Chapter Eleven

by Mrs. Elizabeth Prentiss
Edited by Amber Moeller

I'm awful sorry, but I've broke a plate," proclaimed Mary one morning, when Horace was giving into Maggie's hands the usual scanty supply of household expenses.

"I am sorry," said Maggie. "For Biddy broke two, and chipped the edges of several more."

"I just let 'em slip out of my hands: the suds made 'em slippery, and down they went," pursued Mary, and it turned out the one broken plate meant three, so chipped and scolloped as to be unfit for use.

"And I'm sure I don't know how it happened, but here's all the cuffs and collars mildewed; it's just the weather; and my own is among 'em."

"Mary, do try to be careful," said Maggie. "Mr. Wheeler only gives me just enough for the table, and nothing for wear and tear; how should he, when everything in the house is new?"

"He's a nice gentleman," said Mary, "and won't mind giving you a little more. Though I'm awful sorry I've been so unlucky."

Maggie looked troubled. Horace was finding it hard to keep up even their simple little establishment: he had owned that, when she had laughingly told him he kept her too short of money; and now there were plates to buy and new collars and cuffs to be got. And such perplexities were constantly occurring.

Mary was faithful and economical, and devotedly attached to her young mistress, but she would make sour bread every now and then, and had a regular habit of breaking the china and scorching the table linen. Everybody knows what fearful prices had to be paid for the real necessaries of life at this time, and how hard many who had been almost rich found it to live. Without saying much to each other about it, both Horace and Maggie were getting careworn. He was afraid he would not make enough to meet inevitable expenses, and she was afraid she was extravagant or hadn't a faculty of getting along with a little. Yet she was really doing wonders, if she had only known it.

On the evening of this particular day Horace came home a good deal out of sorts. He had had a most unpleasant business encounter for one thing, and a couple of hundred dollars lent to a friend, and now due, was not forthcoming. He must have it when quarter-day came round, and it was coming as fast as it could, and his friend declared, with tears, that he would pay it by that time, but the case seemed anything but hopeful. He did not mean to trouble Maggie about it, and told her so when she at last got it out of him.

"Dear me, what is a wife good for if she mayn't cheer a man when he is downcast?" cried she. "You have said more than once that you did not decide to get married till you had asked God to direct you about it, and don't you suppose He did? You are not sorry you are married, are you, dear Horace?"

"Sorry!" he repeated, and snatched her from the low seat she had taken at his knee. "Why, it wasn't living before I had you!"

"But having me you have increased your cares. Hadn't we better break up housekeeping and let me go home till these high prices come down?" she asked demurely, and well knowing what he would say, or rather, what he would do.

"It is for you I care," he said, after a time. "I hate to keep you ground down so and to give you no luxuries."

"I call it a luxury to have a husband," she said, laughing. "I'm sure that isn't one of the necessaries of life-or wasn't a little while ago. Dear Horace, I did not expect anything I have not gained. I am more than happy, more than contented, and I do not believe we are going to want for any good thing. My father always said he hoped his children would begin at the little end of life."

"You've cheered me up wonderfully," he declared. "I came home feeling such a weight on my mind!"

"If worst comes to worst, I can let Mary go and get a little girl to run errands, and have a woman to wash, and do the rest myself. So don't worry till I come to the end of my resources. Why, if you can't afford to keep this house, we'll move out of town where we can have a cheaper rent. We are not tied to New York."

"I don't know about that," he said. "I'm lamer than usual today and need to be nearer my office, instead of going farther from it."

And then Maggie was all tenderness and was down on her knees in a minute before the suffering limb; oh, how literally on her knees, for much as she loved her husband for himself, here was a tie between them only less sacred than death.

"I want to have Aunt Jane to dinner tomorrow," said Maggie, when Horace felt easier in body and mind. "You know we haven't had her all this time, except to lunch, and then she didn't see you."

"Yes, I know. But could she put up with our plain ways, after her own luxurious table?"

"She never had a "luxurious table," except for visitors. And nothing could be plainer than the style at our little Stafford parsonage, and she spent several summers there."

"I should so like, though, to spread an ample table and exercise a large-hearted hospitality," said Horace.

