CHRISTMAS.
Long before the Christmas dawn was bright enough to bring the blue
parrots into plain view on the walls of Joyce's room, she had climbed
out of bed to look for her "messages from Noël." The night before,
following the old French custom, she had set her little slippers just
outside the threshold. Now, candle in hand, she softly slipped to the
door and peeped out into the hall. Her first eager glance showed that
they were full.
Climbing back into her warm bed, she put the candle on the table beside
it, and began emptying the slippers. They were filled with bonbons and
all sorts of little trifles, such as she and Jules had admired in the
gay shop windows. On the top of one madame had laid a slender silver
pencil, and monsieur a pretty purse. In the other was a pair of little
wooden shoes, fashioned like the ones that Jules had worn when she
first knew him. They were only half as long as her thumb, and wrapped in
a paper on which was written that Jules himself had whittled them out
for her, with Henri's help and instructions.
"What little darlings!" exclaimed Joyce. "I hope he will think as much
of the scrap-book that I made for him as I do of these. I know that he
will be pleased with the big microscope that Cousin Kate bought
for him."
She spread all the things out on the table, and gave the slippers a
final shake. A red morocco case, no larger than half a dollar, fell out
of the toe of one of them. Inside the case was a tiny buttonhole watch,
with its wee hands pointing to six o'clock. It was the smallest watch
that Joyce had ever seen, Cousin Kate's gift. Joyce could hardly keep
back a little squeal of delight. She wanted to wake up everybody on the
place and show it. Then she wished that she could be back in the brown
house, showing it to her mother and the children. For a moment, as she
thought of them, sharing the pleasure of their Christmas stockings
without her, a great wave of homesickness swept over her, and she lay
back on the pillow with that miserable, far-away feeling that, of all
things, makes one most desolate.
Then she heard the rapid "tick, tick, tick, tick," of the little watch,
and was comforted. She had not realized before that time could go so
fast. Now thirty seconds were gone; then sixty. At this rate it could
not be such a very long time before they would be packing their trunks
to start home; so Joyce concluded not to make herself unhappy by longing
for the family, but to get as much pleasure as possible out of this
strange Christmas abroad.
That little watch seemed to make the morning fly. She looked at it at
least twenty times an hour. She had shown it to every one in the house,
and was wishing that she could take it over to Jules for him to see,
when Monsieur Ciseaux's carriage stopped at the gate. He was on his way
to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and had come to ask Joyce to drive
with him to bring his sister home.
He handed her into the carriage as if she had been a duchess, and then
seemed to forget that she was beside him; for nothing was said all the
way. As the horses spun along the road in the keen morning air, the old
man was busy with his memories, his head dropped forward on his breast.
The child watched him, entering into this little drama as
sympathetically as if she herself were the forlorn old woman, and this
silent, white-haired man at her side were Jack.
Sister Denisa came running out to meet them, her face shining and her
eyes glistening with tears. "It is for joy that I weep," she exclaimed,
"that poor madame should have come to her own again. See the change that
has already been made in her by the blessed news."
Joyce looked down the corridor as monsieur hurried forward to meet the
old lady coming towards them, and to offer his arm. Hope had
straightened the bowed figure; joy had put lustre into her dark eyes and
strength into her weak frame. She walked with such proud stateliness
that the other inmates of the home looked up at her in surprise as she
passed. She was no more like the tearful, broken-spirited woman who had
lived among them so long, than her threadbare dress was like the elegant
mantle which monsieur had brought to fold around her.
Joyce had brought a handful of roses to Sister Denisa, who caught them
up with a cry of pleasure, and held them against her face as if they
carried with them some sweetness of another world.
Madame came up then, and, taking the nun in her arms, tried to thank her
for all that she had done, but could find no words for a gratitude so
deep, and turned away, sobbing.
They said good-by to Sister Denisa,--brave Little Sister of the Poor,
whose only joy was the pleasure of unselfish service; who had no time to
even stand at the gate and be a glad witness of other people's Christmas
happiness, but must hurry back to her morning task of dealing out coffee
and clean handkerchiefs to two hundred old paupers. No, there were only
a hundred and ninety-nine now. Down the streets, across the Loire, into
the old village and out again, along the wide Paris road, one of them
was going home.
The carriage turned and went for a little space between brown fields and
closely clipped hedgerows, and then madame saw the windows of her old
home flashing back the morning sunlight over the high stone wall. Again
the carriage turned, into the lane this time, and now the sunlight was
caught up by the scissors over the gate, and thrown dazzlingly down into
their faces.
Monsieur smiled as he looked at Joyce, a tender, gentle smile that one
would have supposed never could have been seen on those harsh lips. She
was almost standing up in the carriage, in her excitement.
"Oh, it has come true!" she cried, clasping her hands together, "The
gates are really opening at last!"
Yes, the Ogre, whatever may have been its name, no longer lived. Its
spell was broken, for now the giant scissors no longer barred the way.
