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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Edna Browning; or, the Leighton Homestead," Mary Jane Holmes masterfully weaves a compelling narrative centered around the protagonist, Edna Browning, and her experiences at the Leighton homestead. The novel is characterized by Holmes's rich, descriptive prose and attentive character development, which bring the setting to life and engage the reader emotionally. Set against the backdrop of 19th-century America, the story reflects societal norms, gender roles, and class dynamics of the era, while elucidating themes of love, loyalty, and personal growth. Holmes expertly employs dialogue and situational imagery, creating a vivid tapestry that captures the complexities of relationships within the constraints of her time. Mary Jane Holmes, an influential figure in American literature, wrote extensively about women's experiences and societal challenges. Born in 1825, her own life experiences as a woman in a patriarchal society informed her writing, enabling her to delve deeply into her characters' psyches. Holmes was well-acquainted with the trials of marriage and family life, often exploring these themes in her work. Her commitment to depicting the everyday struggles of her characters makes her novels resonate with authenticity and depth. "Edna Browning; or, the Leighton Homestead" is highly recommended for readers who appreciate historical fiction with a strong feminist perspective. The novel will captivate those interested in exploring the intricacies of women's lives in a bygone era while offering insights into human resilience and sociocultural dynamics. Through Edna's journey, Holmes encourages readers to reflect on their own lives and the lessons learned from the past. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Edna Browning; or, the Leighton homestead. A novel
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of Edna Browning; or, the Leighton Homestead lies the paradox of home as both sanctuary and crucible, where affection, ambition, duty, and desire meet under the exacting gaze of society to shape a young woman’s character, test her loyalties, and reveal how the bonds that promise safety can also demand sacrifice, how kinship confers privilege yet compels responsibility, and how the search for belonging navigates the narrow path between personal integrity and public expectation, turning everyday rooms and rituals into the very stage on which identity, justice, and love struggle toward their rightful place.
Mary Jane Holmes, a widely read American novelist of the nineteenth century, builds this work within the traditions of domestic fiction that captivated a broad popular audience. First issued in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the novel unfolds in and around a family homestead, a setting that concentrates social life, property, and memory in one emblematic space. Holmes’s readers would have recognized the recognizable rhythms of household affairs and community interactions that anchor the narrative. The book’s subtitle signals its focus: an estate whose very name centers the drama, with the homestead serving as both physical landmark and moral landscape.
The premise is elegantly simple and rich with implication: a young woman, Edna Browning, stands at the center of a household whose habits, histories, and hopes are larger than any one life. As she moves through parlors, thresholds, and the wider circle of neighbors and acquaintances, her choices illuminate the unwritten rules that govern reputation and reciprocity. Readers encounter the promise and pressure of acceptance, the magnetism of affection, and the uncertain weight of past events that ripple into the present. Without disclosing later turns, it is enough to note that the homestead gathers people and secrets alike, inviting tests of character and heart.
Holmes’s voice combines clarity and sentiment with a purposeful moral core, favoring intimate scenes, swift turns of feeling, and carefully timed revelations that lend the narrative a steady undertow of suspense. Conversation and domestic detail carry philosophical weight without slowing momentum, and the tone remains earnest yet companionable. The style privileges accessibility and emotional immediacy, hallmarks of popular nineteenth-century storytelling, while keeping the plot tightly bound to the social world of a single household. Readers can expect the interplay of tenderness and tension, the quiet surprise of a letter or a remembered gesture, and the cumulative force of small decisions.
Several themes pulse through the book with steady insistence: the meaning of home; the measure of a person’s worth against class and appearance; the responsibilities that accompany kinship; and the fragile architecture of trust. The homestead symbolizes inheritance in every sense—of property, of customs, of reputations that precede individuals and shape their prospects. The novel asks what it costs to be seen rightly, how compassion can coexist with judgment, and where duty ends and desire begins. It is particularly attentive to the ways women navigate constraining expectations, locating moral agency not in grand gestures but in persistent, everyday choices.
Contemporary readers may find the book compelling for both its historical texture and its enduring questions. It offers a window onto a society that articulated virtue, ambition, and belonging through domestic life, even as it reveals the tensions simmering beneath that surface. Its moral inquiries—about fairness, loyalty, and the possibility of renewal—remain resonant, inviting reflection on how communities remember, forgive, and change. The focus on a young woman’s self-definition within a dense web of obligations speaks to ongoing conversations about identity and care, making the story feel immediate despite its nineteenth-century origins and conventions.
Approached on its own terms, Edna Browning; or, the Leighton Homestead invites a patient, immersive reading that rewards attention to tone, gesture, and the social signals threaded through everyday scenes. Accept the period’s sentimental idiom as a tool, not a limitation, and its moral architecture as a way to map nuance rather than to flatten it. The experience promises intimacy over spectacle, insight over shock, and a steady widening of perspective as household concerns become ethical ones. In its measured cadence and humane curiosity, the novel offers a thoughtful journey into the meanings of home and the making of a life within it.
Synopsis
Mary Jane Holmes’s Edna Browning; or, the Leighton Homestead follows a young woman of modest means whose life changes when circumstances draw her into the orbit of the prominent Leighton family. Edna’s upbringing has instilled self-reliance, quiet pride, and a strong moral compass. When an opportunity arises at the Leighton homestead—part household duty, part companionship—she accepts, stepping into a world of wealth, tradition, and careful scrutiny. The homestead itself, with its routines and rituals, becomes a character in the story, framing her encounters with expectation and privilege. The narrative opens by contrasting Edna’s simplicity with the estate’s grandeur, setting up questions of belonging and worth.
On arrival, Edna navigates a layered household: a respected elder who guards family honor, a charming yet burdened heir, and relatives whose warmth or wariness depends on pedigree. She observes unspoken rules while steadily earning goodwill through tact and competence. Holmes sketches the social hierarchy through dinners, calls, and village interactions, revealing how reputation shapes opportunity. Edna listens more than she speaks, but her small acts—managing a task, assisting during a minor illness, showing kindness to servants—mark her influence. Early misreadings of her quiet manner generate tension, while hints of a private history suggest that fortune has not told its whole story.
