V
Slowly the long weeks of late winter succeeded each other, alike monotonous, gray and dreary. Tom Ralston worked, at first manfully, then doggedly, on the farm, fighting with a strong will against public opinion and private temptation. Everybody had heard of his fall. Young girls eyed him curiously from the opposite side of the road, and the frequenters of the village store gathered at night to sit around the stove, heels in air, and bring out stories of old Major Ralston, two or three generations back, whose dissipations had been town talk; and the gossips gravely wagged their heads and said: “’Twas bound to crop out sooner or later.”
So passed the icy months, and song-sparrows and bluebirds began to flit among the naked boughs like dreams of spring. Following them came the robins, plump and cheery embodiments of summer. One morning in April the maples and oaks stretched out their arms, full of rosy and restless baby leaves born in the night. The heats of July parched the land; September laid her gentle hand upon its brow until it was refreshed and slept.
Still Tom Ralston worked on, through sun and shower, seed-time and harvest, beginning at last to win approving nods and kindly smiles and words from his self-appointed critics. Still Charity, with heavy heart, went about her routine of household duties, from which all the sweetness, the vague looking forward, the pretty, girlish longing which had of late clothed them were gone. When she met Tom, as she was often obliged to, she spoke not coldly indeed, but as to a mere acquaintance. Right or wrong, she had conscientiously chosen her course, and she would keep it to the end. She would never marry a man who might become a drunkard, and perhaps leave his curse to be inherited by his innocent children.
It was five days before Christmas when Charity, having finished her daily tasks, stole away to spend the last hour or two of the short winter afternoon in her favorite walk, an old logging-path through the pine woods. The air was deliciously clear and sweet. Overhead, a flock of chickadees called to her merrily, and hung upside down among the tasseled boughs in search of insects and other small bird food. Not an anxious search, by any means; rather a contented one, on the whole, as if they were quite sure their daily bread had been given them, and they were only to see that it was not wasted. Charity half unconsciously took note of their happy little movements to and fro, as, for the hundredth time, she went over and over the arguments against forgiving Tom. She had just reached the triumphant “lastly,” in her course of reasoning, when, suddenly startled by the breaking of a twig, she glanced up, to see the subject of her syllogisms not twenty feet away, gathering evergreen. Like the rushing waters of a great tide, sweeping away her artificial landmarks and barriers, came the overwhelming conviction that it was she, and not the man before her, who needed forgiveness.
At the sound of her dress, Tom, too, had started up, as he did in the cell a year ago; but presently went on with his task, stooping low over a refractory vine of princess pine.
“It was the least I could do,” he said humbly, and with evident effort. “I shall take it up to the city myself and sell it for the girls.”
Something in her very silence, or perhaps a slight exclamation that escaped her lips, made him look up. She stood there, alternately paling and flushing, with a look in her eyes he had not seen for many a long day. He sprang to his feet, but she put out her hand to check him.
“Tom,” she began, with quivering lip, “dear Tom, can you forgive”—
What was the use of her hand then! If she had been surrounded by Napoleon’s Old Guard I believe Tom would have got at her somehow. Forgive her! Bless you, if you had seen him for the next five minutes, or had heard them talk as they walked home together beneath the pines, you would have been puzzled to know which forgave or which was forgiven, or which had done right or wrong, or whether either had ever doubted the other for an instant of their lives.
“‘Suffereth long and is kind,’” whispered grandmother that night, stroking the girl’s brown hair.
Of course Tom went home with her afterward, in the old way, and made footprints again before her door, while the moon smiled to itself and poured down its silvery blessing upon them.
So they had a merry Christmas after all, and a New Year’s wedding, on which occasion grandmother was resplendent in fresh ribbons, and the girls laughed and cried by turns.
The hard, dreary year of Tom’s struggle is long since past, but as Christmastide draws nigh and the wreaths are hung at the windows, Charity Ralston, the dearest and brightest little woman in all the country, looks fondly into her husband’s strong, manly face, and lays her cheek upon his shoulder in a way that tells him she remembers. He, too, has never forgotten, and, standing there in the twilight, with the sweet Christmas incense of the evergreen about them, he tells her again how he endured, and hoped, and loved, and ends by holding her close in his arms, while she whispers, “Merry Christmas, Tom!”
