Through her his soul took on new light, and from a vigorous young woodsman, he was slowly but surely passing into an intellectual existence. He had been strangely favored by the mainsprings of destiny, and why should he not give the world all that was best in him. Life, ruthless though it seems, has always compensations, and if we live rightly and truly, the debt will be owing us, whereas most of us through mistakes and misdeeds, have a great volume of retribution coming in an inevitable sequence.
XXIV
A Misunderstanding
It was the night before Christmas in the little mountain church near Wolfe’s Store. The small, low-roofed, raftered chapel was illumined as brightly as coal oil lamps in the early stage of their development could do it; a hemlock tree, decked out with candles and tinsel stood to one side of the altar, an almost red-hot ten-plate stove on the other, while the chancel and rafters were twined and garlanded with ground pine and ilex, or winter berries. In one of the rear pews sat a very good looking young couple, a former school teacher revisiting the valley, and his favorite pupil. Lambert Girtin and Elsie Vanneman were their names.
The young man, who was a veteran of the Civil War, possessed the right to wear the Congressional medal, and while teaching at the little red school house on the pike near the road leading to Gramley’s Gap, had noticed and admired the fair Elsie, so different from the rest of his flock. She was the daughter of a prosperous lumberman, a jobber in hardwoods, and her mother was above the average in intelligence and breeding, yet Elsie in all ways transcended even her parents.
She had seemed like a mere child when he left her at the close of the term the previous Christmas, but he could not evict her image from his soul. It was mainly to see her, though he would have admitted this to no one, that induced him to revisit the remote valley during the following holiday season. The long drive in the stage through drifted roads had seemed nothing to him, he was so elated at the thought of reviving old memories at the sight of this most beloved of pupils.
In order not to arouse any one’s suspicions, he did no more than to inquire how she was at the general store and boarding house where he stopped.
“You would never know her,” exclaimed old Mother Wolfe, the landlady. “Why, she’s a regular young lady, grown a head taller,” making a gesture with her hand to denote her increased stature.
On Christmas Eve there was to be the usual entertainment at the Union Church, and Lambert Girtin posted himself outside the entrance to wait for the object of his dreams. The snow was drifted deep, and it was bitterly cold, yet social events were so rare in the mountains that almost every one braved the icy blasts to be present. It was not long before he was rewarded by a sight of Elsie Vanneman. It was remarkable how tall she’d grown! As he expressed it to himself, “An opening bud became a rose full-blown” in one short year!
She of course recognized him, and greeted him warmly, and they entered the church together. Inside by the lamplight he had a better chance to study her appearance more in detail than by the cold starlight on the church steps. She had grown until she was above the middle height, yet had literally taken her figure and her grace with her. She was slender, yet shapely, dainty and graceful in the extreme. Her violet eyes were even more deeply pensive than of yore, her cheeks were pink and white, her lips red and slightly full. Her hair was a golden or coppery brown, and shone like those precious metals in the reflected light of the lamps and the stove; the slight upward turn of her nose still remained.
How demure, earnest and sincere she was! In the intervening year he had never seen her like in Bellefonte, Altoona or Pittsburg. She seemed to be happy to be with him again, minus the restraint existing between a pupil and teacher. Instinctively their fingers touched, and they held hands during most of the evening.