Tommy shook his head. He would have liked to own a stereoscope.

“They’re real pretty. They couldn’t all go into my stocking. They were

all round it on the floor. Say, Tommy, did you hang your stocking?”

Tommy hesitated just one moment. Then—he had the blood of honest

soldiers in his veins—he nodded.

“Oh, Tommy, what did you have in your stockings?”

“Useful things,” replied Tommy gruffly.

“What kind of useful things? Mittens?”

“I said useful things,” replied Tommy with masculine dignity and

finality. He walked away with the proud carriage of a victor leaving a

hardly won battlefield, while Cora screamed after him. “Tommy Dunbar, I

think you are real mean, so there!”

Nancy and Sarah had seen Tommy out in the yard talking to Cora.

“I wonder if Tommy’s telling Cora,” said Nancy uneasily.

“Let him, if he wants to; I’m sure I don’t care. This hanging stockings

Christmas and talking about Santa Claus, is silly and heathenish,

anyway.”

Nancy still looked uneasy. When Tommy entered she did not hesitate.

“What did Cora mean by speaking to you like that? What had you done?”

she said.

“I hadn’t done anything.”

“What did she mean?” persisted Aunt Nancy. Aunt Sarah was looking at

him; so was his uncle.

The little boy looked at them. In his small face was an expression

of scorn so high that it was entirely above all petty, childish

resentment. “She said that because I wouldn’t tell her what was in my

stocking,” he replied.

“Why wouldn’t you tell her?” inquired his aunt Sarah sharply.

“Because I am ashamed,” said Tommy. “I shall never tell anybody,

because I am ashamed.”

“Ashamed of what?” demanded Sarah. Her face was flushed.

“Ashamed of you all,” replied Tommy simply.

Then Tommy walked out. Another morning task of his was replenishing the

hearth fire and cleaning the hearth in the sitting-room. They heard

him about it. The three looked at one another. A dim conception of the

nobility of the trust of childhood and the enormity of its betrayal was

over them. Nancy whimpered a little.

“We never ought to have done such a thing,” she said unsteadily.

Reuben echoed her. “No, we shouldn’t.”

“Well, what’s done can’t be undone,” said Sarah, but she also looked

disturbed.

“Suppose Reuben hitches up, and we go down to the store and get some

things for him,” suggested Nancy timidly.

Reuben denied the motion peremptorily. “If you think you can salve over

matters that way, with a boy like that, you are mistaken,” said he. “I

could tell you that, both of you.”

There was the sharp tinkle of a bell, and Nancy started. “That’s

Mother’s bell,” said she.

“I’ll go see what she wants,” said Sarah.

Sarah entered her mother’s room, and the old woman looked up at her

from her feather-bed nest. “What did you ring your bell for, Mother?”

Sarah asked.

“Is that door shut tight?” asked her Mother.

“Yes, it is.”

“I don’t want Tommy to hear. Sarah, what ails Tommy?”

Sarah was a truthful woman, but she hedged. “What do you mean, Mother?”

“I called him in here a minute ago to give him a pep’mint, and that

child don’t look a mite well. Has he been complaining?”

“No, he ain’t.”

“You don’t think he’s et too much sassage?”

“I know he didn’t.” Sarah’s voice gained emphasis. She was relieved at

being able to tell the truth without evasion.

“Well, all I’ve got to say is that child don’t look right this

morning,” said her mother. “If I was up and about I’d put him to bed

and dose him. I’m afraid he’s in for a sick spell. What’s that?”

There had been a sound of a sudden fall in the sitting-room. The

grandmother sat up. “I knew it!” said she. “I’m going to get up.”

“You keep still, Mother,” said Sarah, who had turned white.

“Then you run and see, and you leave my door wide open, or I’ll get up.”

Sarah obeyed. On the floor in the sitting-room lay Tommy in a little

sprawl of unconsciousness. Over him knelt Nancy and Reuben.

“Stop asking him what the matter is when he’s fainted dead away, and

fetch me the bottle of cordial from the top butt’ry shelf, Reuben; and

you, Nancy, get the camphor bottle, quick,” commanded Sarah.

After a while Tommy was revived, but he was a sick little boy. He was

put to bed in the little room out of his grandmother’s, and the doctor

was called. At that date the medical fraternity was not very anxious

concerning shocks to the nerves. Tommy swallowed valerian and was

afterward comforted with peppermints. He had a hot brick at his feet,

and nobody spoke out loud anywhere near him.

“He is a very delicate child,” said the doctor out in the sitting-room

with the door tightly closed. “Don’t give him much to eat to-day.”

“A little jelly?” sobbed Nancy, who was quite overcome.

“Oh, yes, jelly and toast and weak tea when he wakes up,” said the

doctor.

Tommy slept for hours. He was a delicate child, and his night of rapt

wakefulness, his terrible disillusionment, his lack of food, for he had

eaten no breakfast, had all been too much for him.

It was after the noon dinner when he awaked and had his tea and toast

and jelly. He had just finished it when there was a sound of wheels and

horse hoofs in the yard. The snow had all melted and the ground was

quite bare. Nancy and Reuben ran to the windows.

“It’s Tom Loring,” exclaimed Nancy. Tom Loring was Tommy’s mother’s

brother, his uncle Tom.

Sarah came running out from Tommy’s bedside. “He’s better,” said she

joyfully. “He has eaten every mite.”

“Tom Loring has come,” announced Nancy.

“I suppose now there will be a to-do. I suppose that child will tell

the whole thing, and we can’t ever make Tom Loring understand,” said

Sarah.

“Tommy won’t tell,” said Reuben grimly. He had not eaten much dinner

himself, and he looked downcast. He was really fond of Tommy.

Sarah ushered Uncle Tom Loring into the sitting-room. He was a youngish

man, stout and rosy. “Where’s Tommy?” he demanded.

“Tommy had a little sick spell just before dinner,” said Sarah

entering, wiping her hands on her apron. “How do you do, Tom?”

“Sick spell!” repeated Uncle Tom Loring.

Reuben followed after Sarah. He greeted Tom, who turned to him

hopefully. “What do they mean by a sick spell?”

“Fainted dead away,” replied Reuben shortly.

Uncle Tom made an exclamation of dismay. “Why, I came out thinking I

would take him back to Boston with me,” he said. “Sister Annie has

come to live with me now her husband’s dead and her children are all

married; and I thought little Tommy could come and make us a visit,

maybe live with us most of the time, if he likes it. And now he’s sick!

Annie will be dreadfully disappointed. She’s got a tree all rigged up

for him, and a big dinner, and everything.”

“He can go,” Reuben stated firmly.

“Oh, Reuben, do you think he’s well enough?” gasped Nancy.

“Of course he is. What’s a little fainting spell? He can go. The air

will do him good. His grandmother will miss him, and we shall, too, but

it will do him good to have a change.”

Just then Tommy, who heard his uncle’s voice and got into his clothes,

came weakly out. Tom grabbed him and looked at him.

“Say, young man, you do look peaked,” he said.

Grandmother’s voice was heard from her bedroom.

“Tom Loring, you take that child home with you. When I’m up again you

can bring him back. He’s all run down.”

“All right, Grandma,” called back Uncle Tom. He shook the boy lovingly.

“Well, little Tommy, I’m going to take you back to Boston with me. Your

aunt Annie is there, and there’s a great Christmas tree all trimmed

with candles. I suppose you didn’t have a tree?”

“No, sir,” said little Tommy.

“Hung up your stocking, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sarah and Nancy were pale, Reuben looked dogged. Then came the question

direct.

“Well, what was in the stocking?”

“Useful things,” replied little Tommy.

Sarah was a courageous woman. She was really ashamed of the miserable

joke they had tried on the child, but she was quite prepared to face

the consequences.

“You tell your uncle what was in your stocking, Tommy,” said she.

Reuben echoed her. “No use beating about the bush,” said he, while Tom

looked puzzled. “Go ahead and tell him, Tommy.”

“Useful things,” repeated stanch little Tommy.

Uncle Tom gave a shrewd glance at him. “Well, useful things are very

good things to have,” said he; “but I think your aunt Annie has a lot

of the other kind for you.”

“You get that child ready right away, Nancy and Sarah,” ordered

Grandmother from the bedroom, “and mind you wrap him up warm. It’s a

cold ride to Boston.”

“I have a lot of fur robes,” said Uncle Tom. “And we are going to stop

in at The Sign of the Lion on our way home, and get some hot milk for

him, and anything else he wants.”

In a very short time little Tommy was riding beside his uncle Tom. He

was enveloped in furs. He had a hot brick at his feet. He was happy

again, but his rapt ecstasy of the night before, which even without the

after-shock of disillusionment had been a strain, had settled down into

a deep peace of realization.

Nancy and Sarah were in their mother’s room. They had told her. Nancy

was sobbing and Sarah looked sober. Reuben stood in the doorway,

looking soberer still.

“I wish he would tell,” sobbed Nancy.

“He never will, and we can’t any of us have the comfort of thinking he

is anywhere near as mean as the rest of us,” said Reuben gloomily.

“Don’t you make too much of it, Reuben,” said Grandmother. “You didn’t

any of you mean any harm. You couldn’t know that what seemed funny to

you—and it was sort of funny—would be taken in dead earnest by a child

like that. I could have told you.”

After that Christmas, Tommy lived much of the time in Boston with his

uncle Tom and his aunt Annie. He spent the summers with his aunts and

uncle on the farm. He seemed as fond of them as ever. Nobody mentioned

the stocking.

When Tommy and Cora were grown up they fell in love and were married,

and lived in Boston. On Christmas Day Cora asked Tommy a question.

“Tommy dear, what was in that stocking you were so mysterious about

when you were a little boy?” said she. “Tell me now, please.”

Tommy laughed, but he shook his head. “Just something useful, dear,”

said he. The man was faithful to his code of honor of childhood.

Cora, however, remained curious. The next summer when she and Tommy

were staying at the farm, she asked Sarah to tell her what had been in

the stocking.

“Aunt Sarah,” said pretty Cora, “do please tell me what was in Tommy’s

stocking that Christmas when he was a little boy. He won’t tell me, and

I want to know.”

“You ought to know,” said Sarah. “We have always been ashamed of it,

although we meant it to be only a joke, and never realized what we were

doing. We did not understand how a child like Tommy might take it. We

were doing pig work that Christmas, and”—Sarah laughed a little and

colored—“we put in some pigs’ ears nicely wrapped up, and a pig’s tail,

and a potato, and a turnip, and two beets.”

“Goodness!” said Cora.

