Part 29

“No, I won't fail, Mark; but I never know the day that father will go to town until the night before. I can always hear him making his preparations in the barn and the shed, and ordering Waitstill here and there. He is as excited as if he was going to Boston instead of Milltown.”

“The night before will do. I will watch the house every evening till you hang a white signal from your window.”

“It won't be white,” said Patty, who would be mischievous on her deathbed; “my Sunday-go-to-meetin' petticoat is too grand, and everything else that we have is yellow.”

“I shall see it, whatever color it is, you can be sure of that!” said Mark gallantly. “Then it's decided that next morning I'll wait at the tavern from sunrise, and whenever your father and Waitstill have driven up Saco Hill, I'll come and pick you up and we 'll be off like a streak of lightning across the hills to New Hampshire. How lucky that Riverboro is only thirty miles from the state line!--It looks like snow, and how I wish it would be something more than a flurry; a regular whizzing, whirring storm that would pack the roads and let us slip over them with our sleigh-bells ringing!”

“I should like that, for they would be our only wedding-bells. Oh! Mark! What if Waitstill shouldn't go, after all: though I heard father tell her that he needed her to buy things for the store, and that they wouldn't be back till after nightfall. Just to think of being married without Waitstill!”

“You can do without Waitstill on this one occasion, better than you can without me,” laughed Mark, pinching Patty's cheek. “I've given the town clerk due notice and I have a friend to meet me at his office. He is going to lend me his horse for the drive home, and we shall change back the next week. That will give us a fresh horse each way, and we'll fly like the wind, snow or no snow, When we come down Guide Board Hill that night, Patty, we shall be man and wife; isn't that wonderful?”

“We shall be man and wife in New Hampshire, but not in Maine, you say,” Patty reminded him dolefully. “It does seem dreadful that we can't be married in our own state, and have to go dangling about with this secret on our minds, day and night; but it can't be helped! You'll try not to even think of me as your wife till we go to Portsmouth to live, won't you?”

“You're asking too much when you say I'm not to think of you as my wife, for I shall think of nothing else, but I've given you my solemn promise,” said Mark stoutly, “and I'll keep it as sure as I live. We'll be legally married by the laws of New Hampshire, but we won't think of it as a marriage till I tell your father and mine, and we drive away once more together. That time it will be in the sight of everybody, with our heads in the air. I've got the little house in Portsmouth all ready, Patty: it's small, but it's in a nice part of the town. Portsmouth is a pretty place, but it'll be a great deal prettier when it has Mrs. Mark Wilson living in it. We can be married over again in Maine, afterwards, if your heart is set upon it. I'm willing to marry you in every state of the Union, so far as I am concerned.”

“I think you've been so kind and good and thoughtful, Mark dear,” said Patty, more fondly and meltingly than she had ever spoken to him before, “and so clever too! I do respect you for getting that good position in Portsmouth and being able to set up for yourself at your age. I shouldn't wonder a bit if you were a judge some day, and then what a proud girl I shall be!”

Patty's praise was bestowed none too frequently, and it sounded very sweet in the young man's ears.

“I do believe I can get on, with you to help me, Patty,” he said, pressing her arm more closely to his side, and looking down ardently into her radiant face. “You're a great deal cleverer than I am, but I have a faculty for the business of the law, so my father says, and a faculty for money-making, too. And even if we have to begin in a small way, my salary will be a certainty, and we'll work up together. I can see you in a yellow satin dress, stiff enough to stand alone!”

“It must be white satin, if you please, not yellow! After having used a hundred and ten yards of shop-worn yellow calico on myself within two years, I never want to wear that color again. If only I could come to you better provided,” she sighed, with the suggestion of tears in her voice. “If I'd been a common servant I could have saved something from my wages to be married on; I haven't even got anything to be married IN!”

“I'll get you anything you want in Portland to-morrow.”

“Certainly not; I'd rather be married in rags than have you spend your money upon me beforehand!”

“Remember to have a box of your belongings packed and slipped under the shed somewhere. You can't be certain what your father will say or do when the time comes for telling him, and I want you to be ready to leave on a moment's notice.”

“I will; I'll do everything you say, Mark, but are you sure that we have thought of every other way? I do so hate being underhanded.”

“Every other way! I am more than willing to ask your father, but we know he would treat me with contempt, for he can't bear the sight of me! He would probably lock you up and feed you on bread and water. That being the state of things, how can I tell our plans to my own father? He never would look with favor on my running away with you; and mother is, by nature, set upon doing things handsomely and in proper order. Father would say our elopement would be putting us both wrong before the community, and he'd advise me to wait. 'You are both young'--I can hear him announcing his convictions now, as clearly as if he was standing here in the road--'You are both young and you can well afford to wait until something turns up.' As if we hadn't waited and waited from all eternity!”

“Yes, we have been engaged to be married for at least five weeks,” said Patty, with an upward glance peculiar to her own sparkling face,--one that always intoxicated Mark. “I am seventeen and a half; your father couldn't expect a confirmed old maid like me to waste any more time. But I never would do this--this--sudden, unrespectable thing, if there was any other way. Everything depends on my keeping it secret from Waitstill, but she doesn't suspect anything yet. She thinks of me as nothing but a child still. Do you suppose Ellen would go with us, just to give me a little comfort?”

“She might,” said Mark, after reflecting a moment. “She is very devoted to you, and perhaps she could keep a secret; she never has, but there's always a first time. You can't go on adding to the party, though, as if it was a candy-pull! We cannot take Lucy Morrill and Phoebe Day and Cephas Cole, because it would be too hard on the horse; and besides, I might get embarrassed at the town clerk's office and marry the wrong girl; or you might swop me off for Cephas! But I'll tell Ellen if you say so; she's got plenty of grit.”

“Don't joke about it, Mark, don't. I shouldn't miss Waitstill so much if I had Ellen, and how happy I shall be if she approves of me for a sister and thinks your mother and father will like me in time.”

“There never was a creature born into the world that wouldn't love you, Patty!”

“I don't know; look at Aunt Abby Cole!” said Patty pensively. “Well, it does not seem as if a marriage that isn't good in Riverboro was really decent! How tiresome of Maine to want all those days of public notice; people must so often want to get married in a minute. If I think about anything too long I always get out of the notion.”

“I know you do; that's what I'm afraid of!”--and Mark's voice showed decided nervousness. “You won't get out of the notion of marrying me, will you, Patty dear?”

“Marrying you is more than a 'notion,' Mark,” said Patty soberly. “I'm only a little past seventeen, but I'm far older because of the difficulties I've had. I don't wonder you speak of my 'notions.' I was as light as a feather in all my dealings with you at first.”

“So was I with you! I hadn't grown up, Patty.”

“Then I came to know you better and see how you sympathized with Waitstill's troubles and mine. I couldn't love anybody, I couldn't marry anybody, who didn't feel that things at our house can't go on as they are! Father has had a good long trial! Three wives and two daughters have done their best to live with him, and failed. I am not willing to die for him, as my mother did, nor have Waitstill killed if I can help it. Sometimes he is like a man who has lost his senses and sometimes he is only grim and quiet and cruel. If he takes our marriage without a terrible scene, Mark, perhaps it will encourage Waitstill to break her chains as I have mine.”

“There's sure to be an awful row,” Mark said, as one who had forecasted all the probabilities. “It wouldn't make any difference if you married the Prince of Wales; nothing would suit your father but selecting the man and making all the arrangements; and then he would never choose any one who wouldn't tend the store and work on the farm for him without wages.”

“Waitstill will never run away; she isn't like me. She will sit and sit there, slaving and suffering, till doomsday; for the one that loves her isn't free like you!”