The young scamp chuckled with delight as he read over this letter and thought what a bombshell it would be in the staid household at Schuyler Hill.
“I haven’t written a lie either,” he said; “I only told them to think of father’s fancying such a person, and they will think of it, and Aunt Christine will have a fit and swallow more than a quart of her bitters, and take a shock strong enough to knock her down, and Jule’s back will be up, and Alice’s nose, and Em will cry, and Tiffe will snort her indignation, and there’ll be thunder raised generally.”
After these remarks Godfrey folded his letter and shook himself down, and looked in the glass, and started for Caledonia Street to call upon Edith. He found her at home, looking so beautiful as she rose to meet him, with the flush on her cheek, and the new expression of peace and quiet in her eyes, that he was conscious of a sharp pang of regret for the years which lay between them. Then, as he remembered the woman of forty, with the limp and glass eye, and thought of the consternation at Schuyler Hill when his letter was received, and the surprise when the bride herself should arrive, he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter, while Edith looked wonderingly at him, with a rising color in her cheeks.
“You must excuse me,” he said, as he held her hand in his. “It seems so ridiculous to think of calling you mother.”
“Don’t do it, please,” Edith replied. “I’d rather you would not. Let me be Edith.”
And so the ice was broken, and Godfrey plunged into the subject at once, in his half-comical, half-serious way.
“Honestly,” he said, “I am real glad you are going home with us. I never liked any one outside of our family as well as I do you, and once I had serious thoughts of making love to you myself! I did, upon my word, but when I subtracted eighteen from twenty-eight, I said ‘no go.’ So far as years are concerned that is worse than Aunt Christine and father.”
“Who is Aunt Christine?”
“Have I never told you of her? Well, inasmuch as you are to be one of us, I may as well enlighten you with regard to the individuals whose step-mother you are to be. Aunt Christine is mother’s sister, an old maid, whose love died and left her his money. Since mother’s death she has been with us a great deal of her time, quarrelling with Mrs. Tiffe,—that’s the housekeeper,—bullying the servants, nagging the governess, and watching to see that father didn’t look at a bonnet with matrimony in his eye. You see, she wanted him herself, he forty-one and she forty-six, and looking almost a hundred, with all the drugs and nostrums she takes for her fancied ailments. She has the neuralgia, and catarrh, and dyspepsia, and bronchitis, and liver complaint, and doctors for them all, and has her room as full of bottles as an apothecary’s shop, and sits with a dish of tar under her nose, and takes galvanic shocks, and has her hair dressed every day, and wears the richest of silk and finest of lace, and really looks splendidly when she is dressed,—was handsome once, and is very exclusive and aristocratic, and proud of her Rossiter blood, and will never rest until she knows a person’s pedigree, root and branch.”