“We were all ashamed of it,” said Aunt Sarah.

Cora went over and kissed her. “Don’t you worry one bit,” said she.

“Maybe Tommy’s having such awful things in his stocking, poor little

boy, made him better all his life. Perhaps his keeping still and not

telling made him so honorable and honest. Aunt Sarah, it can’t have

done Tommy much harm, for he is certainly about the best man who ever

lived now.”

“He certainly is,” said Sarah, “but if I had to live over again, I

wouldn’t try such a way of making him so, for my own sake.”

[18] By permission of the author and the “Woman’s Home Companion.”

THE SAD SHEPHERD[19]

_Henry Van Dyke_

I

DARKNESS

Out of the Valley of Gardens, where a film of new-fallen snow lay

smooth as feathers on the breast of a dove, the ancient Pools of

Solomon looked up into the night sky with dark, tranquil eyes,

wide-open and passive, reflecting the crisp stars and the small, round

moon. The full springs, overflowing on the hill-side, melted their way

through the field of white in winding channels, and along their course

the grass was green even in the dead of winter.

But the sad shepherd walked far above the friendly valley, in a region

where ridges of gray rock welted and scarred the back of the earth,

like wounds of half-forgotten strife and battles long ago. The solitude

was forbidding and disquieting; the keen air that searched the wanderer

had no pity in it; and the myriad glances of the night were curiously

cold.

His flock straggled after him. The sheep, weather beaten and dejected,

followed the path with low heads nodding from side to side, as if they

had travelled far and found little pasture. The black, lop-eared goats

leaped upon the rocks, restless and ravenous, tearing down the tender

branches and leaves of the dwarf oaks and wild olives. They reared up

against the twisted trunks and crawled and scrambled among the boughs.

It was like a company of gray downcast friends and a troop of merry

little black devils following the sad shepherd afar off.

He walked looking on the ground, paying small heed to them. Now and

again, when the sound of pattering feet and panting breath and the

rustling and rending among the copses fell too far behind, he drew out

his shepherd’s pipe and blew a strain of music, shrill and plaintive,

quavering and lamenting through the hollow night. He waited while the

troops of gray and black scuffled and bounded and trotted near to him.

Then he dropped the pipe into its place and strode forward, looking on

the ground.

The fitful, shivery wind that rasped the hill-top fluttered the rags of

his long mantle of Tyrian blue, torn by thorns and stained by travel.

The rich tunic of striped silk beneath it was worn thin, and the girdle

about his loins had lost all its ornaments of silver and jewels. His

curling hair hung down dishevelled under a turban of fine linen, in

which the gilt threads were frayed and tarnished; and his shoes of soft

leather were broken by the road. On his brown fingers the places of the

vanished rings were still marked in white skin. He carried not the long

staff nor the heavy nail-studded rod of the shepherd, but a slender

stick of carved cedar battered and scratched by hard usage, and the

handle, which must once have been of precious metal, was missing.

He was a strange figure for that lonely place and that humble

occupation—a branch of faded beauty from some royal garden tossed by

rude winds into the wilderness—a pleasure craft adrift, buffeted and

broken, on rough seas.

But he seemed to have passed beyond caring. His young face was as

frayed and threadbare as his garments. The splendour of the moonlight

flooding the wild world meant as little to him as the hardness of the

rugged track which he followed. He wrapped his tattered mantle closer

around him, and strode ahead, looking on the ground.

As the path dropped from the summit of the ridge toward the Valley of

Mills and passed among huge broken rocks, three men sprang at him from

the shadows. He lifted his stick, but let it fall again, and a strange

ghost of a smile twisted his face as they gripped him and threw him

down.

“You are rough beggars,” he said. “Say what you want, you are welcome

to it.”

“Your money, dog of a courtier,” they muttered fiercely; “give us your

golden collar, Herod’s hound, quick, or you die!”

“The quicker the better,” he answered, closing his eyes.

The bewildered flock of sheep and goats, gathered in a silent ring,

stood at gaze while the robbers fumbled over their master.

“This is a stray dog,” said one, “he has lost his collar, there is not

even the price of a mouthful of wine on him. Shall we kill him and

leave him for the vultures?”

“What have the vultures done for us,” said another, “that we should

feed them? Let us take his cloak and drive off his flock, and leave him

to die in his own time.”

With a kick and a curse they left him. He opened his eyes and lay quiet

for a moment, with his twisted smile, watching the stars.

“You creep like snails,” he said. “I thought you had marked my time

to-night. But not even that is given to me for nothing. I must pay for

all, it seems.”

Far away, slowly scattering and receding, he heard the rustling and

bleating of his frightened flock as the robbers, running and shouting,

tried to drive them over the hills. Then he stood up and took the

shepherd’s pipe from the breast of his tunic. He blew again that

plaintive, piercing air, sounding it out over the ridges and distant

thickets. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end; a melancholy,

pleading tune that searched forever after something lost.

While he played, the sheep and the goats, slipping away from their

captors by roundabout ways, hiding behind the laurel bushes, following

the dark gullies, leaping down the broken cliffs, came circling back to

him, one after another; and as they came, he interrupted his playing,

now and then, to call them by name.

When they were nearly all assembled, he went down swiftly toward the

lower valley, and they followed him, panting. At the last crook of the

path on the steep hillside a straggler came after him along the cliff.

He looked up and saw it outlined against the sky. Then he saw it leap,

and slip, and fall beyond the path into a deep cleft.

“Little fool,” he said, “fortune is kind to you! You have escaped from

the big trap of life. What? You are crying for help? You are still in

the trap? Then I must go down to you, little fool, for I am a fool too.

But why I must do it, I know no more than you know.”

He lowered himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found

the creature with its leg broken and bleeding. It was not a sheep

but a young goat. He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his

turban and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal. Then

he climbed back to the path and strode on at the head of his flock,

carrying the little black kid in his arms.

There were houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them

lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women

were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy

bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they

wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there

was no mill but many lights, came to the door and looked out laughing,

her face and bosom bare.

But the sad shepherd did not stay. His long shadow and the confused

mass of lesser shadows behind him drifted down the white moonlight,

past the yellow bars of lamplight that gleamed from the doorways. It

seemed as if he were bound to go somewhere and would not delay.

Yet with all his haste to be gone, it was plain that he thought little

of where he was going. For when he came to the foot of the valley,

where the paths divided, he stood between them staring vacantly,

without a desire to turn him this way or that. The imperative of choice

halted him like a barrier. The balance of his mind hung even because

both scales were empty. He could act, he could go, for his strength was

untouched; but he could not choose, for his will was broken within him.

The path to the left went up toward the little town of Bethlehem, with

huddled roofs and walls in silhouette along the double-crested hill. It

was dark and forbidding as a closed fortress. The sad shepherd looked

at it with indifferent eyes; there was nothing there to draw him.

The path to the right wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the

Dead Sea. But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two

away, the smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of

a cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak. There the

great cone was cut squarely off, and the levelled summit was capped

by a palace of marble, with round towers at the corners and flaring

beacons along the walls; and the glow of an immense fire, hidden in

the central court-yard, painted a false dawn in the eastern sky. All

down the clean-cut mountain slopes, on terraces and blind arcades, the

lights flashed from lesser pavilions and pleasure-houses.

It was the secret orchard of Herod and his friends, their

trysting-place with the spirits of mirth and madness. They called it

the Mountain of the Little Paradise. Rich gardens were there; and

the cool water from the Pools of Solomon plashed in the fountains;

and trees of the knowledge of good and evil fruited blood-red and

ivory-white above them; and smooth, curving, glistening shapes,

whispering softly of pleasure, lay among the flowers and glided behind

the trees. All this was now hidden in the dark. Only the strange bulk

of the mountain, a sharp black pyramid girdled and crowned with fire,

loomed across the night—a mountain once seen never to be forgotten.

The sad shepherd remembered it well. He looked at it with the eyes of

a child who has been in hell. It burned him from afar. Turning neither

to the right nor to the left, he walked without a path straight out

upon the plain of Bethlehem, still whitened in the hollows and on the

sheltered side of its rounded hillocks by the veil of snow.

He faced a wide and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to

the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away

from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the

blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like

pinholes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a

bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The

ragged, inhospitable ridges of Tekoa lay stretched in mortal slumber

along the horizon, and between them he caught a glimpse of the sunken

Lake of Death, darkly gleaming in its deep bed. There was no movement,

no sound, on the plain where he walked, except the soft-padding feet of

his dumb, obsequious flock.

He felt an endless isolation strike cold to his heart, against which

he held the limp body of the wounded kid, wondering the while, with a

half-contempt for his own foolishness, why he took such trouble to save

a tiny scrap of the worthless tissue which is called life.

Even when a man does not know or care where he is going, if he steps

onward he will get there. In an hour or more of walking over the plain

the sad shepherd came to a sheep-fold of grey stones with a rude tower

beside it. The fold was full of sheep, and at the foot of the tower a

little fire of thorns was burning, around which four shepherds were

crouching, wrapped in their thick woollen cloaks.

As the stranger approached they looked up, and one of them rose quickly

to his feet, grasping his knotted club. But when they saw the flock

that followed the sad shepherd, they stared at each other and said: “It

is one of us, a keeper of sheep. But how comes he here in this raiment?

It is what men wear in king’s houses.”

“No,” said the one who was standing, “it is what they wear when they

have been thrown out of them. Look at the rags. He may be a thief and

a robber with his stolen flock.”

“Salute him when he comes near,” said the oldest shepherd. “Are we not

four to one? We have nothing to fear from a ragged traveller. Speak him

fair. It is the will of God—and it costs nothing.”

“Peace be with you, brother,” cried the youngest shepherd; “may your

mother and father be blessed.”

“May your heart be enlarged,” the stranger answered, “and may all your

families be more blessed than mine, for I have none.”

“A homeless man,” said the old shepherd, “has either been robbed by his

fellows, or punished by God.”

“I do not know which it was,” answered the stranger; “the end is the

same, as you see.”

“By your speech you come from Galilee. Where are you going? What are

you seeking here?”

“I was going nowhere, my masters; but it was cold on the way there, and

my feet turned to your fire.”

“Come then, if you are a peaceable man, and warm your feet with us.

Heat is a good gift; divide it and it is not less. But you shall have

bread and salt too, if you will.”

“May your hospitality enrich you. I am your unworthy guest. But my

flock?”

“Let your flock shelter by the south wall of the fold: there is good

picking there and no wind. Come you and sit with us.”

