第80章 XI(3)

It was the Mistress,--she was crying. What was she crying for? It was impressive, certainly, to listen to these young voices, many of them blending for the last time,--for the scholars were soon to be scattered all over the country, and some of them beyond its boundaries,--but why the Mistress was so carried away, I did not know. She must be more impressible than most of us; yet I thought Number Five also looked as if she were having a struggle with herself to keep down some rebellious signs of emotion.

The exercises went on very pleasingly until they came to the awarding of the gold medal of the year and the valedictory, which was to be delivered by the young lady to whom it was to be presented. The name was called; it was one not unfamiliar to our ears, and the bearer of it--the Delilah of our tea-table, Avis as she was known in the school and elsewhere--rose in her place and came forward, so that for the first time on that day, we looked upon her. It was a sensation for The Teacups. Our modest, quiet waiting-girl was the best scholar of her year. We had talked French before her, and we learned that she was the best French scholar the teacher had ever had in the school.

We had never thought of her except as a pleasing and well-trained handmaiden, and here she was an accomplished young lady.

Avis went through her part very naturally and gracefully, and when it was finished, and she stood before us with the medal glittering on her breast, we did not know whether to smile or to cry,--some of us did one, and some the other. --We all had an opportunity to see her and congratulate her before we left the institution. The mystery of her six weeks' serving at our table was easily solved. She had been studying too hard and too long, and required some change of scene and occupation. She had a fancy for trying to see if she could support herself as so many young women are obliged to, and found a place with us, the Mistress only knowing her secret.

"She is to be our young Doctor's wife!" the Mistress whispered to me, and did some more crying, not for grief, certainly.

Whether our young Doctor's long visits to a neighboring town had anything to do with the fact that Avis was at that institution, whether she was the patient he visited or not, may be left in doubt.

At all events, he had always driven off in the direction which would carry him to the place where she was at school.

I have attended a large number of celebrations, commencements, banquets, soirees, and so forth, and done my best to help on a good many of them. In fact, I have become rather too well known in connection with "occasions," and it has cost me no little trouble.

I believe there is no kind of occurrence for which I have not been requested to contribute something in prose or verse. It is sometimes very hard to say no to the requests. If one is in the right mood when he or she writes an occasional poem, it seems as if nothing could have been easier. "Why, that piece run off jest like ile.

I don't bullieve," the unlettered applicant says to himself, "I don't bullieve it took him ten minutes to write them verses." The good people have no suspicion of how much a single line, a single expression, may cost its author. The wits used to say that Ropers,--the poet once before referred to, old Samuel Ropers, author of the Pleasures of Memory and giver of famous breakfasts,--was accustomed to have straw laid before the house whenever he had just given birth to a couplet. It is not quite so bad as that with most of us who are called upon to furnish a poem, a song, a hymn, an ode for some grand meeting, but it is safe to say that many a trifling performance has had more good honest work put into it than the minister's sermon of that week had cost him. If a vessel glides off the ways smoothly and easily at her launching, it does not mean that no great pains have been taken to secure the result. Because a poem is an "occasional" one, it does not follow that it has not taken as much time and skill as if it had been written without immediate, accidental, temporary motive. Pindar's great odes were occasional poems, just as much as our Commencement and Phi Beta Kappa poems are, and yet they have come down among the most precious bequests of antiquity to modern times.

The mystery of the young Doctor's long visits to the neighboring town was satisfactorily explained by what we saw and heard of his relations with our charming "Delilah,"--for Delilah we could hardly help calling her. Our little handmaid, the Cinderella of the teacups, now the princess, or, what was better, the pride of the school to which she had belonged, fit for any position to which she might be called, was to be the wife of our young Doctor. It would not have been the right thing to proclaim the fact while she was a pupil, but now that she had finished her course of instruction there was no need of making a secret of the engagement.

So we have got our romance, our love-story out of our Teacups, as I hoped and expected that we should, but not exactly in the quarter where it might have been looked for.

What did our two Annexes say to this unexpected turn of events? They were good-hearted girls as ever lived, but they were human, like the rest of us, and women, like some of the rest of us. They behaved perfectly. They congratulated the Doctor, and hoped he would bring the young lady to the tea-table where she had played her part so becomingly. It is safe to say that each of the Annexes world have liked to be asked the lover's last question by the very nice young man who had been a pleasant companion at the table and elsewhere to each of them. That same question is the highest compliment a man can pay a woman, and a woman does not mind having a dozen or more such compliments to string on the rosary of her remembrances. Whether either of them was glad, on the whole, that he had not offered himself to the other in preference to herself would be a mean, shabby question, and I think altogether too well of you who are reading this paper to suppose that you would entertain the idea of asking it.