"She would turn over in her coffin, I do believe," he thought, and then he wondered how much Augusta's wedding portion would be, and how far it would go toward restoring his Irish home to something like its former condition. But on this point, pere Browne maintained a rigid silence, and he was obliged to be content with the hints which mere Browne dropped from time to time. She had made minute inquiries with regard to Hardy Manor, her daughter's future home, and at her request he had made a drawing of it, so that she knew just how many rooms there were, and how they were furnished.
"I shall h'ist them feather beds out double quick," she said, "and them high four-posters, with tops like a buggy. I'd as soon sleep in a hearse, and I shall put in some brass bedsteads and hair mattresses, and mabby I shall furnish Gusty's room with willer work. I'll show 'em what Uncle Sam can do."
Was she then going with him to Hardy Manor, and must he present her to his aristocratic friends as the mother of his bride? The very possibility of such a calamity made the perspiration ooze from the tips of Lord Hardy's fingers to the roots of his hair, and once he contemplated running away and taking the first ship which sailed for Liverpool. But when he remembered his debts he concluded to swallow everything, even the mother-in-law, if necessary. He was to sail the last week in November, and as, when he engaged his state-room, nothing had been said about a second one for Mrs. Browne, he comforted himself with the hope that she did not meditate going with him. She would, perhaps, come in the spring, by which time he might be glad for the brass bedsteads and hair mattresses which abounded at the Ridge House, and which were really more in accordance with his luxurious tastes than the feather beds and high four-posters which had done duty at Hardy Manor for more years than he could remember.
Over four hundred invitations were given to the wedding, as Mrs. Browne said she "didn't mean to make nobody mad." But she did offend more people than if her party had been more select, for when Mrs. Peter Stokes, the truckman's wife, heard that her next door neighbor, Mrs. Asa Noaks, the hackman's wife, had received an invitation and she had not, her indignation knew no bounds, and she wondered who Miss Ike Browne thought she was, and if she had forgotten that she once went out to work like any other hired girl; and when Susan Slocum, whose mother took in washing, heard that her friend Lucy Smith, who worked in the mill, was invited and she was not, she persuaded her mother to roll up the four dozen pieces which had been sent from the Ridge to be washed, and return them with the message that if she wa'n't good enough to go to the wedding she wa'n't good enough to wash the weddin' finery. This so disturbed poor Mrs. Browne, who really wished to please every body, that but for the interference of Allen and Augusta she would have gone immediately to the offended washerwoman with an apology, and an earliest request to be present at the wedding.