CHAPTER XVI.AUNT JERRY AND EDNA.
If Miss Pepper had owned the truth, she was not sorry to see Edna, and the feeling of loneliness which all the morning had been tugging at her heart, began to give way at once; but she was one of those people who feel bound to “stick to their principles,” whether right or wrong, and as one of her principles was that her niece had behaved very shabbily and deserved punishing, she steeled her heart against her, and putting on her severest look and manner, said to her:
“Edna Browning, how dare you come here after disgracing me so?”
This was the speech with which Miss Pepper had intended to greet her niece if she ever came back unannounced, and she had repeated it many times to herself, and to Tabby, and to the teakettle boiling on the stove, and the clock ticking upon the mantel, and from having said it so often, she had come to repeat it without any great amount of genuine indignation; but this Edna did not know, and the eager, expectant look on her face died out in a moment as she heard the words of greeting.
“Oh, auntie,” she cried, and her little hands clasped each other more tightly as she took a step forward, “don’t speak so to me. I am so desolate, and I had not anywhere else to go. I thought you would be lonely eating dinner alone, and might be glad to see me.”
“Glad to see you after all you’ve done! You must think me a saint, which I don’t pretend to be,” was the harsh reply, as Aunt Jerusha hurried past Edna, without noticing the hand involuntarily stretched out toward her.
Going into her bedroom to lay her bonnet and cloak aside, Miss Pepper’s lip quivered a little as she said to herself,—
“The child has suffered, and no mistake, but I’m not going to be talked over at once. She deserves a good lesson. If she was a youngster, I’d spank her smartly and be done with it, but as I can’t do that I shall carry a stiff upper lip a spell, till she’s fairly cowed.”
With this intention Miss Pepper returned to the attack, and once having opened her volley of abuse,—reproof she called it,—she did not know where to stop, and said far more than she really felt or had at first any intention of saying. The runaway match with a mere boy; the meanness, aye the dishonesty of breaking the contract with the principal of the seminary, and leaving that four hundred dollars for some one else to pay; the littleness of wearing jewelry which astranger must pay for, and the wickedness of decoying a young man into marriage, and thereby causing him to lose his life, and making her a murderess, were each in turn brought up and eloquently handled; while Edna stood with bowed head and heard it quietly, until her aunt reached thering, and asked if she was not ashamed to wear it. Then it was that the “pale-gray look came over her face and the steel-gray look in her eye,” as she took the golden band from her finger, and laid it away in her purse, saying in a voice Miss Pepper would never have recognized as Edna’s,—
“You are right, auntie. I am a murderess, and I ought not to wear this ring until I have paid for it myself, and I never will.”
Something in her tone and manner stopped Miss Pepper, and for a moment she gazed curiously at this young girl who seemed to expand into a dignified, self-assured woman as she drew off her wedding ring, and, putting it away from her sight, walked quietly to the window, where she stood looking out upon the dull November sky from which a few snowflakes were beginning to fall. Miss Pepper was puzzled, and for an instant seriously contemplated taking back a part, at least, of what she had said, but that would not have been in accordance with her theory of managing young people, and so she contented herself with doing instead of saying. She made the kind of gravy for the turkey which she remembered Edna liked, and put an extra lump of butter in the squash, and brought from the cellar a tumbler of cranberry jelly and a pot of peach preserves, and opened a bottle of pickled cauliflower, and warmed one of her best mince pies, and made black tea instead of green, because Edna never drank the latter, and then, when all was ready, said, in a half-conciliatory tone, “Come now, the victuals is ready.”
Then Edna came away from the window and took her seat at the table, and took the heaped-up plate offered toher, and made some casual remarks about theprice of butter, and asked if Blossom gave as much milk as ever, but she did not eat. She had been very hungry, but the hunger was gone now, and so she sipped her tea and toyed with her fork, and occasionally put it to her lips, but never with anything on it which Aunt Jerusha could see. In short, the dinner was a failure; and when it was over Aunt Jerry removed her turkey nearly as whole as when it went upon the table, and carried back her cranberries and peaches untouched, and felt as if she had been badly used that her dinner was thus slighted. Edna did not offer to help her as she cleared the dinner away, but sat with folded hands looking out to where a brown, blighted rose-bush was gently swayed by the wind.
Once when Aunt Jerry could endure the silence no longer, she said:
“What under the sun do you see out there? What are you looking at?”
“My future life,” Edna replied, without so much as turning her head, and Aunt Jerry gave an extra whisk to her dish towel as she went on washing her dishes.