A circle of visitors introduces contrast and rivalry, bringing eligible guests and long-standing neighbors who provide both friendship and challenge. Edna learns the subtleties of the family’s alliances, including expectations around marriage and property that silently govern behavior. She is drawn into household projects—teaching younger kin, organizing charitable efforts—that reveal her steadiness under pressure. Moments of misunderstanding, born of class assumptions, test her poise, yet Holmes keeps the tone measured, emphasizing observation over confrontation. A keepsake from Edna’s past, innocuous at first, glimmers with importance, signaling a thread the narrative will later draw tight without prematurely revealing its knot.
With the social season in motion, the homestead becomes a stage for compliments and contest, where glances carry meaning and words do careful work. Festive gatherings provide Edna with chances to shine and to slip, especially when a careless remark or misplaced confidence triggers rumors. Affectionate attentions toward her from unexpected quarters stir interest and doubt. Meanwhile, family conversations turn to inheritance, duty, and the character required to steward the estate’s legacy. Edna observes these debates from the margins, weighing her own dignity against a desire for acceptance. The story presses forward through quiet pressures rather than loud declarations.
A turning point arrives when a small scandal—nursed by envy and half-truths—threatens Edna’s place. She confronts the choice between silence, which would protect her position, and frankness, which risks it. Her decision showcases the novel’s moral center: constancy is worth more than convenience. The homestead feels the ripple, exposing cracks in its well-kept façade as loyalties are tested. Some who admired Edna’s usefulness question her worth, while others, recalling her steady kindness, stand firm. The episode broadens the story’s canvas beyond drawing rooms, revealing how reputation travels through town lanes and how quickly status can shift with a whispered word.
Away from the brightest rooms, Edna discovers a broader sphere—teaching, nursing, and helping where need runs deeper than etiquette. A community crisis, practical and urgent, draws out her courage, underscoring strengths forged before she knew the Leightons. In this space, she meets figures who recognize traces of her past and acknowledge debts long unspoken. Letters and documents surface at the edges of the plot, not yet decisive, but sharpening questions the reader has learned to ask. While the homestead weighs appearances, the world beyond measures character by service. The contrast prepares the ground for changes neither Edna nor the Leightons can ignore.
Back at the homestead, private concerns become public needs. Illness among elders, a legal matter touching the estate, and the specter of financial strain compress choices that once seemed leisurely. Familiar rooms grow tense as practical decisions demand moral clarity. Edna’s perspective, informed by hardship and duty, proves unexpectedly valuable, prompting some to revisit earlier judgments. Old letters, family stories, and faint resemblances converge without yet disclosing full answers, and the household’s guarded history takes on new urgency. Invitations are extended and withdrawn; departures are hastened and delayed. Through it all, Holmes maintains a steady pace, letting revelations approach rather than burst.
The climax gathers threads that have been quietly laid: a truth about Edna’s origins, obligations intertwined with affection, and a reckoning over what stewardship of the homestead must mean. Choices about loyalty, forgiveness, and the uses of wealth move to the forefront. Without detailing specifics, the resolution depends less on sudden fortune than on consistent virtue meeting opportunity. Relationships realign as pretense gives way to candor, and those who watched from safe distances are drawn into the consequences of earlier words. The novel’s emotional crest arrives through conversation and recognition rather than spectacle, honoring the domestic scale in which the story has lived.
In the closing movement, the Leighton homestead stands renewed not by grandeur but by a reorientation of values. Edna’s journey affirms that merit, once doubted, can command respect without demanding applause. The themes cohere: identity affirmed without boast, love tempered by duty, and home defined by mutual regard rather than mere inheritance. The narrative leaves room for reflection, suggesting that belonging is earned by steadfastness, and that generosity must be partnered with justice. Holmes’s conclusion ties public reputation to private character, letting the final scenes echo the book’s early questions. The homestead endures, with its doors opened a little wider than before.
Historical Context
Set in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the novel unfolds amid the domestic, Protestant communities of New England and upstate New York, where village elites, parish life, and kin networks organize daily affairs. The titular homestead evokes a multi-generational estate rooted in Yankee agrarian respectability yet increasingly connected to markets by canal and rail. The time frame straddles the antebellum years into the postbellum era (circa 1850s–1870s), when coverture still constrained married women but reform was visible, and when small towns felt the pull of distant cities. Holmes’s long residence in Brockport, New York, on the Erie Canal, informs the book’s sense of place and social texture.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) and its aftermath fundamentally shaped the milieu that the novel mirrors. The conflict mobilized over 2.1 million Union soldiers and about 880,000 Confederates; casualties are now estimated between 620,000 and 750,000. Wartime finance, inflation, and shortages reached even rural households, while the 1863 Enrollment Act and disturbances such as the New York City Draft Riots exposed class and ethnic tensions. Emancipation unfolded through the 1863 Proclamation and constitutional measures—the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth Amendments (1870)—that redefined citizenship and labor. Reconstruction (1865–1877) brought contested federal authority, veterans’ pensions, widows’ claims, and volatile credit conditions. Many Northern families experienced disrupted inheritances, absent heirs, and reconfigured work as men returned injured or did not return at all. In such a world, the stability of a homestead depended on legal clarity, solvent guardians, and prudent management. The novel’s emphasis on a family seat, contested authority within households, and the moral testing of heirs echoes these pressures: estates are vulnerable to mismanagement, sudden bereavement, and the social realignments of war and peace. Holmes’s domestic focus—mourning customs, charitable visiting, and the ethics of care—parallels how communities in Massachusetts and New York coped with loss and reintegration. By staging encounters between country respectability and urban speculation, the narrative channels Reconstruction-era anxieties about credit, trustworthy stewardship, and the meaning of loyalty after a national rupture, without dramatizing battles themselves. Its household politics distill the broader reordering of American society between Appomattox and the Panic of 1873.
Shifts in women’s property and marital law frame the novel’s treatment of inheritance and agency. Under coverture, a married woman’s legal identity merged with her husband’s; reforms chipped away state by state. New York’s Married Women’s Property Act (1848) allowed wives to hold separate real estate; an 1860 expansion granted control of earnings and certain guardianship rights, partially curtailed in 1862. Massachusetts enacted key reforms in 1845 and 1855, safeguarding separate estates. These statutes altered wills, dowers, and guardianship practices across the Northeast. The book’s focus on the security of the Leighton homestead, female stewardship, and the negotiation of settlements reflects these legal recalibrations of authority within families.
