A CHRISTMAS REUNION—A MIDNIGHT WARNING—HOW A GOOD MAN CAME TO “THE
HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE”
“SKIES bright, and brightening!” was the clan watchword, in passing
along the summons for a rally in the old home at Christmas-time, 1866,
that should include three generations of the name and blood.
On Sunday, December 23d, we attended church in a body, in morning and
afternoon. Not one was missing from the band except my brother Herbert,
whose professional duties detained him over Sunday. He was pledged to
be with us early on Monday morning.
That evening, we grouped about the fire in the parlor, a wide circle
that left room for the babyest of the party to disport themselves upon
the rug, in the glow of the grate piled with cannel coal. My father,
entering last of all, stooped to pick up a granddaughter and kiss her,
in remarking:
“I had intended to go down to hear Doctor Moore to-night. I am very
fond of him as man and preacher. But”—a comprehensive glance around the
room, pointing the demurrer—“you look so comfortable here that I am
tempted to change my mind.”
A chorus of entreaties broke forth. It had been so long since we had
had—“all of us together—a Sunday evening at home; there was so much to
talk of; Christmas was so near; the night was damp and raw; there would
be snow by ten o’clock,” etc.—all in a breath, until the dear man put
his hands to his ears, ready to promise anything and everything, for
the sake of peace.
This was before supper, a jolly meal, over which we lingered until the
mothers of the company had to hustle the younglings off to bed by the
time we left the table.
Returning to the drawing-room after hearing my girls’ prayers, and
assuaging their impatience at the lagging flight of time, by telling
them that, in twenty-two hours more, they would be hanging up their
stockings, I found my father alone. He stood on the rug, looking down
into the scarlet depths of the coals, his hands behind him and his head
bent—in thought, not in sadness, for he turned a bright face to me as
my voice awoke him from his revery:
“‘A penny for your thoughts!’”
I said it gayly, laying my hand on his shoulder. He turned his cheek to
meet it.
“My thoughts were running upon what has kept them busy all day. I
suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess it, but I lost one ‘head’ of
Doctor Hoge’s sermon this afternoon. I was thinking of—_my children_!”
His voice sank into a tender cadence it seldom took. He was reckoned
an undemonstrative man, and he had a full strain of the New England
Puritan in his blood.
I waited to steady my own voice before asking, softly, “And what of
them, father?”
The query was never answered. The opening door let in a stream of happy
humanity—mother, brothers, and sisters—Mea and her husband, Horace
and Percy, Myrtle and her _fiancé_, “Will” Robertson, who would, ere
long, be one of us in fact, as he was now in heart. They were full of
Christmas plans and talk. Among other items one was fixed in my memory
by subsequent events. In consequence of the intervention of Sunday, the
business of decorating the house had to be postponed until Monday. The
evergreens were to be sent in from the country early on the morrow.
Percy reported that the snow had begun to fall. If the roads were heavy
by morning, would the countryman who had promised a liberal store of
running cedar, pine, and juniper, in addition to the Christmas-tree,
keep his word?
“I will see that the evergreens are provided,” my father laid the
disquiet by saying. “There will be no harm in engaging a double supply.”
Then Mea went to the piano, and we had the olden-time Sunday-evening
concert, all the dear old hymns we could recall, among them two called
for by our father:
“God moves in a mysterious way,”
and,
“There is an hour of peaceful rest,
To weary wanderers given;
There is a joy for souls distressed,
A balm for every wounded breast,—
’Tis found alone in Heaven!”
We sang, last of all, _The Shining Shore_, and talked of the time when
the composer set the MS. upon the piano-rack, with the ink hardly dried
upon the score, and trial was made of the music in that very room—could
it be just eleven years ago?
My father left us as the clock struck ten. My mother lingered half an
hour later. We all knew, although none of us spoke of it, that he liked
to have a little time for devotional reading on Sunday evening, before
he went to bed. He had not demitted the habit in fifty-odd years, yet I
doubt if he had ever mentioned, even to his wife, why he kept it up and
what it meant to him.
