After gazing on her with satisfaction through his glasses, Uncle Jesse turned the paper over, and rapidly read a small codicil, which nevertheless choked him. He knew nothing about this part of the will. It destroyed Serena Hedding’s claims, on account of her disobedience, and made Howard Miller unconditional heir.
So that settled the matter. Serena turned whiter. It was a shock, after realizing one instant the possession of competence.
“I ’low Mozy must have put that on the day he took it away to have more added, he said,” remarked Uncle Jesse huskily. His good wife, who was all cap-rim and beak, with a thin neck and general air of scrawniness, sat with her claws crossed in silent sympathy. Jesse and his wife did not find Lindy a congenial sister.
“Well,” remarked Aunt Lindy, turning her head so the light fell in a sheet of glare upon her spectacles, “I’m satisfied. That is, I will be when I’ve said what I’m goin’ to say. I’m a plain speaker, and tell my mind. Things has turned out right. Sereny Heddin’ left her pap, and we stayed by him. She’s got her reward, and we’ve got our’n. I hope you don’t take no exceptions to his will, Sereny?”
Sereny replied in a low voice that she did not take any.
“To show that I’m fair-minded and want to do right by you,” said Aunt Lindy, raising her voice to the tone she used in speaking-meeting when exhorting sinners, “I’ll give you your mother’s spinnin’-wheel that stands in the smoke-house. You ought to have something to remember her by.”
Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife nudged the woman next to her, and whispered, with a curving mouth, “Just the idy! And all Sereny’s mother’s spoons, and her quilts and coverlids she had wove! And the girl never having any settin’-out in the first place!”
Serena climbed the staircase, to take off her borrowed mourning, and put on her own shabby weeds for her ride back into the world. She passed presses stacked with household linen. The precious things of her childhood, seen and handled in this trying visit, seemed so heart-breakingly precious because Hod Miller’s future wife would throw them about as common. She would like to have the yellow, leather-bound copy of “Alonzo and Melissa,” the novel of the house, always considered unwholesome by the elders, and as surely read with sly zest by the children. The coverlet with her mother’s name woven into it had never been intended for anybody but the daughter of the house. It was unendurable to go away from home this second time, and into perpetual exile.
“Now I wisht they’d find a later will,” said Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife, tying on her bonnet in the best bedroom. The persons who had lingered to support the family through the ordeal of will-reading were driving off, one after another. “Oh, but Aunt Lindy’ll carry things before her! Is she anywhere near? I don’t want her to hear me.”
“Things don’t turn out that way except in novel-stories,” observed another woman, with her mouth full of pins. “They don’t find wills hid around in stockin’s or Bibles. I declare, I’m real sorry for Sereny. I don’t see how old Mr. Jeffr’s can lay easy in his grave, turnin’ his own child out to give place to a big, hearty feller, with money in his own right.”