The Romance of a Christmas Card | Page 2

I remember his
friendship for my Dick; but that was before your time.--Oh! these boys,
these boys!" The minister's voice quavered. "We give them our very
life-blood. We love them, cherish them, pray over them, do our best to
guide them, yet they take the path that leads from home. In some way,
God knows how, we fail to call out the return love, or even the filial
duty and respect!--Well, we won't talk about it, Reba; my business is to
breathe the breath of life into my text: 'Here am I, Lord, send me!' Letty
certainly continues to say it heroically, whatever her troubles."
"Yes, Letty is so ready for service that she will always be sent, till the
end of time; but if David ever has an interview with his Creator I can
hear him say: 'Here am I, Lord; send Letty!'"
The minister laughed again. He laughed freely and easily nowadays.
His first wife had been a sort of understudy for a saint, and after a brief
but depressing connubial experience she had died, leaving him with a
boy of six; a boy who already, at that tender age, seemed to cherish a
passionate aversion to virtue in any form--the result, perhaps, of daily
doses of the catechism administered by an abnormally pious mother.
The minister had struggled valiantly with his paternal and parochial

cares for twelve lonely years when he met, wooed, and won (very much
to his astonishment and exaltation) Reba Crosby. There never was a
better bargain driven! She was forty-five by the family Bible but
twenty-five in face, heart, and mind, while he would have been printed
as sixty in "Who's Who in New Hampshire" although he was far older
in patience and experience and wisdom. The minister was spiritual,
frail, and a trifle prone to self-depreciation; the minister's new wife was
spirited, vigorous, courageous, and clever. She was also Western-born,
college-bred, good as gold, and invincibly, incurably gay. The minister
grew younger every year, for Reba doubled his joys and halved his
burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other as if
they were feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of Beulah like a
salt sea breeze. She infused a new spirit into the bleak church
"sociables" and made them positively agreeable functions. The choir
ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and
flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced
up the missionary societies, she captivated the parish, she cheered the
depressed and depressing old ladies and cracked jokes with the
invalids.
"Ain't she a little mite too jolly for a minister's wife?" questioned Mrs.
Ossian Popham, who was a professional pessimist.
"If this world is a place of want, woe, wantonness, an' wickedness,
same as you claim, Maria, I don't see how a minister's wife can be too
jolly!" was her husband's cheerful reply. "Look how she's melted up the
ice in both congregations, so't the other church is most willin' we
should prosper, so long as Mis' Larrabee stays here an' we don't get too
fur ahead of 'em in attendance. Me for the smiles, Maria!"
And Osh Popham was right; for Reba Larrabee convinced the members
of the rival church (the rivalry between the two being in rigidity of
creed, not in persistency in good works) that there was room in heaven
for at least two denominations; and said that if they couldn't unite in
this world, perhaps they'd get round to it in the next. Finally, she saved
Letitia Boynton's soul alive by giving her a warm, understanding
friendship, and she even contracted to win back the minister's absent

son some time or other, and convince him of the error of his ways.
"Let Dick alone a little longer, Luther," she would say; "don't hurry him,
for he won't come home so long as he's a failure; it would please the
village too much, and Dick hates the village. He doesn't accept our
point of view, that we must love our enemies and bless them that
despitefully use us. The village did despitefully use Dick, and for that
matter, David Gilman too. They were criticized, gossiped about, judged
without mercy. Nobody believed in them, nobody ever praised
them;--and what is that about praise being the fructifying sun in which
our virtues ripen, or something like that? I'm not quoting it right, but I
wish I'd said it. They were called wild when most of their wildness was
exuberant vitality; their mistakes were magnified, their mad pranks
exaggerated. If I'd been married to you, my dear, while Dick was
growing up, I wouldn't have let you keep him here in this little
backwater of life; he needed more room, more movement. They
wouldn't have been so down on