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IV
It was Saturday afternoon, the 24th of December, and the weary sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths. This was a feminine custom of long standing, and as no village dressmaker had ever died of pins in the digestive organs, so were no symptoms of carpet-tacks ever discovered in any Dorcas, living or dead. Men wondered at the habit and reviled it, but stood confounded in the presence of its indubitable harmlessness.
The red ingrain carpet was indeed very warm, beautiful, and comforting to the eye, and the sisters were suitably grateful to Providence, and devoutly thankful to themselves, that they had been enabled to buy, sew, and lay so many yards of it. But as they stood looking at their completed task, it was cruelly true that there was much left to do.
The aisles had been painted dark brown on each side of the red strips leading from the doors to the pulpit, but the rest of the church floor was “a thing of shreds and patches.” Each member of the carpet committee had paid (as a matter of pride, however ill she could afford it) three dollars and sixty-seven cents for sufficient carpet to lay in her own pew; but these brilliant spots of conscientious effort only made the stretches of bare, unpainted floor more evident. And that was not all. Traces of former spasmodic and individual efforts desecrated the present ideals. The doctor’s pew had a pink-and-blue Brussels on it; the lawyer’s, striped stair-carpeting; the Browns from Deerwander sported straw matting and were not abashed; while the Greens, the Whites, the Blacks, and the Grays displayed floor coverings as dissimilar as their names.
“I never noticed it before!” exclaimed Maria Sharp, “but it ain’t Christian, that floor! it’s heathenish and ungodly!”
“For mercy’s sake, don’t swear, Maria,” said Mrs. Miller nervously. “We’ve done our best, and let’s hope that folks will look up and not down. It is n’t as if they were going to set in the chandelier; they’ll have something else to think about when Nancy gets her hemlock branches and white carnations in the pulpit vases. This morning my Abner picked off two pinks from a plant I’ve been nursing in my dining-room for weeks, trying to make it bloom for Christmas. I slapped his hands good, and it’s been haunting me ever since to think I had to correct him the day before Christmas.—Come, Lobelia, we must be hurrying!”
“One thing comforts me,” exclaimed the Widow Buzzell, as she took her hammer and tacks preparatory to leaving; “and that is that the Methodist meetin’-house ain’t got any carpet at all.”
“Mrs. Buzzell, Mrs. Buzzell!” interrupted the minister’s wife, with a smile that took the sting from her speech. “It will be like punishing little Abner Miller; if we think those thoughts on Christmas Eve, we shall surely be haunted afterward.”
“And anyway,” interjected Maria Sharp, who always saved the situation, “you just wait and see if the Methodists don’t say they’d rather have no carpet at all than have one that don’t go all over the floor. I know ‘em!” and she put on her hood and blanket-shawl as she gave one last fond look at the improvements.
“I’m going home to get my supper, and come back afterward to lay the carpet in my pew; my beans and brown bread will be just right by now, and perhaps it will rest me a little; besides, I must feed ‘Zekiel.”
As Nancy Wentworth spoke, she sat in a corner of her own modest rear seat, looking a little pale and tired. Her waving dark hair had loosened and fallen over her cheeks, and her eyes gleamed from under it wistfully. Nowadays Nancy’s eyes never had the sparkle of gazing into the future, but always the liquid softness that comes from looking backward.
“The church will be real cold by then, Nancy,” objected Mrs. Burbank.—“Good-night, Mrs. Baxter.”
“Oh, no! I shall be back by half-past six, and I shall not work long. Do you know what I believe I’ll do, Mrs. Burbank, just through the holidays? Christmas and New Year’s both coming on Sunday this year, there’ll be a great many out to church, not counting the strangers that’ll come to the special service tomorrow. Instead of putting down my own pew carpet that’ll never be noticed here in the back, I’ll lay it in the old Peabody pew, for the red aisle-strip leads straight up to it; the ministers always go up that side, and it does look forlorn.”
“That’s so! And all the more because my pew, that’s exactly opposite in the left wing, is new carpeted and cushioned,” replied the president. “I think it’s real generous of you, Nancy, because the Riverboro folks, knowing that you’re a member of the carpet committee, will be sure to notice, and think it’s queer you have n’t made an effort to carpet your own pew.”
“Never mind!” smiled Nancy wearily. “Riverboro folks never go to bed on Saturday nights without wondering what Edgewood is thinking about them!”
The minister’s wife stood at her window watching Nancy as she passed the parsonage.
“How wasted! How wasted!” she sighed. “Going home to eat her lonely supper and feed ‘Zekiel.... I can bear it for the others, but not for Nancy.... Now she has lighted her lamp,… now she has put fresh pine on the fire, for new smoke comes from the chimney. Why should I sit down and serve my dear husband, and Nancy feed ‘Zekiel?”