As it began to grow dark, Miss Pepper brought out her candle, and was about to light it, when Edna started suddenly, and turning her white, stony face toward her aunt, said:
“Don’t light the candle now. I like the dark the best. I want to talk with you, and can do it better if I do not see your face.”
There was a ring in the voice which puzzled Aunt Jerry a little, but she humored her niece, and felt glad that at last Edna was going to talk. But she was not quite prepared for what followed when her niece, who had suddenly outgrown all fear of her aunt, spoke of some things in the past, which, had they been different, might have borne a different result and have kept her from doing what she had done.
“I believe you meant well, Aunt Jerry,” she said, “and perhaps some would say you did well. You gave me a home when I had none; gave me food and clothes, and taught me many things; but for the one great thing which children need the most and miss the most, I did hunger so terribly. I wanted some love, auntie; some petting, some kind, caressing act which should tell me I was more to you than the poor orphan whom you took from charity. But you never gave it, never laid your hand upon me fondly, never called me a pet name, never kissed me in your life, and we living together these dozen years. You chide me for turning so readily to a stranger whom I had only known for a few months, and preferring him to my own flesh and blood. Auntie, in the few months I knew Charlie Churchill, he gave me more love, more kindness than I had ever known from you in the twelve years we lived together, and when he asked me to go with him, as I did, I hesitated, for I knew it was wrong; but when your letter came threatening to bring me home, the thought of the long, dreary winter during which scarcely a kind, pleasant word would be spoken to me, was more than I could bear, and so I went with Charlie.”
Edna paused a moment with the hope that what she had said might bring some expression of regret from the woman sitting so straight, and prim, and silent in the chair near by. But it did not, and as Edna could not see her face she never dreamed of the effect her words had produced, and how the great lumps were swelling in her aunt’s throat, as that peculiar woman forced down the impulse of her better nature which did prompt her to say she had been to blame. To confess herself in error was a hard thing for Miss Pepper to do, and glad that the darkness prevented her niece from seeing the tear which actually rolled down her cheek, she maintained a perfect silence while Edna told her more of Charlie, and of her life in Chicago, and her indebtedness to Roy, andher resolve to cancel it as well as to pay for her education if her aunt would wait patiently till she could earn it.
“I am very tired,” she said, when she had finished her story. “I rode all night, you know, and if you don’t mind being left alone so early, I think I’ll go to bed. I shall find my room the same as ever, I suppose.”
Then Aunt Jerry arose and struck a light, and without looking at her niece, said to her: “Hadn’t you better go up to the front chamber? It’s a nicer bed, you know; nicer every way. I guess you better try it.”
This was a great concession on Aunt Jerry’s part, and Edna was touched by it, but she preferred her old room, she said; she should not feel at home elsewhere, and taking the candle from Aunt Jerry’s hand she said good-night, and went up the steep, narrow stairs she had so often climbed in childhood. As she reached the landing, Aunt Jerry called after her:
“You’ll find a blanket in the chest if there ain’t clothes enough. You better take it, anyway, for it is cold to-night.”
This was another olive branch, and Edna accepted it as such, and took the blanket more to please her aunt than because she needed it. Her room was the same as ever, with the exception of a few rolls of carpet-rags which were lying in one corner, and at which Edna looked with a kind of nervous dread, as if they had been cut and sewed by her own unwilling hands. It was too dark outside to distinguish more than the faint outline of the tombstones in the graveyard, but Edna singled out her father’s, and putting out her candle knelt down by the low window and gazed long and earnestly at the spot where her father slept. She was bidding his grave farewell, it might be forever, for her resolution was taken to go away from there, and find a place among entire strangers.
“It is better so,” she said, as she leaned her hot foreheadagainst the cool window-pane. “’Tis better so, and father would bid me go, if he could speak. Oh, father, if you had not died, all this might have been spared to me.”
Then, as she remembered her other Father, her Heavenly one, and His promise to the orphan, she clasped her hands over her face and prayed earnestly for His protection and blessing upon her wherever she might go. And then she thought of Aunt Jerry, and asked that God would bless her, too, and if in what she had said that night there was any thing harsh and wrong, He would forgive her for it, and help her to make amends. Her prayers ended, she crept into her bed, which seemed, with its softness and warmth, to embrace and hold her as a mother might have done, and so embraced and held, she soon fell away to sleep, and forgot all that was past, and ceased to dread what might be in store for her.
