Chapter 1 – A Christmas Wedding
Friday December 25, 1812
Miss Macintosh was to be married. There was a great deal of surprise in the little village of Bentford when this interesting fact was announced. I do not know any particular reason why there should have been, for she was both pleasant and virtuous. She had managed Dr. Macintosh’s house perfectly for the past seven years. Not one of the many people who expressed their astonishment over the engagement could deny the fact that she would make a very good wife, and yet somehow none of them could help saying, from the bottom of their hearts, that they would never have expected it in their wildest dreams. Miss Macintosh had always seemed so contented to keep her brother’s house. She had filled her role there so very effectively that no one else could ever take her place. And then there were the children, too! Why, Miss Macintosh had been practically a mother to them, ever since Dr. Macintosh’s own wife had died.
These facts were all quite true, but they were not exactly a logical objection to Miss Macintosh’s wedding. They did not exactly explain the townspeople’s astonishment when the engagement was announced. I think that the real explanation is that the routine of life becomes very much entrenched, at times, in a small town. The people of Bentford had gotten so used to seeing Miss Macintosh sitting at the head of the Doctor’s table, and were so accustomed to reading the bright, cheerful notes which she sent out on the endless supply of cream notepaper, marked with her name at the top, that they had come to depend upon her as a sort of local fixture in the landscape. It was quite an astonishment to find that she was not so inanimate a part of Bentford as the stone bridge, and the old flour mill, and the red barn on the crest of the hill; but had still very much a will of her own, and could under extreme circumstances be moved away from the town without even consulting them.
Still, a wedding is a wedding, whether the town would have chosen it or not, and one by one the citizens could not help beginning to be interested in the matter, and to forget the coming loss in the excitement of preparing for it. This was true in no greater extent than in the Macintosh house itself, where the Doctor’s children, who might have had the most excuse of anyone, scarcely had time to think of the dark side of the prospect in the sunshine of merry preparations. The wedding was to be upon Christmas Day, the bride having had a fancy for that date, and thus to the ordinary arrangements was added the orchestration of the Christmas feast, to be served after the ceremony to as many guests as could be crowded into the Doctor’s good-sized parlor and kitchen.
Perhaps Miss Macintosh herself exerted her own great personal influence that the children should not dwell upon the parting, for she was a bright, brisk, cheerful person, who would willingly avoid alike unnecessary fuss and lamentation. Thus, it was not until the bride and groom had driven off, the last guest had wandered home, and all traces of the recent festivities had been put away, that the young Macintoshes realized their loss. What a doleful end to a Christmas Day! The doctor had been called out, as doctors sometimes are, at this inopportune moment. The little boys had escaped to the barn, which, as it had perhaps been favored twice with the presence of the departed bride in the entire course of her residence there, offered at least an escape from contrast. Henry, the eldest of the flock, had taken up a very fat book of his father’s upon medical theory, and gone to sleep behind it on the sofa. And the three sisters were sitting round the fire, feeling very dull and dreary, and wondering how it was that they could ever have looked forward to their aunt’s wedding.
“It doesn’t seem like home without her, does it?” remarked Helen, the eldest of the three, to no one in particular. “I declare, if we ever get married we must all do it at once, so that nobody is left behind to be miserable when we are gone.”
“You’ll be a very long time waiting,” remarked Grace soberly, raising her round face from where it had been resting on her hands. “Philip’s only seven!”
“Oh, Philip and Percy will be surgeons in the army by that time, and not home anymore,” said Helen recklessly. “And George too, for that matter. He was telling Philip the other day that that was what he meant to be. It was Percy’s idea, so that settles it for him, and Philip always does everything the older two do.”
“I don’t think Papa would like for them to,” said Mary, the middle sister, who was always the rational element of the conversation. “He told Aunt Alice only last evening that he regretted the army having been so much in the neighbourhood last fall. He said George had far too much of a leaning that way already, and that making heroes of soldiers was glorifying war to a dangerous extent.”
“I wish there were no war at all,” said Grace, the youngest of the sisters, shivering a little although the room was not cold.
“I do not admire people for fighting each other,” said Helen. “But that is not what anyone does. We admire the courage, or enterprise, or leadership which a person may show, but that does not mean we think they have done no wrong.”
“That is a fine point,” said Mary seriously. “I think people who begin by admiring part of a person’s life, end by admiring the whole.”
“Oh, Mary, I hope not!” exclaimed Helen. “We ought to look for the good in everyone! And how are we to do that, if we wait until everyone is a saint?”
“The boys have certainly not been saints since they have made General Brock their hero,” said Mary.
“They have not been ill-behaved because of him,” said Helen, rather surprised.
“My dear Helen,” said Mary, “You cannot have failed to notice how many catastrophes they have brought upon themselves and all the house by constantly playing at soldiers! They have upset more furniture than can be calculated by besieging fortresses, they have worn their clothes to rags getting in and out of ambushes—”
“Or raspberry bushes,” put in Grace slyly, recollecting one cause of Mary’s disapproval.
