So the hills were levelled, and the hollows filled up; the fences and farming implements, and the house itself, carried out of the way, and all the ancient landmarks utterly removed.
“Just as if there wasn’t enough waste land in the country, but they must take the home of a solitary old woman to put their depots, and their engines, and their great wood-piles on,” said Miss Bethia, making a martyr of herself.
But, of course, she was well paid for it all, and, to her neighbours, was an object of envy rather than of pity; for it could not easily be understood by people generally, how the breaking-up of her house seemed to Miss Bethia like the breaking-up of all things, and that she felt like a person lost, and friendless, and helpless for a little while. But there, was a bright side to the matter, she was, by and by, willing to acknowledge. She knew too well the value of money—had worked too hard for all she had, not to feel some come complacency in the handsome sum lodged in the bank in her name by the obnoxious company.
It is a great thing to have money, most people think, and Miss Bethia might have had a home in any house in Gourlay that summer if she chose. But she knew that would not suit anybody concerned long; so, when it was suggested to her that she should purchase the house which the departure of Mrs Inglis and her children left vacant, she considered the matter first, and then accomplished it. It was too large for her, of course, but she let part of it to Debby Stone, who brought her invalid sister there, and earned the living of both by working as a tailoress. Miss Bethia did something at that, too, and lived as sparingly as she had always done, and showed such shrewdness in investing her money, and such firmness in exacting all that was her due, that some people, who would have liked to have a voice in the management of her affairs, called her hard, and a screw, and wondered that an old woman like her should care so much for what she took so little good of.
But Miss Bethia took a great deal of good out of her money, or out of the use she made of it, and meant to make of it; and a great many people in Gourlay, and out of it, knew that she was neither hard nor a screw.
And the book-case still stood up-stairs, and Miss Bethia took excellent care of the books, keeping the curtains drawn and the room dark, except when she had visitors. Then the light was let in, and she grew eloquent over the books and the minister, and the good he had done her in past days; but no one ever heard from her lips how the books came to be left in her care, or what was to become of them at last.
Chapter Nine.
May has come again, and the Inglises had been living a whole year in Singleton; or, rather, they had been living in a queer little house just out of Singleton. The house itself was well enough, and the place had been a pretty place once; but Miss Bethia’s enemies—the great Railway Company—had been at work on it, and about it, and they had changed a pretty field of meadow-land, a garden and an orchard, into a desolate-looking place, indeed. There was no depot or engine-house in the immediate neighbourhood, but the railway itself came so close to it, and rose so high above it, that the engine-driver might almost have looked down the cottage chimney as he passed.