"But I do not wish my wife to be a lesson," he said fondly. Yet he could
not urge her to alter her decision. The old home and the old church,
which he had diligently tried to forget, thrust themselves as freshly
and imperiously upon his memory as if he had left them but yesterday. He
had not known how great his sacrifice had been when he had given them up
in his misery. Ann Holland and his boy shared his delight, and before
they sailed for home Sophy herself found that she could take very real
pleasure in their new prospects.
Mrs. Bolton did not live to welcome them back to Upton. The last few
years had been years of vexation and loneliness to her, and there had
been no one to care for her and to help her to bear her troubles. She
had been ailing for some time, and the trying changes of the spring
hastened her death before her favorite nephew could reach England. The
hired nurses who attended her through her last illness heard her often
muttering to herself, as if her enfeebled brain was possessed by one
idea, "If any will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross daily, and follow Me." The words haunted her, and once she said,
in an awed voice and with a look of pain, "He that taketh not up his
cross and followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me." "Not worthy of me!"
she repeated, mournfully, "not worthy of me!"
The rector of Upton and his wife have dwelt among their own people again
for some years. Though the story is still sometimes told of Mrs.
Chantrey's sin, the life she leads among them is a better lesson than
perhaps it could have been had she never fallen. They see in her one who
has not merely been tempted, but who has conquered and escaped from the
tyranny of a vice shamefully common among us. There is hope for the
feeblest and the most degraded when they hear of her, or when they learn
the story from her own lips. For if by the sorrowful confession she can
help any one, she does not shrink from making it, with tears often, but
with a profound thankfulness for the deliverance wrought out for her by
those who made themselves "fellow-workers with God."
Ann Holland found her shop and pleasant kitchen transformed into a
fashionable draper's establishment, with plate glass windows down to the
pavement. But she did not need a home. David and Sophy Chantrey would
not have parted from her if the old house had not been gone. A few of
her old-fashioned goods she managed to gather together again, to furnish
her own room at the rectory, and among them was the screen containing
the newspaper records of events at Upton. One long column gives a
high-flown description of the rector's return to his old parish, and Ann
feels a glow of pleasant pride at seeing her own name there in print.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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