So they all sat down by the fire; and the sad shepherd ate of their

bread, but sparingly, like a man to whom hunger brings a need but no

joy in the satisfying of it; and the others were silent for a proper

time, out of courtesy. Then the oldest shepherd spoke:

“My name is Zadok the son of Eliezer, of Bethlehem. I am the chief

shepherd of the flocks of the Temple, which are before you in the fold.

These are my sister’s sons, Jotham, and Shama, and Nathan: their father

Elkanah is dead; and but for these I am a childless man.”

“My name,” replied the stranger, “is Ammiel the son of Jochanan, of the

city of Bethsaida, by the Sea of Galilee, and I am a fatherless man.”

“It is better to be childless than fatherless,” said Zadok, “yet it is

the will of God that children should bury their fathers. When did the

blessed Jochanan die?”

“I know not whether he be dead or alive. It is three years since I

looked upon his face or had word of him.”

“You are an exile, then? he has cast you off?”

“It was the other way,” said Ammiel, looking on the ground.

At this the shepherd Shama, who had listened with doubt in his face,

started up in anger. “Pig of a Galilean,” he cried, “despiser of

parents! breaker of the law! When I saw you coming I knew you for

something vile. Why do you darken the night for us with your presence?

You have reviled him who begot you. Away, or we stone you!”

Ammiel did not answer or move. The twisted smile passed over his face

again as he waited to know the shepherds’ will with him, even as he had

waited for the robbers. But Zadok lifted his hand.

“Not so hasty, Shama-ben-Elkanah. You also break the law by judging a

man unheard. The rabbis have told us that there is a tradition of the

elders—a rule as holy as the law itself—that a man may deny his father

in a certain way without sin. It is a strange rule, and it must be

very holy or it would not be so strange. But this is the teaching of

the elders: a son may say of anything for which his father asks him—a

sheep, or a measure of corn, or a field, or a purse of silver—‘it is

Corban, a gift that I have vowed unto the Lord’; and so his father

shall have no more claim upon him. Have you said ‘Corban’ to your

father, Ammiel-ben-Jochanan? Have you made a vow unto the Lord?”

“I have said ‘Corban,’” answered Ammiel, lifting his face, still

shadowed by that strange smile, “but it was not the Lord who heard my

vow.”

“Tell us what you have done,” said the old man sternly, “for we will

neither judge you, nor shelter you, unless we hear your story.”

“There is nothing in it,” replied Ammiel indifferently. “It is an old

story. But if you are curious you shall hear it. Afterward you shall

deal with me as you will.”

So the shepherds, wrapped in their warm cloaks, sat listening with

grave faces and watchful, unsearchable eyes, while Ammiel in his

tattered silk sat by the sinking fire of thorns and told his tale with

a voice that had no room for hope or fear—a cool, dead voice that spoke

only of things ended.

II

NIGHTFIRE

“In my father’s house I was the second son. My brother was honoured

and trusted in all things. He was a prudent man and profitable to the

household. All that he counselled was done, all that he wished he had.

My place was a narrow one. There was neither honour nor joy in it, for

it was filled with daily tasks and rebukes. No one cared for me. My

mother sometimes wept when I was rebuked. Perhaps she was disappointed

in me. But she had no power to make things better. I felt that I was a

beast of burden, fed only in order that I might be useful; and the dull

life irked me like an ill-fitting harness. There was nothing in it.

“I went to my father and claimed my share of the inheritance. He was

rich. He gave it to me. It did not impoverish him and it made me free.

I said to him ‘Corban,’ and shook the dust of Bethsaida from my feet.

“I went out to look for mirth and love and joy and all that is pleasant

to the eyes and sweet to the taste. If a god made me, thought I, he

made me to live, and the pride of life was strong in my heart and in

my flesh. My vow was offered to that well-known god. I served him in

Jerusalem, in Alexandria, in Rome, for his altars are everywhere and

men worship him openly or in secret.

“My money and youth made me welcome to his followers, and I spent

them both freely as if they could never come to an end. I clothed

myself in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day. The

wine of Cyprus and the dishes of Egypt and Syria were on my table. My

dwelling was crowded with merry guests. They came for what I gave them.

Their faces were hungry and their soft touch was like the clinging of

leeches. To them I was nothing but money and youth; no longer a beast

of burden—a beast of pleasure. There was nothing in it.

“From the richest fare my heart went away empty, and after the wildest

banquet my soul fell drunk and solitary into sleep.

“Then I thought, Power is better than pleasure. If a man will feast

and revel let him do it with the great. They will favour him and raise

him up for the service that he renders them. He will obtain place and

authority in the world and gain many friends. So I joined myself to

Herod.”

When the sad shepherd spoke this name his listeners drew back from him

as if it were a defilement to hear it. They spat upon the ground and

cursed the Idumean who called himself their king.

“A slave!” Jotham cried, “a bloody tyrant and a slave from Edom! A fox,

a vile beast who devours his own children! God burn him in Gehenna.”

The old Zadok picked up a stone and threw it into the darkness, saying

slowly, “I cast this stone on the grave of the Idumean, the blasphemer,

the defiler of the Temple! God send us soon the Deliverer, the Promised

One, the true King of Israel!” Ammiel made no sign, but went on with

his story.

“Herod used me well—for his own purpose. He welcomed me to his palace

and his table, and gave me a place among his favourites. He was so much

my friend that he borrowed my money. There were many of the nobles

of Jerusalem with him, Sadducees, and proselytes from Rome and Asia,

and women from everywhere. The law of Israel was observed in the open

court, when the people were watching. But in the secret feasts there

was no law but the will of Herod, and many deities were served but

no god was worshipped. There the captains and the princes of Rome

consorted with the high-priest and his sons by night; and there was

much coming and going by hidden ways. Everybody was a borrower or a

lender, a buyer or a seller of favours. It was a house of diligent

madness. There was nothing in it.

“In the midst of this whirling life a great need of love came upon me

and I wished to hold some one in my inmost heart.

“At a certain place in the city, within closed doors, I saw a young

slave-girl dancing. She was about fifteen years old, thin and supple;

she danced like a reed in the wind; but her eyes were weary as death,

and her white body was marked with bruises. She stumbled, and the men

laughed at her. She fell, and her mistress beat her, crying out that

she would fain be rid of such a heavy-footed slave. I paid the price

and took her to my dwelling.

“Her name was Tamar. She was a daughter of Lebanon. I robed her in silk

and broidered linen. I nourished her with tender care so that beauty

came upon her like the blossoming of an almond tree; she was a garden

enclosed, breathing spices. Her eyes were like doves behind her veil,

her lips were a thread of scarlet, her neck was a tower of ivory, and

her breasts were as two fawns which feed among the lilies. She was

whiter than milk, and more rosy than the flower of the peach, and her

dancing was like the flight of a bird among the branches. So I loved

her.

“She lay in my bosom as a clear stone that one has bought and polished

and set in fine gold at the end of a golden chain. Never was she glad

at my coming, or sorry at my going. Never did she give me anything

except what I took from her. There was nothing in it.

“Now whether Herod knew of the jewel that I kept in my dwelling I

cannot tell. It was sure that he had his spies in all the city, and

himself walked the streets by night in a disguise. On a certain day

he sent for me, and had me into his secret chamber, professing great

love toward me and more confidence than in any man that lived. So I

must go to Rome for him, bearing a sealed letter and a private message

to Cæsar. All my goods would be left safely in the hands of the king,

my friend, who would reward me double. There was a certain place of

high authority at Jerusalem which Cæsar would gladly bestow on a Jew

who had done him a service. This mission would commend me to him. It

was a great occasion, suited to my powers. Thus Herod fed me with fair

promises, and I ran his errand. There was nothing in it.

“I stood before Cæsar and gave him the letter. He read it and laughed,

saying that a prince with an incurable hunger is a servant of value to

an emperor. Then he asked me if there was nothing sent with the letter.

I answered that there was no gift, but a message for his private ear.

He drew me aside and I told him that Herod begged earnestly that

his dear son, Antipater, might be sent back in haste from Rome to

Palestine, for the king had great need of him.

“At this Cæsar laughed again. ‘To bury him, I suppose,’ said he, ‘with

his brothers, Alexander and Aristobulus! Truly, it is better to be

Herod’s swine than his son! Tell the old fox he may catch his own

prey.’ With this he turned from me and I withdrew unrewarded, to make

my way back, as best I could with an empty purse, to Palestine. I had

seen the Lord of the World. There was nothing in it.

“Selling my rings and bracelets I got passage in a trading ship for

Joppa. There I heard that the king was not in Jerusalem, at his Palace

of the Upper City, but had gone with his friends to make merry for a

month on the Mountain of the Little Paradise. On that hill-top over

against us, where the lights are flaring to-night, in the banquet-hall

where couches are spread for a hundred guests, I found Herod.”

The listening shepherds spat upon the ground again, and Jotham

muttered, “May the worms that devour his flesh never die!” But Zadok

whispered, “We wait for the Lord’s salvation to come out of Zion.” And

the sad shepherd, looking with fixed eyes at the firelit mountain far

away, continued his story:

“The king lay on his ivory couch, and the sweat of his disease was

heavy upon him, for he was old, and his flesh was corrupted. But his

hair and his beard were dyed and perfumed and there was a wreath of

roses on his head. The hall was full of nobles and great men, the sons

of the high-priest were there, and the servants poured their wine in

cups of gold. There was a sound of soft music; and all the men were

watching a girl who danced in the middle of the hall; and the eyes of

Herod were fiery, like the eyes of a fox.

“The dancer was Tamar. She glistened like the snow on Lebanon, and the

redness of her was ruddier than a pomegranate, and her dancing was like

the coiling of white serpents. When the dance was ended her attendants

threw a veil of gauze over her and she lay among her cushions, half

covered with flowers, at the feet of the king.

“Through the sound of clapping hands and shouting, two slaves led me

behind the couch of Herod. His eyes narrowed as they fell upon me. I

told him the message of Cæsar, making it soft, as if it were a word

that suffered him to catch his prey. He stroked his beard and his look

fell on Tamar. ‘I have caught it,’ he murmured; ‘by all the gods, I

have always caught it. And my dear son, Antipater, is coming home of

his own will. I have lured him, he is mine.’

“Then a look of madness crossed his face and he sprang up, with

frothing lips, and struck at me. ‘What is this,’ he cried, ‘a spy, a

servant of my false son, a traitor in my banquet-hall! Who are you?’

I knelt before him, protesting that he must know me; that I was his

friend, his messenger; that I had left all my goods in his hands; that

the girl who had danced for him was mine. At this his face changed

again and he fell back on his couch, shaken with horrible laughter.

