This answer was very quieting to Nellie's conscience, and in unusually good spirits she abandoned herself to the excitement which usually precedes a wedding. Mrs. Kennedy, too, entered heart and soul into the matter, and arming herself with the plea, that "it was his only daughter, who would probably never be married again," she coaxed her husband into all manner of extravagances, and by the 1st of March few would have recognized the interior of the house, so changed was it by furniture and repairs. Handsome damask curtains shaded the parlor windows, which were further improved by large heavy panes of glass. Matty's piano had been removed to Maude's chamber, and its place supplied by a new and costly instrument, which the crafty woman made her husband believe was intended by Mrs.
Kelsey, who selected it, as a bridal present for her niece. The furnace was in splendid order, keeping the whole house, as Hannah said, "hotter than an oven," while the disturbed doctor lamented daily over the amount of fuel it consumed, and nightly counted the contents of his purse or reckoned up how much he was probably worth.
But neither his remonstrances nor yet his frequent groans had any effect upon his wife. Although she had no love for Nellie, she was determined upon a splendid wedding, one which would make folks talk for months, and when her liege lord complained of the confusion, she suggested to him a furnished room in the garret, where it would be very quiet for him to reckon up the bill, which from time to time she brought him.
"Might as well gin in at oncet," John said to him one day, when he borrowed ten dollars for the payment of an oyster bill. "I tell you she's got more besom in her than both them t'other ones."
The doctor probably thought so too, for he became comparatively submissive, though he visited often the sunken graves, where he found a mournful solace in reading, "Katy, wife of Dr. Kennedy, aged twenty-nine,"--"Matty, second wife of Dr. Kennedy, aged thirty," and once he was absolutely guilty of wondering how the words, "Maude, third wife of Dr. Kennedy, aged forty-one," would look. But he repented him of the wicked thought, and when on his return from his "graveyard musings," Maude, aged forty-one, asked him for the twenty dollars which she saw a man pay to him that morning, he gave it to her without a word.
Meanwhile the fickle J.C. in Rochester was one moment regretting the step he was about to take and the next wishing the day would hasten, so he could "have it over with." Maude Remington had secured a place in his affections which Nellie could not fill, and though he had no wish to marry her now, he tried to make himself believe that but for her misfortune she should still have become his wife.
"Jim would marry her, I dare say, even if she were blind as a bat," he said; "but then he is able to support her," and reminded by this of an unanswered letter from his cousin, who was still in New Orleans, he sat down and wrote, telling him of Maude's total blindness, and then, almost in the next sentence saying that his wedding was fixed for the 5th of March. "There," he exclaimed, as he read over the letter, "I believe I must be crazy, for I never told him that the bride was Nellie; but no matter, I'd like to have him think me magnanimous for a while, and I want to hear what he says."
Two weeks or more went by, and then there came an answer, fraught with sympathy for Maude, and full of commendation for J.C., who "had shown himself a man."
Accompanying the letter was a box containing a most exquisite set of pearls for the bride, together with a diamond ring, on which was inscribed, "Cousin Maude."
"Aint I in a deuced scrape," said J.C., as he examined the beautiful ornaments; "Nellie would be delighted with them, but she shan't have them; they are not hers. I'll write to Jim at once, and tell him the mistake," and seizing his pen he dashed off a few lines, little guessing how much happiness they would carry to the far-off city, where daily and nightly James De Vere fought manfully with the love that clung with a deathlike grasp to the girl J.C. had forsaken, the poor, blind, helpless Maude.