Expanding education and women’s paid work underwrite the heroine’s prospects for self-reliance. The common school movement, propelled by Horace Mann after 1837 in Massachusetts, produced standardized curricula and trained teachers. Normal schools proliferated—Massachusetts opened state normals in 1839; the New York State Normal School at Albany was founded in 1844; the Oswego Normal School in 1861 pioneered object teaching. Women increasingly filled classrooms; by the 1870s, a majority of northern public school teachers were female. New avenues of advanced study emerged with Mount Holyoke (1837) and Vassar College (chartered 1861, opened 1865). The novel’s esteem for literacy, letter-writing, and sometimes governess or teaching roles aligns with these pathways to respectable female autonomy.
Abolitionism and antislavery activism saturated the regional climate from the 1830s through the 1850s. Upstate New York hosted Underground Railroad routes through Rochester and Syracuse; the Jerry Rescue of 1851 defied the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, while Boston’s Anthony Burns case in 1854 dramatized federal enforcement. Frederick Douglass published the North Star in Rochester beginning in 1847, linking moral suasion with political action. Though the narrative centers on domestic life, its moral vocabulary—charity, conscience, duty—was shaped in towns where antislavery lectures, church debates, and personal liberty laws were familiar. The book’s portrayal of benevolence and ethical testing mirrors communities forged by reformist sensibilities.
Industrialization and market integration reconfigured fortunes central to the novel’s tensions. The Erie Canal (opened 1825) and the New York Central Railroad (consolidated 1853) stitched rural homesteads to urban credit and commodity flows; the telegraph (1844) accelerated information. Economic shocks—the Panic of 1857 and the later Panic of 1873—collapsed firms, froze mortgages, and redistributed property. Rural estates often depended on urban partners, insurance, and banks in Rochester, Buffalo, Boston, and New York City. The narrative’s contrasts between old-family land, mercantile wealth, and speculative risk, and its attention to mortgages, guardians, and solvency, reflect these cycles of boom and contraction that imperiled even venerable homesteads.
Temperance and domestic reform movements supplied a moral infrastructure for household narratives. The Maine Law of 1851, championed by Neal Dow, inspired prohibitory experiments across the North; New York’s 1855 statute was short-lived, but local option campaigns persisted. After the war, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed in 1874 in Cleveland, mobilizing church women into national activism. Benevolent societies, sewing circles, and relief associations proliferated during the 1850s–1870s. The novel’s depictions of guardianship, moral rescue, and the disciplining of intemperate or irresponsible kin resonate with temperance-era ideals that linked sobriety, thrift, and feminine moral suasion to the preservation of the household and community order.
By insisting on the ethical governance of property, exposing the precariousness of women under coverture, and scrutinizing the seductions of urban speculation, the book functions as a critique of mid-century social arrangements. It highlights class stratification in small towns, the vulnerability of dependents to patriarchal caprice, and the fragility of status when credit falters. Through the homestead’s fate, the narrative challenges the legitimacy of inheritance practices that silence women and elevate dubious male authority. Its vision of prudent female stewardship, accessible education, and community responsibility rebukes legal and economic systems that rewarded risk-taking elites while burdening households, thus offering a distinctly civic, not merely private, indictment of the period’s injustices.
Edna Browning; or, the Leighton homestead. A novel
CHAPTER I.ROY, OUR HERO.
“Robert, son of Arthur and Anna Leighton, born April 5th, 18——,” was the record which the old family Bible bore of our hero’s birth, parentage, and name, but by his mother and those who knew him best, he was always called Roy, and by that name we introduce him to our readers on a pleasant morning in May, when, wrapped in a heavy shawl, he sat in a corner of a car with a tired, worn look upon his face, and his teeth almost chattering with the cold.
A four-month’s acquaintance with the chill fever, taken at the time the river rose so high, and he worked all day to save some of his tenants who lived along the meadows, had wasted him to a shadow, and he was on his way to the West, hoping that change of air and scene would accomplish what bottles and bottles of quinine, with all the usual remedies for fever and ague, had failed to do.
Beside him sat his mother, a fair-haired, proud-faced little lady of fifty, or more, who conducted herself with a dignity becoming the mistress of Leighton Homestead, her son’s beautiful home on the Hudson.
Anna Leighton had been much younger than her husband, and at the time of her marriage there were rumors of another suitor in whose brown beard there were no threads of gray, and of whom Mr. Leighton had been fearfully jealous. If this were true, it accounted in part for his strange will, by which only a small portion of his large fortune was left to his wife, who was to forfeit even this in the event of a second marriage. In her case, love proved more potent than gold, and, two years after her husband’s death, she married Charlie Churchill, who made up in family and blood what he lacked in lands and money. There was a trip to Europe, a dolce far niente[1] dream of happiness for eighteen months amid the glories of the eastern hemisphere, and then, widowed a second time, Anna Churchill came one dreary autumn day to the Leighton Place, on the river side, where, six months after, she gave birth to a little boy, for whom Roy, then a mere lad, stood as one of the sponsors in the old ivy-grown church at the foot of the hill.
Since that time, Mrs. Churchill had lived at the Leighton Homestead, and been, with her younger son, altogether dependent upon her eldest born, who had made her, to all intents and purposes, the honored and welcome mistress of his house. Only one sore point was there between them, and that was handsome and winning, but unprincipled Charlie,—who, looking upon his brother’s fortune as his own, would, if uncontrolled, have spent it with a recklessness which would soon have brought the Leighton Homestead under the auctioneer’s hammer.
Charlie was a spoiled boy, the neighbors said; and when, at sixteen, he coolly appropriated his brother’s gold watch, together with a hundred dollars in money, and went off to Canada, “to travel and see a little of the world,” they shook their heads, and said Roy would be justified in never taking him again into favor.
But Roy did not think so, and when Charlie had fished all summer among the Thousand Islands, and spent his hundred dollars, and pawned his watch, and fallen sick in Montreal, Roy went for the young scamp, who cried like a child at sight of him, and called him “a brick,” and a “dear old Roy,” and promised he would never be bad again, and in proof thereof would, if Roy said so, join the church, or take a class in Sunday-school, or go through college, he did not care which. And so Roy took him to the Academy in Canandaigua, and said that to the teachers which resulted in Mr. Charlie’s being kept rather closer than was altogether agreeable to him. After a time, however, the strict surveillance was relaxed, and by his winning ways, he grew to be very popular with both teachers and pupils, and many a slight misdemeanor was winked at and overlooked, so powerfully did his soft blue eyes and pleasant smile plead for him.