‘Yours!’ he cried, ‘when was she yours? What is yours? I know you

now, poor madman. You are Ammiel, a crazy shepherd from Galilee, who

troubled us some time since. Take him away, slaves. He has twenty sheep

and twenty goats among my flocks at the foot of the mountain. See to it

that he gets them, and drive him away.’

“I fought against the slaves with my bare hands, but they held me. I

called to Tamar, begging her to have pity on me, to speak for me, to

come with me. She looked up with her eyes like doves behind her veil,

but there was no knowledge of me in them. She laughed lazily, as if it

were a poor comedy, and flung a broken rose-branch in my face. Then

the silver cord was loosened within me, and my heart went out, and I

struggled no more. There was nothing in it.

“Afterward I found myself on the road with this flock. I led them past

Hebron into the south country, and so by the Vale of Eshcol, and over

many hills beyond the Pools of Solomon, until my feet brought me to

your fire. Here I rest on the way to nowhere.”

He sat silent, and the four shepherds looked at him with amazement.

“It is a bitter tale,” said Shama, “and you are a great sinner.”

“I should be a fool not to know that,” answered the sad shepherd, “but

the knowledge does me no good.”

“You must repent,” said Nathan, the youngest shepherd, in a friendly

voice.

“How can a man repent,” answered the sad shepherd, “unless he has hope?

But I am sorry for everything, and most of all for living.”

“Would you not live to kill the fox Herod?” cried Jotham fiercely.

“Why should I let him out of the trap,” answered the sad shepherd. “Is

he not dying more slowly than I could kill him?”

“You must have faith in God,” said Zadok earnestly and gravely.

“He is too far away.”

“Then you must have love for your neighbour.”

“He is too near. My confidence in man was like a pool by the wayside.

It was shallow, but there was water in it, and sometimes a star shone

there. Now the feet of many beasts have trampled through it, and the

jackals have drunken of it, and there is no more water. It is dry and

the mire is caked at the bottom.”

“Is there nothing good in the world?”

“There is pleasure, but I am sick of it. There is power, but I hate it.

There is wisdom, but I mistrust it. Life is a game and every player is

for his own hand. Mine is played. I have nothing to win or lose.”

“You are young, you have many years to live.”

“I am old, yet the days before me are too many.”

“But you travel the road, you go forward. Do you hope for nothing?”

“I hope for nothing,” said the sad shepherd. “Yet if one thing should

come to me it might be the beginning of hope. If I saw in man or woman

a deed of kindness without a selfish reason, and a proof of love gladly

given for its own sake only, then might I turn my face toward that

light. Till that comes, how can I have faith in God whom I have never

seen? I have seen the world which he has made, and it brings me no

faith. There is nothing in it.”

“Ammiel-ben-Jochanan,” said the old man sternly, “you are a son of

Israel, and we have had compassion on you, according to the law. But

you are an apostate, an unbeliever, and we can have no more fellowship

with you, lest a curse come upon us. The company of the desperate

brings misfortune. Go your way and depart from us, for our way is not

yours.”

So the sad shepherd thanked them for their entertainment, and took the

little kid again in his arms, and went into the night, calling his

flock. But the youngest shepherd Nathan followed him a few steps and

said:

“There is a broken fold at the foot of the hill. It is old and small,

but you may find a shelter there for your flock where the wind will not

shake you. Go your way with God, brother, and see better days.”

Then Ammiel went a little way down the hill and sheltered his flock in

a corner of the crumbling walls. He lay among the sheep and the goats

with his face upon his folded arms, and whether the time passed slowly

or swiftly he did not know, for he slept.

He waked as Nathan came running and stumbling among the scattered

stones.

“We have seen a vision,” he cried, “a wonderful vision of angels. Did

you not hear them? They sang loudly of the Hope of Israel. We are going

to Bethlehem to see this thing which is come to pass. Come you and keep

watch over our sheep while we are gone.”

“Of angels I have seen and heard nothing,” said Ammiel, “but I will

guard your flocks with mine, since I am in debt to you for bread and

fire.”

So he brought the kid in his arms, and the weary flock straggling after

him, to the south wall of the great fold again, and sat there by the

embers at the foot of the tower, while the others were away.

The moon rested like a ball on the edge of the western hills and rolled

behind them. The stars faded in the east and the fires went out on the

Mountain of the Little Paradise. Over the hills of Moab a grey flood of

dawn rose slowly, and arrows of red shot far up before the sunrise.

The shepherds returned full of joy and told what they had seen.

“It was even as the angels said unto us,” said Shama, “and it must be

true. The King of Israel has come. The faithful shall be blessed.”

“Herod shall fall,” cried Jotham, lifting his clenched fist toward the

dark peaked mountain. “Burn, black Idumean, in the bottomless pit,

where the fire is not quenched.”

Zadok spoke more quietly. “We found the new-born child of whom the

angels told us wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. The

ways of God are wonderful. His salvation comes out of darkness. But

you, Ammiel-ben-Jochanan, except you believe, you shall not see it. Yet

since you have kept our flocks faithfully, and because of the joy that

has come to us, I give you this piece of silver to help you on your

way.”

But Nathan came close to the sad shepherd and touched him on the

shoulder with a friendly hand. “Go you also to Bethlehem,” he said in a

low voice, “for it is good to see what we have seen, and we will keep

your flock until you return.”

“I will go,” said Ammiel, looking into his face, “for I think you wish

me well. But whether I shall see what you have seen, or whether I shall

ever return, I know not. Farewell.”

III

DAWN

The narrow streets of Bethlehem were waking to the first stir of life

as the sad shepherd came into the town with the morning, and passed

through them like one walking in his sleep.

The court-yard of the great khan and the open rooms around it were

crowded with travellers, rousing from their night’s rest and making

ready for the day’s journey. In front of the stables half hollowed

in the rock beside the inn, men were saddling their horses and their

beasts of burden, and there was much noise and confusion.

But beyond these, at the end of the line, there was a deeper grotto in

the rock, which was used only when the nearer stalls were full. Beside

the entrance of this cave an ass was tethered, and a man of middle age

stood in the doorway.

The sad shepherd saluted him and told his name.

“I am Joseph the carpenter of Nazareth,” replied the man. “Have you

also seen the angels of whom your brother shepherds came to tell us?”

“I have seen no angels,” answered Ammiel, “nor have I any brothers

among the shepherds. But I would fain see what they have seen.”

“It is our first-born son,” said Joseph, “and the Most High has sent

him to us. He is a marvellous child: great things are foretold of him.

You may go in, but quietly, for the child and his mother Mary are

asleep.”

So the sad shepherd went in quietly. His long shadow entered before

him, for the sunrise was flowing into the door of the grotto. It was

made clean and put in order, and a bed of straw was laid in the corner

on the ground.

The child was asleep, but the young mother was waking, for she had

taken him from the manger into her lap, where her maiden veil of white

was spread to receive him. And she was singing very softly as she bent

over him in wonder and content.

Ammiel saluted her and kneeled down to look at the child. He was

nothing different from other young children. The mother waited for him

to speak of angels, as the other shepherds had done. The sad shepherd

did not speak, but only looked. And as he looked his face changed.

“You have suffered pain and danger and sorrow for his sake,” he said

gently.

“They are past,” she answered, “and for his sake I have suffered them

gladly.”

“He is very little and helpless; you must bear many troubles for his

sake.”

“To care for him is my joy, and to bear him lightens my burden.”

“He does not know you, he can do nothing for you.”

“But I know him. I have carried him under my heart, he is my son and my

king.”

“Why do you love him?”

The mother looked up at the sad shepherd with a great reproach in her

soft eyes. Then her look grew pitiful as it rested on his face.

“You are a sorrowful man,” she said.

“I am a wicked man,” he answered.

She shook her head gently.

“I know nothing of that,” she said, “but you must be very sorrowful,

since you are born of a woman and yet you ask a mother why she loves

her child. I love him for love’s sake, because God has given him to me.”

So the mother Mary leaned over her little son again and began to croon

a song as if she were alone with him.

But Ammiel was still there, watching and thinking and beginning to

remember. It came back to him that there was a woman in Galilee who

had wept when he was rebuked; whose eyes had followed him when he was

unhappy, as if she longed to do something for him; whose voice had

broken and dropped silent while she covered her tear-stained face when

he went away.

His thoughts flowed swiftly and silently toward her and after her

like rapid waves of light. There was a thought of her bending over a

little child in her lap, singing softly for pure joy,—and the child

was himself. There was a thought of her lifting a little child to the

breast that had borne him as a burden and a pain, to nourish him there

as a comfort and a treasure,—and the child was himself. There was a

thought of her watching and tending and guiding a little child from day

to day, from year to year, putting tender arms around him, bending over

his first wavering steps, rejoicing in his joys, wiping away the tears

from his eyes, as he had never tried to wipe her tears away,—and the

child was himself. She had done everything for the child’s sake, but

what had the child done for her sake? And the child was himself: that

was what he had come to,—after the nightfire had burned out, after the

darkness had grown thin and melted in the thoughts that pulsed through

it like rapid waves of light,—that was what he had come to in the early

morning,—_himself_, a child in his mother’s arms.

Then he arose and went out of the grotto softly, making the three-fold

sign of reverence; and the eyes of Mary followed him with kind looks.

Joseph of Nazareth was still waiting outside the door.

“How was it that you did not see the angels?” he asked. “Were you not

with the other shepherds?”

“No,” answered Ammiel, “I was asleep. But I have seen the mother and

the child. Blessed be the house that holds them.”

“You are strangely clad for a shepherd,” said Joseph. “Where do you

come from?”

“From a far country,” replied Ammiel; “from a country that you have

never visited.”

“Where are you going now?” asked Joseph.

“I am going home,” answered Ammiel, “to my mother’s and my father’s

house in Galilee.”

“Go in peace, friend,” said Joseph.

And the sad shepherd took up his battered staff, and went on his way

rejoicing.

[19] From “The Unknown Quantity”; copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner’s

Sons. By permission of the publishers.

CHRISTMAS BREAD[20]

_Kathleen Norris_

“But what time will your operation be over, mother?”

A silence. The surgeon opened three letters, looked at them, tore them

in two, cast them aside, glanced at her newspaper, glanced at her

coffee cup, and took a casual sip of the smoking liquid. But she did

not answer.

“If you were thr-r-rough at ’leven o’clock—” Merle began again

hopefully. She paid some attention to consonants, because until

recently she had called through “froo,” and she was anxious to seem

grown-up. “I could go to the hospital with Miss Frothingham,” she

suggested, “and wait for you?”