There was some truth in Mrs. Baxter’s feeling. Mrs. Buzzell, for instance, had three sons; Maria Sharp was absorbed in her lame father and her Sunday-School work; and Lobelia Brewster would not have considered matrimony a blessing, even under the most favorable conditions. But Nancy was framed and planned for other things, and ‘Zekiel was an insufficient channel for her soft, womanly sympathy and her bright activity of mind and body.
‘Zekiel had lost his tail in a mowing-machine; ‘Zekiel had the asthma, and the immersion of his nose in milk made him sneeze, so he was wont to slip his paw in and out of the dish and lick it patiently for five minutes together. Nancy often watched him pityingly, giving him kind and gentle words to sustain his fainting spirit, but tonight she paid no heed to him, although he sneezed violently to attract her attention.
She had put her supper on the lighted table by the kitchen window and was pouring out her cup of tea, when a boy rapped at the door. “Here’s a paper and a letter, Miss Wentworth,” he said. “It’s the second this week, and they think over to the store that that Berwick widower must be settin’ up and takin’ notice!”
She had indeed received a letter the day before, an unsigned communication, consisting only of the words,—
Second Epistle of John. Verse x2.
She had taken her Bible to look out the reference and found it to be:—
Having many tilings to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full.
The envelope was postmarked New York, and she smiled, thinking that Mrs. Emerson, a charming lady who had spent the summer in Edgewood, and had sung with her in the village choir, was coming back, as she had promised, to have a sleigh ride and see Edgewood in its winter dress. Nancy had almost forgotten the first letter in the excitements of her busy day, and now here was another, from Boston this time. She opened the envelope and found again only a simple sentence, printed, not written. (Lest she should guess the hand, she wondered?)
Second Epistle of John. Verse 5.—
And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.
Was it Mrs. Emerson? Could it be—any one else? Was it? No, it might have been, years ago; but not now; not now!—And yet; he was always so different from other people; and once, in church, he had handed her the hymn-book with his finger pointing to a certain verse.
She always fancied that her secret fidelity of heart rose from the fact that Justin Peabody was “different.” From the hour of their first acquaintance, she was ever comparing him with his companions, and always to his advantage. So long as a woman finds all men very much alike (as Lobelia Brewster did, save that she allowed some to be worse!), she is in no danger. But the moment in which she perceives and discriminates subtle differences, marveling that there can be two opinions about a man’s superiority, that moment the miracle has happened.
And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.
No, it could not be from Justin. She drank her tea, played with her beans abstractedly, and nibbled her slice of steaming brown bread.
Not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee.
No, not a new one; twelve, fifteen years old, that commandment!
That we love one another.
Who was speaking? Who had written these words? The first letter sounded just like Mrs. Emerson, who had said she was a very poor correspondent, but that she should just “drop down” on Nancy one of these days; but this second letter never came from Mrs. Emerson.—Well, there would be an explanation some time; a pleasant one; one to smile over, and tell ‘Zekiel and repeat to the neighbors; but not an unexpected, sacred, beautiful explanation, such a one as the heart of a woman could imagine, if she were young enough and happy enough to hope. She washed her cup and plate; replaced the uneaten beans in the brown pot, and put them away with the round loaf, folded the cloth (Lobelia Brewster said Nancy always “set out her meals as if she was entertainin’ company from Portland”), closed the stove dampers, carried the lighted lamp to a safe corner shelf, and lifted ‘Zekiel to his cushion on the high-backed rocker, doing all with the nice precision of long habit. Then she wrapped herself warmly, and locking the lonely little house behind her, set out to finish her work in the church.
V
At this precise moment Justin Peabody was eating his own beans and brown bread (articles of diet of which his Detroit landlady was lamentably ignorant) at the new tavern, not far from the meeting-house.
It would not be fair to him to say that Mrs. Burbank’s letter had brought him back to Edgewood, but it had certainly accelerated his steps.
For the first six years after Justin Peabody left home, he had drifted about from place to place, saving every possible dollar of his uncertain earnings in the conscious hope that he could go back to New England and ask Nancy Wentworth to marry him. The West was prosperous and progressive, but how he yearned, in idle moments, for the grimmer and more sterile soil that had given him birth!
Then came what seemed to him a brilliant chance for a lucky turn of his savings, and he invested them in an enterprise which, wonderfully as it promised, failed within six months and left him penniless. At that moment he definitely gave up all hope, and for the next few years he put Nancy as far as possible out of his mind, in the full belief that he was acting an honorable part in refusing to drag her into his tangled and fruitless way of life. If she ever did care for him,—and he could not be sure, she was always so shy,—she must have outgrown the feeling long since, and be living happily, or at least contentedly, in her own way. He was glad in spite of himself when he heard that she had never married; but at least he had n’t it on his conscience that he had kept her single!