At the time our story opens he had been in Canandaigua nearly a year and a half, and Mrs. Churchill and Roy were intending to stop for a day at the hotel and visit him. There were but few passengers in the car occupied by Roy and his mother, and these were mostly of the quiet, undemonstrative kind, who nodded in their seats, or read the newspaper, and accepted matters, air included, as they found them; consequently, poor Roy, who, shaking with ague, had a morbid dread of open windows, had for hours luxuriated in an atmosphere which made a group of young girls exclaim with disgust, when at a station thirty miles or so from Canandaigua they came trooping in, their cheeks glowing with health and their eyes sparkling with excitement.
There were four of them, and appropriating the two seats directly opposite Roy, they turned one of them back, and to the great horror of the invalid opened both the windows, thereby letting in a gust of air which blew directly across Roy’s face, while Mrs. Churchill received an ugly cinder in her eye, which nearly blinded her. In blissful ignorance of the discomfort they were causing, or of the very uncomplimentary things the sick man and his mother were thinking, the girls chattered on, and the cool wind blew the ribbons on their hats far out behind, and tossed their veils airily, and lifted the golden brown curls of the one who seemed to be the life of the party, and who talked the most, and kept the others shrieking with laughter, while her bright eyes glanced rapidly around the car, noting everything and everybody, until at last they lighted upon the pair just across the aisle, Mrs. Churchill working away at the obstinate cinder, and Roy wrapping his shawl more closely about him, and wondering why girls would always persist in keeping the windows open when everybody else was freezing. Roy was not in a very amiable state of mind, and he showed it in his eyes, which flashed a savage glance at the girl with the curls of golden brown, whom her companions addressed as Edna. She was the worst of them all, for she had opened both the windows, and then with the exclamation that she was “roasted alive,” sat fanning herself briskly with the coquettish little hat she had taken from her head. As she met Roy’s angry glance, the smile which a moment before had wreathed her lips, vanished suddenly, and she looked at him curiously, as if half expecting him to speak. But Roy was silent for a time; then, as the bright, restless eyes of the offender kept meeting his own inquiringly, he mustered courage to say:
“Young lady, you’ll oblige me by shutting that window. Don’t you see I am catching cold?” and a loud sneeze attested to the truth of what he said.
It was not like Roy Leighton thus to address any one, and he repented of his surliness in an instant, and wished he might do something to atone. But it was now too late. He had shown himself a savage, and must abide the result.
The window was shut with a bang, and the gay laughter and merry talk were hushed for a time, while the girl called Edna busied herself with writing or drawing something upon a bit of paper, which elicited peals of laughter from her companions to whom it was shown. Roy could not help fancying that it in some way related to himself, and his mother thought the same, and was mentally styling them “a set of ill-bred, impertinent chits,” when the train stopped before the Canandaigua depot, where, as usual, a crowd of people was assembled. This was the destination of the girls, who, gathering up their satchels and parasols, hurried from the car in such haste that the bit of paper which had so much amused them was forgotten, and fluttered down at Mrs. Churchill’s feet. Her first impulse, as she stooped to pick it up, was to restore it to its owner, but when she saw what it was, she uttered an angry exclamation, and thrust it into her son’s hand, saying:
“Look, Roy, at the caricature the hussy has made of us.”
No man likes to be ridiculed, and Roy Leighton was not an exception, and the hot blood tingled in his pale cheeks as he saw a very correct likeness of himself, wrapped in a bundle of shawls, with his eyes cast reproachfully toward a shadowy group of girls across the aisle, while from his mouth issued the words, “Shut that window, miss. Don’t you see I am freezing?”
Beside him was his mother, her handkerchief to her eye, and the expression of her face exactly what it had been when she worked at the troublesome cinder. Instead of a hat, the mischievous Edna had perched a bonnet on Roy’s head, and under this abominable picture had written, “Miss Betty and her mother, as they looked on their travelling excursion. Drawn by Edna Browning, Ont. Fem. Sem., May 10th.”
It was only a caricature; but so admirably was it done, and so striking was his own likeness in spite of the bonnet, that Roy could not help acknowledging to himself that Edna Browning was a natural artist; and he involuntarily began to feel an interest in the young girl who, if she could execute this sketch in so short a time, must be capable of better things. Still, mingled with this interest was a feeling of indignation that he should have been so insulted by a mere school-girl, and when, as he alighted from the car, he caught the flutter of her blue ribbons, and heard her merry laugh as she made her way through the crowd to the long flight of stairs, and then with her companions walked rapidly toward Main street, he felt a desire to box her ears, as she deserved that they should be boxed.
Thrusting the picture into his pocket, he conducted his mother through the crowd, and then looked about in quest of his brother, who was to have been there to meet them, and who soon appeared, panting for breath and apologizing for his delay.
“Professor Hollister wouldn’t let me out till the last minute, and then I stopped an instant to speak to some girls who came on this train. How are you, mother, and you, old Roy? I don’t believe I should have known you. That ague has given you a hard one, and made you shaky on your legs, hasn’t it? Here, lean on me, while we climb these infernally steep stairs. Mother, I’ll carry that satchel. What ails your eye? looks as if you’d been fighting. Here, this way. Don’t go into that musty parlor. Come on to No. —. I’ve got your rooms all engaged, the best in the hotel.”
And thus talking, with his invalid brother leaning on his arm, Charlie Churchill led the way to the handsome rooms which overlooked the lake and the hills beyond. Roy was very tired, and he lay down at once, while his mother made some changes in her toilet, and from a travel-soiled, rather dowdy-looking woman in gray, was transformed into a fair, comely and stylish matron, whose rich black silk trailed far behind her, and whose frills of costly lace fell softly about her neck and plump white hands as she went in to dinner with Charlie, who was having a holiday, and who ordered claret and champagne, and offered it to those about him with as much freedom as if it was his money instead of his brother’s which would pay for it all.
Roy’s dinner was served in his room, and while waiting for it he studied Edna Browning’s sketch, which had a strange fascination for him, despite the pangs of wounded vanity he felt when he saw what a guy she had made of him.
“I wonder if I do look like that,” he said, and he went to the glass and examined himself carefully. “Yes, I do,” he continued. “Put a poke bonnet on me and the likeness is perfect, hollows in my cheeks, fretful expression and all. I’ve been sick and coddled, and petted until I’ve grown a complete baby, and a perfect boor, but there’s no reason why I need to look so confounded cross and ill-tempered, and I won’t either. Edna Browning has done me some good at least. I wonder who the little wretch is. Perhaps Charlie knows; she seems to be here at school.”
