At Last | Page 3

Episcopalian, she was yet an unquestioning believer in predestination and "special Providences"--and what but Providence had brought together the dear creatures now basking in the benignant beam of her smile, sailing smoothly toward the haven of Wedlock before the prospering breezes of Circumstance (of her manufacture)?
While putting sugar and cream into the cups intended for the happy pairs, she reviewed the situation rapidly in her mind, and sketched the day's manoeuvres.
First, there was the case of Tom Barksdale and Imogene Tabb--highly satisfactory and creditable to all the parties concerned in it, but not romantic. Tom, a sturdy young planter, who had studied law while at the University, but never practised it, being already provided for by his opulent father, had visited his relatives, the Tabbs, in August, and straightway fallen in love with the one single daughter of his second cousin--a pretty, amiable girl, who would inherit a neat fortune at her parent's death, and whose pedigree became identical with that of the Barksdales a couple of generations back, and was therefore unimpeachable. The friends on both sides were enchanted; the lovers fully persuaded that they were made for one another, an opinion cordially endorsed by Mrs. Sutton, and they could confer with no higher authority.
Next came Alfred Branch and Rosa Tazewell--incipient, but promising at this juncture, inasmuch as Rosa had lately smiled more encouragingly upon her timid wooer than she had deigned to do before they were domesticated at Ridgeley. Mrs. Sutton did not approve of unmaidenly forwardness. The woman who would unsought be won, would have fared ill in her esteem. Her lectures upon the beauties and advantages of a modest, yet alluring reserve, were cut up into familiar and much-prized quotations among her disciples, and were acted upon the more willingly for the prestige that surrounded her exploits as high priestess of Hymen. But Rosa had been too coy to Alfred's evident devotion--almost repellent at seasons. Had these rebuffs not alternated with attacks of remorse, during which the exceeding gentleness of her demeanor gradually pried the crushed hopes of her adorer out of the slough, and cleansed their drooping plumes of mud, the courtship would have fallen through, ere Mrs. Sutton could bring her skill to bear upon it. Guided, and yet soothed by her velvet rein, Rosa really seemed to become more steady. She was assuredly more thoughtful, and there was no better sign of Cupid's advance upon the outworks of a girl's heart than reverie. If her fits of musing were a shade too pensive, the experienced eye of the observer descried no cause for discouragement in this feature. Rosa was a spoiled, wayward child, freakish and mischievous, to whom liberty was too dear to be resigned without a sigh. By and by, she would wear her shackles as ornaments, like all other sensible and loving women.
Thus preaching to Alfred, when he confided to her the fluctuations of rapture and despair that were his lot in his intercourse with the sometimes radiant and inviting, sometimes forbidding sprite, whose wings he would fain bind with his embrace, and thus reassuring herself, when perplexed by a flash of Rosa's native perverseness, Mrs. Sutton was sanguine that all would come right in the end. What was to be would be, and despite the rapids in their wooing, Alfred would find in Rosa a faithful, affectionate little wife, while she could never hope to secure a better, more indulgent, and, in most respects, more eligible, partner than the Ayletts' well-to-do, well-looking neighbor.
But the couple who occupied the central foreground of our match-maker's thoughts were her niece, Mabel Aylott, and her own departed husband's namesake, Frederic Chilton. She dilated to herself and to Mabel with especial gusto upon the "wonderful leading," the inward whisper that had prompted her to propose a trip to the Rockbridge Alum Springs early in July. Neither she nor Mabel was ailing in the slightest degree, but she imagined they would be the brighter for a glimpse of the mountains and the livelier scenes of that pleasant Spa--and whom should they meet there but the son of "dear Frederic's" old friend, Mr. Chilton, and of course they saw a great deal of him--and the rest followed as Providence meant it should.
"The rest" expressed laconically the essence of numberless walks by moonlight and starlight; innumerable dances in the great ball-room, and the sweeter, more interesting confabulations that made the young people better acquainted in four weeks than would six years of conventional calls and small-talk. They stayed the month out, although "Aunt Rachel" had, upon their arrival, named a fortnight as the extreme limit of their sojourn. Frederic Chilton was their escort to Eastern Virginia, and remained a week at Ridgeley--perhaps to recover from the fatigue of the journey. So soon as he returned to Philadelphia, in