BACKWARD now we turn to Edna herself, who was
a brave little woman, though she did not know herself
of what she was capable, or how soon her capabilities
were to be tested on that October morning when she
entered the cars, at Buffalo, a happy bride,—save when
something whispered to her that perhaps she had not done
the wisest thing in marrying so secretly. What would her
teachers say when they heard the use she had made of their
permission for her to accompany her sick friend home? And
what would Aunt Jerry say to the runaway match when she
was so great a stickler for the proprieties of life?

“She'll charge it all to my High Church proclivities,”
Edna said to herself, trying to laugh as she recalled her
aunt's peculiarities, and the probable effect the news would
have on her. “I don't care! I'm glad to be free from her
any way,” she thought, as she remembered, with a shudder,
all the dreariness and longing for something different which
she had felt in that house by the graveyard where her childhood
was passed.

It had never been hers to know the happiness which many
children know. No mother had ever put her to bed, and
tucked her up, with loving words and the good-night kiss.

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

No hand had smoothed her locks of golden brown, as she
said her little prayer. No pleasant voice had waked her in
the morning from her dreamless sleep, and found excuse
when the slumber was so hard to break, the eyes so unwilling
to unclose. No little extra pie or cake was ever baked
for her on the broken bit of plate, or cracked saucer. No
sled, with her name upon it, stood out by gate, or door-step;
and no genuine doll-baby ever lay in any box, or basket, or
drawer in that prim, silent house, for Aunt Jerry did not believe
in such useless things. “She gave the child enough to
eat of good, plain, wholesome food, and that was all any one
could ask.” She knew, too, that Edna said her prayers, and
she saw that her Sunday-school lesson was always learned,
and heard her say the Creed and Commandments every
Sunday afternoon; but there were no gentle words and kind
caresses, no tucking up on winter nights, no loving solicitude
to see if the little hands and feet were warm. Edna
knit or sewed till eight o'clock, and then, prompt with the
first stroke, put by her work and took the tallow candle from
the mantle piece, and without a word stole up the steep back
stairs to her little bed in the room which looked out upon
the graveyard just across the lane, where the white headstones
shining through the darkness seemed to her like so
many risen ghosts. She was afraid of the graveyard; and
many a night she crept trembling into bed, and hiding her
face under the clothes, said her prayers, not from any sense
of duty, but because of the question sure to be put to her
next morning, “Did you say your prayers, Edna?”

At the time of her father's death Aunt Jerry had contended
with his parishioners about his body, and, coming off victorious,
had brought it home with her and buried it just by
the fence under the shadow of her own cherry-tree, where
regularly every Sunday in summer she took Edna and talked
to her of her father, and told her how sorry he would be if

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

he knew what a bad girl she was, and how he would rest better
in his coffin if she would try to be good and learn the
creed and catechism, so as to be confirmed the next time the
Bishop came. And, more from fear than anything else,
Edna learned the catechism and was confirmed, and hoped
her father would be easy in his coffin, as Aunt Jerusha said
he would.

As a child, Edna shunned her father's grave, and thought
only with terror of him who slept there; but after a time
there came a change, and she no longer stood in fear of that
grassy mound, but tended it with the utmost care, and sometimes,
when no one saw her, knelt or rather crouched beside
it, and whispered softly:

“Dear father, I am trying to be good: but oh, it is so
hard, and Aunt Jerry is so cross. I wish you had not died.
Help me,—can't you, father?”

In this prayer there was no direct appeal to God; but He
who knew all the trials and sorrow of the poor orphan girl,
heard that cry for help, and the world was always brighter to
Edna after a visit to that grave, and Aunt Jerusha's tongue
had less power to sting.

Aunt Jerusha meant to do her duty, and thought she did
it when she tried to repress her naturally gay, light-hearted
niece, and make her into a sober, quiet woman, content to
sew the blessed day through and knit the livelong evening.

But Edna was like a rubber ball,—she could be crushed,
but she would not stay so, and the moment the oppressor's
foot was removed she bounded back again as full of fun, and
frolic, and life as ever! So when at the age of fifteen she
became, in one sense, a charity scholar in Canandaigua
Seminary, she recovered all her elasticity of spirits, and, freed
from her aunt's scrutiny, seemed constantly bubbling over
with happiness and joy.

She was very popular, and, in spite of her plain dress,

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

became the goddess by whom every academy boy swore, dreaming
of her by night, and devising ways and means of seeing
her by day.

Charlie Churchill was in love with her at once,—desperately,
irretrievably in love, and, though she snubbed him at
first, and made laughable caricatures of him in his foppish
clothes, with his eye-glass, which he carried for no reason
except to be dandyish, she ended by returning his affection
and pledging herself to him on the fly-leaf of her algebra,
that being the only bit of paper available at the time.