"So should I," returned Maggie, "but I'm not going to make myself wretched because I can't. I know Aunt Jane will love to come, and I am ashamed that I have let a silly pride prevent my asking her. Or rather, pride and selfishness, for it has been so pleasant to have you all to myself that I have not wanted anyone else."

So Aunt Jane came, in one of her best and sweetest moods, and they had a simple little dinner, ever so much pleasant chat, and some loving, motherly words from her at parting, that did them both good.

It cost Horace something to take down the family Bible and say, "We have made up out minds, Maggie and I, to have prayers directly after dinner, Aunt Jane, and she says visitors must make no difference."

But when he had said it there stole over him such sweet peace as he had never known in all his life before: both Aunt Jane and Maggie caught its tone in the prayer he offered, and wondered whence it came.

At the close of the evening, as the young husband and wife stood alone together before the parlor fire, Horace made confession to Maggie on this wise:

"Do you know, dear, I wanted to put off having prayers till after Aunt Jane had gone? Was I ashamed of Jesus, or what was it?"

Maggie looked up in great surprise.

"Why, when you were in the army were you ashamed to show your colors?" she asked.

"No, I was proud of them; proud to flaunt them in the very face of the enemy."

"And Aunt Jane is not an enemy," said Maggie.

"I have always had this shyness," said Horace.

"It is strange," said Maggie, thoughtfully. "For in ordinary worldly matters you are not shy."

"But don't you think it is natural to conceal our deepest, most sacred thoughts and feelings?"

"Thoughts and feelings are one thing," said Maggie, "and acts are another. It seems to me it would sound very oddly for a soldier to say that his patriotism lay so deeply in his heart that he must hide his colors. Dear Horace, let us show ours."

"But, Maggie, darling, in those days when I secretly loved you I could not have spoken of it to a living soul. I hid my love with the most jealous care."

"Yes, while it had so little vitality that you could hide it. But how much of a secret did you make of it when you stood at my side and proclaimed that you would love, honor, and cherish me till death should we part, in such a decided "I will!" that everybody in the church heard it?"

Horace smiled. "Yes, that I would do it again!" he cried, "if I could get a chance."

"And if our love to Christ has in it real life and force, won't it speak out just so? Can it hold its peace?"

"I never knew till now what a coward I had been," said Horace. "I positively thought that I shrank from betraying my love to Christ-for I do love Him, Maggie!-because it was so sacred a principle. I think now that its poverty and its infancy kept it silent."

"I think I understand you," said Maggie, after a little silence. "You have been mixed up with people who shuffled religion out of the way, as something to come in play on one's death-bed, but as unfit to mix up gracefully with daily life. How little I thought when I saw you at Miss Fitzsimmons' wedding that you would ever be anything to me! How I fought against myself that day for admiring you!"

And then, of course, Horace said some of the foolish, yet passing sweet things he was wont to say to his little wife, and she found it hard to get away from him to that retreat upstairs that was the tower of all her strength. Left alone, Horace thanked God for giving him this wise, fearless, loving wife, never so dear to him as now when she had tacitly rebuked his cowardice and revealed him to himself. And as Maggie herself, in a few sweet child-like words, she asked that she and her husband might walk hand in hand heavenward, keeping step, and told her Savior about the perplexities in which he was involved, exactly as she would have told the story to a dear earthly friend. She went to sleep serenely, and without a care: wondering why she had suffered herself to grow anxious and troubled, when she could cast herself on One who had control of al the silver and gold on earth.

But that next day brought new difficulties, and as if in mockery of the pressure on their domestic life, came a long letter from Annie, who was wandering over Europe without a care, indulging herself in all sorts of luxuries, and having, as she declared, the nicest time in the world.

"Think now, if you could have some of these nice times!" cried Horace.

"With Tom White?" asked Maggie, in a tone that said all the most insatiable heart could ask.

And yet, after a little, Horace fell into a reverie, now only too frequent. The incessant petty economies he was forced to practice wearied him; by nature he was disposed to amply expenditure both for himself and others, and hated everything small and prosaic.

