Edna Browning;

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:

“There has been a railroad accident, and your niece Edna’s husband was killed. They were married yesterday morning in Buffalo.

“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.”