CHAPTER IX.AFTER THE ACCIDENT.
It was Jack Heyford who found our heroine; big-hearted Jack, who, after shaking himself loose from Georgie’s nervous, terrified grasp, and ascertaining that neither she nor himself was injured, went at once to the rescue of the poor wretches shrieking and dying beneath the wreck. A man from a house near by came out with a lantern, and Jack stood beside him when its rays first fell upon Edna, kneeling by her husband and trying to get him free. Something in the exceeding beauty of her face, together with its horrified expression, struck deep at Jack’s heart, and bendingover her, he said softly as a mother would address her child:
“Poor little one, are you hurt? and is that your brother lying there?”
Edna recognized the genuine kindness and sympathy in the voice, and answered:
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, get him out. He is my husband. We were married this morning.”
A look of surprise and incredulity flitted over Jack’s face; she seemed so young, so like a child, this girl who was married that morning, and whose husband lay dead before him. But he asked her no more questions then, and set himself at once to release the body from the heavy timbers which held it fast. There was a terrible gash across the temple, and the blood was pouring from it so that recognition was impossible until the body was taken to a house near by, and the white, marred face made clean. Then, with a start, Jack exclaimed:
“Oh, Georgie, come quick! It’s Charlie Churchill. Don’t you remember my telling you that I saw some one in the front car who resembled him?”
In an instant Georgie was at his side and bending over the lifeless form of the young man.
“Yes, ’tis Charlie,” she said, “and who is this girl clinging to him and kissing him so?”
Her voice showed plainly that she thoughtthis girlhad no right to be “clinging to him and kissing him so,” and her black eyes had in them a look of virtuous indignation as they scrutinized poor Edna, who shrank back a little when Georgie, wholly disbelieving Jack’s answer that she was Charlie’s wife, married the previous day, laid her hand firmly on the girl’s shoulder and demanded sternly:
“Who are you, and what do you know of Mr. Churchill? He is a friend of mine.”
In a kind of frightened, helpless way, Edna lifted up her tearful eyes, and with lips quivering with pain, replied:
“Charlie was my husband. I am Edna Browning. We ran away and were married in Buffalo, and now he is killed.”
She had told her story, and her eyes fell beneath the cold gaze bent upon her, while as one woman reads another, so Edna, though ignorant of the world and of such people as Georgie Burton, read doubt and distrust in the proud face above her; and with a moan like some hunted animal brought to bay, she turned appealingly toJack, as if knowing instinctively that in him she had a friend. And Jack bent down beside her, and laid his great warm hand upon her head, and smoothed her tangled hair, and wiped from one of the curls a drop of blood which had come from Charlie’s wound. Edna answered all Jack’s questions unhesitatingly, and when he asked if she was not hurt, she told of the blow on her head and shoulder, and offered no remonstrance when he proposed that she should lie down upon the lounge the woman of the house prepared for her. She was not seriously hurt, but the pain in her head increased, and she found it impossible to sit up when once she had lain down upon the pillow, which Jack himself arranged for her.
Georgie was busy with Charlie for a time, and then when it was certain that he was past recall, she went to Edna and asked what she could do for her.
Edna knew that she was Georgie Burton, the proud woman whom Charlie disliked, and she shrank from her advances and answered rather curtly:
“Nothing, thank you. No one can do anything for me.”
Towards Jack, however, she felt differently. Charlie had spoken well of him, and even if he had not, Edna would have trusted that honest face and kindly voice anywhere, and when he said to her, “We have telegraphed to your husband’s family, and if you will give me the address of yourChicago friends I will also send a dispatch to them,” she told him of Mrs. Joseph Dana, and of her aunt in Richmond, to whom she wished both letter and telegram to be forwarded.
When Edna knew the dispatch had gone to Charlie’s brother, she turned her face to the wall and wept bitterly as she thought how different her going to Leighton would be from what she had anticipated, for that she should go there she never for a moment doubted. It was Charlie’s home, and she was his wife, and when she remembered Aunt Jerusha and the house by the graveyard, she was glad she had a refuge from the storm sure to burst upon her head.
Edna was very young, and sleep comes easily to such, and she fell asleep at last and slept heavily for two or three hours, while around the work of caring for the dead and ministering to the living went on.
Georgie was very busy, and with her own hands wiped the blood from some flesh wound, and then bandaged up the hand or arm with a skill unsurpassed by the surgeons in attendance. She could do this to strangers who thought her a perfect saint, and remembered her always as the beautiful woman who was so kind, and whose voice was so soft and pitiful as she administered to their wants. But when she passed the room where Edna lay, there came a look upon her face which showed she had but little sympathy with that poor girl. Edna had concealed nothing in her story, and Georgie, judging from a worldly point of view, knew that Charlie Churchill had made a terriblemésalliance, and said so to Jack, when for a few moments he stood by her near the door of Edna’s room.
“A poor girl with no family connections, what will poor Mrs. Churchill say, and she so proud. I think it a dreadful thing. Of course, they never can receive her at Leighton.”
“Why not?” Jack asked, a little sharply, and Georgie replied:
“There can be nothing in common between this girl and people like the Leightons. Besides that, she really has no claim on them, for you know that Charlie had not a cent in the world of his own.”
“No, I did not; Charlie’s talk would lead one to a different conclusion,” Jack said, and Georgie continued:
“Yes, I know Charlie used to talk to strangers as if it was all his, when the facts are that the property came through the Leighton line, and neither Charlie nor his mother have anything except what Roy gives them. This girl thought otherwise, I dare say, and married for money more than anything else.”
