Everybody in that part of the city knew Old Claus; that is, they knew
him by sight; very few had ever spoken to him or heard his voice. The
grocer and the provision man, and one or two others said he was civil
enough to them, that his name was Jonathan R. Claus, spelt with a _u_,
not a _w_, and that he paid his bills promptly. That was about all
anybody knew of him.
What a surly, grim old man he was, as you met him on a cold winter’s
afternoon on his way home from his marketing; his long white hair and
beard blowing about his head, his forehead puckered into a frown, his
stout cane striking the pavements as if he hated the very earth he
walked on!
Grown people gave him the width of the sidewalk; children shouted
after him,
“Old Claus,
Show your claws!”
and then dodged around the corner in terror, although he had never
been known to punish or even chide one of them, save by a dark look
from beneath his shaggy eyebrows. Ah, a gloomy, silent, mysterious
fellow he was, to be sure; and many a mother in that neighborhood
frightened her child into good behavior by threatening to call in Old
Claus.
One cold December evening, when the twilight had fallen early,
hastened by leaden skies and a few shivering flakes of snow, he sat in
his own room, solitary as usual, and even more than usually grim, for
he was thinking over his past.
Now, thinking over one’s past may be a very cheerful occupation or a
very gloomy one. Old Claus undoubtedly found his full of shadows.
He remembered how he was left an orphan, when still a small boy; how
he had suffered from cold and want, and had been buffeted and scolded
and ill-used, until he ran away from the people who had taken charge
of him (he had no home nor friends); how he had worked hard, had saved
his money, and had become a very rich man.
Still he had longed to be richer, and, retiring from regular business,
he had gone far away to search for a sunken treasure in tropical seas.
He had failed to find it, but more eager than ever, he mined for gold,
without success. Again, it was the buried hoard of a pirate which
attracted him; but months of fruitless labor had been thrown away in a
vain attempt to discover exactly where it lay. So he had spent his
years, always in search of a Treasure, which had become the ruling
idea of his life; always disappointed; until, embittered, discouraged
and alone in the world, though still rich, he had given up the
pursuit.
The home he had chosen was as strange as the life he had lived; a
huge, old-fashioned house, which had once been occupied by a wealthy
family, but had long lain empty, save for the rats that scampered
through its wide halls and gloomy chambers, and the spiders that spun
their webs unhindered across the blurred window-panes.
The city had grown up about the house, and it was now part of a brick
block. Indeed, one wing of the ancient building formed a portion of
the tenement house next door, where it seemed as if men wrangled and
staggered, and ragged women scolded and wept, and children cried from
hunger and cold, all night long. But the walls were very thick, and
the occupant of the lonely chamber heard them not.
“Christmas Eve,” muttered Old Claus to himself. “I heard them say it
in the streets. Merry Christmas! merry, merry Christmas!” he repeated
bitterly. “Right merry for me. What a wretched, useless failure of a
wreck I am!”
As he spoke he stamped his foot angrily upon the floor. There was a
crash in the room behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he found that
a large picture, an old portrait, the frame of which had been built
into the wall and alone remained of the former splendor of the
mansion, lay face downward upon the floor. Jarred by his heavy
footfall, the decaying woodwork had at last given way, and let the
canvas drop.
Claus’ glance wandered to the wall where it had been fastened. Then he
started to his feet, the old fire returning to his eyes. In place of
the picture was an opening, with a deep space beyond. He raised
himself on tiptoe, and saw what appeared to be the top of a flight of
steps, built into the thickness of the wall, and leading downward.
“Treasure at last!” he stammered, gazing greedily at the dusty steps,
down which a huge rat scrambled, squeaking. “Treasure at last! I knew
luck would turn! After all these years! It is mine, it is mine!”
Hastening to the mantel, he took down a small lamp, lighted it with
trembling fingers, and dragging a chair to the wall beneath the
aperture, climbed up to and into it. Yes, it was plainly a stone
flight of steps. What bags of gold must lie at the bottom of that
long-hidden passage?