On the 17th of December, Justin, his business day over, was walking toward the dreary house in which he ate and slept. As he turned the corner, he heard one woman say to another, as they watched a man stumbling sorrowfully down the street: “Going home will be the worst of all for him—to find nobody there!” That was what going home had meant for him these ten years, but he afterward felt it strange that this thought should have struck him so forcibly on that particular day. Entering the boarding-house, he found Mrs. Burbank’s letter with its Edgewood postmark on the hall table, and took it up to his room. He kindled a little fire in the air-tight stove, watching the flame creep from shavings to kindlings, from kindlings to small pine, and from small pine to the round, hardwood sticks; then when the result seemed certain, he closed the stove door and sat down to read the letter. Whereupon all manner of strange things happened in his head and heart and flesh and spirit as he sat there alone, his hands in his pockets, his feet braced against the legs of the stove.
It was a cold winter night, and the snow and sleet beat against the windows. He looked about the ugly room: at the washstand with its square of oilcloth in front and its detestable bowl and pitcher; at the rigors of his white iron bedstead, with the valley in the middle of the lumpy mattress and the darns in the rumpled pillowcases; at the dull photographs of the landlady’s hideous husband and children enshrined on the mantelshelf; looked at the abomination of desolation surrounding him until his soul sickened and cried out like a child’s for something more like home. It was as if a spring thaw had melted his ice-bound heart, and on the crest of a wave it was drifting out into the milder waters of some unknown sea. He could have laid his head in the kind lap of a woman and cried: “Comfort me! Give me companionship or I die!”
The wind howled in the chimney and rattled the loose window-sashes; the snow, freezing as it fell, dashed against the glass with hard, cutting little blows; at least, that is the way in which the wind and snow flattered themselves they were making existence disagreeable to Justin Peabody when he read the letter; but never were elements more mistaken.
It was a June Sunday in the boarding-house bedroom; and for that matter it was not the boarding-house bedroom at all: it was the old Orthodox church on Tory Hill in Edgewood. The windows were wide open, and the smell of the purple clover and the humming of the bees were drifting into the sweet, wide spaces within. Justin was sitting in the end of the Peabody pew, and Nancy Wentworth was beside him; Nancy, cool and restful in her white dress; dark-haired Nancy under the shadow of her shirred muslin hat.
Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings,
Thy better portion trace.
The melodeon gave the tune, and Nancy and he stood to sing, taking the book between them. His hand touched hers, and as the music of the hymn rose and fell, the future unrolled itself before his eyes: a future in which Nancy was his wedded wife; and the happy years stretched on and on in front of them until there was a row of little heads in the old Peabody pew, and mother and father could look proudly along the line at the young things they were bringing into the house of the Lord.
The recalling of that vision worked like magic in Justin’s blood. His soul rose and stretched its wings and “traced its better portion” vividly, as he sprang to his feet and walked up and down the bedroom floor. He would get a few days’ leave and go back to Edgewood for Christmas, to join, with all the old neighbors, in the service at the meetinghouse; and in pursuance of this resolve, he shook his fist in the face of the landlady’s husband on the mantelpiece and dared him to prevent.
He had a salary of fifty dollars a month, with some very slight prospect of an increase after January. He did not see how two persons could eat, and drink, and lodge, and dress on it in Detroit, but he proposed to give Nancy Wentworth the refusal of that magnificent future, that brilliant and tempting offer. He had exactly one hundred dollars in the bank, and sixty or seventy of them would be spent in the journeys, counting two happy, blessed fares back from Edgewood to Detroit; and if he paid only his own fare back, he would throw the price of the other into the pond behind the Wentworth house. He would drop another ten dollars into the plate on Christmas Day toward the repairs on the church; if he starved, he would do that. He was a failure. Everything his hand touched turned to naught. He looked himself full in the face, recognizing his weakness, and in this supremest moment of recognition he was a stronger man than he had been an hour before. His drooping shoulders had straightened; the restless look had gone from his eyes; his somber face had something of repose in it, the repose of a settled purpose. He was a failure, but perhaps if he took the risks (and if Nancy would take them—but that was the trouble, women were so unselfish, they were always willing to take risks, and one ought not to let them!), perhaps he might do better in trying to make a living for two than he had in working for himself alone. He would go home, tell Nancy that he was an unlucky good-for-naught, and ask her if she would try her hand at making him over.
VI
These were the reasons that had brought Justin Peabody to Edgewood on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, and had taken him to the new tavern on Tory Hill, near the meeting-house.
