HOW AUNT JERUSHA RECEIVED THE NEWS.
Aunt Jerusha had never heard of Charlie Churchill, or dreamed of her
niece’s love affair, and she sat milking Blossom, her pet cow, with her
skirts tucked up around her, and an old sun-bonnet perched on her head,
when the boy from Livonia station came furiously round the corner of the
church, and reined up his panting, hard driven horse so suddenly, that
Blossom, frightened out of her usually grave, quiet mood, started aside,
and in so doing upset the pail, and came near upsetting the highly
scandalized woman, who, turning fiercely to the boy, demanded what he
wanted, and what he meant by tipping over all that milk, which was as
good as a quarter right out of her pocket.
The boy, who knew the contents of the telegram, made no reply with
regard to the milk, except a prolonged whistle as he saw the white
liquid streaming along upon the ground, and then glanced curiously at
the tall, grim woman confronting him so angrily.
“Here’s a telegraph,” he said, “and there’s two dollars to pay on it,
’cause I had to fetch it so far; and your nephew, or niece, Edna, I
forgot which, is dead, killed by the cars.”
At the mention of the price she must pay for that bit of paper, Miss
Pepper bristled at once, and began to revolve the propriety of not
taking it from the boy, who could not compel her to pay for what she
never received; but when, boy-like, he blurted out the contents, making
a great blunder, and telling her Edna was dead, she grew whiter than the
milk which Tabby, her cat, was lapping at her feet, and forgetting the
two dollars leaned up against the fence, and taking the telegram in her
hands, began to question the boy as to the _when_ and _how_ of the
terrible catastrophe.
“Edna killed!” she gasped, and to do her justice, she never thought of
the piles of carpet-rags the girl was to have cut that winter; for she
had made up her mind to bring her home when she went with her poultry to
Canandaigua; but she _did_ think of the dreary look she had so often
seen in the young girl’s face; of the tears, which Edna had shed so
plentifully when under discipline; and there arose in her heart a wish
that she had been less strict and exacting with the girl who was said to
be dead. “How came she near the cars to get killed?” she asked, and the
boy replied:
“Read for yourself, and you’ll know all I do.”
It was growing dark, and Miss Pepper led the way into the house, and
bade the boy sit down while she hunted up a tallow candle and lighted it
from a coal taken from the hearth. There was certainly a tear on her
hard face as she blew the coal to a blaze, and the pain in her heart
kept growing until with the aid of the candle she read:
“IONA, _October 8th, 18—_.
“TO MISS JERUSHA PEPPER:
ALLEN’S HILL, ONTARIO CO., N.Y.
(_via_ LIVONIA STATION.)
“There has been a railroad accident, and your niece Edna’s husband was
killed. They were married yesterday morning in Buffalo.
MISS GEORGIE BURTON.”
“Edna’s husband! Married yesterday morning in Buffalo! What does it
mean?” she exclaimed, forgetting the dreary look, and the tears, and the
harsh discipline, and in her amazement seizing the boy by the collar, as
if he had been the offending Edna, and asking him again “what it meant,
and where he got that precious piece of news, and who Edna’s husband
was, and how he knew it was true, and if it was not, how he dared come
there with such ridiculous stuff and tip her milk over and charge her
two dollars to boot?”
She had come to herself by this time, and the milk and the money were of
more importance to her than the story, which she believed was false; and
she continued to shake the boy until he twisted himself loose from her
grasp and retreated toward the door.
“Goll darn ye,” he said, “a pretty actin’ woman you be, with some of yer
relations dead. What do I know about it? Nothin’, only it was
telegraphed to the office this afternoon, and they posted me off to once
to tell you ’bout it. I’ll take the two dollars, or if you won’t they’ll
send you a writ to-morry;” and the boy, grown bold from the fact that he
was standing on the door-step and out of the vixen’s reach, began to
whistle “Shoo Fly” with a great deal of energy.
People like Miss Pepper usually have a great terror of a _writ_, and
without stopping to consider the probabilities of the case, the good
woman reluctantly counted out two dollars, and handing them to the boy,
bade him be off and never darken her door again. Once alone, Miss Pepper
read and _re-read_ the telegram, which gave her no further intelligence
than that first imparted to her. There had been a railroad accident out
west and Edna’s husband was killed. What could it mean, and who was
Edna’s husband? Then as she thought of Canandaigua and reflected that
somebody there knew something about it, she resolved upon going to town
on the morrow and ascertaining for herself what it all was about. But
the next morning was ushered in with a driving rain, which came in under
Miss Jerusha’s front door, and drove into the cellar and through that
patch of old shingles on the roof, and kept the old dame hurrying hither
and thither with mop, and broom, and pail, and drove Canandaigua from
her mind as utterly impracticable.
The next day, however, was tolerably clear; and having borrowed a
neighbor’s horse, and arrayed herself in an old water-proof cloak, with
the hood over her head, she started for town, where the news had
preceded her, and produced a state of wild excitement among the seminary
girls, who pounced upon Miss Pepper at once, each telling what she knew,
and sometimes far more than she knew. First, they had heard that Charlie
Churchill had run away from the academy, then of the marriage in
Buffalo, and then the last evening’s papers had brought the news of the
fearful tragedy, which changed the public feeling of blame into pity for
poor Edna. But Aunt Jerusha knew no pity. That four hundred dollars
which she must now pay for Edna’s education precluded the possibility of
pity in a nature like hers, and she felt only anger and resentment
towards her luckless niece who had thrown such a bill of expense upon
her. Not that the principal spoke of the bill so soon; he had no fears
of its being unpaid, and would have waited till a more fitting time,
before touching upon so delicate a point. It was Miss Pepper herself who
dragged in the subject and insisted upon knowing _about_ how much it
was, even if she could not know exactly, and showed so much bitterness
that Mr. Stone threw off fifty dollars and made it an even four hundred,
and told her not to trouble herself, and a good deal more meant to
conciliate her.
But he might as well have talked to the wind, for any effect his words
had upon the excited woman. Everything which it was possible to learn
with regard to Charlie Churchill she learned, and in her secret heart
felt that if it had turned out well, she should be a little proud of the
Leighton family; but it had not turned out well, and she expressed
herself so freely, that a few of the girls who had always been envious
of Edna, and Charlie’s attentions to her, dropped a hint of a rumor they
had heard about some bill at Greenough’s, and forthwith the incensed
Jerusha drove to the jeweller’s, and by dint of questioning and
cross-questioning, learned about the watch, and the coral, and the ring;
then hurrying back to the Seminary, she picked up the clothes Edna had
left, and cramming them into a little square hair-trunk which had held
Henry Browning’s wardrobe when he first went to college, carried it to
the buggy by the gate, and putting her feet upon it, drove back to the
Hill in a state of greater mental excitement than she had ever been in
before.
Two days after Jack’s letter came, telling her the particulars, and
saying “Mrs. Churchill sends her love and will write herself when she is
able. She is very sorry to make you feel as badly as she knows you must,
and hopes you will forgive her.”
This letter, instead of conciliating Miss Pepper, threw her into a
greater rage than ever. This might have been owing in part to the fact
that she was suffering from an attack of neuralgia, induced by a cold
taken the day she went to Canandaigua in Edna’s behalf. Neuralgia is not
pleasant to bear at any time, and Miss Pepper did not bear it
pleasantly, and looked more like a scarecrow than a human being as she
crouched before the fire, with her false teeth out, a hasty pudding
poultice on her face, a mustard paste on the back of her neck, and an
old woollen shawl pinned over her head to keep it warm.
“Mrs. Churchill! Mrs. Fiddlesticks! That chit of a child,” she said,
when she finished reading Jack Heyford’s letter, “sends her love, and is
sorry, and hopes I’ll forgive her! Stuff! I hope I won’t! Brought up
religiously as she was, confirmed and all that, and then ran away with a
beggar who breaks his neck. No, I shan’t forgive her; leastwise not for
a spell. She ought to suffer awhile, and she needn’t think to wheedle me
into asking her home right away. By and by, when she is punished enough,
I may take her back, but not now. She has made her bed and must lie in
it.”