“Heaven help her then, poor little thing,” Jack said, as he moved away, and his ejaculation was echoed in the faint cry which the “poor little thing” tried to smother as she, too, whispered gaspingly, “yes, Heaven help me, if all that woman has said is true.”
Edna was awake, and had been an unwilling listener to a conversation which made her at first grow angry and resentful, and then quiver and shake with a nameless terror of something coming upon her worse even than Charlie’s terrible death. To lose confidence in him whom she had trusted so implicitly; to know he had deceived her; aye, had died with a lie in his heart, if not on his lips, was terrible, and Edna felt for a moment as if she were going mad. From the lounge where she lay she could see a corner of the sheet which covered her dead, and with a shudder she turned herself away from that shrouded form, moaning bitterly:
“Oh, Charlie, is it true, and was it a lie you told me all the time. I didn’t care for your money. It isn’t that which hurts me so. It’s losing faith in you. Oh, Charlie, my lost, lost Charlie.”
One of the women of the house heard her, and catching the last words went in to comfort her. Her story was generallyknown by this time, and great was the sympathy expressed for her and the curiosity to see her, and there was a world of pity for her in the heart of the woman, who, feeling that she must say something, began in that hackneyed kind of way some people have of talking to one in sorrow:
“Don’t give way so, poor little dear. Your husband isnotlost; he has only gone a little while before. You will meet him again some time. He is not lost forever.”
Edna fairly writhed in anguish, and could have screamed outright in her agony.
“Don’t, don’t,” she cried, lifting up both her hands. “Please go away. Don’t talk. I can’t bear it. Oh I wish I had never been born.”
“She was getting out of her head,” the woman thought, and she went after Jack Heyford, who seemed to be more to her than any one else.
But Edna was not crazy, and when Jack came to her, there were no tears in her eyes, no traces of violent emotion on her face,—nothing but a rigid, stony expression on the one, and a hopeless, despairing look in the other.
She did not tell him what she had heard, for if it were true she did not wish him to know how she had been deceived. Of her own future she did not think or care. Charlie had not been true and honest with her. Charlie had died with his falsehoods unforgiven; that was the burden of her grief, and if prayers of the living can avail to save the dead, then surely there was hope for Charlie in the ceaseless, agonized prayers which went up from Edna’s breaking heart all that long, terrible day, when Georgie thought her asleep, so perfectly still she lay with her hands folded upon her breast and her eyelids closed tightly over her eyes. She knew they had telegraphed to Charlie’s friends, and she heard Miss Burton telling some one that an answer had been received, andRussellwas then on his way to Iona. Who Russellwas she did not know; and at first she felt relieved that it was not Roy coming there to look at her as coldly and curiously as Miss Burton did. Then her feelings underwent a change, and she found herself longing to see some one who had been near and dear to Charlie, and she wondered if a message would not be sent to her by Russell,—something which would look as if she was expected to go back to Leighton, at least, for the funeral. She wanted to see Charlie’s old home; to hear his mother’s voice; to crouch at her feet and ask forgiveness for having been instrumental in Charlie’s death; to get the kind look or word from Roy, and that would satisfy her. She would then be content to go away forever from the beautiful place, of which she had expected to be mistress.
But Russell brought no message, and when she heard that, Edna said, “I cannot go,” and turned her face again to the wall, and shut her lids tightly over the hot, aching eyes which tears would have relieved. When Mrs. Dana came from Chicago and took the young creature in her motherly arms, and said so kindly, “Don’t talk about it now,” her tears flowed at once, and she was better for it, and clung to her cousin as a child clings to its mother in some threatened peril. Russell was very kind to her too, for her extreme youth and exceeding great beauty affected even him, and he spoke to her very gently, and urged her to accompany him back to Leighton. And perhaps she might have yielded but for Georgie, who said to Russell:
“You know your mistress as well as I, and that just now this girl’s presence would only augment her grief.” This remark was overheard by Mrs. Dana, who reported it to her cousin, and that settled the matter; Edna would not go, and lay with her hands clasped over her eyes when they took Charlie away. Jack Heyford had come to her side, andasked if she wished to see her husband again, and with a bitter cry she answered him:
“No, I could not bear it now. I’d rather remember him as he was.”
And so they carried him out, and Edna heard them as they went through the yard to the wagon which was to take the coffin to the station, and the house seemed so lonely now that all were gone, and she missed Jack Heyford so much, and wondered if she should ever see him again to thank him for all his kindness to her. He was a clerk in one of the large dry-goods stores in Chicago, and Mrs. Dana said she had occasionally seen him there, and they were talking of him and wondering how his sister chanced to be so unlike him, when a rapid step came up the walk, and Jack’s voice was heard in the adjoining room. He had never intended going to Leighton, he said, in reply to Edna’s remark, “I supposed you had gone with your sister.”
He seemed very sad indeed as he sat a few moments by the fire kindled in Edna’s room, and as she lay watching him, she fancied that she saw him brush a tear away, and that his lips moved as if talking to some one. And he was talking to a poor little crippled girl, waiting so anxiously in Chicago for his coming, and whose disappointed voice he could hear asking, “Where is sister?”
“Poor Annie! Sister is not here. There! there! Don’t cry. She is coming by and by.”
That was what Jack Heyford was saying to himself, as he sat before the fire, with that tired, sad look upon his face, and his heart was very sore toward the woman who had shown herself so selfish.