Charlie had the reputation of being very rich,—heir, or
joint-heir with his brother of Leighton Place, on the Hudson.
And Edna fully believed him when he talked so largely of
“my house, my horses, my hounds, my park.” All mine,
and nothing Roy's, “Old Roy,” as he usually designated his
brother, whom Edna thought of as a sober, middle-aged man,
who was at Leighton rather on sufferance than as its rightful
owner.

After her adventure in the cars, and she learned that the
man she had caricatured was the veritable Roy, she thought
him rather younger and better-looking than she had supposed,
but still esteemed him a kind of supernumerary, who
would be dreadfully in her way when she was mistress at
Leighton, and of whom she would dispose as soon as possible.

She would do nothing unkind, she thought,—nothing for
which any one could blame her; but it was so much better
for young folks and old folks to live apart, that she would
fit up some one of the numerous cottages which Charlie had
told her were on his place.

There was one near the river, a Gothic cottage, he said,
somewhat out of repair. This she would improve and beautify,
and furnish tastefully, and move Roy and his mother
thither, where they could not be disturbed by the gayeties

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

at Leighton. For she meant to be very gay, and have the
house full all the time, and had made out a list of those who
were to be her guests.

Aunt Jerry was to come during Lent, and the carriage
was to take her every day to morning service in the little
church; while, every Friday, they would have omelets for
breakfast, and baked salmon trout for dinner. Edna had
the programme of her future life all marked out, even to the
dresses she would wear on different occasions. And she
knew just how beautiful her future home was; for Charlie
had described it so minutely that she had made a little
sketch of it, and, with Charlie to suggest, had corrected
and improved and enlarged it, until it was a very accurate
picture of the grounds and house at Leighton; with
Edna herself on the steps, fastening a rose in Charlie's
button-hole.

The likeness to Charlie was perfect, and Edna prized it
most for this, and put it away in her portfolio of drawings;
and went on dreaming her bright dreams of the glorious
future opening so joyfully before her.

She was not mercenary, and would have loved and married
Charlie all the same if he had not been rich, as she believed
him to be. But she was very glad that he had money,
for her tastes were naturally luxurious. She liked beautiful
things about her; and then she could do so much good, and
make so many happy, she said to Charlie, when he asked
her once how she would feel to know he was poor as a
church mouse.

Charlie had almost made up his mind to tell her the truth,
for his conscience troubled him greatly; but when, among
other things, she said: “I do not care for your money,
Charlie; and should love you just the same if you had not
a penny. The only thing that could change me toward you,
would be losing confidence in you,” he could not tell her

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

that he was deceiving her; and so he let her dream on, and
tried to remember if he ever had told her positively that he
was the heir of Leighton, and concluded that he had not.
She had taken it for granted, and he was not responsible for
the mistake.

Then, he trusted much to Roy's generosity. Roy would
let them live at Leighton, of course; and it would be Edna's
home just the same as if he owned it, only he did not know
about moving his mother and Roy into that cottage by the
river.

But he would not worry; it would all be right; and, in
any event, Edna would be his, and could not “go back on
him,” when she did find out; and he could easily persuade
her it was all done from love and his fear of losing her.

So he silenced his conscience, and let her go on blindly
toward her fate, and surprised her one day with a proposition
to elope.

At first, Edna refused; but when the mail brought her a
letter from Aunt Jerusha, she began to waver. She had
asked her aunt for a dollar of pocket money, and her aunt
had written a stinging reply, telling her she had a dollar when
she left home three weeks ago, and asking what had become
of that.

“I know,” she wrote, “that if you follow my instructions,
you have put five cents every Sunday on the plate; that
makes fifteen cents; then, you may have wanted some bootlacings,—
you always do,—and possibly some elastics, but that
is all you have any business to want; and you ought to have
on hand fifty cents at least, and still allow for some extravagance
I can't think of. No; I shan't send you any dollar
for three weeks to come; then, if the roads are not too
muddy, I shall be in town with some butter, and eggs, and
poultry, and, if I hear a good account of you, shall give you,
maybe, seventy-five cents.

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

“P.S. I've been half sorry that I let you go back to
school this winter, for I aint feeling very well, and I shouldn't
wonder if I took you home with me for a spell. I've got
stuff enough together to make a nice carpet, and you could
cut and sew the rags.”

Now Edna had not spent her dollar of pocket money in
ways of which her aunt would at all approve. Fifteen cents
had gone on the plate, and five cents more to Sunday-school.
Fifteen more had gone for chocolates, and twenty-five more
for the blue ribbon on her hair which Charlie liked so
much; twenty-five more to a poor woman, carrying one child
in her arms and leading another by the hand, while the remaining
fifteen had been paid for a saucer of ice-cream
which she shared with two of her companions; nothing for
shoe-lacings, nothing for elastics, and only twenty cents for
anything which would commend itself to her stern aunt, who
would call the beggar woman an impostor, the blue ribbon
trash and vanity, which Edna had promised to renounce,
while the chocolates and cream would be classed under
the head of gormandizing, if, indeed, the literal Miss Jerusha
did not accuse her of “gluttony and stuffing.”