"Do put away that work!" he said at last, a little impatiently, "and come and talk to me, Maggie. Surely you can do your needle work during the day."

"Yes, I can," she said cheerfully, laying aside her work. "I was only doing a little for our sewing circle. We call ourselves poor, and make a great time about it, but just fancy living up four hundred dollars a year, as the Western Missionary does for whom we are now working."

"You might as well say fancy our living in an Irish shanty, or in one room in a tenement-house."

"Well," said Maggie, "I could be happy in any Irish shanty, or in one room in a tenement-house, provided I could keep it clean. Dear Horace, you can put on as long a face as you please, but I am going to be contented and in good spirits as long as I stay in the world where I can experience what I have done today."

"And what was that?" cried Horace, rousing himself.

"If you won't think it just my silliness, I'll tell you. After you went down town this morning, and I had started for the day (ah, what taking counsel of God was involved in Maggie's doing that!), I tried to think what I could do in the way of comforting somebody besides myself, and what I should do it with. You are so fond of soup made of old bones that I hadn't a scrap of meat to spare, and—"

"Now Maggie, that is adding insult to injury," said Horace. "It is bad enough to give a man nothing but soup for his supper, without insinuating that he is charmed with that arrangement."

"It doesn't hurt one to fast occasionally," retorted Maggie, who was proud, with reason, of her soups. "Besides, you had a nice bit of beefsteak after it."

"A bit indeed!"

"I am glad I am not such a carnivorous animal as you are" she returned. "Why, you ought to see all the fresh meat eaten in my father's house in the course of the year."

"But it would be far better for him if he left off his pies, his doughnuts, his tea, and his coffee, and had a good, generous slice of beef or mutton in their place. You are behind the age, my dear, or you would know where his headaches come from."

"Am I? Well, go back to the point. I had heard, through Mary, that there was a family nearly opposite, where a sick child was dragging out a weary little life, sometimes lying alone all day while her mother was at work, or gossiping with the neighbors, and I thought I'd just run over and see it."

"Well?" asked Horace, as she paused.

"I don't believe I can tell it," she said, trying not to cry. "Oh, Horace! We call ourselves poor and we chafe under our little cares and economies, and if we dared, we should say we wondered why the Lord kept from us the luxuries he gives so many others!"

"You'll get hardened to the horrors of city life," said Horace, laying his hand tenderly on her head.

"That I never shall!" she cried. "To think that that poor child, only a stone's-throw from our dear little home, was lying there all alone, with nothing on, literally, nothing but a small shawl; no fire, no bedstead, no food, no compassionate, loving words, nothing for companionship, but its sufferings, its dreariness, its hopelessness! And I had gone there empty handed!"

"And what did you do, my darling?" asked Horace, gently touched by Maggie's emotion.

"There was only one thing I could do. I hadn't brought her anything, and I hadn't a word to say, and I just took the poor little creature in my arms and kissed her, till my tears wet her thin, white cheeks. And the two arms flung themselves round my neck, and the child clung to me as a drowning man clings to the straw, and with such a wail of grief and joy and loneliness and gladness."

"And then?"

"And then I knelt down with the little figure still in my arms, and thanked the Lord that if he hadn't given me money, or eloquent lips, He had given me a heart warm enough and big enough to take in and love and cherish hundreds of such children, yes, and hundreds upon hundreds."

"Come, my Maggie, stop crying," said Horace, "and I'll live on soup all the days of my life."

"All the soup in the world wouldn't have put the life into that child's breast that love and sympathy did," she answered. "Only to think!" it kept saying, "a lady has kissed me!"

"I don't wonder at her delight," said Horace. "I can remember a time when if you had come and caught me in your arms and kissed me—"

"Hush, you foolish boy! Well, you won't look disgusted if I pinch you a little at your breakfast tomorrow, will you? For I came home and stole a part of it, and made a little broth for the starved creature, and Horace, we're not poor! We're rich, just as long as we've got two loving hearts beating in our bosoms, and can defy any living creature to ask more from them than they can give."

"Yes, we are rich," said Horace." Or, at least I am, in the dearest and best little wife that ever crossed a human threshold."

To be continued ...

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