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.
VII. Justin Peabody silently closed the inner door, and stood in the
entry with his head bent and his heart in a whirl until he should hear
Nancy rise to her feet. He must take this Heaven-sent chance of telling
her all, but how do it without alarming her?
A moment, and her step sounded in the stillness of the empty church.
Obeying the first impulse, he passed through the outer door, and
standing on the step, knocked once, twice, three times; then, opening
it a little and speaking through the chink, he called, “Is Miss Nancy
Wentworth here?”
“I'm here!” in a moment came Nancy's answer; and then, with a little
wondering tremor in her voice, as if a hint of the truth had already
dawned: “What's wanted?”
“You're wanted, Nancy, wanted badly, by Justin Peabody, come back from
the West.”
The door opened wide, and Justin faced Nancy standing halfway down
the aisle, her eyes brilliant, her lips parted. A week ago Justin's
apparition confronting her in the empty meeting-house after nightfall,
even had she been prepared for it as now, by his voice, would have
terrified her beyond measure. Now it seemed almost natural and
inevitable. She had spent these last days in the church where both of
them had been young and happy together; the two letters had brought him
vividly to mind, and her labor in the old Peabody pew had been one
long excursion into the past in which he was the most prominent and the
best-loved figure.
“I said I'd come back to you when my luck turned, Nancy.”
These were so precisely the words she expected him to say, should she
ever see him again face to face, that for an additional moment they but
heightened her sense of unreality.
“Well, the luck hasn't turned, after all, but I could n't wait any
longer. Have you given a thought to me all these years, Nancy?”
“More than one, Justin.” For the very look upon his face, the tenderness
of his voice, the attitude of his body, outran his words and told her
what he had come home to say, told her that her years of waiting were
over at last.
“You ought to despise me for coming back again with only myself and my
empty hands to offer you.”
How easy it was to speak his heart out in this dim and quiet place! How
tongue-tied he would have been, sitting on the black hair-cloth sofa in
the Wentworth parlor and gazing at the open soapstone stove!
“Oh, men are such fools!” cried Nancy, smiles and tears struggling
together in her speech, as she sat down suddenly in her own pew and put
her hands over her face.
“They are,” agreed Justin humbly; “but I've never stopped loving you,
whenever I've had time for thinking or loving. And I was n't sure that
you really cared anything about me; and how could I have asked you when
I had n't a dollar in the world?”
“There are other things to give a woman besides dollars, Justin.”
“Are there? Well, you shall have them all, every one of them, Nancy, if
you can make up your mind to do without the dollars; for dollars seem to
be just what I can't manage.”
Her hand was in his by this time, and they were sitting side by side,
in the cushionless, carpetless Wentworth pew. The door stood open; the
winter moon shone in upon them. That it was beginning to grow cold in
the church passed unnoticed. The grasp of the woman's hand seemed
to give the man new hope and courage, and Justin's warm, confiding,
pleading pressure brought balm to Nancy, balm and healing for the wounds
her pride had suffered; joy, too, half-conscious still, that her life
need not be lived to the end in unfruitful solitude. She had waited,
“as some gray lake lies, full and smooth, awaiting the star below the
twilight.”
Justin Peabody might have been no other woman's star, but he was
Nancy's! “Just you sitting beside me here makes me feel as if I'd been
asleep or dead all these years, and just born over again,” said
Justin. “I've led a respectable, hard-working, honest life, Nancy,” he
continued, “and I don't owe any man a cent; the trouble is that no man
owes me one. I've got enough money to pay two fares back to Detroit on
Monday, although I was terribly afraid you would n't let me do it. It'll
need a good deal of thinking and planning, Nancy, for we shall be very
poor.”
Nancy had been storing up fidelity and affection deep, deep in the hive
of her heart all these years, and now the honey of her helpfulness stood
ready to be gathered.
“Could I keep hens in Detroit?” she asked. “I can always make them pay.”
“Hens--in three rooms, Nancy?”
Her face fell. “And no yard?”
“No yard.”
A moment's pause, and then the smile came. “Oh, well, I've had yards and
hens for thirty-five years. Doing without them will be a change. I can
take in sewing.”
“No, you can't, Nancy. I need your backbone and wits and pluck and
ingenuity, but if I can't ask you to sit with your hands folded for the
rest of your life, as I'd like to, you shan't use them for other people.
You're marrying me to make a man of me, but I'm not marrying you to make
you a drudge.”
His voice rang clear and true in the silence, and Nancy's heart vibrated
at the sound.
“O Justin, Justin! there's something wrong somewhere,” she whispered,
“but we'll find it out together, you and I, and make it right. You're
not like a failure. You don't even look poor, Justin; there is n't a man
in Edgewood to compare with you, or I should be washing his dishes and
darning his stockings this minute. And I am not a pauper! There'll be
the rent of my little house and a carload of my furniture, so you can
put the three-room idea out of your mind, and your firm will offer you a
larger salary when you tell them you have a wife to take care of. Oh, I
see it all, and it is as easy and bright and happy as can be!”
Justin put his arm around her and drew her close, with such a throb of
gratitude for her belief and trust that it moved him almost to tears.
There was a long pause; then he said:--
“Now I shall call for you tomorrow morning after the last bell has
stopped ringing, and we will walk up the aisle together and sit in the
old Peabody pew. We shall be a nine days' wonder anyway, but this will
be equal to an announcement, especially if you take my arm. We don't
either of us like to be stared at, but this will show without a word
what we think of each other and what we've promised to be to each other,
and it's the only thing that will make me feel sure of you and settled
in my mind after all these mistaken years. Have you got the courage,
Nancy?”
“I should n't wonder! I guess if I've had courage enough to wait for
you, I've got courage enough to walk up the aisle with you and marry
you besides!” said Nancy.--“Now it is too late for us to stay here any
longer, and you must see me only as far as my gate, for perhaps you have
n't forgotten yet how interested the Brewsters are in their neighbors.”
They stood at the little Wentworth gate for a moment, hand close clasped
in hand. The night was clear, the air was cold and sparkling, but with
nothing of bitterness in it, the sky was steely blue, and the evening
star glowed and burned like a tiny sun. Nancy remembered the shepherd's
song she had taught the Sunday-School children, and repeated softly:--
For I my sheep was watching
Beneath the silent skies,
When sudden, far to eastward,
I saw a star arise;
Then all the peaceful heavens
With sweetest music rang,
And glory, glory, glory!
The happy angels sang.
So I this night am joyful,
Though I can scarce tell why,
It seemeth me that glory
Hath met us very nigh;
And we, though poor and humble,
Have part in heavenly plan,
For, born tonight, the Prince of Peace
Shall rule the heart of man.
Justin's heart melted within him like wax to the woman's vision and the
woman's touch.
“Oh, Nancy, Nancy!” he whispered. “If I had brought my bad luck to you
long, long ago, would you have taken me then, and have I lost years of
such happiness as this?”
“There are some things it is not best for a man to be certain about,”
said Nancy, with a wise smile and a last goodnight.