With December the deep snows came, and there were times when Andrea could not make her daily pilgrimage to the Hill Farm. She regarded her plan of life as settled, and was grateful that she met with no opposition. She had spoken to the Grigses, and was only waiting for Christmas, her marriage day, to go home! Home! She made the most of the magic word, not realizing its emptiness.
She was in an overwrought, exalted state. Feeling that Waldsen was very near, she knew no loneliness. When she was not working, she sat in his room and looked up the hill. Once or twice she took down his violin, and drew the bow across its strings, half expecting it would yield its old music.
To sympathizing neighbours she told her plans freely, and they, marvelling at her courage, wondered among themselves if her head was quite right.
The weeks went on, and Margaret dreaded every mail, lest it should bring the foreign letter. Christmas was drawing near when, on the day before it, the letter came. It was from Mrs. Waldsen’s lawyer, brief and couched in technical language, giving directions for the disposal of the farm and declining peremptorily to make any allowance to “the woman who had brought about the estrangement between mother and son, and had so boldly followed the latter to America, though it was evident, as he had made no provision for her, that he had no intention of marrying her.”
The Deacon handed the paper to Margaret, and then sat looking dumbly at her. The snow blew against the window in great felty masses; it lay so deeply over wood and field that no one had been able to gather Christmas greens; even the laurels on the hillside were weighed down and hidden. “I cannot tell her,” said Margaret; “wait until after to-morrow; she will not try to go to the Hill House as she planned, for the road is drifted over.”
There was to be a Christmas tree down at the church at seven o’clock on Christmas Eve, and Margaret had promised to lead the carols with the children, as a matter of course. She looked out at half-past six and shivered at the storm, but a deacon’s daughter must not quail in the face of duty,—in a small town she always shares responsibility with the minister’s wife, and just now the minister’s wife was ill. Soon Andrea came downstairs dressed in the plain black gown that she had worn when Margaret first saw her, and said that she also wished to go to church; and the two women, preceded by the Deacon, and a blinking lantern, felt, rather than saw, their way out to the sleigh.
Once at the church, Andrea hid herself in the corner of an old-fashioned high pew, silently looking at the lights and the children’s happy faces. When the singing began, tears ran down her cheeks, and she made no effort to restrain them, or even wipe them away.
The Deacon hurried the girls home as soon as possible, after the exercises were over, for though the storm had ceased, the thermometer had fallen, and the cold was intense.
Margaret begged Andrea to share her room that night, for the house seemed inexpressibly dreary, but she refused gently, and, after kissing Margaret, went up to Waldsen’s attic room. There she moved about awhile, and finally Margaret heard her go to her own room, and in a few moments everything was still.