He tested the stairway cautiously with his foot, and, finding it
apparently secure, slowly descended, the space being barely wide
enough for him to squeeze through.
Eight, nine, ten steps down. Then a sharp turn to the right! two more
steps, and he emerged from the narrow passage into what once must have
been a huge fireplace, having a hidden door in one side, some freak of
the ancient builders, to allow a person to pass from one portion of
the old house to the other without detection.
As Claus glanced about him his heart sank. There was no sign of a
treasure. The chimney overhead had been stopped with stone slabs, and
the original opening of the fireplace was closed by a wooden
partition, one panel of which was hinged and bolted so as to form a
small door. Doubtless the people in the next house were ignorant of
this, and, probably, of the existence of the fireplace itself.
It was very cold, and the disappointed man shivered as he prepared to
retrace his steps to his own quarters. Suddenly he heard a noise in
the room beyond the fireboard. It was the sound of a child sobbing
quietly to itself. In another moment a heavy, drunken step sounded on
the bare floor.
“Are ye goin’ to stop cryin’, Moll, or will I give ye the stick agin?”
demanded a woman’s harsh voice. “What’s the matter now?”
“I won’t--any--more,” he could hear the child answer. “I don’t--mean
to. Only I was thinkin’ it was Christmas to-morrow, and I
wouldn’t--get anything,--mother used to”--
“Stop that!” warningly.
It was evidently hard work to control the sobs, now. Old Claus
clenched his fist, and resolved that if he heard the sound of a blow,
that fireboard would go down.
There was silence for a minute. Then the woman staggered off,
muttering: “Don’t let me hear any more from ye the night. Go to sleep,
d’ ye hear? You must be off with yer basket agin in the mornin’.”
Five minutes later a singular sight might have been seen in front of
the big house. It was nothing less than Old Claus himself, clad in his
shaggy fur coat, setting forth through the darkness and snow, which
was now falling fast.
Past liquor saloons ablaze with light and hung, alas! with holly and
mistletoe; past the little Mission Church at the corner, where he
lingered an instant to catch the notes of a glad Christmas carol; away
from the wretched and squalid quarter of the city he marched, halting
only when he reached a toy-shop, where there were multitudes of
talking dolls and barking dogs and mewing cats and bleating sheep;
where people tumbled over each other in their eagerness to buy, and
blew into all the toy horns and jingled all the toy pianos and laughed
from the pure joy of Christmastide, like God’s own little children.
It was a good half hour again before Old Claus dismissed at his own
door the boy who had helped him bring home his bundles from that
blessed toy-shop. The boy went off whistling, too, with a bright new
silver dollar in his pocket.
It took the old man three trips to get his purchases down that secret
stairway. I don’t know how he ever got the sled through anyway; nor
the big doll with eyes that winked upside down, nor the sheep, nearly
life-size, which _baa_-ed loudly in the passage; and the tricycle was
the worst of all; but he did it and landed them safely in the old
fireplace, which surely never contained such precious fuel before.
Why, the very smell of the toys, a delicious painty, gluey, varnishy,
woolly, sawdusty smell, was enough to set you wild with delight. It
brought to Old Claus some dim remembrance of his childhood, and made
him pause to wipe away a tear with his shaggy sleeve. For all this
time he was in fur coat and cap, with snow lying thick upon them.
Now came the trying moment. Could he open that long-disused door
without waking the child, who now was evidently sleeping soundly?
Dear old door--I believe it knew, as well as you do, what was wanted
of it. Never a squeak it gave, as Claus, with infinite pains, drew
back the rusty bolt and softly opened it.
He stepped inside the room, shading the lamp with his hand. It was a
very small room indeed, with great holes in the bare plastering, and a
broken pane of glass through which the keen wind was blowing. The room
was even colder than the fireplace.
