University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
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
s'posed 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:

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:

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.

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 mountaintops
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.