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 neighbours, 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 odours. 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 Hearts-ease 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
practised 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
sunshades, in his mind's eye, as he closed the outer door behind him and
gently opened the inner one. The church was flooded with moonlight 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 honour 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 landmarks, 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
grey dress was turned up in front over a crimson moreen petticoat. She
had on a cosy jacket, a fur turban of some sort with a redbreast 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 labours 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.