“I thought Miss Frothingham was going to take you to Mrs.

Winchester’s?” Doctor Madison countered in surprise, at last giving

a partial attention to her little daughter. “Don’t you want to spend

Christmas Day with little Betty?” she went on, easily, half-absently.

“It seems to me that is a very nice plan—straighten your shoulders,

dear. It seems to me that it was extremely nice of Mrs. Winchester to

want you to come. Most people want only their own families on Christmas

Day!”

She was paying small heed to her own words. “That band really

did straighten her teeth,” she was thinking. “I must remind Miss

Frothingham to order some more of the little smocks; she doesn’t

look half so well in the blue-jacket blouses. How like George she is

growing!... What did you say, Merle?” she added, realizing that the

child’s plaintive voice was lingering still in the air.

“I said that _I_ would like my own family, too, on Christmas,” the

child repeated, half-daring, half-uncertain.

“Ring the bell, dear,” her mother said from the newspaper.

“I wish I didn’t know what you were going to give me for Christmas,

mother!”

“You what?”

“I wish I didn’t know what you were going to give me!”

Silence.

“For Christmas, you know?” Merle prompted. “I love your present. I

love to have a little desk all my own. It’s just like Betty’s, too,

only prettier. But I would drather have it a surprise, and run down

Christmas morning to see what it was!”

“Don’t say ‘drather,’ dear.”

“Rather.” With a gold spoon, Merle made a river through her cream

of wheat in the monogrammed gold bowl and watched the cream rivers

flood together. “What interests you in the paper, mother?” she asked

politely.

“Why, they are going to have the convention in California next summer,”

her mother said.

“And shall you go, mother?”

“Oh, I think so! Perhaps you and Miss Frothingham will go with me.”

“To hotels?”

“I suppose so.”

Merle sighed. She did not like large strange hotels. “Mother, doesn’t

it seem funny to you that a patient would have his operation on

Christmas Day? Couldn’t he have it to-morrow, or wait till Wednesday?”

The doctor’s fine mouth twitched at the corners. “Poor fellow, they

only get him here to-morrow, Merle, Christmas morning. And they tell me

there is no time to lose.”

Tears came into the little girl’s eyes. “It doesn’t seem—much—like

Christmas,” she murmured under her breath. “To have you in the surgery

all morning, and me with the Winchesters, that aren’t my relations at

all——”

“Tell me exactly what you had planned to do, Merle,” her mother

suggested reasonably. “Perhaps we can manage it for some other day.

What did you especially want to do?”

The kindly, logical tone was that of the surgeon used to matters no

less vital than life and death. Merle raised her round, childish

eyes to her mother’s pleasant, keen ones. Then with a great sigh she

returned to the golden bowl and spoon. Nothing more was said until

Lizzie came in for the orders.

“Dear me, I miss Miss Frothingham!” said Doctor Madison then. “Tell

Ada to use her own judgment, Lizzie. Tell her—you might have chicken

again. That doesn’t spoil, in case I’m late.”

“You wouldn’t have a turkey, Doctor? To-morrow’s Christmas, you know.”

“Well—if Ada thinks so. I don’t particularly care for turkey—yes, we

may as well have a turkey. But no pudding, and above all, no mince pie,

Lizzie. Have something simple—prune whip, applesauce, I don’t care!

Merle will be with the Winchesters all day, and she’ll need only a

light supper. If there are any telephones, I’m at the hospital. Miss

Frothingham will be back this afternoon.”

Then she was gone, and there was a long lonely day ahead of her small

daughter. But Merle was accustomed to them. She went into the kitchen

and watched Ada and Ada’s friend, Mrs. Catawba Hercules, until Miss

Watson came. Then she had a music lesson, and a French lesson, and

after lunch she posted herself at a front window to watch the streets

and wait for pretty Miss Frothingham, who filled the double post

of secretary and governess, and who had gone home yesterday to her

sister’s house for a Christmas visit.

Outside was Christmas weather. All morning the streets had been bare

and dark, and swept with menacing winds that hurried and buffeted the

marketing and shopping women. But at noon the leaden sky had turned

darker and darker, and crept lower and lower, and as Merle watched, the

first timid snowflakes began to flutter whitely against the general

grayness.

Then there was scurrying and laughter in the streets, bundles dampened,

boys shouting and running, merry faces rouged by the pure, soft cold.

The shabby leather-sheathed doors of St. Martin’s, opposite Merle’s

window, creaked and swung under the touch of wet, gloved hands. Merle

could see the Christmas trees and the boxed oranges outside the State

Street groceries coated with eider-down; naked gardens and fences and

bare trees everywhere grew muffled and feathered and lovely. In the

early twilight the whole happy town echoed with bells and horns and the

clanking of snow-shovels.

By this time Miss Frothingham was back again, and was helping Merle

into the picturesque black velvet with the deep lace collar. Merle,

sputtering through the blue embroidered cloth while her face was being

washed, asked how Miss Frothingham’s little niece had liked her doll.

“Oh, my dear, she doesn’t get it until she comes down-stairs to-morrow

morning, of course!”

“Will she be excited?” Merle asked, excited herself.

“She’ll be perfectly frantic! I see that your mother’s present came.”

“My desk. It came last night. I moved all my things into it to-day,”

Merle said. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas when a person gets

their presents two days before,” she observed.

“His presents. Her presents,” corrected the governess.

“Her presents. Will your sister’s little girls have a tree?”

“Oh, my, yes! It’s a gorgeous tree!”

“And did you see my cousins while you were there?”

Miss Frothingham nodded. Her married sister lived next to Doctor

Madison’s brother, a struggling young engineer with a small family, in

a certain not-too-fashionable suburb. There had been a difference of

opinion regarding a legacy, between the physician and her brother some

years earlier, and a long silence had ensued, but Merle took a lively

interest in the little cousins of whom she had only a hazy and wistful

memory, and her mother had no objection to an occasional mention of

them.

“I saw Rawley—that’s the second little boy—playing with my niece,” Miss

Frothingham said. “And I saw Tommy—he’s older than you—taking care of

the baby. I think he was going to the grocery for his mother; he was

wheeling the baby very carefully. But I think those children are going

to have a pretty sad Christmas because their Daddy is very sick, you

know, and they all had whooping-cough, and I think their mother is too

tired to know whether it’s Christmas or Fourth of July!”

“Maybe their father’s going to die like my father,” Merle suggested

stoically. “I guess they won’t hang up their stockings,” she added

suddenly.

For it had been reported that this was their custom, and Merle liked to

lie awake in her little bed, warm and cosy on a winter night, and think

thrillingly of what it would be to explore a bulging and lumpy stocking

of her own.

Miss Frothingham looked doubtful. “I don’t suppose they will!” she

opined.

Merle was shocked. “Will they cry?”

“I don’t suppose so. My sister says they’re extremely good children and

will do anything to help their mother.”

“Maybe they’ll hang them up anyway, and they’ll be empty?” Merle said,

wide-eyed.

But the governess had lost interest in the subject, as grown-ups so

often and so maddeningly did, and was manicuring her pretty nails, and

humming, so Merle had to abandon it for the moment.

However, she thought about it continually, and after dinner she said

suddenly and daringly to her mother:

“The Rutledge children’s father is sick, and they aren’t going to hang

up their stockings! Miss Frothingham said so!”

When this was said, she and Miss Frothingham and her mother were all

in the attic. Merle had not been there for weeks, nor her mother for

months, and it was enchanting to the child to find herself bustling

about, so unexpectedly in this exciting atmosphere, which, if it was

not typically Christmassy, was at least unusual. It had come about

suddenly, as did much that affected her mother’s movements.

The doctor had arrived home at half-past four, and Miss Frothingham

had lost no time in reminding her that the promised bundle for the

New Year’s rummage sale for some charity was to have been ready this

evening. Doctor Madison had said—did she remember?—that she had any

amount of old clothing to dispose of.

“Oh, that attic is full of it!” Merle’s mother had said, wearily.

“You know this was my grandmother’s house, and goodness only knows

the rubbish that is up there! I’ve meant to get at it all some time—I

couldn’t do it in her lifetime. What time is it? Suppose we go up there

and get a start?”

There was twilight in the attic, and outside the dormer windows the

snow was falling—falling. Merle performed a little pirouette of sheer

ecstasy when they mounted the stairs. Her mother lighted the lights in

a business-like fashion.

“Here, take this—take this—take this!” she began to say carelessly,

picking one garment after another from the low row of ghostly forms

dangling against the eaves. “Mr. Madison’s army coats——”

“But, Mrs. Madison, this is beautiful beaver on this suit—yards of it!”

“Take it—take it!” Merle’s equable mother said feverishly, almost

irritably. “Here, I shall never wear this fur coat again, and all these

hats—I suppose those plumes are worth something!”

She was an energetic, restless creature. The hard work strangely calmed

her, and just before dinner she was settling down to it almost with

enjoyment. The summons to the meal annoyed her.

“Suppose we come back to it and make a thorough job?” she suggested.

Merle’s heart leaped for joy.

“But you ought to be in bed, Kiddie,” her mother said, not urgently,

when dinner was over.

“Oh, mother, please! It’s Christmas Eve!” Merle begged, with all the

force of her agonized eight years.

So here they all were again, and the snow was still falling outside,

and the electric lights on their swinging cords were sending an

eerie light over the miscellaneous shapes and contours of the attic,

now making the shadow of an old what-not rush across the floor with

startling vitality, now plunging the gloomy eaves behind Merle into

alarming darkness.

Pyramids of books were on the floor, magazines tied in sixes with pink

cord, curtains, rugs, beds, heaped mattresses, trunks, boxes, the

usual wheel-chair and the usual crutch—all the significant, gathered

driftwood of sixty years of living was strewn and packed and heaped and

hung about.

“Here, here’s a wonderful patent preserving kettle, do you suppose they

could use that? And what about these four terrible patent rockers?”

“Oh, Mrs. Madison, I imagine they would be only too delighted! Their

idea is to open a regular store, you know, and make the sale permanent.

But ought you——”

“I ought to have done it years before! But Doctor Madison—” His widow’s

breast rose on a sharp sigh; she lost the words for a second. “Doctor

Madison and I never lived here, you know,” she resumed. “And I stayed

abroad for years after his death, when Merle was a baby. And for a long

time I was like a person dazed—” She stopped.

“I had my work,” she resumed, after a pause. “It saved my reason, I

think. Perhaps—perhaps I went into it too hard. But I had to have—to

do—something! My grandparents died and left me this place and the

Beachaways’ place, but I’ve had no time for housekeeping!”