Our mother told me afterward that when she joined him in their chamber,
the Bible was still open on the stand before him. He closed it at her
entrance and glanced around, a smile of serene happiness lighting up
his face.
“We have had a delightful Sunday!” he observed. “It is like renewing my
youth to have all the children about us once more.”
He had had his breakfast and gone down-town, when we came into the
dining-room next morning. At my exclamation of regretful surprise, our
mother told us how he had hurried the meal for himself, pleading that
he had much to attend to that forenoon. The snow was not deep, but
it was sodden by the fine rain that had succeeded it toward the dawn
of the gray December day, and he feared the evergreens might not be
forthcoming.
“I shall send a couple of carts into the country at once,” were his
parting words. “I would not have the children disappointed for ten
times the worth of the evergreens.”
It was to be a busy morning with us all. As soon as breakfast
was dispatched, the long table—pulled out to its utmost limit to
accommodate the tribe—was cleared of dishes, plates, and cloth, and we
fell to tying up parcels for the tree, sorting _bonbons_, and other
light tasks. Mince-pies, concocted according to the incomparable
recipe handed down from mother to daughter, in the Montrose and
Olney families, for a century-and-a-half, had been baked last week,
and loaded the pantry-shelves. My mother’s unsurpassable crullers,
superintended by herself at Christmas, and at no other season, were
packed away in stone jars; and, that no distinctive feature of
Yule-tide might be missing from the morrow’s dinner, the whitest,
plumpest, tenderest sucking pig the market could offer, lay at length
in a platter in the store-room. Before he could go into the oven, he
would be buttered from nose to toes, and coated with bread-crumbs.
When he appeared on the table, he would be adorned with a necklace of
sausages, cranberries would fill out the sunken eyes, and a lemon be
thrust into his mouth. A mammoth gobbler, fattened for the occasion,
would support him at the other end of the board.
I had offered last Friday to make pumpkin-pies—the genuine New England
brand, such as my father had eaten at Thanksgiving in the Dorchester
homestead.
The colored cooks could not compass the delicacy. He had sent home four
bouncing pumpkins on Saturday, and two had been pared, eviscerated,
and stewed. I sat at the far end of the table, beating, seasoning, and
tasting. My mother was filling candy-bags at the other, when Myrtle
rallied her upon not tasting the confectionery, of which she was
extravagantly fond.
“Mother is saving up her appetite for the Christmas pig!” she asserted.
“I never eat sweets when I have a headache,” was the answer. “I did not
sleep well last night.”
This led to her account of a “queer fright” she had had at midnight, or
thereabouts. Awakened from her first sound sleep by the unaccountable
thrill of alarm each of us has felt, in the impression that some one or
something that has no right to be there, is in the darkened chamber,
she lay still with beating heart and listened for further proof of the
intrusion. In a few minutes she heard a faint rustle that ran from the
farthest window toward her bed, and passed to the door leading into the
hall. Thoroughly startled, she shook my father’s shoulder and whispered
to him that there was some one in the room. He sprang up, lighted the
gas, and made a thorough search of the chamber and the dressing-room.
The door was locked, and, besides themselves, there was no occupant
of the apartment. He had fallen asleep again, when she heard the same
rustling noise, louder and more definite than before. There was no
mistaking the direction of the movement. It began at the window, swept
by the bed, and was lost at the door. The terrified wife again awoke
her husband, and he made the round a second time, with the same result
as before.
When the mysterious movement seemed to brush her at the third coming,
she aroused her companion in an agony of nervousness:
“I am terribly ashamed of my foolishness,” she told him, shivering with
nameless fears; “but there really is something here, now!” He was, as I
have said in a former part of my true story, usually so intolerant of
nervous whimsies that we forbore to express them in his hearing. He had
mellowed and sweetened marvellously within the last few years, as rare
vintages are sure to ripen. Arising now, with a good-humored laugh, he
made a third exploration of the premises, and with no better result.
When he lay down again, he put his hand affectionately upon my mother’s
arm with a soothing word:
“I will hold _you_ fast! You are the most precious thing in the house.