But Roy did not ask Charlie, for the asking would have involved an explanation, and he would a little rather not show his teasing brother the picture which he put away so carefully in his pocket-book. They drove that afternoon in the most stylish turnout the town afforded, a handsome open barouche, and Roy declined the cushion his mother suggested for his back, and only suffered her to spread his shawl across his lap instead of wrapping it around him to his chin. His overcoat and scarf were all he should need, he said, and he tried to sit up straight, and not look sick, as Charlie, who managed the reins himself, drove them through the principal streets of the town, and then out into the country for a mile or two.
On their way back they passed the seminary just as a group of girls came out accompanied by a teacher, and equipped apparently for a walk. There were thirty or more of them, but Roy saw only one, and of her he caught a glimpse, as she tossed back her golden brown curls and bowed familiarly to Charlie, whose hat went up and whose horses sheered just enough to make his mother utter an exclamation of fear. She, too, had recognized the wicked Edna by her dress, had seen the bow to Charlie, with Charlie’s acknowledgment of it, and when the gay horses were trotting soberly down the street, she asked,—
“Who was that girl you bowed to, Charlie? the bold-faced thing with curls, I mean.”
Now if she had left off that last, the chances are that Charlie would have told her at once, for he knew just whom she meant. A dozen of the girls had bowed to him, but he had had but one in his mind when he lifted his hat so gracefully, and it hurt him to hear her called “a bold-faced thing.” So he answered with the utmost nonchalance.
“I don’t know which one you mean. I bowed to them all collectively, and to no one individually. They are girls from the seminary.”
“Yes, I know; but I mean the one in blue with the long curls.”
“Big is she?” and Charlie tried to think.
“No, very small.”
“Dark face and turned-up nose?” was the next query.
“No, indeed; fair-faced, but as to her nose I did not notice. I think she was on the same car with us.”
“Oh, I guess you must mean Edna Browning. She’s short, and has long curls,” and Charlie just touched his spirited horses, causing them to bound so suddenly as to jerk his mother’s head backward, making her teeth strike together with such force as to hurt her lip; but she asked no more questions with regard to Edna Browning, who had recognized in Charlie Churchill’s companions her fellow-passengers in the car, and was wondering if that dumpy woman and that muff of a man could be the brother and mother whom Charlie had said he was expecting when she met him that morning in the street.
CHAPTER II.AT LEIGHTON HOMESTEAD.
It was a magnificent old place, and had borne the name of Leighton Homestead, or Leighton Place, ever since the quarrel between the two brothers, Arthur and Robert, as to which should have the property in New York, and which should have the old family house on the Hudson, thirty miles or so below Albany, and in plain sight of the Catskills. To Arthur, the elder, the place had come at last, while Robert took the buildings on Broadway, and made a fortune from them, and dying without family, left it all to his brother’s son and namesake, who, after his father’s death, was the richest boy for many miles around.
As Roy grew to manhood he caused the old place to be modernized and beautified, until at last there were few country seats on the river which could compete with it in the luxuriousness of its internal adorning, or the beauty of the grounds around it. Broad terraces were there, with mounds and beds of bright flowers showing among the soft green turf; gravel walks which wound in and out among clumps of evergreen and ran past cosey arbors and summerhouses, over some of which the graceful Wisteria was trailing, while others were gorgeous with the flowers of the wonderful Trumpet-creeper. Here and there the ripple of a fountain was heard, while the white marble of urns and statuary showed well amid the dense foliage of shrubbery and trees. That Roy had lived to be twenty-eight and never married, or shown a disposition to do so, was a marvel to all, and latterly some of the old dowagers of the neighborhood who had young ladies to dispose of had seriously taken the matter in hand, to see if something could not be done with the grave, impassive man. He was polite and agreeable to all the girls, and treated them with that thoughtful deference so pleasing to women, and so rarely found in any man who has not the kindest and the best of hearts. But he never passed a certain bound in his attentions, and the young ladies from New York who spent their summers in the vicinity of Leighton Place went back to town discouraged, and hopeless so far as Roy was concerned.
“It was really a shame, and he getting older every year,” Mrs. Freeman Burton of Oakwood said, as on a bright October morning in the autumn succeeding the May day when we first met with Roy, she drove her ponies down the smooth road by the river and turned into the park at Leighton. “Yes; it really is a shame that there is not a young and handsome mistress to grace all this, and Georgie would be just the one if Roy could only see it,” the lady continued to herself, as she drove to the side door which was ajar, though there was no sign of life around the house except the watch-dog Rover, who lay basking in the sunlight with a beautiful Maltese kitten sleeping on his paws.
Mrs. Freeman Burton, whose husband was a Wall-street Bull, lived on Madison Square in the winter, and in the summer queened it among the lesser lights in the neighborhood of Leighton Homestead. As thought Mrs. Freeman Burton of Oakwood, so thought Mrs. Anna Churchill of Leighton, and as Mrs. Burton knew that Mrs. Churchill was in all respects her equal, it came about naturally that the two ladies were on the most intimate terms,—so intimate indeed, that Mrs. Burton, seeing no one and hearing no one, passed into the house dragging her rich India shawl after her and knocking at the door of her friend’s private sitting-room. But Mrs. Churchill was up in Roy’s room in a state of great mental distress and agitation, which Roy was trying to soothe as well as his own condition would admit. He had been thrown from his horse only the day before and broken his leg, and he lay in a state of great helplessness and pain when, about half an hour before Mrs. Burton’s call, the morning letters were brought in and he asked his mother to read them.
There were several on business, which were soon dispatched, and then Mrs. Churchill read one to herself from Maude Somerton, a relative of Mr. Freeman Burton, who had spent the last summer at Oakwood, and flirted desperately with Charlie Churchill all through his vacation. Roy liked Maude and hoped that in time she might become his sister. Once he said something to Charlie on the subject, hinting that if he chose to marry Maude Somerton, and tried to do well, money should not be wanting when it was needed to set him up in business. There had been an awkward silence on Charlie’s part for a few moments, while he turned very red, and seemed far more embarrassed than the occasion would warrant. Then he had burst out with:
“Don’t you mind about Maude Somerton. She will flirt with anybody who wears a coat; but, old Roy, maybe I shall want that money for somebody else; or at all events want you to stand by me, and if I do, you will; won’t you, Roy?”
