However, that was not my consideration now. The Redwine Circuit was only twenty miles distant; the little house between the two green hills that had been the Methodist parsonage thirty years before was long since abandoned for a shiny, green and yellow spindle-legged new parsonage at Royden. And while William, who had always had his home dictated to him by the Conference, showed a pathetic apathy about choosing one for himself, I hankered for the ragged-roof cottage with its ugly old chimneys that had first sheltered our life together. So within a month the horse and buggy were sold, the cottage at Redwine rented, and we settled in it like two crippled birds in a half-feathered nest.
Now, for the first time since I left Edenton, a happy, thoughtless bride, I had leisure to think just of ourselves, of our sum total, as it were. And I found that we were two human numerals added together for a lifetime which made a deficit. Yet we had not been idle or indifferent workers. For thirty years William had been in the itinerancy, filling nearly every third and fourth class appointment in his Conference. He had preached over three thousand sermons, baptized more than four hundred infants, received nearly four thousand souls into membership. He had been untiring in his efforts to raise his assessments, and had paid more pastoral calls than half a dozen doctors need to make in order to become famous and wealthy.
Time changed us; we grew old. I abandoned my waist-line to Nature's will and my face settled into the expression of a good negative that has been blurred by too long exposure to a strong light. Toward the end William looked like the skin-and-bones remnant of a saint. His face was sunken and hollowed out till the very Wesley in him showed through. His beard was long and had whitened until it gave his Moses head the appearance of coming up out of a holy mist.
So, I say, we aged; but we went on from circuit to circuit with no other change except that when we saved enough money William bought a new horse. It is a terrible treadmill, and we could expect no reward or change in this world, no promotion, no ease of mind except the ease of prayers, which I never enjoyed as much as William did. I had feelings that prayers did not put down the desires that they did not satisfy. There were times when I almost hated prayers, when I had a mortal aversion to Heaven and wished only that God would give me a long earth-rest of the spirit.
We found the same kind of sinners everywhere and the same defects in all the saints. Sometimes I even wished some one would develop a new sort of wickedness, a kind that would vary the dreadful monotony of repentance and cause William to scratch his theological head for a different kind of sermon. But no one ever did; whether we were in the mountains or in the towns, among the rich or the poor, the people transgressed by the same mortal "rule of three" and fell short of the glory of God exactly alike.
At last I came to understand that there is just one kind of sin in the world—the sin against love—and no saints at all. I can't say that I was disappointed, but I was just tired of the awful upward strain of trying to develop faculties and feelings suitable to another world in this one. And to make things worse, William took on a weary look after his superannuation, like that of a man who has made a long journey in vain. This is always the last definition the itinerancy writes upon the faces of its superannuates. They are unhappy, mortified, like honorable men who have failed in a business. They no longer pretend to have better health than they really have, which is the pathetic hypocrisy they all practice toward the last when they are in annual fear of superannuation.
So, I looked at our deficit and knew that something was wrong. Still, I went about the little old house and garden, trying to reconstruct the memory of happiness and planning to spend our last days unharassed by salvation anxieties. I have never doubted the goodness of God, but, things being as they are, and we being what we are, it takes a long time for Him to work it out for us, especially in any kind of a church. Meanwhile, I tried to find some of our old friends, only to discover that most of them were dead. I planted a few annuals, set some hens and prepared to cultivate my own peace. But William was changed. He had lost his courage. Whenever the rheumatism struck him he gave in to it with a groan. Then he took up with Job in the Scriptures, and before we had been back long enough for the flowers to bloom he just turned over on his spiritual ashheap and died.