All this Edna knew was in store for her whenever the
state of the roads would admit of her aunt's journey to town
with her butter, eggs, and poultry; but, aside from these,
there was the dreadful possibility of being taken from school
and compelled to pass the dreary winter in that lonely house
by the graveyard, with no companions but the cat and her
own gloomy thoughts, unless it were the balls of carpet-rags
she hated so terribly. When Edna thought of all this, and
then remembered that Charlie had said, “I shall see you
again to-night, when I hope to find you have changed your
mind and will go with me yet,” she began to hesitate, and
balance the two situations offered for her acceptance. One,
the lonely house, the dreary winter, the rasping aunt, and

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

the carpet-rags; the other, Leighton Place, with its freedom
from all restraint, its life of perfect ease, and Charlie! Can
we wonder that she chose the latter, and told Charlie
yes instead of no, and planned the visit to Mrs. Dana, her
mother's cousin, and looked upon the proposition to accompany
her sick friend home as something providential. There
was no looking back after that, and Edna hardly stopped
to think what she was doing, or to consider the consequences,
until she found herself a bride, and stepped with
Charlie on board the train at Buffalo. She was very happy,
and her happiness showed itself in the sparkle of her eye,
and the bright flush on her cheeks, and the restlessness of
her little head, which tossed and turned itself airily, and kept
the golden brown curls in constant motion.

Charlie, too, was happy, or would have been, could he
have felt quite sure that Roy would send some money, without
which he would be reduced to most unpleasant straits,
unless he pawned his watch. He could do that, and he decided
that he would; but as it could not be done until he
reached Chicago, and as his purse, after paying the clergyman,
and paying for his tickets, and paying for the book which
Edna wanted, was none the heaviest, he feigned not to be
hungry when they stopped to dine, and so had only Edna's
dinner to pay for, and contented himself with crackers and
pop-corn for his supper; and when Edna proposed sharing
them with him, he only made a faint remonstrance, and
himself suggested that they should travel all night, instead
of stopping at some horrid hotel where the fare was execrable.

And Edna consented to everything, and, as the evening
advanced, and she began to grow weary, nestled her curly
head down on Charlie's shoulder, and slept as soundly as if
she had been at home in her own room looking out upon
the graves behind the churchyard. Once, about midnight,

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as they stopped at some station, Charlie went out for a
minute, and when he returned and took his seat beside her,
he said, hurriedly, as if it were something for which he was
not very glad:

“I have just recognized two old acquaintances in the rear
car, Jack Heyford and Georgie Burton. I hope they won't
see us. I like Jack well enough; but to have that Georgie's
great big eyes spearing at you I could not bear.”

“Who is Georgie Burton, and who is Jack Heyford?”
Edna asked; and Charlie replied, “Georgie lives at Oakwood,
near Leighton, and is the proudest, stuck-up thing,
and has tried her best to catch old Roy. I think she'll do
it, too, in time, and then, my —, won't she snub you, because—”

He hesitated a moment, while Edna said:

“Because what? Tell me, please, why Georgia Burton
will snub me.”

“Well, because you are poor, and she is rich,” Charlie
jerked out; and Edna said, innocently:

“But I shall be rich, too, as rich as she, won't I, Charlie?”

Her clear, honest eyes were fixed upon his without a
shadow of suspicion; and Charlie could not undeceive her,
and tell her that ten dollars was all the money he had in the
world; that to defray the expenses of that journey he had
sold a diamond stud in Buffalo, and, if Roy did not come to
the rescue, his watch must get them back to Leighton.

“Even if you were not rich you would be worth a hundred
Georgie Burtons,” he said, as he drew her closely to
his side; and then he spoke of Jack Heyford, Georgie's half-brother,
and the best fellow in the world, and Edna listened
awhile, until things began to get a little mixed in her brain,
and her head lay again on Charlie's shoulder, and her eyes
were closed in sleep.

p595-074

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The day had been very warm and sultry, and although
somewhat out of season, a heavy thunder-storm had come
up, and the darkness without grew darker as the rain beat
against the windows, and flashes of lightning showed occasionally
against the inky sky. Faster and faster the train
sped on; and Charlie's head drooped till his locks mingled
with Edna's curls of golden brown, and in his sleep his arm
tightened around her waist, and he was dreaming perhaps of
Roy and his mother, and what they would say to his wife,
when suddenly, without a moment's warning, came the fearful
crash, and the next flash of lightning which lit up the gloom
showed a dreadful sight of broken beams, and shattered
boards, and shivered glass, and a boyish form wedged tightly
in, its white face upturned to the pitiless sky, while beside it
crouched the girlish bride, trying in vain to extricate her
lover, as her quivering lips kept whispering, “Charlie, oh,
Charlie!”