Roy’s first impulse was to decline, but in spite of himself he was attracted by this queer woman, who boiled soap in so unsightly a garb, and quoted Shakespeare while she did it, and showed, in all she said and did, a striking originality of character, which pleased while it surprised him. He accepted her invitation to dine with her, and while she was making the needful preparations, looked curiously around the home which had once been Edna’s. It was scrupulously neat and clean, and very comfortable, still he could imagine just how a bright young girl would pine and languish there, and long to break away from the grim stillness and loneliness of the house.
“Poor Edna,” he said to himself, more than once, while there awoke in his heart a longing to take the little girl in his arms and comfort her, after all she had borne of loneliness and sorrow.
Aunt Jerry’s dinner, though not like the dinners at Leighton Place, was tempting and appetizing, and Roy did full justice to it, and drank two cups of coffee, for the cream, he said, and ate two pieces of berry pie, and a fried cake for dessert, and suffered from dyspepsia for the remainder of the day. Aunt Jerry asked him to spend the night, but Roy declined, and said good-by to her soon after dinner was over. His attempt to find Edna was a failure, and he went back to his mother, who, secretly, was glad, for she was not at all enthusiastic with regard to having her daughter-in-law for a companion. She greatly preferred Miss Overton from Rocky Point. Indeed, she had conceived quite a liking for that unknown young lady, and as soon as Roy came home and reported his ill success, she made him write at once to Miss Overton, asking if she would come, and what her terms were.
“Perhaps you’d better name three hundred and fifty dollars a year; that surely is enough,” Mrs. Churchill said; and so Roy, to whom a few dollars more or less was nothing, and who felt that to be constantly with a half-blind, nervous invalid was no desirable position, made it four hundred dollars, and asked for an early reply.
CHAPTER XXVII.
EDNA ACCEPTS.
During the last few months Edna’s school had not been as large as usual, and when at last it closed for the summer vacation, it numbered only fifteen scholars, and she was not quite certain that she should open it again. She was as popular as ever. No one had aught to say against her, but Uncle Phil’s “Synagogue” had gotten him into a world of trouble, and made him many enemies. So long as the work made little or no progress, the people were quiet and regarded the thing as a crazy kind of project which, let alone, would die a natural death. And for a time it did bid fair to do so, for what with the trouble to get men, and the fearfully high prices when he did get them, and the bother it was to see to them, Uncle Phil was inclined to take the matter easy, and after the cellar-wall was laid, there were weeks and months during which nothing was done, and Squire Gardner said, with a knowing wink, “We hain’t lost the old man yet,” and began to talk seriously of repairing his own church and having the ladies get up a Fair, of which his wife and Ruth were to be head and front. Accordingly Ruth came down one day to talk with Edna about it, and get her interested, as with her taste and skill she was sure to be a powerful ally if once enlisted in the cause. But Edna would not commit herself, and Ruth returned home disheartened and disappointed.
That night Uncle Phil was attacked with dizziness and a rush of blood to his head, which frightened him nearly out of his wits.
“I can’t die yet,” he said, when recovered somewhat, “but it came pretty nigh takin’ me off. Yes, yes; had a narrer escape; but I can’t go yet; it’s no use talkin’. I ain’t ready, and that synagogue business ain’t moved a peg this two months; but if the Lord will set me on my legs agin, I promise to go at it at once. Try me and see if I don’t.”
He was taken at his word, and once well again he attacked the chapel with a right good-will, and brought out men from Millville, and boarded them himself, and kept them at work early and late, and proved so conclusively that he was in earnest, that his opponents took the alarm, and waiting upon him a second time grew so warm and even provoking that Uncle Phil blazed up fiercely, and said he wouldn’t give a red toward any other church, nor ask anybody to give to his, and swore so hard that the Unitarians asked “how soon he intended to be confirmed;” while the Orthodox added that “it was of such materials the Episcopal church was composed,” and then Uncle Phil wondered if he was not being “persecuted for righteousness’ sake,” and if it would not be put to his account as a kind of offset for the hay he had raked up and gotten into the barn away from the rain on two or three different Sundays which he could remember.