And Roy, without a suspicion of his brother’s meaning, said he would, and the next day Charlie returned to Canandaigua, while Maude went back to her scholars about ten miles from Leighton; for she was poor, and earned her own livelihood. But for her poverty she made amends in the quality of her blood, which was the very best New England could produce; and as she was fair, and sweet, and pure as the white pond-lilies of her native State, Mrs. Freeman Burton gave her a home at Oakwood, and gave her Georgie’s cast-off clothing, and would very much have liked to give her Charlie Churchill, after she heard that Roy intended to do something for his brother whenever he was married.
Maude’s letter was a very warm, gushing epistle, full of kind remembrances of Roy, “the best man in the world,” and inquiries after Charlie, “the nicest kind of a summer beau,” and professions of friendship for Mrs. Churchill, “the dear sweet lady, whose kindnesses could never be forgotten.”
“Maude writes a very good letter,” Mrs. Churchill said, folding it up and laying it on the table, and as she did so, discovering another which had fallen from her lap to the floor.
It was from Charlie and directed to Roy, but Mrs. Churchill opened it, turning first scarlet and then pale, and then gasping for breath as she read the dreadful news. Charlie was going to be married; aye, was married that moment, for he had named the morning of the 7th of October as the time when Edna Browning would be his wife! At that name Mrs. Churchill gave a little shriek, and tossed the letter to Roy, who managed to control himself, while he read that Charlie was going to marry Edna Browning, “the nicest girl in the whole world and the prettiest, as Roy would think if he could see her.” They had been engaged a long time; were engaged, in fact, when Roy and his mother were in Canandaigua, and he would have told them then, perhaps, if his mother had not asked who “that brazen-faced thing” was, or something like it, when they passed the seminary girls in driving.
“Mother means well enough, I suppose,” Charlie wrote, “but she is too confounded proud, and if I had told her about Edna, she would have raised the greatest kind of a row, for Edna is poor as a church mouse,—hasn’t a penny in the world, and nobody but an old maid aunt who lives in Richmond, and treats her like a dog. Her father was an Episcopal clergyman and her mother was a music teacher, and that’s all I know of her family, or care. I love her, and that’s enough. I s’pose I may as well make a clean breast of it, and tell you I’ve had a fuss with one of the teachers; and I wouldn’t wonder if they expelled me, and so I’ve concluded to take time by the forelock, and have quit on my own hook, and have persuaded Edna to cast in her lot with mine, a little sooner than she had agreed to do. They wrote to you about the fuss, but I paid the man who carries the letters to the office five dollars for the one directed to you, as I’d rather tell you myself, and it gives me time, too, for this other matter in hand. Fortune favors the brave[1q]. Edna went yesterday to Buffalo with her room-mate, who is sick, and wanted her to go home with her; and I am going up to-morrow, and Wednesday morning, the 7th, we shall be married, and take the early train for Chicago, where Edna has some connection living.
“And now, Roy, I want some money,—there’s a good fellow. You remember you spoke of my marrying Maude Somerton, and said you’d give me money and stand by me, too. Do it now, Roy, and when mother goes into hysterics and calls Edna that creature, and talks as if she had persuaded me, whereas it was I who persuaded her, say a word for me, won’t you? You will like Edna,—and, Roy, I want you to ask us to come home, for a spell, anyway. The fact is, I’ve romanced a little, and Edna thinks I am heir, or at least joint heir with you, of Leighton Homestead. She don’t know I haven’t a cent in the world but what comes from you, and I don’t want her to. Set me up in business, Roy, and I’ll work like a hero. I will, upon my word,—and please send me five hundred at once to the care of John Dana, Chicago. I shall be married and gone before this reaches you, so there’s no use for mother to tear her eyes out. Tell her not to. I’m sorry to vex her, for she’s been a good mother, and after Edna I love her and you best of all the world. Send the money, do. Yours truly,
This was the letter which created so much consternation at Leighton Homestead, and made Mrs. Churchill faint with anger, while Roy’s pale face flushed crimson and the great drops of sweat stood on his forehead. That Charlie should be disgraced in school was bad enough, but that to the disgrace he should add the rash, imprudent act of marrying, was far worse,—even if the girl he married had been in all respects his equal. Of that last, Roy did not think as much as his mother. He knew Charlie better than she did, and felt that almost any respectable girl was good enough for him; but it did strike him a little unpleasantly that the Edna Browning, whose caricature of himself was still preserved, should become his sister-in-law. He knew it was she,—the girl in the cars, and his mother knew it too. She had never forgotten the girl, nor could she shake off the impression that Charlie knew more of her than she would like to believe. For this reason she had favored his flirting with Maude Somerton, who, though poor, was highly connected, which was more than could be said for Edna.
During the summer, there had been at Oakwood a Miss Rolliston, a friend of Maude Somerton, and a recent graduate of Canandaigua Seminary. And without seeming to be particularly interested, Mrs. Churchill had learned something of Edna Browning, “whom she once met somewhere” she said. “Did Miss Rolliston know her?”
“Oh, yes, a bright little thing, whom all the girls liked, though she was only a charity scholar[3], that is, she was to teach for a time in the Seminary to pay for her education.”
“Indeed; has she no friends?” Mrs. Churchill asked, and Miss Rolliston replied: “None but an aunt, a Miss Jerusha Pepper, who, if rumor is correct, led her niece a sorry life.”
It was about this time that Charlie commenced flirting so desperately with Maude Somerton, and so Mrs. Churchill for a time forget Edna Browning, and what Miss Rolliston had said of her. But it came back to her now, and she repeated it to Roy, who did not seem as much impressed with Miss Pepper and the charity scholar part as his mother would like to have had him. Perhaps he was thinking of Charlie’s words, “You’ll stand by me, won’t you, old Roy,” and rightly guessing now that they had reference to Edna Browning. And perhaps, too, the shadow of the fearful tragedy so soon to follow was around him, pleading for his young brother whose face he would never see again.
“What shall we do? What can we do?” his mother asked, and he replied:
“We must make the best of it, and send him the money.”
“But, Roy, the disgrace; think of it,—an elopement; a charity scholar, a niece of Miss Jerusha Pepper, whoever she may be. I’ll never receive her, and I shall write and tell her so.”
“No, mother, you’ll do nothing of the kind,” Roy said; “Charlie is still your boy, and Edna is his wife. She is not to blame for being poor or for having an aunt with that horrible name. Write and tell them to come home. The house is large enough. Maybe you will like this Edna Browning.”
