bedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes were
piled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrine
of feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, she
made her last communion with him:
_“You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;
whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast--all of whose
eyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed;
husband of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who took
her home; strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is best
in me; my defender against things in myself that I cannot govern;
pathfinder of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turn
white as driven snow and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never cease
to be the flame that you yourself have kindled.
“But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there
must be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard
our whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--the
Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung
to!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!”_
She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would
not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his
pillow the last drop of things that must go.
She there--her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life’s
Calvary of the Snows.
The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, and
there it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near when
she must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over before
the children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked.
She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the
gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly
away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one of
nature’s noblest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the
women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of
their baptism into a new life.
She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders rising
out of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, but
exempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once and
made a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide them
under the sleeves.
Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and
quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.
Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look
of the rejected.
So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed,
resting on one elbow and looking down at him.
For years her first words to him on this day had been the world’s best
greeting:
“A Merry Christmas!”
She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready.
At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and
instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out
of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future
would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so gone
out of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She
struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly
about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his
face. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it across
her eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her.
The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears.
Tears not for Life’s faults but for Life when there are no
faults. They locked in each other’s arms--trying to save each other on
Nature’s vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
The rush of children’s feet was heard in the hall and there was
smothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
It was Christmas Morning.
* * * * *
The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over
the gladness of the Shield. The farmhouse--such as the poet had sung
of when he could not help singing of American home life--looked out
from under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller
who laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders. Smoke poured out of
its chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak
tree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing. Soon after
sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of the
snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; and
sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a little
while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence to
understand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summer
away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun so
true could shine on a world so false.
Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling
paths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with
fireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat,
rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternly
booted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going
at it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancing
a dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to some
one to come and look--beckoned in vain.
All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little
girl played with the doll--hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient
sacrifice, the emblem of the world’s new mercy. Along the turnpike
sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the
shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the
shining valleys.
Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its
surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low,
thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for
decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid
off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity,
and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never to
be told by Sorrow’s fingers.
The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward
across the sadness of the Shield. One by one the stars came back to
their faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging
lamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round
mats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a
low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and
between those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and
children assembling for the party.
Late into the night the party lasted.
The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to
ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the
robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our
life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and
drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go
faster than the music.
The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the
Christmas Tree--the handing over to this person and to that person of
those unread lessons of the ages--little mummied packages of the lord
of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those
burnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white
now.
Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!
Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:
hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing
and talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the
doctor’s wife--faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the
American wife and mother in the home of the poet’s dream: the
spiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life’s snow
as it never lifts itself from the face of the _Jungfrau_ amid the
sad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!--herself the
_Jungfrau_ among the world’s women!
The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes
place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State
which is also a song of the Nation--its melody of the unfallen home:
with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at
the piano--the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of:
those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the
embodied--the Guests of the Imagination.
The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers
arm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present
scene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the
Wraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught
of those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill
their places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes
that bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these were
Life’s Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils and
look out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and
relapse into their compassionate vigil.
But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled
the entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the
rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned
her to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back
peeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition
ran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms around
her. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked past
her one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
This was the Shape:
In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under the
chandelier--which had no decoration whatsoever--stood an exquisite
Spirit of Youth, more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet most
alive; her lips scarce parted--her skin like white hawthorn shadowed
by pink--in her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love--in her heart
the surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she move
nor did her look once change: she waiting there--waiting for some one
to come--waiting.
Waiting.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen