PAYING DEBTS.
Early in April, Aunt Jerry received a letter from Edna containing a
draft for one hundred dollars. “All honestly earned,” Edna wrote; “and
affording me more pleasure to pay it than you can well imagine. I have
fifty dollars beside, which I enclose in an envelope, and wish you to
send to Mr. Leighton; but don’t tell him where I am, for the world.”
Aunt Jerry was not in the best of spirits when she received the letter.
She had been having a cistern dug under her back stoop, and what with
hurrying Robbins, who dug it, and watching her clock to see that he
worked his hours, she had worried herself almost sick; while to crown
all, the poor old man, who at her instigation had spent nearly one
entire day in wheeling the dirt to a safe distance from the house, where
it wouldn’t “stand round in a great ugly pile,” found on sinking his
hogshead that he had dug his excavation too large, and would need all,
or nearly all, the dirt to fill it up again; and greatly to the horror
of the highly incensed Miss Pepper, he spent another day in wheeling his
dirt back again. It was of no use for Miss Jerusha to scold, and call
the man a fool. She had ordered the dirt away herself, and now she
listened in a half-frantic condition to the slow tramp, tramp of
Robbins’ feet, and the rattling sound of the wheelbarrow which brought
it back again, and undid the work of yesterday.
“Shiffless as the rot,” was Aunt Jerry’s parting comment, spoken to
herself, as, the cistern finally finished, Robbins departed, just as a
boy brought her Edna’s letter.
The sight of the money mollified her a little, and for a long time she
sat thinking, with her pasteboard sun-bonnet on her head, and Tabby in
her lap. At last, her thoughts found vent in words, and she
anathematized Roy Leighton, and called him “a stingy hunks if he touched
a dollar of that child’s hard earnings. Don’t catch me to do it, though
I dare say _he_ thinks I will!” and Aunt Jerry gave a contemptuous sniff
at the mysterious _he_, whoever he might be.
The next day she went to Canandaigua, and got a new bank-book, with
“Edna Browning’s” name in it, and put to her credit two hundred dollars,
and then at night wrote to her niece, telling her “she had done better
than she ever ’sposed she would, and that if she kept on she might in
time make a woman, perhaps.”
Not a word, however, did she say with regard to her disposition of the
funds: that was a surprise for the future; but after finishing her
letter, she caught up a half sheet of paper, in a fierce kind of way,
and wrote hurriedly:
“PHILIP OVERTON:—I dare say you think me as mean as _pussley_, and that
I kept that money Edna sent for my own, but I assure you, sir, I didn’t.
I put every dollar in the bank for _her_, and added another hundred
besides.
“Yours to command, JERUSHA PEPPER.”
“P.S.—I hope, from some things Edna tells me, you are thinking about
your depraved state, while out of the ark of safety.
J. P.”
Edna never saw this letter, for Uncle Phil did not think it best to show
it to her; but he read it many times with infinite satisfaction, and
took a pinch of snuff each time he read it, and chuckled over it
amazingly, and said to himself:
“There’s now and then a good streak about the old gal. Maybe she gets it
from the Church,—the ark she calls it. Anyhow, I’ll speak to Carson
to-day about the plan. I couldn’t please three wimmen folks better.”
He answered the letter at once, and said:
“MISS JERUSHA PEPPER:—Well done, good and faithful servant. Many
daughters have done well, but you excel them all. Three cheers and a
tiger for you.
“P.S.—I ain’t thinkin’ particularly about my depraved condition, but I
_am_ thinkin’ of building a chapel for you to enjoy religion in, when
you come to visit Edna.
“PHILIP OVERTON.”
Uncle Phil _did_ see Carson, as he proposed doing; and as a result of
the conference, a delegation of the leading men in the Unitarian Church
called upon him the next morning, to know if it was true that he had
abjured their faith, and was going to be confirmed at St. Jude’s, and
build a church in Rocky Point, and pay the minister himself. They had
heard all this, and a great deal more; and unwilling to lose so
profitable and prominent a member from their own numbers, they came to
expostulate and reason with him, and if necessary use harsher and
severer language,—which they did before they were through with him. For
Uncle Phil owned to the chapel arrangement, and said he thought it well
enough for a man of his years to be thinking about leaving behind him
some monument by which he should be remembered; otherwise, who would
think of the old codger, Phil Overton, three months after he was dead.