This was Miss Pepper’s decision, and taking advantage of a few minutes
when her face was easier, she commenced a letter to Edna, berating her
soundly for what she had done, telling her she could not expect her
friends to stand by her when she disgraced herself by “marrying a man or
boy who did not own so much as the shirt on his back, and who was mean
enough to buy a lot of jewelry and never pay for it. Greenough told me
about the watch, and coral, and ring, and he’s going to send the bill to
Mr. Leighton. I should think you’d feel smart wearing the jimcracks.
Yes, I should.”
Edna was better when the letter came to her, and the world did not look
one half so dreary as it had done when viewed from her sick bed in that
little front room of Mrs. Dana’s. For the first time since the accident,
she had given some thought to her toilet, and had brushed and arranged
her beautiful hair, and thought of Charlie with a keen throb of pain as
she wound round her fingers the long curls he used so to admire. Edna
was proud of her hair, which so many people called beautiful, but which
Aunt Jerusha had set herself so strongly against. Twice had that
maiden’s scissors been in dangerous proximity to the mass of golden
brown, but something in the girl’s piteous expression had reminded her
of the dead man under the shadow of the cherry-trees, and the curls had
not been harmed. Edna thought of Aunt Jerusha now, as she shook back the
shining ringlets, which rippled all round her neck and shoulders, and
with the thought came a desire to know what that worthy woman would say,
and a wonder as to why she did not write. She was beginning to long for
some expression with regard to her conduct, even though it should be
anything but commendatory. She knew she would be blamed; she deserved
it, she thought, but she was not quite prepared for the harsh tone of
Aunt Jerusha’s letter, and she felt for a moment as if her heart would
burst with a sense of the injustice done to her.
One piece of information which the letter contained hurt her cruelly,
and that was the news concerning the jewelry, which Roy Leighton must
pay for, even to her wedding ring which she clutched at first with an
impulse to tear it from her finger and thrust it from her forever. But
the solemn words—“With this ring I thee wed”—sounded again in her ears,
and brought back that hour when she stood at Charlie’s side, loving him,
believing in him, trusting him implicitly. She did not ask herself how
much of that faith, and trust, and love was gone; she dared not do that,
for fear of what the answer might be. Charlie was dead, and that was
enough; and she wrung her hands helplessly and looked at the ring, the
seal of her marriage, but could not take it off then, even though Roy
Leighton must pay for it. She wrote to him again that very day, with
what sore heart and utter humiliation we have seen in her letter to him,
but with a firm determination to do what she promised him she would do,
namely: liquidate her indebtedness to him and arrange if possible with
the jeweller.
“I must go to work now,” she said to herself. “I can be idle no longer.”
But what to do, and where to seek employment in that city, where she was
an utter stranger, was the point which puzzled her greatly; and when
Jack Heyford came next to see her, she told him of her plans and asked
him for advice. Had he been rich, Jack would have offered to pay her
debts and make her free from want, for never was there a more generous,
unselfish heart than that which beat under his old worn coat. But Jack
was not rich, and his salary, though comparatively liberal, could not at
present warrant any additional expense to those he already had to meet;
and when she asked him if he knew of any scholars either in music or
drawing, which she would be likely to get, he replied that he _did_ know
of _one_, and it would be just the thing for her, too, and help to
relieve the tedium of sitting all day long in her chair, or reclining on
the couch. Annie should take lessons of Mrs. Churchill, and commence
to-morrow, if that would suit, and meantime he would inquire among his
friends, and tell them Edna’s story.
And so it was arranged that Edna should go to little Annie Heyford the
next day, at two o’clock, and give her first lesson in drawing.
“You will have no difficulty in finding your way,” Jack said. “I would
come for you myself, but might not be able to leave the store at the
hour.” Then, just before leaving, he added: “Suppose you make it one,
instead of two, and lunch with Annie. That will please her vastly, she
complains of eating alone so often.”
As there was no special reason why Edna should decline this invitation,
she accepted it readily; and that night, just as she was falling away to
sleep, and dreaming that she had more scholars than she could well
manage, and that her debt to Roy was nearly paid, Jack was conferring
with old Luna concerning the lunch of the next day.
“Get up a tip-top one, auntie,” he said, handing her a bill. “She was
half-starved in the seminary, I’ll warrant, and I don’t believe those
Danas know much about good cooking; anyway they _fry_ their beefsteak,
for I’ve smelled it, and that I call heathenish. So scare up something
nice, irrespective of the expense.”