“And,” concluded Mary, as the crowning stroke, “Phil actually called Uncle Thomas ‘an enemy’ last week, because he lives on the other side of the Niagara.”
“Did Papa mean that Aunt Alice ought to forbid them to play soldiers?” asked Grace uncertainly.
“Aunt Alice won’t forbid them to do anything, anymore,” sighed Helen, which relapsed the party into their former silence.
There is a piece of advice sometimes given to young writers, that it is not desirable form to set aside a paragraph out of one’s narrative for the description of one’s characters. It is a tactic, however, which some of the most successful and beloved authors of children’s literature have been known to use; and as my personal experience, limited though it is, seems to show that young readers enjoy such a picture, I will with their permission endeavor to paint it.
The three sisters sitting about the hearth that day were in many ways a study of contrasts. Helen was the eldest, at seventeen years of age. She had thick red hair of a bouncy, flyaway nature which was not exactly curly and yet had far too much spring in it to be only called wavy. This hair had a way of mirroring her mood in a fashion which was almost comical. It was a sort of barometer to the entire house. If it was at its best, with the crinkled mass bouncing lightly about her face, Helen might be judged to be in high spirits, full of energy and enthusiasm. If it stood out in a stringy, frizzy fashion, then Helen was most likely cross or frustrated or what the little ones called “frazzled.” Today, it was expressive of the general sentiments of the entire party. The two thick “sausages” of artificial curl which framed her face in the general fashion of the day hung down heavy and dejected. The rest of the hair was tucked back half-heartedly into a sagging mob-cap, whose limp air, bordered by such of the wispy semi-curls as did not choose to be bound by its confines, finished the dismal mood of the picture. And yet for all that Helen, on the whole, had the highest spirits of the party. She was bright and lively, full of energy and enthusiasm, always ready with a plan or idea, and though she was, for the moment, the most cast down in the room, this was only because her emotions tended to be as violent as they were short-lived. Though now she sat in an attitude of doleful dejection, slowly revolving a much dilapidated feather pen in her hands, it might be safely guessed that when her fit of gloom had passed off, she would be the first to regain vigor and animation.
Mary, upon the other hand, seemed the complete opposite in almost everything. Gravity, it is true, sat more gracefully upon her than it did upon Helen, who could not be sad without looking moody, nor pensive without seeming melodramatic. Mary was a trim, well-put-together young figure, rather tall for her age, and with a small, tidy head which she carried with an air of calm confidence that always commanded a certain respect in whoever she associated with. Mary had smooth dark hair, drawn neatly up into a tidy little cap, and a calm, steady pair of brown eyes which always gave an air of rational conviction to her well-balanced opinions. Her clothes, even after the most trying events and rumpling days, were ever smooth and orderly, although of a simplicity in cut and arrangement which spoke of the sensible, practical light in which she viewed them. Though her face was tonight graver, and her manner more silent and thoughtful than was even her wont, there was no other alteration in demeanor or employment with Mary, as she sat by the fire, her needles clicking steadily over a pair of gray wool stockings which she was knitting. The pair of stockings, as George had been known to call them upon more than one occasion, for although Mary’s skill was such that a new pair was turned off every two or three weeks, it was always replaced by one of the identical pattern; the only variant which had ever been known to exist between two sets being the size, for Mary had made it her duty to keep the entire house supplied with stockings at all times.
Grace, the third sister, was a rosy, plump, comfortable girl. There were only two years between the girls, but Mary seemed as much older than sixteen as Grace was younger than fourteen. Her round face, big blue eyes, and the sweet, innocent expression of her whole countenance combined to give her an air of childhood, while Mary had long since thought and acted as a woman. Grace was sitting upon the floor—a piece of bad form which was tolerated in consideration of the day—with a furry little dog in her lap, consoling herself with comforting the animal, although his spirits seemed rather high than otherwise, and he made occasional attempts to induce her to more rambunctious sport by bouncing up into her face and taking short, playful nips at her blonde hair.
“Down, Bobby, down,” said the girl, laughing despite herself, and attempting to push the wriggling animal off her lap. Bobby, however, only bounced back on, and finding his efforts to have solicited so much notice, improved upon them by uttering a series of short, sharp barks that caused Mary to look askance, and induced Henry to start up from the sofa in some surprise.
“Oh, it’s only Bobby,” said Helen, laughing at his startled face. “That dog is better than a rooster!”
“For volume, if not for accuracy,” said Henry, lying back down again but not closing his eyes. “I say, when are we going to have supper?”
“I thought perhaps dinner had been sufficient to do for both itself and supper,” said Mary.
“Oh, no, Mary, don’t add to the general gloom,” put in Helen. “I’m sure I’m hungry enough to eat again, and it will be too bad for Papa to come home after a long cold drive and find nothing for supper. Put on the kettle to make some tea and I will find some leftover meat, and slice up a piece of pudding. How will that do, Henry?”
“Capitally,” said Henry. “I’ll go get some more wood, too, and we’ll have a nice blaze in here. We can’t help missing Aunt Alice, but that’s no reason to be more doleful than we can help. Why don’t you go and find the little boys, Grace. They always cheer one up.”
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