I was fourteen that Christmas:--all Veryan parish knows the date of
the famous "Black Winter," when the _Johann_ brig came ashore on
Kibberick beach, with a dozen foreigners frozen stiff and staring on
her fore-top, and Lawyer Job, up at Ruan, lost all his lambs but two.
There was neither rhyme nor wit in the season; and up to St. Thomas's
eve, when it first started to freeze, the folk were thinking that
summer meant to run straight into spring. I mind the ash being in
leaf on Advent Sunday, and a crowd of martins skimming round the
church windows during sermon-time. Each morning brought blue sky,
warm mists, and a dew that hung on the brambles till ten o'clock.
The frogs were spawning in the pools; primroses were out by scores,
and monthly roses blooming still; and Master shot a goat-sucker on
the last day in November. All this puzzled the sheep, I suppose, and
gave them a notion that their time, too, was at hand. At any rate
the lambs fell early; and when they fell, it had turned to perishing
cold.
That Christmas-eve, while the singers were up at the house and the
fiddles going like mad, it was a dismal time for two of us. Laban
Pascoe, the hind, spent his night in the upper field where the sheep
lay, while I spent mine in the chall[1] looking after Dinah, our
Alderney, that had slipped her calf in the afternoon--being promised
the castling's skin for a Sunday waistcoat, if I took care of the
mother. Bating the cold air that came under the door, I kept pretty
cosy, what with the straw-bands round my legs and the warm breath of
the cows: for we kept five. There was no wind outside, but moonlight
and a still, frozen sky, like a sounding board: so that every note of
the music reached me, with the bleat of Laban's sheep far up the
hill, and the waves' wash on the beaches below. Inside the chall the
only sounds were the slow chewing of the cows, the rattle of a
tethering-block, now and then, or a moan from Dinah. Twice the
uproar from the house coaxed me to the door to have a look at Laban's
scarlet lantern moving above, and make sure that he was worse off
than I. But mostly I lay still on my straw in the one empty stall
staring into the foggy face of my own lantern, thinking of the
waistcoat, and listening.
I was dozing, belike, when a light tap on the door made me start up,
rubbing my eyes.
"Merry Christmas, Dick!"
A little head, bright with tumbled curls, was thrust in, and a pair
of round eyes stared round the chall, then back to me, and rested on
my face.
"Merry Christmas, little mistress."
"Dick--if you tell, I'll never speak to you again. I only wanted to
see if 'twas true."
She stepped inside the chall, shutting the door behind her.
Under one arm she hugged a big boy-doll, dressed like a sailor--from
the Christmas-tree, I guessed--and a bright tinsel star was pinned on
the shoulder of her bodice. She had come across the cold town-place
in her muslin frock, with no covering for her shoulders; and the
manner in which that frock was hitched upon her made me stare.
"I got out of bed again and dressed myself," she explained. "Nurse
is in the kitchen, dancing with the young man from Penare, who can't
afford to marry her for _ever_ so long, father says. I saw them
twirling, as I slipped out--"
"You have done a wrong thing," said I: "you might catch your death."
Her lip fell:--she was but five. "Dick, I only wanted to see if
'twas true."
"What?" I asked, covering her shoulders with the empty sack that had
been my pillow.
"Why, that the cows pray on Christmas-eve. Nurse says that at twelve
o'clock to-night all the cows in their stalls will be on their knees,
if only somebody is there to see. So, as it's near twelve by the
tall clock indoors, I've come to see," she wound up.
"It's quig-nogs, I expect. I never heard of it."
"Nurse says they kneel and make a cruel moan, like any Christian
folk. It's because Christ was born in a stable, and so the cows know
all about it. Listen to Dinah! Dick, she's going to begin!"
But Dinah, having heaved her moan, merely shuddered and was still
again.
"Just fancy, Dick," the little one went on, "it happened in a chall
like ours!" She was quiet for a moment, her eyes fixed on the glossy
rumps of the cows. Then, turning quickly--"I know about it, and I'll
show you. Dick, you must be Saint Joseph, and I'll be the Virgin
Mary. Wait a bit--"
Her quick fingers began to undress the sailor-doll and fold his
clothes carefully. "I _meant_ to christen him Robinson Crusoe," she
explained, as she laid the small garments, one by one, on the straw;
"but he can't be Robinson Crusoe till I've dressed him up again."
The doll was stark naked now, with waxen face and shoulders, and
bulging bags of sawdust for body and legs.
"Dick," she said, folding the doll in her arms and kissing it--
"St. Joseph, I mean--the first thing we've got to do is to let people
know he's born. Sing that carol I heard you trying over last week--
the one that says 'Far and far I carry it.'"