Neither burglar nor bogie shall get you.”
“What was it?” we asked.
“Oh, probably the wind blowing the shade, or making free with something
else that was loose. It was a stormy night. We agreed, this morning,
that it must have been that.”
She spoke carelessly, and we took the incident as little to heart.
Passing through the hall, awhile later, I espied my maid Ellen, who
had lived with me for five years, whispering with a mulatto woman in
a corner. They fell apart at seeing me, and Ellen followed me to the
sitting-room.
“Rhoda was saying that the colored people think what happened last
night was a warnin’,” she observed, with affected lightness. “They are
awful superstitious, ma’am, ain’t they?”
“Very superstitious and very ignorant!” I returned, severely.
The trifling episode was gone, like a vapor passing from a mirror,
before my brother Herbert appeared. He had arisen at daybreak, driven
to Petersburg, and taken there the train to Richmond, arriving by nine
o’clock.
At the same hour our father reached his office. I have heard the story
of his walk down-town so minutely described that I can trace each step.
It was more than a mile from his house to the office. There were no
street-cars or omnibuses in the city, at that time. Sometimes he drove
to his place of business; sometimes he rode on horseback. Generally, he
chose to walk. He was a fine horseman and a fearless driver, from his
youth up. At sixty-eight he carried himself as erect as at thirty, and
made less of tramping miles in all weathers than men of half his age
thought of pacing a dozen squares on a sunny day. As he had reminded
his wife, in excusing his hurried breakfast, there were errands, many
and important, to be looked after. He stopped at Pizzini’s, the noted
confectioner of the town, to interview that dignitary in person, anent
a cake of noble proportions and brave with ornate icing—Christmas
fruit-cake—of Pizzini’s own composition, for which the order was given
a week ago. To the man of sweets he said that nothing must hinder the
delivery of the cake beyond that evening.
“We are planning a royal, old-fashioned family Christmas,” he
subjoined, “and there must be no disappointments.”
The evergreens were ordered as stringently. Two cart-loads, as he had
said, and two more Christmas-trees, in case one was not satisfactory.
“There must be no disappointments.”
Not far from Pizzini’s he met Doctor Haxall, also “Christmasing.” The
two silver-haired men shook hands, standing in the damp snow on the
corner, and exchanged the compliments of the season.
“What has come to you?” queried the doctor, eying his friend curiously.
“You are renewing your youth. You have the color, the step, and the
eyes of a boy!”
“Doctor!” letting his hand drop upon the other’s shoulder, “to-morrow
will be the happiest day of my life! After four terrible years of
war and separation, I am to have in the old home all my children and
grandchildren—a united and loving family. It will be the first time in
eight years! My cup runneth over!”
He strode into his office with the springing step that had brought him
all the long mile and a half; spoke cheerily to two or three employees
who were on hand; remarked upon the weather, and his confidence that
we would have a fine day to-morrow, and laid aside his overcoat and
hat. Then he stepped to the outer door to issue an order to two colored
men standing there, began to speak, put his hand to his head, and fell
forward. The men caught him, saved him from falling, and supported him
to a chair. He pointed to the door, and spoke one word:
“Horace!”
My brother was his partner in business, and he could not be far away.
The messenger met him within a short distance of the door. The dulling
eyes brightened at sight of him; with an inarticulate murmur, the
stricken man raised his hand to his head, to indicate the seat of pain,
leaned back upon the strong young arms that held him, and closed his
eyes.
He was still breathing when they brought him home. Doctor Haxall had
galloped on ahead of the carriage containing him and the attendants,
to prepare us measurably for what was coming. The unconscious master
of the home was brought through the hall between banks of evergreens,
delivered in obedience to his order issued but three hours earlier.
Two tall Christmas-trees and three wagon-loads of running cedar, pine,
and spruce heaped the floor, and were pushed aside hastily by the
servants to make way for the mournful procession.
He did not speak or move after they laid him upon his own bed.
One more hour of anguished waiting, and we knew that he had entered
upon the “happiest day of his life.”