“I should think not, indeed!” Miss Frothingham said, timidly respectful.

These fingers, that could cleave so neatly into the very stronghold of

life, that could touch so boldly hearts that still pulsated and lungs

that still were fanned by breath, were they to count silver spoons and

quilt comforters?

The governess felt a little impressed; even a little touched. She

did not often see her employer in this mood. Kind, just, reasonable,

interested, capable, good, Doctor Madison always was. But this was

something more.

“I had no intention of becoming rich, of being—successful!” the older

woman added presently, in a dreamy tone. She was sitting with the great

spread of a brocaded robe across her knee. Her eyes were absent.

“All the more fun!” Miss Frothingham said youthfully.

“I was alone—” Mary Madison said drearily and quietly, in a low tone,

as if to herself. And in the three words the younger caught a glimpse

of all the tragedy and loneliness of widowhood. “Doctor Madison was so

wise,” she began again. “I’ve always thought that if he had lived my

life would have been different.”

“You lost your parents, I know, and were you an only child?” Miss

Frothingham ventured, after a respectful silence. But immediately the

scarlet, apologetic color flooded her face, and she added hastily: “I

beg your pardon! Of course I knew that you have a brother—I know Mr.

Rutledge and his wife!”

“Yes, I have a brother,” the doctor answered, rousing, and beginning

briskly to assort and segregate again. The tone chilled her companion,

and there was a pause.

“Your brother is Tommy’s and Rawley’s and the baby’s father,” Merle

broke it by announcing flatly.

Her mother looked at her with an indulgent half-smile. She usually

regarded Merle much as an amused stranger might have done; the odd

little black-eyed, black-maned child who was always curling herself

into corners about the house. Merle was going to be pretty, her mother

thought to-night, in satisfaction. Her little face was blazing, her

eyes shone, and she had pulled over her dishevelled curls a fantastic

tissue-paper cap of autumn leaves left from some long-ago Hallowe’en

frolic her mother could only half-remember.

“What do you know about them?” she asked good-naturedly. “You never saw

them!”

“You told me once about them, when I was a teeny little girl,” Merle

reminded her. “When we were in the cemetery you did. And Miss

Frothingham told me.”

“So there’s a third child?” Doctor Madison asked, musing. Miss

Frothingham nodded.

“A gorgeous boy. The handsomest baby I ever saw!... John,” she said.

“John was my father’s name. Sad, isn’t it?” Doctor Madison asked after

a silence during which she had folded the brocade and added it to the

heap.

“A costumier would buy lots of this just as it stands,” Miss

Frothingham murmured by way of answer.

“I mean when families quarrel,” persisted the doctor.

“Oh, I think it is very sad!” the secretary said fervently.

“We were inseparable, as children,” Mary Madison said suddenly. “Tim is

just a year younger than I.”

“You’re not going to give away all these beautiful Indian things,

Doctor?”

The doctor, who had been staring absently into the shadows of the

attic, roused herself. “Oh, why not? Merle here isn’t the sort that

will want to hoard them! I loathe them all. It was just this sort of

rubbish——”

She had risen, to fling open the top of one more trunk. Now she moved

restlessly across the attic, and Merle, who did not know her mother in

this mood, hopped after her.

“It was just this sort of rubbish, little girl,” Mary Madison said

gently, one of her thin, clever hands laid against the child’s cheek,

“that made trouble between—your Uncle Timothy and me. Just pictures and

rugs—and Aunt Lizzie’s will.... Well, let’s get through here, and away

from these ghosts!”

“I wish _we_ had three children,” Merle said longingly. “You had your

brother. But I haven’t any one! Did you hang up your stockings?”

“Dear me, yes! At the dining-room mantel.”

“Then I would hang mine there, if I—hanged—it,” Merle decided.

“But we have the big open fireplace in the sitting-room now, dear. We

didn’t have that when we were little, Timmy and I.”

“But I’d drather in the dining-room, mother, if that’s what you did!”

“Here are perfectly good new flannels—” Miss Frothingham interposed.

“Take them. But Merle,” the doctor said, a little troubled, “I would

have filled a stocking for you if I had known you really wanted me to,

dear. Will you remind me, next Christmas, and I’ll see to it?”

“Yes, mother,” Merle promised, suddenly lifeless and subdued. “But

next Christmas is so—so far,” she faltered, with watering eyes and a

trembling lip.

“But all the shops are closed now, dear,” her mother reminded her

sensibly. “You know my brother and I never had a quarrel before,” she

added, after a space, to the younger woman. “And this was never an open

breach.”

“Was?” Miss Frothingham echoed, anxious and eager.

“Wasn’t. No,” said her employer thoughtfully. “It was just a

misunderstanding—the wrong word said here, and the wrong construction

put upon it there, and then resentment—and silence—our lives

separated——”

She fell silent herself, but it was Merle, attentively watching her,

who said now,

“Their father’s sick, and they aren’t going to hang up their stockings!”

“Oh, they’ve had a great deal of trouble,” Miss Frothingham added with

a grave expression, as the older woman turned inquiring eyes upon her.

“Mr. Rutledge has been ill for weeks, and the baby is quite small—six

or seven months old, I suppose.”

“Why, he’s a successful man!” his sister said impatiently as the other

paused.

“Oh, yes, they have a good Swedish girl, I know, and a little car, and

all that! But I imagine this has been a terribly hard winter for them.

They’re lovely people, Doctor Madison,” added little Miss Frothingham

bravely and earnestly. “So wonderful with their children, and they have

a little vegetable garden, and fruit trees, and all that! But all the

children in that neighborhood had whooping cough last fall, and I know

Mrs. Rutledge was pretty tired, and then he got double pneumonia before

Thanksgiving, and he hasn’t been out of the house since.”

“He’s a wonderful boy!” Doctor Madison said in a silence. “We were

orphans, and he was a wonderful little brother to me. My grandparents

were the stern, old-fashioned sort, but Timmy could put fun and life

into punishment, even. Many an hour I’ve spent up here in this very

attic with him—in disgrace.”

She got up, walked a few paces across the bare floor, picked an old fur

buggy-robe from a chair, looked at it absently, and put it down again.

“What insanity brought me up to this attic on a snowy Christmas Eve!”

she demanded abruptly, laughing, but with the tears Miss Frothingham

had never seen there before in her eyes. “It all comes over me so—what

life was when Timmy and George—Merle’s father—were in it! Poor little

girl,” she added, sitting down on a trunk and drawing Merle toward her;

“you were to have seven brothers and sisters, and a big Daddy to adore

you and spoil you! And he had been two months in his grave when she was

born,” she added to the other woman.

“But then couldn’t you afford to have all my brothers and sisters?”

Merle demanded anxiously.

“It couldn’t be managed, dear. Life gets unmanageable, sometimes,” her

mother answered, smiling a little sadly. “But a brother is a wonderful

thing for a small girl to have. Everything has robbed this child,” she

added, “the silence between her uncle and me—her father’s death—my

profession. If I had been merely a general practitioner, as I was for

three years,” she went on, “there would have been a score of what we

call ‘G. P.’s’ to fill her poor little stocking! But half my grateful

patients hardly know me by sight, much less that I have a greedy little

girl who has a stocking to be filled!”

“Mother, I love you,” Merle said, for the first time in her

life stirred by the unusual hour and mood, and by the tender,

half-sorrowful, and all-loving voice she had never heard before.

“And I love you, little girl, even if I am too busy to show it!” her

mother answered seriously. “But here! Do let’s get done with this

before we break our hearts!” she added briskly, in a sudden change of

mood. And she sank upon her knees before a trunk and began vigorously

to deal with its contents. “And I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Merle,”

her mother went on, briskly lifting out and inspecting garments of all

sorts. “I’ll go to see Mr. Waldteufel on Wednesday——”

“Not Waldteufel of the Bazaar, mother?”

“The very same. You know your daddy and I were boarding with his mother

in Potsdam when the war broke out, and two years ago your mother saved

his wife and his tiny baby—after two dear little babies had died. So

he thinks a great deal of the Madisons, my dear, and he’ll give me the

very nicest things in that big shop for my little girl’s stocking. And

suppose you hang it up New Year’s Eve this year, and next year—well, we

won’t say anything about next year now, but just you _wait_!”

“Oh, mother—mother!” Merle sang, her slippered feet dancing. And there

was no question at this minute that she would some day be beautiful.

“Don’t strangle me. There, I remember that dress—look at the puffed

sleeves, Merle,” said her mother, still exploring the trunk. “I suppose

the velvet is worth something—and the lace collar. That was my best

dress.”

“Mother, mayn’t I keep it? And wear it some day?”

“Why, I suppose you may. I wish,” said the doctor in an undertone,

whimsically to the other woman, “I wish I had more of that sort of

sentiment—of tenderness—in me! I did have, once.”

“Perhaps it was the sorrow—and then your taking your profession so

hard?” Miss Frothingham suggested timidly.

“Perhaps—Here, this was my brother Timmy’s sweater,” said the doctor,

taking a bulky little garment of gray wool from the trunk. “How proud

he was of it! It was his first—‘my roll-top sweater,’ he used to call

it. I remember these two pockets——”

She ran her fingers—the beautifully-tempered fingers of the

surgeon—into one of the pockets as she spoke, and Merle and the

secretary saw an odd expression come into her face. But when she

withdrew her hand and exposed to them the palm, it was filled with

nothing more comprehensible than eight or ten curled and crisped old

crusts of bread.

“Mother, what is it?” Merle questioned, peering.

“Bait?” Miss Frothingham asked, smiling.

“Crusts,” the older woman said in an odd voice.

“Crusts?” echoed the other two, utterly at a loss.

There was that in the doctor’s look that made the moment significant.

“Yes,” said Merle’s mother. And for a full minute there was silence in

the attic, Miss Frothingham covertly and somewhat bewilderedly studying

her employer’s face, Merle looking from one to the other with round

eyes like those of a brunette doll, and the older woman staring into

space, as if entirely unconscious of their presence.

The lights stirred, and shadows leaped and moved in answer. Snow made a

delicate, tinkling sound outside, in the dark, on the roof beyond the

dormers. The bell of Saint Paul’s rang nine o’clock on Christmas Eve.

“I was always a stubborn child, and I hated the crusts of my bread, but

they insisted that I eat them,” said Mary Madison suddenly, in an odd,

rather low voice. “I used to cry and fight about it, and—and Timmy used

to eat them for me.”

“Did he like them, mother?” Merle demanded, highly interested.