Nobody recognized him at the station or noticed him at the tavern, and after his supper he put on his overcoat and started out for a walk, aimlessly hoping that he might meet a friend, or failing that, intending to call on some of his old neighbors, with the view of hearing the village news and securing some information which might help him to decide when he had better lay himself and his misfortunes at Nancy Wentworth’s feet. They were pretty feet! He remembered that fact well enough under the magical influence of familiar sights and sounds and odors. He was restless, miserable, anxious, homesick—not for Detroit, but for some heretofore unimagined good; yet, like Bunyan’s shepherd boy in the Valley of humiliation, he carried “the herb called Heartsease in his bosom,” for he was at last loving consciously.
How white the old church looked, and how green the blinds! It must have been painted very lately: that meant that the parish was fairly prosperous. There were new shutters in the belfry tower, too; he remembered the former open space and the rusty bell, and he liked the change. Did the chimney use to be in that corner? No; but his father had always said it would have drawn better if it had been put there in the beginning. New shingles within a year: that was evident to a practiced eye. He wondered if anything had been done to the inside of the building, but he must wait until the morrow to see, for, of course, the doors would be locked. No; the one at the right side was ajar. He opened it softly and stepped into the tiny square entry that he recalled so well—the one through which the Sunday-School children ran out to the steps from their catechism, apparently enjoying the sunshine after a spell of orthodoxy; the little entry where the village girls congregated while waiting for the last bell to ring—they made a soft blur of pink and blue and buff, a little flutter of curls and braids and fans and sun-shades, in his mind’s eye, as he closed the outer door behind him and gently opened the inner one. The church was flooded with moon-light and snowlight, and there was one lamp burning at the back of the pulpit; a candle, too, on the pulpit steps. There was the tip-tap-tip of a tack-hammer going on in a distant corner. Was somebody hanging Christmas garlands? The new red carpet attracted his notice, and as he grew accustomed to the dim light, it carried his eye along the aisle he had trod so many years of Sundays, to the old familiar pew. The sound of the hammer ceased, and a woman rose from her knees. A stranger was doing for the family honor what he ought himself to have done. The woman turned to shake her skirt, and it was Nancy Wentworth. He might have known it. Women were always faithful; they always remembered old land-marks, old days, old friends, old duties. His father and mother and Esther were all gone; who but dear Nancy would have made the old Peabody pew right and tidy for the Christmas festival? Bless her kind, womanly heart!
She looked just the same to him as when he last saw her. Mercifully he seemed to have held in remembrance all these years not so much her youthful bloom as her general qualities of mind and heart: her cheeriness, her spirit, her unflagging zeal, her bright womanliness. Her gray dress was turned up in front over a crimson moreen petticoat. She had on a cozy jacket, a fur turban of some sort with a red breast in it, and her cheeks were flushed from exertion. “Sweet records, and promises as sweet,” had always met in Nancy’s face, and either he had forgotten how pretty she was, or else she had absolutely grown prettier during his absence.
Nancy would have chosen the supreme moment of meeting very differently, but she might well have chosen worse. She unpinned her skirt and brushed the threads off, smoothed the pew cushions carefully, and took a last stitch in the ragged hassock. She then lifted the Bible and the hymn-book from the rack, and putting down a bit of flannel on the pulpit steps, took a flatiron from an oil-stove, and opening the ancient books, pressed out the well-thumbed leaves one by one with infinite care. After replacing the volumes in their accustomed place, she first extinguished the flame of her stove, which she tucked out of sight, and then blew out the lamp and the candle. The church was still light enough for objects to be seen in a shadowy way, like the objects in a dream, and Justin did not realize that he was a man in the flesh, looking at a woman; spying, it might be, upon her privacy. He was one part of a dream and she another, and he stood as if waiting, and fearing, to be awakened.
Nancy, having done all, came out of the pew, and standing in the aisle, looked back at the scene of her labors with pride and content. And as she looked, some desire to stay a little longer in the dear old place must have come over her, or some dread of going back to her lonely cottage, for she sat down in Justin’s corner of the pew with folded hands, her eyes fixed dreamily on the pulpit and her ears hearing:—
Not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning.
Justin’s grasp on the latch tightened as he prepared to close the door and leave the place, but his instinct did not warn him quickly enough, after all, for, obeying some uncontrollable impulse, Nancy suddenly fell on her knees in the pew and buried her face in the cushions. The dream broke, and in an instant Justin was a man—worse than that, he was an eavesdropper, ashamed of his unsuspected presence. He felt himself standing, with covered head and feet shod, in the holy temple of a woman’s heart.
But his involuntary irreverence brought abundant grace with it. The glimpse and the revelation wrought their miracles silently and irresistibly, not by the slow processes of growth which Nature demands for her enterprises, but with the sudden swiftness of the spirit. In an instant changes had taken place in Justin’s soul which his so-called “experiencing religion” twenty-five years back had been powerless to effect. He had indeed been baptized then, but the recording angel could have borne witness that this second baptism fructified the first, and became the real herald of the new birth and the new creature.
