David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician, and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime, they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly abusing his sister for having married a pauper.
It was a quaint old town, a place of red roofs and winding streets and strange old buildings; a very paradise to the dreamer and the woman who had waited so long for him. Her brother's house stood at the far end of the town, in the newer part of it; but they saw little of him, and had, indeed, no particular desire to do so. They had their own quiet dwelling-place, a little house nestling under the frowning shadows of the church wherein he worked; a strange old place, with low ceilings and black beams, with a garden of roses stretching right along under the gray old church wall. Her life, for a few months at least, was a sweet and shadowed thing; people said afterward--people who had never known her--that they had seen her sitting often in the old church, with her mild eyes looking upward at a great rose window over the porch, while her husband practised for the services on the wheezy old organ; had seen her wandering in her garden among the roses, singing to herself in a subdued voice--the voice of one who has long been forced to be silent, or to subdue any natural mirth that might be in her.
The summer went by, while David Willis played on his organ, and his wife sang among her roses; and with the autumn came a new light in the eyes of the woman--a light as of one who waits and hopes for something. Poor, trembling, wistful creature, what dreams were hers then! What dreams when she sat by her husband's side in the twilight, looking out over the town where the lights were beginning to twinkle one by one like sleepy eyes! What dreams of a little life that was to recompense her for all she had missed, and all she never could find in any other way! Childish hands were to draw all that mine of tenderness out of her, as no other hands could have done; childish words were to wake echoing words in her dull heart, and stir it to life again. She dreamed tremblingly of all she would do; of all she would teach the child; saw it walking by her side among the roses; fluttered into church proudly, braving the eyes of younger women with the mite beside her.