“Did he—? No, I don’t know that he did. But he was a very good little

brother to me, Merle. And grandmother and Aunt Lizzie used to be stern

with me, always trapping me into trouble, getting me into scenes where

I screamed at them and they at me.”

Her voice stopped, and for a second she was silent.

“Crusts were a great source of trouble,” she resumed after a while.

“I like them!” Merle said encouragingly, to feed the conversation.

“Yours is a very different world, baby. People used to excite and

bewilder children thirty years ago. I’ve spent whole mornings sobbing

and defiant. ‘You will say it!’ ‘I won’t say it’—hour after hour after

hour.”

Merle was actually pale at the thought.

“Timmy was the favorite, and how generous he was to me!” his sister

said, musing. And suddenly she raised the little dried crusts in

both hands to her face, and laid her cheek against them. “Oh,

Timmy—Timmy—Timmy!” she said, between a laugh and a sob. “To think of

the grimy little hand that put these here just because Molly was so

naughty and so stubborn!”

“Miss Frothingham,” said Doctor Madison quietly, looking up with one

of those amazing changes of mood that were the eternal bewilderment of

those who dealt with her, “I wonder if you could finish this up? Get

Lizzie to help you if you like; we’re all but done anyway! Use your own

judgment, but when in doubt—destroy! I believe—it’s only nine o’clock!

I believe I’ll go and see my brother! Come, Merle, get your coat with

the squirrel collar—it’s cold!”

So then it was all Christmas magic, and just what Christmas Eve should

be. Saunders brought the little closed car to the door, to be sure, but

there he vanished from the scene, and it was only mother and Merle.

The streets were snowy, and snow frosted the windshield, and lights and

people and the bright windows of shops were all mixed up together, in a

pink and blue and gold dazzle of color.

But all this was past before they came to the “almost country,” as

Merle called it, and there were gardens and trees about the little

houses, where lights streamed out with an infinitely heartening and

pleasant effect.

They stopped. “Put your arms tight about my neck, Baby. I can’t have

you walking in this!” said her mother then.

And Merle tightened her little furry arms about her mother’s furry

collar, and they somehow struggled and stumbled up to Uncle Tim’s

porch. There was light in one of the windows, but no light in the hall.

But after a while footsteps came——

“Molly!” said the pale, tall, gentle woman who opened the door, “and

your dear baby!”

“Cassie—may we come in?” Merle had never heard her mother speak in

quite this tone before.

They went in to a sort of red-tinted dimness. But in the dining-room

there was sudden light, and they all blinked at each other. And Merle

instantly saw that over the mantel two short stockings and tiny socks

were suspended.

The women were talking in short sentences.

“Molly!”

“Cassie——”

“But in all this snow——”

“We didn’t mind it.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Cassie—how thin you are, child! And you look so tired!”

“Timmy’s been so ill!”

“But he’s better?”

“Oh, yes—but so weak still!”

“You’ve had a nurse?”

“Not these last two weeks. We couldn’t—we didn’t—really need her. I

have my wonderful Sigma in the kitchen, you know.”

“But, my dear, with a tiny baby!”

The worn face brightened. “Ah, he’s such a dear! I don’t know what we

would have done without him!”

A silence. Then Mrs. Rutledge said: “The worst is over, we hope. And

the boys have been such a comfort!”

“They hung up their stockings,” Merle commented in her deep, serious

little voice.

“Yes, dear,” their mother said eagerly, as if she were glad to have

the little pause bridged. “But I’m afraid Santa Claus is going to be

too busy to remember them this year! I’ve just been telling them that

perhaps he wouldn’t have time to put anything but some candy and some

fruit in, this year!”

“_They_ believe in Santa Claus,” Merle remarked, faintly reproachful,

to her mother. “But I’m younger than Tommy, and I don’t!”

“But you may if you want to, dear!” Doctor Madison said, shaken, yet

laughing, and kneeling down to put her arms about the little girl.

“Cassie, what can I do for Tim?” she pleaded. “We’re neither of us

children. I don’t have to say that I’m sorry—that it’s all been a bad

dream of coldness and stupidity.”

“Oh, Molly—Molly!” the other woman faltered. And tears came into the

eyes that had not known them for hard and weary weeks. “He was to blame

more than you—I always said so. He knew it! And he did try to write

you! He’s grieved over it so. But when he met you in the street that

day——”

“I know it! I know it! He was wrong—I was wrong—you were the only

sensible one, the peacemaker, between us!” the doctor said eagerly and

quickly. “It’s over. It’s for us now to see that the children are wiser

in their day and generation!”

“Ah, Molly, but you were always so wonderful!” faltered Cassie

Rutledge. And suddenly the two women were in each other’s arms. “Molly,

we’ve missed—just _you_—so!” she sobbed.

Two small shabby boys in pajamas had come solemnly in from the

direction of the kitchen, whence also proceeded the fretting of a

baby. Merle was introduced to Tommy and Rawley and was shy. But she

immediately took full charge of the baby.

“Santa Claus may not give us anything but apples and stuff,” Rawley,

who was six, confided. “Because Dad was sick, and there are lots of

poor children this year!”

“And we aren’t going to have any turkey because Dad and John couldn’t

have any, anyway!” Tommy added philosophically.

John was the baby, who now looked dewily and sleepily at the company

from above the teething biscuit with which he was smearing his entire

countenance.

“He’s getting a great, big, hard back tooth, Molly, at eight months,”

said his mother, casting aside the biscuit and wiping the exquisite,

little velvet face. “Isn’t that early?”

“It seems so to me. I forget! Any fever?”

“Oh, no, but his blessed little mouth is so hot! Timmy’s asleep,” said

Cassie anxiously. “But Molly, if you could stay to see him just a

minute when he wakes! Could Merle—we have an extra bed in the little

room right off the boys’ room, where the nurse slept. She couldn’t

spend Christmas with the boys? That would be better than any present to

us!”

She spoke as one hardly hoping, and Merle felt no hope whatever. But to

the amazement of both, the handsome, resolute face softened, and the

doctor merely said:

“Trot along to bed then, Merle, with your cousins. But mind you don’t

make any noise. Remember Uncle Timmy is ill!”

Merle strangled her with a kiss. There was a murmur of children’s

happy voices on the stairs; a messenger came back to ask if Tom’s

nine-year-old pajamas or Rawley’s seven-year-old size would best suit

the guest. Another messenger came discreetly down and hung a fourth

stocking at the dining-room mantel, with the air of one both invisible

and inaudible.

“He’s terrified,” said Cassie in an aside, with her good motherly

smile; “he knows he has no business downstairs at this hour!”

Then Cassie’s baby fretted himself off in her arms, and the two women

sat in the dim light, and talked and talked and talked.

“Cassie, we’ve an enormous turkey—I’ll send it over the first thing in

the morning.”

“But, Molly, when Tim knows you’ve been here, he’ll not care about any

turkey!”

“Their stockings—” mused the doctor, unhearing.

With a suddenly lighting face, after deep thought, she went to the

telephone in the dining-room, and three minutes later a good husband

and father, a mile away across the city, left his own child and the

tree he was trimming and went to answer her summons.

“Mr. Waldteufel? This is Doctor Madison.”

“Oh, Doctor!” came rushing the rich European voice. “Merry Christmas

to you! I wish could you but zee your bapey—so fat we don’t weigh him

Sundays no more! His lecks is like——”

The surgeon’s voice interrupted. There was excited interchange of

words. Then the toy-king said:

“I meet you at my store in ten minutes! It is one more kindness that

you ask me to do it! My employees go home at five—the boss he works

late, isn’t it? I should to work hard for this boy of mine—an egg he

eats to-day, the big rough-neck feller!”

“Oh, Molly, you can’t!” Cassie protested. But there was color in her

face.

“Oh, Cassie, I can! Have we a tree?”

“I couldn’t. It wasn’t the money, Molly—don’t think that. But it was

just being so tired ... the trimmings are all there from last year ...

oh, Molly, into this darkness and cold again! You shouldn’t!”

She was gone. But the hour that Cassie waited, dreaming, with the baby

in her lap, was a restful hour, and when it was ended, and Molly was

back again, the baby had to be carried upstairs, up to his crib, for

there was heavy work to do below stairs.

Molly had a coaster and an enormous rocking-horse. She had the car

loaded and strapped and covered with packages. She had a tree, which

she said she had stolen from the grocer; he would be duly enlightened

and paid to-morrow.

She flung off her heavy coat, pinned back her heavy hair, tied on an

apron. She snapped strings, scribbled cards. And she personally stuffed

the three larger stockings.

Cassie assisted. Neither woman heard the clock strike ten, strike

eleven.

“You’ll be a wreck to-morrow, my dear!”

“Oh, Molly, no! This is just doing me a world of good. I had been

feeling so depressed and so worried. But I believe—I do believe—that

the worst of it is over now!”

“Which one gets this modeling clay? It’s frightfully smelly stuff, but

they all adore it! My dear, does Timmy usually sleep this way? I’ve

looked in at him twice, he seems troubled—restless——”

“Yes—the scissors are there, right under your foot. Yes, he is like

that, Molly, no real rest, and he doesn’t seem to have any particular

life in him. He seems so languid. Nothing tastes exactly right to him

and of course the children are noisy, and the house is small. I want

him——”

Mrs. Rutledge, working away busily in the litter, and fastening a

large tinsel ball to a fragrant bough with thin, work-worn hands,

stepped back, squinted critically, and turned to the next task. The

homely little room was fire-warmed. Mary Madison remembered some of the

books, and the big lamp, and the arm-chair that had belonged to her

father. Cassie had a sort of gift for home-making, even in a perfectly

commonplace eight-room suburban house, she mused.

“I want him,” Cassie resumed presently, “to take us all down south

somewhere—or to go by himself, for that matter!—and get a good rest.

But he feels it isn’t fair to Jim Prescott—his partner, you know.

Only—” reasoned the wife, threading glassy little colored balls with

wire, “only Tim is the real brains of the business, and Jim Prescott

knows it. Timmy does all the designing, and this year they’ve seemed

to get their first real start—more orders than they can fill, really.

And it worries Timmy to fall down just now! He wants to get back. But I

feel that if he had a real rest——”

“I don’t know,” the physician answered, setting John’s big brown bear

in an attitude of attack above the absurd little sock. “It’s a very

common attitude, and nine times out of ten a man is happier in his work

than idling. I’d let him go back, if I were you, I think.”

“Oh, would you, Molly?” Cassie demanded in relief and surprise.

“I think so. And then perhaps you could all get away early to

Beachaways——”

“Molly!”

“Don’t use that tone, my dear. The place wasn’t even opened last year.

