She would have one hundred and fifty dollars, she said, and fifty should go to Roy, and one hundred to her aunt; and she drew a comical picture of that dame when the money was received, proving that her niece’s promise had been no idle thing.
“And you don’t mean to keep a cent for yourself, Dot?” Uncle Phil asked, adopting the name Maude had given to his niece, and which suited her so well.
“No, not a cent till my debts are paid. I’ve clothes enough to last until that time, I guess, if I am careful. At all events I shall buy nothing unnecessary, I assure you,” Edna said; and then Uncle Phil fell into a fit of musing, and thought how for every dollar Edna paid to Jerusha Pepper and Roy, he would put a corresponding dollar in the Millville Savings Bank to the credit of Louise Overton, who might one day find herself quite a rich little woman.
CHAPTER XXIII.
PAYING DEBTS.
Early in April, Aunt Jerry received a letter from Edna containing a draft for one hundred dollars. “All honestly earned,” Edna wrote; “and affording me more pleasure to pay it than you can well imagine. I have fifty dollars beside, which I enclose in an envelope, and wish you to send to Mr. Leighton; but don’t tell him where I am, for the world.”
Aunt Jerry was not in the best of spirits when she received the letter. She had been having a cistern dug under her back stoop, and what with hurrying Robbins, who dug it, and watching her clock to see that he worked his hours, she had worried herself almost sick; while to crown all, the poor old man, who at her instigation had spent nearly one entire day in wheeling the dirt to a safe distance from the house, where it wouldn’t “stand round in a great ugly pile,” found on sinking his hogshead that he had dug his excavation too large, and would need all, or nearly all, the dirt to fill it up again; and greatly to the horror of the highly incensed Miss Pepper, he spent another day in wheeling his dirt back again. It was of no use for Miss Jerusha to scold, and call the man a fool. She had ordered the dirt away herself, and now she listened in a half-frantic condition to the slow tramp, tramp of Robbins’ feet, and the rattling sound of the wheelbarrow which brought it back again, and undid the work of yesterday.
“Shiffless as the rot,” was Aunt Jerry’s parting comment, spoken to herself, as, the cistern finally finished, Robbins departed, just as a boy brought her Edna’s letter.
The sight of the money mollified her a little, and for a long time she sat thinking, with her pasteboard sun-bonnet on her head, and Tabby in her lap. At last, her thoughts found vent in words, and she anathematized Roy Leighton, and called him “a stingy hunks if he touched a dollar of that child’s hard earnings. Don’t catch me to do it, though I dare say he thinks I will!” and Aunt Jerry gave a contemptuous sniff at the mysterious he, whoever he might be.
The next day she went to Canandaigua, and got a new bank-book, with “Edna Browning’s” name in it, and put to her credit two hundred dollars, and then at night wrote to her niece, telling her “she had done better than she ever ’sposed she would, and that if she kept on she might in time make a woman, perhaps.”