In one corner was a small bed, and in it lay a little girl of perhaps
six years, her tangled hair scattered over the bundle of ragged
clothes--evidently her own poor little gown--that served for a pillow;
the dingy counterpane drawn tightly up around her neck to keep out the
bitter cold. There was a broken chair and wooden table in the room
besides; nothing else.
From the back of the chair, which was propped against the wall close
by the bed, hung one small stocking; so small that it seemed better
fitted for a doll than a living human child; only no self-respecting
doll would have worn a stocking so ragged.
The old man set down his lamp and tiptoed back to the fireplace. He
took out the toys one by one, and placed them on the floor. He filled
the poor little stocking with candy; the first package of which came
near betraying him by falling directly through a large hole in the
heel. Luckily he caught it before it reached the floor, and squeezed
in a good-sized rubber ball to replace it.
Last of all he took up the sheep, with a sigh of relief at his success
in depositing all his gifts in the room without disturbing the small
sleeper.
But alas for human calculations! In his excitement he gave that
dreadful sheep an unlucky squeeze, and without the slightest warning
it gave utterance to another prolonged _baa-a-a!_ even louder than
before.
The child opened her eyes wide and sat up in bed. There stood, in
front of a new and cavernous fireplace in the wall, an old man with
shaggy coat and cap, and flowing white beard, his stooping back
sprinkled with snow, with a lamb in his arms, and surrounded with such
a glory of toys as she had never dreamed of in her little starved
life.
One moment only she gazed; then leaped from her bed and sprang into
his arms, crying: “O Santa Claus! Santa Claus! Have you come! Oh, take
me away with you, do, do!”
At the child’s first cry of “Santa Claus!” the old man stood
stupefied, shaking his head and muttering “Jonathan R.”; but when she
came flying to him, he caught her up in his arms, wrapping his great
fur coat about her and holding them close to his heart--God’s little
lamb and the woolly one--without a word.
Before he could fairly collect his wits, he heard that heavy,
irregular footfall coming up the stairs.
He had only one thought--to save the child. Backing hastily into the
fireplace he closed and bolted the door behind him, groped his way up
the stone steps, and sat down in front of his own fire, breathless,
with his new-found treasure still in his arms. The faint sound of a
cry came up from the room below, but whether it was of terror, or
delight at finding such extraordinary personal property miraculously
substituted for the late occupant, he could not tell.
The light of the fire, on which Claus had thrown fresh fuel, shone
upon the child face upraised to his.
“What is your name, little one?” he asked in tones he hardly
recognized as his own.
They called her Moll, she said, but that was not her real name, which
she had forgotten.
“How would you like to be called ‘Agnes’?” said Claus, his old eyes
growing misty over some long-buried memory.
“Oh, that’s a nice name, Santa Claus! And I’m _so_ sleepy!”
The old housekeeper was thereupon roused from her slumbers in a
distant corner of the house, and the child put to bed in her own room
in a couch hastily improvised from chairs and blankets.
Next morning Old Claus, feeling very much more like Young Claus than
he had for years, put an end to the wonderful stories flying about the
neighborhood by acknowledging his own agency in little Agnes’
disappearance. An arrangement was easily made with the dissipated
woman who, it seemed, had taken charge of the child and ill-used her
cruelly since her mother’s death. The proper papers having been drawn,
Mr. Jonathan Claus became the legal guardian of the little waif, with
whom he shortly afterward removed to a more cheerful quarter of the
city.
Agnes lost all her Christmas presents, to be sure, for not one of them
ever could be found--except the sheep which had brought her good
fortune, and who was allowed to _baa_ to his heart’s content that
Christmas day; but Santa Claus (as she persisted in calling her
deliverer) replaced them, with interest.
That is the way Old Claus found his treasure; not only little Agnes,
though she soon became dearer to him than all his wealth, but that
most precious of treasures, Love.
X