"Bruce--MEREDITH!" Miss Branston's voice was like a gong as she jolted off of her horse and flew inside the manse. Her face was like a thundercloud. Cecilia was hot on her heels.
"Uncle Bruce! Uncle Bruce!" she cried, to warn him, and then had a terrible moment of indecision, for the horse Miss Branston had ridden over on wasn't tied to anything. Suppose he ran off? Cecilia recognized him as Mack Douglas's old nag. If she ran off, Miss Branston would like be in trouble. But if she didn't get inside and quick, Uncle Bruce would be. And she hated to admit it, but Cecilia had a nose for gossip, and it was telling her now that she didn't want to miss a moment of this!
Cecilia looped the horse's reins over the fencepost and flew inside in time to see Miss Branston deliver two short slaps to Uncle Bruce's very pale face.
"What is the meaning of this, Penny!" said Grandmother Rosemary quietly but severely, and Grandpa Meredith rose from the chair in which he had been reading the paper and began to go to her. But something in Penelope Branston's face stopped him. She did not answer Grandmother, but instead gave a long, low wail.
"You!" she cried, pointing a trembling finger at Uncle Bruce. "It was you--all along-- how you must have been laughing at me! And you!" She whirled on Cecilia. "Why didn't you tell me, at least? How could you let me do it, Cecilia?"
"Leave her out of it," growled Uncle Bruce. "She had nothing to do with it."
"So you don't deny it!" Miss Branston turned to face Cecilia and the stunned Merediths, who looked like they had been visited by a cyclone. "Let me tell you what happened, then," she said facetiously and with overblown emotion, like an elocutionist to her audience. "I've received seven letters in as many weeks from my 'uncle,' the dear Mr. X. Each one was so positively positive and encouraging that I thought--I must visit him in person. And they were familiar, somehow, too, those letters, but I chalked that up to the fact that the writer was a family relation! So I went down to Queens yesterday-- on my week-end off," Miss Branston turned back to Uncle Bruce.
"There was no one there, in the whole History department, who knew anything about a scholarship. No one with my Father's last name-- nor my mother's. No one in the History Department, or English, or Sciences, or Maths who could possibly be my uncle! I visited them all, trying to piece together this mystery. I took the train back. Then a very cold feeling came over me-- I took out the letters and re-read them. Certain phrases jumped out at me. Then I went home and took these," Miss Branston waved a sheaf of letters in the air, "Out of their storage and read them over. 'You have certainly brushed up against the touchstone of knowledge,' writes Mr. X. 'Dearest Penny, your eyes are a touchstone of beauty'...writes Bruce Meredith! 'The joy of learning makes the heart as free as the wind in the eaves,' writes Dr. X. 'When I am with you I feel as free as the wind in the eaves, again writes Bruce Meredith!'
Grandmother Rosemary began to laugh. "That's certainly Bruce," she murmured to Cecilia. "When he was a boy he thought it was 'wind in the eaves' instead of 'wind in the trees,' and we could never convince him it was otherwise."
"Stubborn," whispered Cecilia back.
"Shhh, and let's watch the show," said Granmother. "I wonder how long before they fall into each other's arms?"
Cecilia thought Grandmother Rosemary might be a bit optimistic. Miss Branston's eyes were blazing.
"And the handwriting is the same," she spat, hurling borth piles of letters at Uncle Bruce. "You didn't even bother to disguise it. Oh, Bruce! How could you!"
"I've given you months and months of hard work in that money," said Uncle Bruce, grasping Penelope by the arms. "You don't know what I did to get it-- worked harder than I ever had before! And now I want to give it to you, woman! Not a loan, not an investment, but a gift. I should have known you'd be too ungrateful and proud to take it."
"Of course I am!" said Miss Branston furiously. "I wanted to do it myself, with money I had earned myself! Whether it be through physical labor or mental. I didn't want to do it with your money!"
"Marry me, then! Then it will be your money, too, and you can do whatever in hell you want with it!" Bruce roared.
Penelope Branston stomped her foot. "Fine! I will!" She burst into tears. "But oh, not only because I want your money!"
The shouting and crying stopped and Bruce and Penelope stared at each other transfixed. "Will you, really?" Uncle Bruce said, increduously.
"Yes, and you shouldn't have asked me if you didn't mean it," said Miss Branston.
"Oh I meant it--I meant it!" said Uncle Bruce and then dipped Miss Branston low so that her hair brushed the floor, and kissed her as no one had ever been kissed in that manse in Glen St. Mary. Maybe even in a manse anywhere in the world.