Slowly the great gate swung open, and the carriage passed through. Joyce
sprang out and ran on ahead to open the door. Hand in hand, just as when
they were little children, Martin and Désiré, this white-haired brother
and sister went back to the old home together; and it was Christmas Day,
in the morning.
* * * * *
At five o'clock that evening the sound of Gabriel's accordeon went
echoing up and down the garden, and thirty little children were
marching to its music along the paths, between the rows of blooming
laurel. Joyce understood, now, why the room where the Christmas tree
stood had been kept so carefully locked. For two days that room had been
empty and the tree had been standing in Monsieur Ciseaux's parlor.
Cousin Kate and madame and Berthé and Marie and Gabriel had all been
over there, busily at work, and neither she nor Jules had suspected what
was going on down-stairs.
Now she marched with the others, out of the garden and across the road,
keeping time to the music of the wheezy old accordion that Gabriel
played so proudly. Surely every soul, in all that long procession filing
through the gate of the giant scissors, belonged to the kingdom of
loving hearts and gentle hands; for they were all children who passed
through, or else mothers who carried in their arms the little ones who,
but for these faithful arms, must have missed this Noël fête.
Jules had been carried down-stairs and laid on a couch in the corner of
the room where he could see the tree to its best advantage. Beside him
sat his great-aunt, Désiré, dressed in a satin gown of silvery gray that
had been her mother's, and looking as if she had just stepped out from
the frame of the portrait up-stairs. She held Jules's hand in hers, as
if with it she grasped the other Jules, the little brother of the olden
days for whom this child had been named. And she told him stories of his
grandfather and his father. Then Jules found that this Aunt Désiré had
known his mother; had once sat on the vine-covered porch while he ran
after fireflies on the lawn in his little white dress; had heard the
song the voice still sang to him in his dreams:
"Till the stars and the angels come to keep
Their watch where my baby lies fast asleep."
When she told him this, with her hand stroking his and folding it tight
with many tender little claspings, he felt that he had found a part of
his old home, too, as well as Aunt Désiré.
One by one the tapers began to glow on the great tree, and when it was
all ablaze the doors were opened for the children to flock in. They
stood about the room, bewildered at first, for not one of them had ever
seen such a sight before; a tree that glittered and sparkled and shone,
that bore stars and rainbows and snow wreaths and gay toys. At first
they only drew deep, wondering breaths, and looked at each other with
shining eyes. It was all so beautiful and so strange.
Joyce flew here and there, helping to distribute the gifts, feeling her
heart grow warmer and warmer as she watched the happy children. "My
little daughter never had anything like that in all her life," said one
grateful mother as Joyce laid a doll in the child's outstretched arms.
"She'll never forget this to her dying day, nor will any of us, dear
mademoiselle! We knew not what it was to have so beautiful a Noël!"
When the last toy had been stripped from the branches, it was Cousin
Kate's turn to be surprised. At a signal from madame, the children began
circling around the tree, singing a song that the sisters at the village
school had taught them for the occasion. It was a happy little song
about the green pine-tree, king of all trees and monarch of the woods,
because of the crown he yearly wears at Noël. At the close every child
came up to madame and Cousin Kate and Joyce, to say "Thank you, madame,"
and "Good night," in the politest way possible.
Gabriel's accordion led them out again, and the music, growing fainter
and fainter, died away in the distance; but in every heart that heard it
had been born a memory whose music could never be lost,--the memory of
one happy Christmas.
Joyce drew a long breath when it was all over, and, with her arm around
Madame Désiré's shoulder, smiled down at Jules.
"How beautifully it has all ended!" she exclaimed. "I am sorry that we
have come to the place to say 'and they all lived happily ever after,'
for that means that it is time to shut the book."
"Dear heart," murmured Madame Désiré, drawing the child closer to her,
"it means that a far sweeter story is just beginning, and it is you who
have opened the book for me."
Joyce flushed with pleasure, saying, "I thought this Christmas would be
so lonely; but it has been the happiest of my life."
[Illustration: "HE TOOK THE LITTLE FELLOW'S HAND IN HIS."]
"And mine, too," said Monsieur Ciseaux from the other side of Jules's
couch. He took the little fellow's hand in his. "They told me about the
tree that you prepared for me. I have been up to look at it, and now I
have come to thank you." To the surprise of every one in the room,
monsieur bent over and kissed the flushed little face on the pillow.
Jules reached up, and, putting his arms around his uncle's neck, laid
his cheek a moment against the face of his stern old kinsman. Not a
word was said, but in that silent caress every barrier of coldness and
reserve was forever broken down between them. So the little Prince came
into his kingdom,--the kingdom of love and real home happiness.
* * * * *
It is summer now, and far away in the little brown house across the seas
Joyce thinks of her happy winter in France and the friends that she
found through the gate of the giant scissors. And still those scissors
hang over the gate, and may be seen to this day, by any one who takes
the trouble to walk up the hill from the little village that lies just
across the river Loire, from the old town of Tours.
THE END.