These Happy Golden Years (Little House 8)

Soberly he answered, “Of course not. I know it is in the wedding ceremony, but it is only something that women say. I never knew one that did it, nor any decent man that wanted her to.”

“Well, I am not going to say I will obey you,” said Laura.

“Are you for woman’s rights, like Eliza?” Almanzo asked in surprise.

“No,” Laura replied. “I do not want to vote. But I cannot make a promise that I will not keep, and, Almanzo, even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgement.”

“I’d never expect you to,” he told her. “And there will be no difficulty about the ceremony, because Reverend Brown does not believe in using the word ‘obey.’”

“He doesn’t! Are you sure?” Laura had never been so surprised and so relieved, all at once.

“He feels very strongly about it,” Almanzo said. “I have heard him arguing for hours and quoting Bible texts against St. Paul, on that subject. You know he is a cousin of John Brown of Kansas, and a good deal like him. Will it be all right, then? The last of this week, or early next?”

“Yes, if it is the only way to escape a big wedding,” said Laura, “I will be ready the last of this week or the first of next, whichever you say.”

“If I can get the house finished, we’ll say the last of this week,” Almanzo considered. “If not, it will have to be next week. Let’s say when the house is finished we will just drive to Reverend Brown’s and be married quietly without any fuss. I’ll take you home now and I may have time to get in a few more licks on the house yet tonight.”

At home again, Laura hesitated to tell of the plan. She felt that Ma would think the haste unseemly. Ma might say, “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” Yet they were not really marrying in haste. They had been going together for three years.

It was not until suppertime that Laura found courage to say that she and Almanzo had planned to be married so soon.

“We can’t possibly get you a wedding dress made,” Ma objected.

“We can finish the black cashmere and I will wear that,” Laura answered.

“I do not like to think of your being married in black,” said Ma. “You know they say, ‘Married in black, you’ll wish yourself back.’”

“It will be new. I will wear my old sage-green poke bonnet with the blue silk lining, and borrow your little square gold pin with the strawberry in it, so I’ll be wearing something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue,” Laura said cheerfully.

“I don’t suppose there’s any truth in these old sayings,” Ma consented.

Pa said, “I think it is a sensible thing to do. You and Almanzo show good judgment.”

But Ma was not wholly satisfied yet. “Let Reverend Brown come here. You can be married at home, Laura. We can have a nice little wedding here.”

“No, Ma, we couldn’t have any kind of a wedding and not wait to have Almanzo’s mother here,” Laura objected.

“Laura is right, and you think so yourself, Caroline,” said Pa.

“Of course I do,” Ma admitted.

Chapter 32

“Haste to the Wedding”

Carrie and Grace eagerly offered to do all the housework, so that Ma and Laura could finish the cashmere, and every day that week they sewed as fast as they could.

They made a tight-fitting basque, pointed at the bottom back and front, lined with black cambric lining and boned with whalebones on every seam. It had a high collar of the cashmere. The sleeves were lined, too. They were long and plain and beautifully fitted, with a little fullness at the top but tight at the wrists. A shirring around each armhole, in front, made a graceful fullness over the breast, that was taken up by darts below. Small round black buttons buttoned the basque straight down the front.

The skirt just touched the floor all around. It fitted smoothly at the top, but was gored to fullness at the bottom. It was lined throughout with the cambric dress lining, and interlined with crinoline from the bottom to as high as Laura’s shoes. The bottom of the skirt and the linings were turned under and the raw edges covered with dress braid, which Laura hemmed down by hand on both edges, so that no stitches showed on the right side.

There was no drive that Sunday. Almanzo came by for only a moment in his work clothes, to say that he was breaking the Sabbath by working on the house. It would be finished, he said, by Wednesday; so they could be married Thursday. He would come for Laura at ten o’clock Thursday morning, for the Reverend Brown was leaving town on the eleven o’clock train.

“Then better come over with your wagon, Wednesday, if you can make it, for Laura’s things,” Pa told him. Almanzo said he would, and so it was settled, and with a smile to Laura he drove quickly away.

Tuesday morning Pa drove to town, and at noon he came back bringing Laura a present of a new trunk. “Better put your things into it today,” he said.

With Ma’s help, Laura packed her trunk that afternoon. Her old rag doll, Charlotte, with all her clothes carefully packed in a cardboard box, she put in the very bottom. Laura’s winter clothes were laid in next, then her sheets and pillow cases and towels, her new white clothes and calico dresses and her brown poplin. The pink lawn was carefully laid on top so that it would not be crushed. In the hatbox of the trunk’s till, Laura put her new hat with the ostrich tips, and in the shallow till itself she had her knitting and crochet needles and worsted yarns.