Then Squire Gardiner suggested that their own church needed repairing,
and that a new and handsome organ would be quite as fitting a monument,
and do quite as much toward wafting one to heaven as the building of an
Episcopal chapel, and introducing into their midst an entirely new
element, which would make fools of all the young people, and set the
girls to making crosses and working altar-cloths. For his part, he would
advise Mr. Overton to think twice, before committing himself to such
folly.
Uncle Phil replied that “he didn’t want any advice,—he knew his own
business; and as to repairing the church, he wouldn’t say but what he
would give as much toward that as anybody else; but he’d ‘be _darned_’
if he’d buy an organ for them to fight over, as to who should or
shouldn’t play it, and how much they should have a Sunday. A choir was a
confounded nuisance, anyway,—always in hot water, and he didn’t mean to
have any in his chapel. No, sir! he’d have _boys_, as they did over to
St. Jude’s.”
“Ha, a Ritualist, hey?” and one of the number drew back from him, as if
he had had the small-pox, asking how long since he had become a convert
to that faith, and when he met with a change?
Uncle Phil told him it was “none of his business;” and after a few more
earnest words, said, “the whole posse might go to thunder, and he would
build as many churches as he pleased, and run ’em _ritual_, if he wanted
to, for all of anybody.”
This was all the satisfaction the Unitarians got; while the Orthodox,
who, like their neighbors, rebelled against the introduction of the
Episcopal element into their midst, fared still worse, for the old man
_swore_ at _them_; and when one of them asked “how soon he intended to
be confirmed?” vowed “he would be the very first chance he got, so as to
spite ’em.”
Uncle Phil was hardly a fit candidate for confirmation, but the lion was
roused in him, and the chapel was now so sure a thing, that before the
first of June, the site was all marked out, and men engaged to do the
mason-work.
Edna’s school was still a success, and Edna herself was very happy in
her work and her home. She heard from Maude frequently, and the letters
were prized according to the amount of gossip they contained concerning
Leighton Place and its inmates. Roy had written a few lines
acknowledging the receipt of the fifty dollars, and asking her, as a
favor, not to think of paying him any more.
“I’d so much rather you would not,” he wrote; “I do not need the money,
and it pains me to think of my little sister working so hard, and
wearing out her young life, which should be happy, and free from care.
Don’t do it, Edna, please; and I so much wish you would let me know
where you are, so that I might come and see you, and sometime, perhaps,
bring you to Leighton, where your home ought to be. Write to me, won’t
you, and tell me more of yourself, and believe me always,
“Your brother, ROY.”
It was a very blithe, merry little girl which went singing about the
farm-house after the receipt of this letter, which came through the
medium of Aunt Jerusha; and Uncle Phil stopped more than once to look
after her, wondering to see her so different from what she had been when
she first came to Rocky Point. Then she was a sad, pale-faced woman,
with a dreary, pitiful expression in the brown eyes, which now sparkled
and danced, and changed their color with every passing emotion, while
her face glowed again with health and girlish beauty. All the
circumstances of her life at Rocky Point had been tending to this
result, but it was Roy’s letter which produced the culminating effect,
and took Edna back to her old self, the gay, light-hearted girl, who had
known no greater care than Aunt Jerry’s rasping manner. From this she
was free now, and life began to look as bright and beautiful to her as
did the hill-sides and the mountain-tops when decked in their fresh
spring robes.
She answered Roy’s letter at once, and told him how glad she was to know
that he had an interest in her, but that she must pay him every dollar
before she could feel perfectly free again, and that for the present she
preferred to remain where she was. In reply to this, Roy sent her a few
hurried lines saying that early in June he should sail for Europe with
his mother, whose health required a change. They might be gone a year or
more, and they might return at any time. It all depended on his mother,
and how the change agreed with her. Edna cried over this letter, and
when she knew that Roy had sailed, her face wore a sober, anxious look,
and she said often to herself the prayer for those upon the sea, and
watched eagerly for tidings of the arrival of the “Adriatic” across the
water. And when they came, and she knew Roy was safe, there was a kind
of jubilee within her heart, and she offered a prayer of thanksgiving to
Him who rules the winds and waves, and had suffered no harm to befall
her brother, Roy Leighton.