Then, as she remembered her other Father, her Heavenly one, and His promise to the orphan, she clasped her hands over her face and prayed earnestly for His protection and blessing upon her wherever she might go. And then she thought of Aunt Jerry, and asked that God would bless her, too, and if in what she had said that night there was any thing harsh and wrong, He would forgive her for it, and help her to make amends. Her prayers ended, she crept into her bed, which seemed, with its softness and warmth, to embrace and hold her as a mother might have done, and so embraced and held, she soon fell away to sleep, and forgot all that was past, and ceased to dread what might be in store for her.
Meantime Aunt Jerry sat in the room below, with her feet on the stove hearth, her hands locked together around her knees, and her head bent forward until her forehead almost touched her dress. Perhaps she maintained this attitude to accommodate Tabby, who had mounted upon her back and nestled across her neck, and perhaps she did it the better to think intently, for she was thinking of all Edna had said to her with reference to her childhood, and wondering if, after all, her theory was wrong, and children were like chickens, which needed brooding from the mother hen.
“But sakes alive, how was I to know that,—I, a dried-up old maid, who never had a baby of my own, and never held one either, except that young one of Mrs. Atwood’s that I stood sponsor for, and almost dropped when I presented it? If things had turned out different, why, I should have been different.”
And with a little sigh as she thought of the yellow brocade in the chest upstairs, Miss Pepper put Tabby from her neck, and bringing out her prayer-book read the Gospel and Epistle and Collect for the day, and then kneeling by her chair said the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and a few words of her own improvising, to the effect that if she was too hard the Lord would thaw her out and make her softer, and help her somehow to make it up to Edna, and then she went to bed.
Edna was hungry the next morning, and did full justice to the cold roast turkey and nicely browned potato, and when her aunt asked if she would like some cranberry jelly, she said she would, for she felt that her aunt wanted her to have it, and did not begrudge the journey to the cellar in quest of it. There was but little talk on either side, until Edna asked if the stage went out the same hour as usual, and announced her intention of going away. Then Aunt Jerry spoke her mind again, and said Edna “was a fool to go sky-larkin’ off alone, when she was welcome there, and could get plenty of scholars too, if that was what she wanted;” and she even went so far as to say “they might as well let bygones be bygones, and begin anew, and see if they couldn’t pull together a little better.”
But Edna was not to be persuaded from her purpose. She did not know exactly where she was going, she said, but would let her aunt know when she was located, and if she did not succeed she might perhaps come back.
“That is, if you will let me. This is all the home I have at present, you know,” she added, looking wistfully up in her aunt’s face, as if for some token that she was cared for by that undemonstrative woman, who scolded the driver for bringing in so much snow and mud when he came for Edna’s trunk, and scolded the boy who came to help him for leaving the door open, and did it all to hide what she really felt at parting with her niece.
“Of course I’ll let you. I’d be a heathen to turn out my own flesh and blood,” she said, in reply to Edna’s remark, and then as the driver’s shrill “all ready” was heard, she gave her hand to Edna, who would have kissed her but for the forbidding look upon her face, and the pin between her teeth.
Aunt Jerry went with her to the stage, and stood looking on until she was comfortably seated, and then, as the driver mounted to his box and gathered up his reins, she said, “Wall, good-by again,” with a tone in her voice which made Edna throw back her veil to look at her more closely. But the horses, obedient to the lash, had started forward, and Aunt Jerry was left, feeling more alone than she had ever before felt in her life.
“I wonder if she would have staid if I’d been more outspoken, and told her how much I really wanted her?” Aunt Jerry said, as she returned to the house and began to put it to rights. “But that’s the way with me. I can’t say what I feel. I guess I’m ugly, if I do belong to the Church. I let him go when a word would have kept him, only I was too proud to speak it; and now I’ve lost her, just as I was beginning to know that I did like her some. I wish she knew how near crying I was when she said so queer-like, ‘You never kissed me, auntie, in my life, and we living together these dozen years.’ Don’t she know I ain’t the kissing sort? Still, I might have kissed her when a little child, and not hurt myself.”