Meantime Aunt Jerry sat in the room below, with her feet on the stove hearth, her hands locked together around her knees, and her head bent forward until her forehead almost touched her dress. Perhaps she maintained this attitude to accommodate Tabby, who had mounted upon her back and nestled across her neck, and perhaps she did it the better to think intently, for she was thinking of all Edna had said to her with reference to her childhood, and wondering if, after all, her theory was wrong, and children were like chickens, which needed brooding from the mother hen.
“But sakes alive, how was I to know that,—I, a dried-up old maid, who never had a baby of my own, and never held one either, except that young one of Mrs. Atwood’s that I stood sponsor for, and almost dropped when I presented it? If things had turned out different, why, I should have been different.”
And with a little sigh as she thought of the yellow brocade in the chest upstairs, Miss Pepper put Tabby from her neck,and bringing out her prayer-book read the Gospel and Epistle and Collect for the day, and then kneeling by her chair said the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and a few words of her own improvising, to the effect that if she was too hard the Lord would thaw her out and make her softer, and help her somehow to make it up to Edna, and then she went to bed.
Edna was hungry the next morning, and did full justice to the cold roast turkey and nicely browned potato, and when her aunt asked if she would like some cranberry jelly, she said she would, for she felt that her aunt wanted her to have it, and did not begrudge the journey to the cellar in quest of it. There was but little talk on either side, until Edna asked if the stage went out the same hour as usual, and announced her intention of going away. Then Aunt Jerry spoke her mind again, and said Edna “was a fool to go sky-larkin’ off alone, when she was welcome there, and could get plenty of scholars too, if that was what she wanted;” and she even went so far as to say “they might as well let bygones be bygones, and begin anew, and see if they couldn’t pull together a little better.”
But Edna was not to be persuaded from her purpose. She did not know exactly where she was going, she said, but would let her aunt know when she was located, and if she did not succeed she might perhaps come back.
“That is, if you will let me. This is all the home I have at present, you know,” she added, looking wistfully up in her aunt’s face, as if for some token that she was cared for by that undemonstrative woman, who scolded the driver for bringing in so much snow and mud when he came for Edna’s trunk, and scolded the boy who came to help him for leaving the door open, and did it all to hide what she really felt at parting with her niece.
“Of course I’ll let you. I’d be a heathen to turn out myown flesh and blood,” she said, in reply to Edna’s remark, and then as the driver’s shrill “all ready” was heard, she gave her hand to Edna, who would have kissed her but for the forbidding look upon her face, and the pin between her teeth.
Aunt Jerry went with her to the stage, and stood looking on until she was comfortably seated, and then, as the driver mounted to his box and gathered up his reins, she said, “Wall, good-by again,” with a tone in her voice which made Edna throw back her veil to look at her more closely. But the horses, obedient to the lash, had started forward, and Aunt Jerry was left, feeling more alone than she had ever before felt in her life.
“I wonder if she would have staid if I’d been more outspoken, and told her how much I really wanted her?” Aunt Jerry said, as she returned to the house and began to put it to rights. “But that’s the way with me. I can’t say what I feel. I guess I’m ugly, if I do belong to the Church. I let him go when a word would have kept him, only I was too proud to speak it; and now I’ve lost her, just as I was beginning to know that I did like her some. I wish she knew how near crying I was when she said so queer-like, ‘You never kissed me, auntie, in my life, and we living together these dozen years.’ Don’t she know I ain’t the kissing sort? Still, I might have kissed her when a little child, and not hurt myself.”
She was dusting the clock and the mantel, and when she came to the little picture in the rustic frame, she stopped, and continued her soliloquy:
“I wonder if she noticed that. If she did, she must know I think something of her, if I never did kiss her, and make a fuss. The likeness ain’t much like her, any way, but still it’s her picture, and I’ve half a mind,—yes, I b’lieve I will;” and reaching up her hand, the strange woman, whoin twelve years had never shown her orphan niece a single mark of genuine affection, took down that photograph and kissed it.
That was a great deal for her to do, and being done, she began to feel as if she had made atonement for all that had, been wrong in herself heretofore, and that Edna really ought now to come back. But Edna had gone, and as the days went by and brought no news of her, Aunt Jerry began to grow indignant, and finally relieved herself by writing to Mrs. Churchill the letter we have seen. Roy’s reply and the check threw her into a violent rage, and after letting him know her mind, she washed her hands, as she said, of the whole of them, and settled back into her lonely life, sharper, harsher than before, and more disposed to find fault with her clergyman and battle with his decided tendency to High Church and Ritualism.