Before Mrs. Churchill could reply, Mrs. Burton’s card was brought to her, and to that lady as her confidential friend did the aggrieved mother unbosom herself, telling all she knew of Edna, and asking what she should do. Mrs. Burton sat a moment thinking, as if the subject demanded the most profound and careful attention, and then said:
“I hardly know how to advise; different people feel so differently. If it were my son I should not invite him home, at present. Let him suffer awhile for his misdeed. He ought to be punished.”
“Yes, and he will be punished, when he comes to his senses and sees what a mésalliance[2] he has made, though of course she enticed him,” Mrs. Churchill said, her mother’s heart pleading for her boy; whereas Mrs. Burton, who had never been a mother, and who felt a little piqued that after knowing Maude Somerton, Charlie could have chosen so unwisely, was very severe in her condemnation of both parties, and spoke her mind freely.
“Probably this Browning girl did entice him, but he should not have yielded, and he must expect to pay the penalty. I, for one, cannot promise to receive her on terms of equality; and Georgie, I am sure, will not, she is so fastidious and particular. Maybe she will see them. Did I tell you she had gone West?—started yesterday morning on the early train? She expected to be in Buffalo last night, and take this morning’s train for Chicago, where she is going to see a child, a relative of her step-mother, who died not long since. I am sorry she happens to be gone just now, when Roy is so helpless. She could read to him, and amuse him so much.”
It was evident that Mrs. Burton was thinking far more of Georgie than of her friend’s trouble; but the few words she had spoken on the subject had settled the matter and changed the whole current of Edna Browning’s life, and when, at last, she took her leave, and went out to her carriage, Mrs. Churchill had resolved to do her duty, and set her son’s sins before him in their proper light.
But she did not tell Roy so. She would rather he should not know all she had been saying to Mrs. Burton.
So to his suggestion that she should write to Charlie that day, she answered that she would, but added:
“I can’t write a lie, and tell him he will be welcome here at once. I must wait awhile before doing that.”
To this Roy did not object. A little discipline would do Charlie good, he believed; and so he signed a check for five hundred dollars, and then tried to sleep, while his mother wrote to Charlie. It was a severe letter, aimed more at Edna than her boy, and told of her astonishment and indignation that her son should have been led into so imprudent an act. Then she descanted upon runaway matches, and unequal matches; and said he must expect it would be a long time before she could forgive him, or receive “Miss Browning” as her daughter. Then she quoted Mrs. Burton, and Georgie, and Roy, whose feelings were so outraged, and advised Charlie to tell Miss Browning at once that every dollar he had came from his brother; “for,” she added in conclusion,
“I cannot help feeling that if she had known this fact, your unfortunate entanglement would have been prevented.
“Your aggrieved and offended mother,
She did not show what she had written to Roy, but she inclosed the check, and directed the letter to “Charles Augustus Churchill. Care of John Dana, Chicago, Ill.” With no apparent reason, Mrs. Churchill lingered long over that letter, studying the name “Charles Augustus,” and repeating it softly to herself, as we repeat the names of the dead. And when, at last, she gave it to Russell to post, she did it unwillingly, half wishing, when it was gone past recall, that she had not written quite so harshly to her boy, whose face haunted her that day wherever she went, and whose voice she seemed to hear everywhere calling to her.
With the waning of the day, the brightness of the early morning disappeared, and the night closed in dark and dreary, with a driving rain and a howling wind, which swept past Mrs. Churchill’s windows, and seemed screaming Charlie’s name in her ears as she tried in vain to sleep. At last, rising from her bed and throwing on her dressing-gown, she walked to the window and looked out into the night, wondering at the strange feeling of fear as of some impending evil stealing over her. The rain was over, and the breaking clouds were scudding before the wind, which still blew in fitful gusts, while the moon showed itself occasionally through an angry sky, and cast a kind of weird light upon the grounds below, the flower-beds, and statuary, which reminded Mrs. Churchill of gravestones, and made her turn away at last with a shudder. Then her thoughts went again after Charlie, and something drew her to her knees as she prayed for him; but said no word for Edna, the young girl-wife, whose sun of happiness was setting in a night of sorrow, darker and more terrible than anything of which she had ever dreamed.
CHAPTER III.GEORGIE’S TELEGRAM[4].
There was no trace of the storm next morning, except in the drops of rain which glittered on the shrubs and flowers, and the soaked condition of the walks and carriage-road. The sun came up bright and warm again, and by noon the hill-tops in the distance showed that purplish haze so common to the glorious October days. Everything about Leighton Homestead was quiet and peaceful, and in nothing was there a sign of the terrible calamity already passed, but as yet a secret to the mother, whose nameless terror of the previous night had faded with returning day. She was in Roy’s room, where a cheerful fire was blazing to counteract any chill or damp which might creep in through the open window. They had had their early lunch, and Roy was settling himself to sleep when Russell appeared, bearing a telegram, a missive which seldom fails to set one’s heart to throbbing with a dread of what it may have to tell. It was directed to Roy, but Mrs. Churchill opened it and read it, and then, with an agonizing shriek, fell forward upon Roy’s pillow, moaning bitterly:
“Oh, Roy, my Charlie is dead,—my Charlie is dead!”
She claimed him for all her own then. It was my Charlie, her fatherless one, her youngest-born, her baby, who was dead; and the blow cut deep and cruelly, and made her writhe in agony as she kept up the faint, moaning sound,—“My Charlie, my boy.”
She had dropped the telegram upon the floor, but Russell picked it up and handed it to Roy, who read:
“There has been a railroad accident, and Charlie is dead. His wife slightly injured. I await your orders.”
When Roy read his brother’s letter the day before, there had been great drops of sweat upon his brow; but now his face was pale as death, and the tears poured over it like rain, as he held the paper in his hand and tried to realize the terrible sorrow which had fallen so suddenly upon him. The telegram was dated at Iona, a little town between Cleveland and Chicago, and nearer to the latter place. Georgie had said: “I await your orders,” and that brought Roy from his own grief to the necessity of acting. Somebody must go and bring poor Charlie home; and as Roy was disabled, the task would devolve on Russell, the head servant at Leighton, who had been in the family for years. With a grave bow he received his orders, and the next train which left the Leighton depot carried him in it, while four or five hours later, Miss Burton, to whom Russell had telegraphed at once, read that “Russell would start immediately for Iona.”
