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
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bending over 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 thought this girl had
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.”
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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 to Jack, 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 your
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Chicago 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 terrible mésalliance, 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:
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“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
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generally known 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 is
not lost; 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,
and Russell was then on his way to Iona. Who Russell
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was 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, and
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asked 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.
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Holmes, Mary Jane, 1825-1907 [1872], Edna Browning, or, The Leighton homestead: a novel. (S. Low, Son & Co., London) [word count] [eaf595T].
