CHAPTER LXIV.,AND LAST.

The Schuylers all remained in Hampstead the winter after Gertie’s marriage, and our little town was the pleasanter and gayer for it. Only one sad thing occurred,—and that, the death of poor Tom, which took place about Christmas time, when we were hanging our garlands of evergreens in the church and making ready for our annual festival. I was sitting by Gertie working upon the same wreath, when the news was brought to us, and I saw the tears, which came with a rush to her eyes, and knew she was thinking of the hopeless love which had, no doubt, shortened poor Tom’s life.

“Tell Gertie,” he said to his sister, when the death-sweat was on his brow, and his utterance was thick and indistinct; “tell Gertie I loved her till the last, and blessed her with my dying breath, for she helped make me a man. But for her I should fill a drunkard’s grave and meet a drunkard’s doom. She warned me of my peril; she led me back from the brink of ruin; and if I am saved, as I hope to be, I shall be a star in her crown of glory, as the sinner whom she converted from his evil ways. Heaven bless her, and Godfrey, too; they are worthy of each other.”

These were Tom’s last words, and Gertie cried as if her heart would break when Rosamond repeated them to her the week after Tom’s funeral when she came to say good-by. They were going away from the Ridge House, Rosamond said, and the place was for sale. She wished Godfrey would buy it; she would rather see him and Gertie there than strangers, who had never known or cared for her and her mother.

The idea of a home of her own was a pleasant one to Gertie, and a few days after Godfrey rode up to the Ridge to confer with Mrs. Barton. But another had been before him and bought the place, and some time in February was to take possession.

Godfrey’s horse never galloped a distance of two miles anda half more swiftly than on that day when his rider was charged with so important news.

“Gertie, Gertie, I say, where are you? Look here!” he exclaimed, as he bolted into the room where she was sitting. “Guess how the rector proposes to keep Lent! What cross is he going to bear!”

Gertie could only look at him in surprise, while he went on:

“He has bought the Ridge House, and is going to take a wife, just before Ash-Wednesday! Think of Alice Creighton running a sewing society and having a church sociable!”

It was as Godfrey said, Alice was to beRev. Mrs. Marks, and live at the Ridge House, which her money bought, and the fitting up of which she came to superintend a few days after the story was out. She had written to me asking permission to stop with us while she remained in Hampstead, and I was expecting the little lady, when both Gertie and Godfrey interfered, and begged so hard for her to stop with them that she yielded to their entreaties and went to Schuyler Hill, where Godfrey nearly teased her life out of her, and was far more attentive to her than he had been during the short period of his engagement. Even Mr. Marks himself was scarcely more interested than Godfrey in the house, which Alice furnished in accordance with her own extravagant notions.

“It was not as if she was poor and dependent upon her husband’s salary,” she said, and so she made a little palace of a home for her future lord, who assented to whatever she suggested, and seemed so excited and absent-minded after she was gone, that we were glad when toward the last of February a young student from New York came up to officiate at St. Luke’s while the rector took a short vacation.

He was absent nearly two weeks,—and when he came back to us Alice was with him, and astonished us all with her wonderful outfit, her tall ruffs which reached to her ears, dresses which trailed a yard, sleeveless jackets of every device and color, and her hair, gotten up in a most remarkable manner. She said that she marriedMr. Marks, and nothis people, consequently nothing more must be expected of her as Mrs. Marks than shehad been willing to render as Miss Creighton. But Alice was fond of “running things,” as Godfrey called it, and she had not been with us a month before she was head and front of the sewing-school for the poor children, and first manager of the Church Home, and secretary of the temperance club for the young men of the working class, and had established a reading room which she controlled entirely. Indeed she seemed in a fair way to revolutionize the town; and though she never approached to anything like familiarity with her husband’s parishioners, she was far more popular and better liked as Mrs. Marks than she had been as Alice Creighton, and when at the Easter festival several children were baptized three of them took her name, Alice Creighton Marks!

Some time in March there was another wedding at the Hill and Julia was the bride. She had accepted Major Camden, and started at once for his home among the pines of Carolina. All that spring and the ensuing summer Godfrey and Gertie stayed at Schuyler Hill, and when the autumn came they went down to New York and took possession of the handsome house which Miss Rossiter had bought and the colonel furnished for them.

It is very lonely and quiet now at Schuyler Hill, but Edith goes often to New York to visit Gertie in her beautiful home, where Miss Rossiter spends more than half her time, and where there is to be a family reunion when the Centennial guns are firing in honor of our nation’s hundredth birthday. Julia is coming from the south, and Robert and Emma from over the sea, and with them the little Highland lady they have named Edith Lyle, and so I finish the story commenced more than a year ago, when the October haze was on the hills and the music of marriage bells was sounding in my ears.

Esther Olivia Armstrong.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSilently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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