“She’ll charge it all to my High Church proclivities,” Edna said to herself, trying to laugh as she recalled her aunt’s peculiarities, and the probable effect the news would have on her. “I don’t care! I’m glad to be free from her any way,” she thought, as she remembered, with a shudder, all the dreariness and longing for something different which she had felt in that house by the graveyard where her childhood was passed.
It had never been hers to know the happiness which many children know. No mother had ever put her to bed, and tucked her up, with loving words and the good-night kiss. No hand had smoothed her locks of golden brown, as she said her little prayer. No pleasant voice had waked her in the morning from her dreamless sleep, and found excuse when the slumber was so hard to break, the eyes so unwilling to unclose. No little extra pie or cake was ever baked for her on the broken bit of plate, or cracked saucer. No sled, with her name upon it, stood out by gate, or door-step; and no genuine doll-baby ever lay in any box, or basket, or drawer in that prim, silent house, for Aunt Jerry did not believe in such useless things. “She gave the child enough to eat of good, plain, wholesome food, and that was all any one could ask.” She knew, too, that Edna said her prayers, and she saw that her Sunday-school lesson was always learned, and heard her say the Creed and Commandments every Sunday afternoon; but there were no gentle words and kind caresses, no tucking up on winter nights, no loving solicitude to see if the little hands and feet were warm. Edna knit or sewed till eight o’clock, and then, prompt with the first stroke, put by her work and took the tallow candle from the mantle piece, and without a word stole up the steep back stairs to her little bed in the room which looked out upon the graveyard just across the lane, where the white headstones shining through the darkness seemed to her like so many risen ghosts. She was afraid of the graveyard; and many a night she crept trembling into bed, and hiding her face under the clothes, said her prayers, not from any sense of duty, but because of the question sure to be put to her next morning, “Did you say your prayers, Edna?”
At the time of her father’s death Aunt Jerry had contended with his parishioners about his body, and, coming off victorious, had brought it home with her and buried it just by the fence under the shadow of her own cherry-tree, where regularly every Sunday in summer she took Edna and talked to her of her father, and told her how sorry he would be if he knew what a bad girl she was, and how he would rest better in his coffin if she would try to be good and learn the creed and catechism, so as to be confirmed the next time the Bishop came. And, more from fear than anything else, Edna learned the catechism and was confirmed, and hoped her father would be easy in his coffin, as Aunt Jerusha said he would.
As a child, Edna shunned her father’s grave, and thought only with terror of him who slept there; but after a time there came a change, and she no longer stood in fear of that grassy mound, but tended it with the utmost care, and sometimes, when no one saw her, knelt or rather crouched beside it, and whispered softly:
“Dear father, I am trying to be good: but oh, it is so hard, and Aunt Jerry is so cross. I wish you had not died. Help me,—can’t you, father?”
In this prayer there was no direct appeal to God; but He who knew all the trials and sorrow of the poor orphan girl, heard that cry for help, and the world was always brighter to Edna after a visit to that grave, and Aunt Jerusha’s tongue had less power to sting.
Aunt Jerusha meant to do her duty, and thought she did it when she tried to repress her naturally gay, light-hearted niece, and make her into a sober, quiet woman, content to sew the blessed day through and knit the livelong evening.
But Edna was like a rubber ball,—she could be crushed, but she would not stay so, and the moment the oppressor’s foot was removed she bounded back again as full of fun, and frolic, and life as ever! So when at the age of fifteen she became, in one sense, a charity scholar in Canandaigua Seminary, she recovered all her elasticity of spirits, and, freed from her aunt’s scrutiny, seemed constantly bubbling over with happiness and joy.
She was very popular, and, in spite of her plain dress, became the goddess by whom every academy boy swore, dreaming of her by night, and devising ways and means of seeing her by day.
Charlie Churchill was in love with her at once,—desperately, irretrievably in love, and, though she snubbed him at first, and made laughable caricatures of him in his foppish clothes, with his eye-glass, which he carried for no reason except to be dandyish, she ended by returning his affection and pledging herself to him on the fly-leaf of her algebra, that being the only bit of paper available at the time.