Edna had frequently played at Rocky Point; sometimes with Maude, sometimes with Ruth Gardner, and sometimes with Uncle Phil for an opponent, and except when playing against the latter, was generally beaten, so she took the mallet Roy brought to her with some hesitation, declaring her inability to interest a skilful player, much less to beat.
“Let me teach you then,” Roy said. “You can learn a great deal in an hour.”
To this Edna readily assented, and the game began with Roy as teacher. But Edna soon found that the uneven ground at Uncle Phil’s, where the balls hid themselves in all sorts of holes and depressions, was a very different thing from the closely-shaven lawn which had been rolled and pounded until it was nearly as smooth as a carpeted floor. She could play here, and was astonished at her own success, and struck so boldly and surely, that Roy soon gave up the task of teaching her, and began to look after his own interests. She was such a little creature, and he so tall and big, that he almost felt as if playing with his daughter, though never did a father watch the motions of his child with just the same feelings with which Roy watched Edna as she moved from point to point, now showing her dimpled hands, and now poising her little boot upon her ball preparatory to croqueting it away. She was very lithe, very graceful, and very modest withal, and she beat Roy twice out of five games, and when at last they were through, and Roy led her to his mother, he said to her, laughingly:
“Remember you are engaged to me for the first game.”
He was extremely kind and gentle, and though Edna had known him personally for only twenty-four hours, she had seen enough to understand just how thoroughly good and noble he was; how different from Charlie, who, had he lived, could hardly have satisfied her now. But Charlie was dead, and she went from the croquet ground to his grave, with his mother, and laid a cluster of flowers upon the sod which covered him, and felt like a guilty hypocrite when Mrs. Churchill pressed her hand and thanked her “for remembering my poor boy.”
“I would like flowers put here every day,” she said; “but my eyesight is so bad that I cannot see, while Roy’s hands are not skilful in fashioning bouquets, and we have had no young lady staying here permanently until now.”
“Charlie shall have flowers so long as they last,” Edna replied with a trembling voice, while into her face there came a look of pain something like what it had worn on that dreadful night in Iona.
She had called him “Charlie,” and the old familiar name carried her back to the Seminary days, when, aside from Aunt Jerry, she had not known what sorrow was,—and she was uncertain how Mrs. Churchill would take it. There was something very sad in the tone of her voice as she uttered the name, Charlie,—pitiful, Mrs. Churchill thought; and she deepened her grasp on Edna’s hand and said, “Call him Charlie always when speaking of him to me. It makes it seem as if you had known him, and I can talk more freely to you than to a stranger. He was my baby, my poor boy; full of faults, but always loving and kind to his mother. Oh! Charlie, my darling. I wish I had him back. I wish he had not done so.”
The tears were pouring over the poor woman’s face, and Edna’s kept company with them. She knew what the mother wished he had not done, and knew that but for her he would not have done it, and she felt for a few moments as if she were really guilty of Charlie’s death; and could she then have restored him to his mother by going herself back to the house by the graveyard, and taking up her lonely life as it had been before she knew Charlie Churchill, she would have done so. But there was no going back when once death had entered in; and all she now could do was to comfort and love the helpless woman who clung to her so confidingly, and who seemed so much afraid of overtaxing or wearying her out.
“You have always been in school, I hear,” she said, after they had returned to the house, and Edna had read aloud to her awhile. “Teaching must be accompanied with more excitement than sitting here and amusing me, so I shall not tax you much at first, lest you get tired of me. Go, now, and enjoy yourself where you like. Perhaps Roy will take you to drive. I’ll ask him; I hear his step now. Roy, come here, please.”