Eleanor and Franklin by Joseph P. Lash Read Free Book Online Page A

the kennels,” and then Elliott sat “cosily over the big wood fire gazing into the flames and wishing for and thinking of my Sweet Heart.”
    â€œA jolly afternoon’s polo yesterday,” he reported a few days later. He was one of the best polo men at Meadow Brook, and his brilliance in this “emperor” of sports thrilled Anna, although she must have worried about the game’s hazards. “You will have to hurry up and marry me,” he warned her,
    if you expect to have anything left to marry. It seems to me that I get from one bad scrape into another. That beastly leg gave me so much pain that I went to the Doctor and I’m in for it this time, I’m afraid, not to get on a horse for a week and not to walk about more than is absolutely necessary. Oh! my! Poultices ! Ointment ! and three evenings alone by myself at 57th St. with my leg on a chair.
    Was he really in such a hurry to marry Anna? He was often melancholy that summer and had some sort of seizure at Tivoli. “My old Indian trouble has left me subject to turns like I had Monday from change of weather or some such cause,” he wrote Anna reassuringly. The trip down on the train had been “pretty bad,” he confessed, but “Herm Livingston and Frank Appleton were on board and very kind so I pulled along very well.”
    Anna was troubled by his sudden depressions. “Please never keep anything from me,” she pleaded with him, “for fear of giving me pain or say to yourself ‘There can be no possible use of my telling her.’Believe me, I am quite strong enough to face with you the storms of this life and I shall always be so happy when I know that you have told and will tell me every thought, and I can perhaps sometimes be of some use to you.”
    She should not worry, he replied. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often, but please darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.” And in Anna’s moments of doubt and despondency, Elliott comforted and cheered her: “Darling if you care to, we will read some of my favorite chapters and verses in the little Testament together.” He had carried that little book all around the world and it had been a “comforting and joyous though silent companion.”
    Mrs. Hall agreed to a December 1 wedding date. Would Anna really like diamonds for a wedding present, Elliott asked her as summer drew to a close, or would she prefer “a little coupe or Victoria?” He thought he could afford to buy one for her if she would find it useful and enjoy the driving.
    As the wedding day neared, Mrs. Hall, although happy for her “darling child,” could not help but feel anxious about entrusting her to this dashing young man, so different from her sternly pious husband. “I pray you and Elliott to enter your new life with your hearts turned to God,” she wrote her daughter on the eve of the wedding. “Go to him tonight before retiring and in His presence read your Bible and kneel together and ask Him to guide you both through this world which has been so bright to you both, but which must have some clouds, and dearest Anna and Elliott for my sake, and for both of your dear fathers’ sakes never fail to have daily prayers.”
    The wedding ceremony was at Calvary Church, two blocks from Elliott’s Twentieth Street birthplace. It was described by the Herald as “one of the most brilliant social events of the season. . . . The bride was every bit a queen and her bridesmaids were worthy of her.” The Herald ’s account of the wedding ended, “It is the desire of the bride to be back by the 11th inst. in order to be present at the time of the Vanderbilt ball.”
    On their way south they stopped in Philadelphia, and Elliott promptly penned a reassuring note to Mrs.