Now that she was growing up she sometimes “tried on” different young men in her imagination, in the place of her emperor. And although she looked on her love life as the reality, Mamma’s as the dream, she tried to imagine Mr. Lacey kissing Mamma—oh—horrid! So prim and pecky! Or else soft and playful, which would be worse. A kiss wouldn’t be a kiss unless it hurt you, made you want to swoon, to die! But Mr. Lacey kissing Mamma would be as passionate as Mamma’s canary pecking at a cherry hung between the bars of his cage. The idea was so silly—so—oh! It made her feel hysterical. She said, to stop her thoughts:
“Lily! Be an angel and make some lemonade. I’m dead with this heat.”
Lily pretended for a moment that she couldn’t stop laughing; but seeing that May was all through, she answered amiably:
“I will if you’ll come with me and ask Martha for the lemons. She’s cross as two sticks having company to tea on such a hot day.”
They went off together, just in time, for Victor could no longer hold in his sobs, and they burst loudly on the empty schoolroom. Mamma was going to marry Mr. Lacey! The idea had never entered his head, and the shock was terrific. Between the forces of life that like a wave lifted Mamma and Mr. Lacey before toppling over and submerging such little in-the-way creatures as himself, and the power of the midsummer sun, that had poured itself all morning on his bare head, he was unbearably shaken. Sobbing, he leaned from the window and was sick into the fern bed far below.
Out in the steaming heat of the “truck patch” Maggie was picking raspberries. It was so hot. The grape leaves, green on one side, pale grey suede on the other, that she had just picked to line the raspberry baskets, were already limp. There was a singing sound in her ears, and now and then blackness and a bursting of bloodred stars floated before her eyes.
She knew from the way Mamma was acting that she was going to marry Mr. Lacey. She had been so shy and smiling, looking like a happy little girl. She had even tried to tell Maggie something, after Mr. Lacey’s coachman brought over a note this morning, but Maggie, fiercely loyal to Papa, had been forbiddingly silent and sullen.
“That little lady-killer to take Papa’s place!” she thought bitterly, desperately. And, yet even to her who loved him so, Papa had grown far away and dim—a dear dream that faded even as she tried to remember.
The moist heat rolled over her like waves. Two cabbage butterflies, one pure white, one faintly veined with green, a Mr. Lacey and a Mrs. Campion of the insect world, quivered over the raspberry bushes, and a dust-colored toad gave a languid hop as she nearly stepped on him, but no other creatures were in sight anywhere; humans were in their darkened houses, birds in their shadowy green ones. Pushing the hair up from her wet forehead with the back of her wrist, Maggie went on picking raspberries for Mr. Lacey’s tea.
XI
Mamma planned to be surprised in the garden, but as the time for Mr. Lacey’s arrival drew near, she grew shy and stayed with the girls on the porch. She wouldn’t let them out of her sight. She felt dreadfully nervous.
She was wearing her white flounced, bustled dress with the little black bows all over it, and her black fringed sash. Black ribbons were tied around her wrists, and an onyx cross on a black velvet ribbon tobogganed on her bosom. She had tucked a crimson rose in her great bird’s nest of braids—would he think that was flighty? But just as she began to take it out, his carriage wheels were heard on the drive, and she had only time to fling one arm about Victor, one about Lily, who were showing signs of running away, before Martha brought him out on the porch.
A new Mr. Lacey, surely! This Mr. Lacey is too spotless, too creaseless, too twinklingly tidy, ever to have been used before. He has never run, ridden on smoky trains, gone to bed, burnt his mouth, fallen down, or shed tears. He has just been created, he and his silver-grey suit, his shoes as polished as black glass, his linen so white that it makes you blink, the cluster of dark geranium in his buttonhole. Or else he has just been done over from tip to toe, with a new wig and whiskers of glossy nut-brown silk, and a fresh coat of pink paint for his face, and of sky-blue paint for his eyes.
No, his eyes are not sky-blue paint, but the real sky itself, and those are real stars shining in them.
“My prediction is that in a hundred years we will all be going about in balloons,” said Mr. Lacey.
“Oh, dear!” said Mamma. “Nothing would induce me!”
That was the end of that. What could they talk about now?
Literature! That was always a nice topic. But one had to be careful with young ladies present. Hawthorne was all right if one stuck to “The Marble Faun,” but there was always “The Scarlet Letter”
