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 honourable 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 hadn't it on his conscience that _he_ had kept her
single!
On the seventeenth 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 rigours
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 neighbours, in the service at the
meeting-house; 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 sombre 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.