dear!" Bess congratulated and exclaimed all in the same breath, then imparted both my announcement and my injunction to Owen on the front seat. I didn"t look at Polly while Owen was laughing and exclaiming, but when I did she looked queer and quiet; however, I didn"t let that at all affect the nice crisp crust that had hardened on me overnight. And I must say that if Corn-ta.s.sel wasn"t happy that evening surrounded by the edition of masculine society that Matt had so carefully expurgated for her, she ought to have been.
By that time I had told Matthew about his approaching marriage, accepted his bear-hug of joy, delivered before Bess and Polly and Owen and Belle, and I had been congratulated and received back into the bosom of my friends with great joy and hilarity.
"Now I can take care of you forever and ever, Ann," whispered Matthew in his good-night, with his lips against my ear. And there in his strong, sustaining arms, even though limp with fatigue, I knew I never did, could, or would, love anybody like I loved him. I don"t really suppose I did hear Polly sob on her pillow beside mine, where she had insisted on reposing.
She must have been all right, for she was gone out into the rural district with Matthew before I was awake the next morning.
After Annette had served mine and Bess"s chocolate in Bess"s bedroom we settled down to the real seriousness of trousseau talk, which lasted for many long hours.
"Now if I sell you back all the things of yours I haven"t worn for two hundred and fifty dollars that will leave you over three hundred in the bank to get a few wash frocks and hats and things to last you until you are enough married to Matthew to use his money freely," said Bess after about an hour of discussion and admiration of her own half-finished trousseau.
"Yes; I should say those things would be worth about two hundred and fifty dollars now that they are third-hand," I answered Bess"s excited eyes, giving her a look of well-crusted affection, for there are not many women in the world, with unlimited command of the material that Bess has, who would not have offered me a spiritual hurt by trying to give me back my thousand dollars" worth of old clothes which she had not needed in the first place when she bought them.
"Now, that"s all settled, and we"ll begin to stretch that three hundred dollars to its limit. We won"t care if things do tear, just so they look smart until you and Matthew get to New York. Matthew won"t be the first bridegroom to go into raptures over a thirty-nine-cent bargain silk made up by a sixty-dollar dressmaker. I"m giving Owen a few deceptions in that line myself. That gray and purple tissue splits if you look at it, and I got it all for three dollars. Felicia made it up mostly with glue, I think, and I will be a dream in it--a dream that dissolves easily. Let"s go shopping." As she thus led me into the maze of dishonest trousseau-buying, Bess began to ring for Annette.
Of course most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can arouse them from any kind of deadness that the s.e.x is heir to, but a few frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case. For three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off each day"s spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion. Everybody in Hayesville wanted to give Bess and me parties, and most of them did, that is, as many as we could get in at the rate of three a day between dressmakers and milliners and other clothing engagements. Owen got perfectly furious and exhausted, but Matthew kept in an angelic frame of mind through it all. I think the long days with Polly out in the open helped him a lot, though at times I detected a worried expression on the faces of them both, and I felt sure that they were dying to tell me that it had been a case of the razor from Rufus" shoe between him and the Belgian or that the oil was of the grade that explodes incubators, but I gave them no encouragement and only inquired casually from time to time if the parental twins were alive. Polly even tried me out with a bunch of roses, which I knew came from the old musk clump in the corner of the garden which I had seen rebudded, but I thanked her coldly and immediately gave them to Belle"s mother. I saw Matthew comforting her in the distance, and his face was tenderly anxious about me all the rest of the evening.
"Dear, are we going to be--be married in town at a church?" Matthew inquired timidly one afternoon as he drove me home from a devastated hat shop on the avenue, in which Bess and I had been spending the day.
"No, Matt dear, at Elmnest," I answered kindly, as a bride, no matter how worn out, ought to answer a groom, though Bess says that a groom ought to expect to be snapped every time he speaks for ten days before the wedding.
"As long as I have got a home that contains two masculine parents I will have to be married in it. I"ll go out the morning of the wedding, and you and Polly fix everything and invite everybody in Riverfield, but just the few people here in town you think we ought to have, not more than a dozen.
Have it at five o"clock." I thought then that I fixed that hour because everybody would hate it because of the heat and uncertainty as to style of clothes.
"All right, dear," answered Matthew, carefully, as if handling conversational eggs.
"Miss Ann, where do you want us to fix the wedding--er--bell and altar?"
Polly ventured to ask timidly a few days later.
"The parlor, of course, Polly. I hate that room, and it is as far from the barn as possible. Now don"t bother me any more about it," I snapped, and sent her flying to Matthew in consternation. Later I saw them poring over the last June-bride number of "The Woman"s Review," and I surmised the kind of a wedding I was in for. That day I tried on a combination of tull, lace, and embroidery at Felicia"s that tried my soul as well as my body.
"It"s no worse than any other wedding-dress I ever saw; take it off quick, Madame," I snapped as crossly as I dared at the poor old lady, who had gowned me from the cradle to the--I was about to say grave.
"Eh, la la, _mais_, you are _tres deficile_--difficult," she murmured reproachfully.
"Any more so than Bess?" I demanded.
"_Non_, perhaps _non_," she answered, with a French shrug.
With beautiful tact Matthew fussed with his throttle, which I couldn"t see stuck at all, the entire time he was driving me home, and left me with a careful embrace and also with relief in his face that I hadn"t exploded over him. Owen is not like that to Bess; he just pours gas on her explosions and fans the resulting flame until it is put out by tears in his arms.
"Let"s never get married at the same time any more, Ann," groaned Bess as Annette tried to put us both to bed that night before we fell dead on her hands.