“Elmira,” said she, “bring me that stockin'.”
Elmira, who also was binding shoes, sitting on a stool before the scanty fire, rose quickly at her mother's command, went into the bedroom, and emerged with an old white yarn stocking hanging heavily from her hand.
“Empty it on the table and show Squire Merritt,” ordered her mother, in a tone as if she commanded the resources of the royal treasury to be displayed.
Elmira obeyed. She inverted the stocking, and from it jingled a shower of coin into a pitiful little heap on the table.
“There!” said Ann, pointing at it with a little bony finger. The smallest coins of the realm went to make up the little pile, and the Lord only knew how she and her children had grubbed them together. Every penny there represented more than the sweat of the brow: the sweat of the heart.
Squire Eben Merritt, with some dim perception of the true magnitude and meaning of that little hoard, gained partly through Ann's manner, partly through his own quickness of sympathy, fairly started as he looked at it and her.
“There's twenty-one dollars, all but two shillin's, there,” said Ann, with hard triumph. “The two shillin's Jerome is goin' to have to-night. He's been splittin' of kindlin'-wood, after school, for your sister, this week, and she's goin' to pay him the same as she did for weedin'. You can take this now, if you want to, or wait and have it all together.”
“I'll wait, thank you,” replied Eben Merritt. For the moment he felt actually dismayed and ashamed at the sight of his ready interest money. It was almost like having a good deed thrust back in his face and made of no account. He had scarcely expected any payment, certainly none so full and prompt as this.
“I thought I'd let you see you hadn't any cause to feel afraid you wouldn't get it,” said Ann, with dignity. “Elmira, you can put the money back in the stockin' now, and put the stockin' back under the feather-bed.”
Squire Merritt felt like a great school-boy before this small, majestic woman. “I did not feel afraid, Mrs. Edwards,” he said, awkwardly.