Stunned and utterly helpless, Mrs. Churchill could only moan and weep, as her maid led her to her room and made her lie down upon the bed. She was a good woman at heart, in spite of the foibles and errors which appeared on the surface, and far greater than her sorrow for her own loss was her anxiety for her boy’s future. Was it well with him? Would she ever meet him again, should she be so fortunate as to gain heaven herself? She had taught him to pray, and back through the years which lay between that dreadful day and his childhood, her thoughts went swiftly, and she seemed to see again the fair head resting on her lap and hear the dear voice lisping the words “Our Father,” or, “Jesus, gentle Shepherd, hear me,” which last had been Charlie’s favorite prayer. But he was a child then, a baby. He had grown to manhood since, and she could not tell if latterly he ever prayed; and if not, oh, where was he that autumn day, whose mellow beauty seemed to mock her woe, as, in the home to which he would never come alive, she made bitter mourning for him. Suddenly, amid her pain, she remembered the previous night when she had prayed so earnestly for her boy. Perhaps God had saved him for the sake of that prayer; His love and mercy were infinite, and she would trust it all to Him, hoping that as He saved the thief on the cross, so from Charlie’s lips in the moment of peril there had gone up a prayer so sincere, and full of penitence and faith, that God had heard and answered, and had her boy safe with Him. “If I only knew it was so,” she moaned; but alas! she did not know, and her soul cried out for sight and knowledge, just as many a bleeding heart has cried out for some word or token to make belief a certainty. But to such cries there comes no answer back; the grave remains unopened; the mystery unexplained, and we, whose streaming eyes would fain pierce the darkness, and see if our loved ones are safe, must still trust it all to God, and walk yet a while by faith, as poor Mrs. Churchill tried to do, even when she had so little to build her faith upon.
They sent for Mrs. Burton, who came at once and did what she could to soothe and quiet her friend.
“It was such a comfort to know Georgie was there, and so providential too,” she said, and then she asked if “that girl was hurt.”
Mrs. Churchill knew she meant Edna, and answered faintly: “Slightly injured, the telegram said,” and that was all that passed between her and her friend respecting that girl. Mrs. Churchill could only think of Edna as one who in some way was instrumental in Charlie’s death. If she had not enticed him, he would not have done what he did, and consequently would not at that moment have been lying where he was, with all his boyish beauty marred and disfigured, until his mother would not have known him. It was the evening paper which had that last in it, and gave an account of the accident, which was caused by a broken rail. The car in which Charlie and Edna were had been thrown down an embankment, and five of the passengers killed. Special mention was made of the young man who had been married in the morning, and though no name was given, Mrs. Churchill knew who it was, and wept piteously as she listened to Mrs. Burton reading the article to her.
Of Edna, however, she scarcely thought; Edna, the bride, who, the paper stated, seemed perfectly stunned with horror. No one thought of her until Maude Somerton came. She had heard of the accident, and as Saturday was always a holiday with her, she came on Friday night to Leighton, and brought with her a world of comfort, though Mrs. Churchill’s tears flowed afresh at sight of the girl who, she had fancied, might one day be her daughter.
“Oh, Maude, my child,” she said, as Maude bent over her. “He’s gone, our Charlie. You were a good friend of his, and I once hoped you might—”
“Let me bathe your head. It is very hot, and aches, I know,” Maude said, interrupting her, for she guessed what Mrs. Churchill was about to say, and did not care to hear it.
She had found it vastly pleasant to flirt with Charlie Churchill, but when the excitement was over, and she was back again in the school-room with her restless, active pupils, she scarcely thought of him until the news of his sudden death recalled him to her mind. That he was married did surprise her a little, and deep down in her heart there might have been a pang of mortified vanity that she had been so soon forgotten after all those walks upon the mountain side, and those moonlight sails upon the river; but she harbored no ill-will toward his wife, and almost her first inquiries after Mrs. Churchill had grown quiet were for her.
“Is she so badly hurt, that she will not be able to come home with the body?” she asked, and Mrs. Churchill started as if she had been stung.
“Come home! Come here! That girl! I’d never thought of that,” she exclaimed; and then Maude knew just how “that girl” was regarded by her husband’s mother.
She did not know how Roy felt; but she went to him next and asked if it was not expected that Charlie’s wife would come to Leighton if she was able to travel, and Georgie’s telegram “slightly injured” would indicate that she was. Although he knew it to be a fact, still Charlie’s wife was rather mythical to Roy, and he had thought but little about her, certainly never that she was coming there, until Maude’s question showed him the propriety of the thing.
“Of course she will come,” he said. “I wonder if mother sent any message by Russell. Ask her, please.”
Mrs. Churchill had sent no message. She did not think it necessary; the girl would do as she liked, of course.
“Then she will come; I should,” Maude said; and next morning, as she combed and brushed Mrs. Churchill’s hair, she casually asked:
“Which room is to be given to Charlie’s wife?
“I thought, perhaps, she would prefer the one he used to occupy in the north wing,” she added, “and if you like I will see that it is in readiness for the poor girl. How I pity her, a widow in less than twenty-four hours. And such a pretty name too,—Edna. Don’t you think it is pretty?”
“Oh, child, don’t ask me. I want to do right, but I don’t like to hear of her. It seems as if she was the means of Charlie’s death,” Mrs. Churchill sobbed, and Maude’s soft hands moved caressingly over the grayish-brown hair as she spoke again for the poor girl lying stunned, and scared, and white, so many miles away.
“Charlie must have loved her very much,” she said, “or he would never have braved your displeasure, and that of Roy. She may be a comfort to you, who have no other daughter. I begin to feel a great interest in her, and mean to be her friend.”
Maude had espoused Edna’s cause at once, and her heart was full of sympathy for the poor girl, for she foresaw just how lonely and dreary her life would be at Leighton, where every one’s hand was against her.
“Mrs. Churchill will worry and badger her, and Roy without meaning to do it will freeze her with indifference, while Aunt Burton and Georgie will criticise and snub her awfully,” she thought. “But I will do what I can for her, and make her room as attractive as possible.”
So all of Saturday morning was spent by Maude in brushing up and righting Charlie’s old room for the reception of the widowed Edna. There were many traces of the dead in there, and Maude’s eyes were moist with tears as she put them away, and thought how Charlie would never want them again. It was a very pleasant room, and under Maude’s skilful hands it looked still pleasanter and more inviting on the morning when the party was expected.