I went to Canada for some hospital work, and took Merle with me and

left her at the Lakes with my secretary. I wanted then to suggest that

you and Timmy use Beachaways. It’s in a bad condition, I know——”

“Bad condition! Right there on the beach, and all to ourselves! And he

can get away every Friday night!”

“Perhaps you’ll have my monkey down with her cousins, now and then. She

doesn’t seem to have made strangers of them, exactly.”

“Not exactly,” agreed Cassie with her quiet smile. “They were all

crowded into the boys’ big bed when I went up. I carried Rawley into

the next room. Tom and Merle had their hands clasped, even in their

sleep. Molly,” she added suddenly, in an odd tone, “what—I have to ask

you!—what made you come?”

“Christmas, perhaps,” the doctor answered gravely, after a moment.

“I’ve always wanted to. But, I’m queer. I couldn’t.”

“Tim’s always wanted to,” his wife said. “He’s always said: ‘There’s no

real reason for it! But life has just separated us, and we’ll have to

wait until it all comes straight naturally again.’”

“I don’t think those things ever come straight, naturally,” said Mary

Madison thoughtfully. “One thinks, ‘Well, what’s the difference? People

aren’t necessarily closer, or more congenial, just because they happen

to be related!’ But at Christmas time you find it’s all true; that

families do belong together; that blood is thicker than water!”

“Or when you’re in trouble, Molly, or in joy,” the other woman said,

musing. “Over and over again I’ve thought that I must go to you—must

try to clear up the whole silly business! But you are away so much, and

so busy—and so famous now—that somehow I always hesitated! And just

lately, when it seemed—” her voice thickened, “when it seemed as if

Timmy really might die,” she went on with a little difficulty, “I’ve

felt so much to blame! He’s always loved you so, admired you—his big

sister! He is always quoting you, what Molly says and does. And just to

have the stupid years go on and on, and this silence between us, seemed

so—so wasted!”

“Die!” Molly echoed scornfully. “Why should he? With these lovely boys

and you to live for!”

“Yes, I know. But don’t you remember saying years ago, when you were

just beginning to study medicine to have an intelligent interest in

George’s work—don’t you remember saying then that dying is a point of

view? That you had seen a sudden sort of meekness come over persons who

really weren’t very sick, just as if they thought to themselves: ‘What

now? Oh, yes, I’m to die?’ I remember our all shouting when you said

it, but many a time since I’ve thought it was true. And somehow it’s

been almost that way with Timmy, lately. Just—dying, because he was

through—living!”

“Cassie, what utter foolishness to talk that way, and get yourself

crying when you are tired out, anyway!”

“Ah, well, I believe just the sight of you when he wakes up is going

to cure him, Molly!” his wife smiled through her tears.

But only a little later, the invalid fell, as it chanced, into the most

restful sleep he had known for weeks, and Mary, creeping away to her

car, under the cold, high moon, and hearing the Christmas bells ring

midnight as she went over the muffling snow toward her own room and

her own bed, could only promise that when she had had a bath, and some

sleep, she would come back and perhaps be beside him when he awakened.

And so it happened that in the late dawn, when three little wrappered

forms were stirring in the Rutledge nursery, and when thrilled whispers

were sounding in the halls, Merle Madison was amazed to see her mother

coming quietly up from the kitchen and could give her an ecstatic

Christmas kiss.

“We know it’s only oranges and candy,” breathed Merle, “but we’re going

down to get our stockings now!”

“Is the tree lighted?” Mary Madison, who was carrying a steaming bowl,

asked in French.

“It is simply a vision!” the other mother, whose pale face was radiant,

answered, with her lips close to the curly head of the excited baby

she was carrying. “Timmy’s waking,” she added, with a nod toward the

bedroom door.

“I’ll go in.”

The other woman carried her burden across the threshold—in the quiet

orderly sick room her eyes and her brother’s eyes met for the first

time in years.

He was very white and thin, unshorn, and somehow he reminded her of the

unkempt little motherless boy of years ago.

“Molly!” he whispered, his lips trembling.

And her own mouth shook as she put the bowl on the bedside table, and

sat down beside him, and clasped her fine, strong, warm hand over his

thin one.

“Hello, Timmy,” she said gently, blinking, and with a little thickness

of speech.

“Molly,” he whispered again in infinite content. And she felt his

fingers tighten, and saw two tears slip through the closed eyelids as

his head was laid back against the pillow.

“Weak—” he murmured, without stirring.

“You’ve been so sick, dear.”

A silence. Then he said, “Molly, were you here in the night?”

“Just to peep at you, Timmy!”

“I thought you were. It was so delicious even to dream it. I didn’t

dare ask Cassie, for fear it was only a dream. Cassie’s been an angel,

Molly!”

“She always was, Tim. You and I were the demon liars.”

“‘Demon liars!’ Oh, do you remember the whipping we got for yelling

that at each other?”

“Do you remember that we agreed that ‘yellow cats’ would mean all the

very worst and naughtiest things that ever were, and the grown-ups

would never know what it meant?”

He submitted childishly to her ministrations. She washed his face,

brushed his hair, settled herself beside him with the steaming bowl.

“Come now, Timmy, Christmas breakfast!”

“Do you remember crying for mother, that first Christmas in this house?”

“Ah, my dear! Fancy what she must have felt, to leave us!”

“I’ve thought of that so often, since the boys have grown big enough to

love us, and want to be with us!”

“My girl is with them downstairs—I’ll have to tell you what a Christmas

we’ve made for them! The place looks like a toy-shop! Timmy, I hope

they’ll always like her, be to her like the own brothers that she never

had!” So much Mary said aloud. But to herself she was saying: “He

doesn’t seem to know it, but that’s fully two ounces—three ounces—of

good hot bread and milk he’s taken. Well, was it a riot?” she added to

Cassie, who came quietly in to sit on the foot of the bed and study the

invalid with loving and anxious smiling eyes.

“Mary, you should have seen it! It was too wonderful,” said Cassie, who

had been crying. “I never saw anything like the expression on their

little faces when I opened the door. Merle was absolutely white—Tom

gave one yell! It was a sight—the candles all lighted, the floor

heaped, the mantel loaded—I suppose there never was such a Christmas!”

“Cassie, you wouldn’t taste this? It is the most delicious milk-toast

I ever tasted in my life!” Tim said.

“If it tastes good to you, dearest!”

“I don’t know how Molly makes it. Molly, do you suppose you would show

Sigma how you do it?”

“I think so, Tim.” The women exchanged level quick glances of perfect

comprehension, and there was heaven in their eyes.

“There isn’t any more downstairs?”

“I don’t know that I would now, Timmy,” dictatorial and imperious

Doctor Madison said mildly. “You can have more when I get back from the

hospital, say at about one. Now you have to sleep—lots, all the time,

for days! I’m going to take all the children to my house for dinner and

over night. You’re not to hear a sound. Look at the bowl, Cassie!”

She triumphantly inverted it. It was clean.

“Do you remember,” Mary Madison asked, holding her brother’s hands

again, “do you remember years ago, when you used to eat my crusts for

me, Timmy?”

“And is this bread upon the water, Molly?” he asked, infinitely

satisfied to lie smiling at the two women who loved him. “I ate your

crusts, and now you come and turn other crusts into milk-toast for me!”

“But don’t you remember?”

He faintly shook his head. It was long ago forgotten, the little-boy

kindness and loyalty, in the days of warts and freckles, cinnamon

sticks and skate-keys, tears that were smeared into dirty faces, long

incomprehensibly boring days in chalk and ink-scented schoolrooms,

long blissful vacation forenoons dreaming under bridges, idling in the

sweet dimness of old barns. There had been a little passionate Molly,

alternately satisfactory and naughty, tearing aprons and planning

Indian encampments, generous with cookies and taffies, exacting and

jealous, marvellous, maddening, and always to be protected and admired.

But she was a dim, hazy long-ago memory, merged now into the handsome,

brilliant woman whose fine hand held his.

“He used to fill his little pockets with them, Cassie. I can remember

passing them to him, under the table.”

“Our Tom is like that,” Cassie nodded.

“Think of your remembering—” Tim murmured contentedly.

He did not, but then it did not matter. It was Christmas morning, the

restless dark night was over. Sun was shining outdoors on the new

snow. His adored boys were happy, and the baby was asleep, and Cassie,

instead of showing the long strain and anxiety, looked absolutely

blooming as she smiled at him. Best of all, here was Molly, back in

his life again, and talking of teaching the boys swimming, down at

beloved old Beachaways. He had always thought, when he was a little

boy, that no felicity in heaven or earth equalled a supper on the shore

at Beachaways. The grown-ups of those days must have been hard, indeed,

thought Tim mildly, drifting off to sleep, for he could remember

begging for the joy of taking sandwiches down there, and being coldly

and, unreasonably—he could see now—refused. Well, it would be different

with his kids. They could be pirates, smugglers, beachcombers, whale

fishers, anything they pleased. They could build driftwood fires and

cook potatoes and toast bread——

“Crusts, hey?” he said drowsily. “Bread upon the waters.”

“Bread is oddly symbolical anyway, isn’t it, Molly?” Cassie said, in

her quiet, restful voice. “Bread upon the waters, and the breaking of

bread, and giving the children stones when they ask for bread! Even the

solemnest words of all—‘Do this in commemoration’—are of bread.”

“Perhaps there is something we don’t understand about it,” Molly

answered very softly. “The real sacrament of love—the essence of all

religion and all sacraments.”

She thought of the little crusts still in the pocket of the roll-top

sweater, she looked at the empty bowl, and she held Tim’s thin hand

warmly, steadily.

“Christmas bread,” she said, as if to herself.

[20] By permission of the author and “Good Housekeeping.”

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been

corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within

the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,

when a predominant preference was found in each individual work.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,

and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Page 19. “mother and said.” replaced by “mother and said,”.

Page 114. “unforgetable” replaced by “unforgettable”.

Page 121. “black loves” replaced by “black, loves”.

Page 121. “blin’ fol’s” replaced by “blin’fol’s”.

Page 126. “Merry Chistmas” replaced by “Merry Christmas”.

Page 200. “light or morning” replaced by “light of morning”.

Page 217. “Boyne accustomed” replaced by “Boyne, accustomed”.

Page 262. “swashy package” replaced by “squashy package”.

Page 332. “my father.” replaced by “my father,”.

Page 345. “so stubborn!” replaced by “so stubborn!””.

Page 358. “Madison said mildly,” replaced by “Madison said mildly.”.

Page 358. “skate-key” replaced by “skate-keys”.