"I believe I have some important errands to run," said Grandfather Meredith, clearing his throat and rising from his chair by way of making an exit. "I understand that congratulations are in order, Son--and Daughter-to-be."
Uncle Bruce waved a hand in acceptance of the felicitation, but did not stop kissing his bride.
"I suppose we should go, too," Grandmother Rosemary whispered to Cecilia. "We should give them some privacy, even if we won't sleep a wink tonight with wondering what was said."
"Will we listen at the door with a glass?" asked Cecilia mischievously. She had seen that technique in a movie.
"Of course I won't!" said Grandmother Rosemary. "That would hardly be fitting, as a mother and a minister's wife. But you may-- if you tell me what is said."
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It was so romantic, Cecilia wrote to Leslie, after a detailed account of the proposal itself.
They are to be married at the end of August-- just in time for Miss Branston-- or just plain Penny, as she has instructed me to call her-- to enroll in the fall term at Redmond. Father luckily says that I might stay an extra week, which is good, because I am to be bridesmaid! Uncle Bruce has postponed finishing his doctorate and has bought a little gray, gabled house in Summerside. They are going to call it 'Wind-in-the-Eaves." Miss Branston--Penny!-- let me pick the paper for the second upstairs guest room-- they are going to keep it always as my room, for when I come to visit. Uncle Bruce says they will fill it with bon-bons and magazines and books and books of poetry. He says they never would have gotten back together if it hadn't been for me, and that I deserve heaps of riches and their firstborn child for it. Anyway, I picked a silvery paper with violets, and they are having a white eyelet bedspread made, with white wicker furniture to match.
Penny is going to wear Grandmother Rosemary's dress-- that style is 'in' again, Merry tells me, but even if it weren't that dress looks like it was made for her. She and Grandmother Rosemary are so alike in appearance-- they are both so tall and slender and fair. And they get along famously! "She won't ever hold him back," Grandmother says happily. Uncle Bruce has had a dozen new dresses made for Penny-- all in varying shades of green and gold. He says she shall wear nothing else, for no color suits her so well as those two. She has an engagement present from him-- a beautiful yellow topaz pendant to wear with the green dresses-- and a wedding present of peridot earrings to wear with the gold.
Uncle Bruce worships her, and Grandpa Meredith has jokingly reminded him of the first commandment many times: 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' 'But it doesn't say a thing about goddesses,' explained Uncle Bruce irreverantly. He is always kissing Penny in places where he shouldn't and he doesn't care who sees. And he is always saying shocking things. He told Mary Vance that he and Penny plan on having at least five children, and that they mean to start as soon as possible. Mary Vance was unfazed. 'Good for you,' she said. 'Although I think you'd better practice a bit first.' And oh, Leslie, he told Mrs. Raymond Russell that they are having sheets imported from Japan for their marriage bed and that quite shocked her! The Russells are all hopelessly Victorian. But no one really holds it against him because they are obviously so in love.
Penny is the happiest I have ever seen her. "I'm reading Dickinson--and liking it, truly," she confided to me one day last week. And that is really all that needs to be said on that!
So we are all very happy. The elder Mrs. Branston is even happy, though she will be losing her nursemaid-- her 'slave,' as Penny says. She thinks that Grandpa and Grandma Meredith are rich-- she doesn't seem to understand that the church owns the manse, not them, and she wouldn't understand the ways in which they are rich. And she said, quite satisfactorily, that she is sure the marriage will last because a minister's son 'won't run' like her own husband did. She has even started going to the Presbyterian church out of family loyalty, even though the Branstons have always been Methodists! So all's well that end's well, and isn't it the most romantic thing in the world? Two lovers who thought their love was lost-- and then found it again.
"I suppose it is romantic," the prosaic Leslie wrote back. "But wouldn't it have been more so if they'd never been separated to begin with?"
And it must be admitted that it would have been.
"But it's romantic enough for me as it is," said Cecilia contentedly.
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A/N: Thanks for the reviews everyone!
Gufa: yes, Cecilia and Blythe are double cousins, but as I said before, someone posted some links in comments about Canadian laws concerning first (and double-first) cousin marriage. And if Cee and Bly do end up together I promise not to make it too "oogy" (for lack of better word!) But who's to say they will? Cecilia's still with Sid, and she might fall for someone else in the sequel. Cecilia of Red Apple Farm sounds nice...if only they decide to stay on the Island.
Miri: Nope, not May! May would never do anything that romantic. And yes, I plan on having some discussion of Walter before this story's through.