A Brace Of Boys Part 4

Miss Pilgrim looked at the earnest little suitor with a face in which tender interest and compa.s.sion quite overrode any sense of the whimsicality of the situation which might lurk there. Daniel's astonishment at the sight was so great that he realized the entire state of the case before he could recover himself sufficiently to rise and go into the back room.

Billy jumped up and looked defiantly at the intruder. Miss Pilgrim blushed violently, but turned away her head to avoid the exhibition of a still more convulsing emotion than embarra.s.sment.

"I must beg your pardon, Miss Pilgrim--and yours, too, Billy," began Daniel in a hesitating way, hardly knowing how to treat the posture in which he found things, "but--you see--the fact is the servant said she'd go to announce me--and really when I came in, I hadn't any idea you were here, or Billy either."

"Then," said Billy, moderating the defiant att.i.tude, "you actually weren't dodging around and trying to find out what Lottie and I were about on the sly? Well, I'll believe you. I'm sure you couldn't be as mean as that, when I'm the only brother you have got, that always brings you oranges when you're sick, and never plays ball on the stairs when you've got a headache. Now, then, I'll trust you, I've been asking Lottie to marry me, and I want you to help me. Ask her if she won't, Daniel--see if she won't do it for you!"

Miss Pilgrim had been trying to find words, but her face was too much for her and she was obliged to seek retirement in her handkerchief. As she drew it from her pocket, a well-worn piece of paper followed it and fell upon the floor. Billy picked it up before she noticed it, and was about to hand it to her, when his jealous eye fell upon a withered rosebud sewed to its margin. As he looked at it, with his little brows knit into a precocious sternness, he recognized his brother's handwriting immediately beneath the flower. It was one of the daily anonymous sonnets, of which Daniel had told me, and the bud a relic of the bouquet accompanying it. Still Daniel was silent. What else could he be?

"Very well, very well, Master Daniel!" exclaimed Billy, in a voice trembling with grief and indignation, "there's good enough reason why you won't speak a word for me. You want her yourself--here it is in your own writing. No wonder you won't tell Lottie to be my wife, when you're trying to take her away from me. Oh, Lottie, dear Lottie! I love you just as much as he does, though I don't know everything and can't write you poetry like it was out of the Fifth Reader! Daniel, how could you go and write to my Lottie this way: 'My churner'--no, it isn't churner, it's charmer,--'let me call thee mine'?"

Forgetting the sacredness of private MS. in that of private grief, he would have gone on, with a pause here and there for certainty of spelling, to the conclusion of the poem, had not Lottie sprung up, with her imploring face suffused by her discovery, for the first time, of the ident.i.ty of her secret lover and the escape of his sonnet from her pocket. It was too late! There he stood before her unmistakably proved, and herself unmistakably proving in what estimation she held his verses and bouquets.

"Oh Billy, dear Billy! If you do love me, don't do so!" So exclaiming, she held out her hand, and Billy put the MS. into it with all the dignity of a wounded spirit.

"Mr. Lovegrove," said Miss Pilgrim, "I don't know what to say."

"I feel very much that way myself," said Daniel.

"_I_ don't," said Billy, now in command of his voice. "I'll tell you what it is: perhaps Daniel didn't know how much I wanted you, Lottie--and perhaps he wants you 'most as bad as I do. But whatever way it is, I want you to choose between us, fair and square, and no dodging.

Come now! You can take just whichever one of us you please, and the other won't lay up any grudge, though I know if that's me, or like me, he'll feel awful. You can have till to-morrow morning to make up your mind between me and Daniel, and if he won't say anything about it to pa and ma till then, I won't. Good-by, _dear_ Lottie!"

He drew her face down to his, kissed her almost affectionately and then marched out of the door, feeling, as he afterward told me, as if he had blackened his boots all for nothing. Ah me! my dear Billy, how many times we do that in this world! Of what followed when Daniel and Miss Pilgrim were left alone, I have never had full details.

But I do know that the young lady obeyed Billy and made her choice. Six months after that both my nephews stood up in Mrs. Rumbullion's parlor to take their several shares in a ceremony in which Miss Pilgrim was the central figure when it began, and Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove when it concluded. Time and elasticity of boyhood had so closed the sharp but evanescent wound in Billy's heart that he could stand the trial of being groomsman where he had wanted to be groom--more especially since he was supported through the emergency by a little sister of Lottie's who promised to be wondrously like her by the time Billy could stand up in the more enviable capacity. Neither Daniel nor Lottie would listen to any objection to such a groomsman on the score of his extreme youth, for, as they said, Billy had been quite as instrumental in bringing them together as any agent, save the Divinity shaping the ends and tying all the knots in which there are heartstrings concerned, as well as white ribbon.

Since then Lu has stopped wishing that Billy were like Daniel, for she says that if he had been, there would never have been any Mrs. Daniel Lovegrove in the world.