doubtless, and night was at hand; then another, and still another. Their
posture reminded Absalom, as he looked, that this was Christmas Eve,
and of the old superstition that the cattle of the barns spend the night
upon their knees, in memory of the wondrous Presence that once graced
their lowly place. The boughs rattled suddenly in the chill blast above
his head; the drifts fell about him. He glanced up mechanically to see
in the zenith a star of gracious glister, tremulous and tender, in the
rifts of the breaking clouds.
“I wonder ef it air the same star o' Bethlehem?” he said, thinking of
the great sidereal torch heralding the Light of the World. He had a
vague sense that this star has never set, however the wandering planets
may come and go in their wide journeys as the seasons roll. He looked
again into the glooming place, at the mother and her child, remembering
that the Lord of heaven and earth had once lain in a manger, and clung
to a humble earthly mother.
The man shook with a sudden affright. He had intended to wrest the child
from her grasp, and mount and ride away; he was roused from his reverie
by the thrusting upon him of his opportunity, facilitated a hundredfold.
Evelina had evidently forgotten something. She hesitated for a moment;
then put the baby down upon a great pile of straw among the horned
creatures, and, catching her shawl about her head, ran swiftly to the
house.
Absalom moved mechanically into the doorway. The child, still pensive
and silent, and looking tenderly infantile, lay upon the straw. A sudden
pang of pity for her pierced his heart: how her own would be desolated!
His horse, hitched in a clump of cedars, awaited him ten steps away. It
was his only chance--his last chance. And he had been hardly entreated.
The child's eyes rested, startled and dilated, upon him; he must be
quick.
The next instant he turned suddenly, ran hastily through the snow,
crashed among the cedars, mounted his horse, and galloped away.
It was only a moment that Evelina expected to be at the house, but the
gourd of salt which she sought was not in its place. She hurried out
with it at last, unprescient of any danger until all at once she saw the
footprints of a man in the snow, otherwise untrodden, about the
fodder-stack. She still heard the two axes at the wood-pile. Her father,
she knew, was at the house.
A smothered scream escaped her lips. The steps had evidently gone
into the stable, and had come out thence. Her faltering strength could
scarcely support her to the door. And then she saw lying in the straw
Elnathan Daniel, beginning to babble and gurgle again, and to grow
very pink with joy over a new toy--a man's glove, a red woollen glove,
accidentally dropped in the straw. She caught it from his hands, and
turned it about curiously. She had knit it herself--for Absalom!
When she came into the house, beaming with joy, the baby holding the
glove in his hands, the men listened to her in dumfounded amaze, and
with significant side glances at each other.
“He wouldn't take the baby whenst he hed the chance, 'kase he knowed
'twould hurt me so. An' he never wanted ter torment me--I reckon he
never _did_ mean ter torment me. An' he did 'low wunst he war sorry he
spited dad. Oh! I hev been a heap too quick an' spiteful myself. I hev
been so terrible wrong! Look a-hyar; he lef' this glove ter show me he
hed been hyar, an' could hev tuk the baby ef he hed hed the heart ter do
it. Oh! I'm goin' right up the mounting an' tell him how sorry I be.”
“Toler'ble cheap!” grumbled Stephen--“one old glove. An' he'll git
Elnathan Daniel an' ye too. A smart fox he be.”
They could not dissuade her. And after a time it came to pass that the
Quimbey and Kittredge feuds were healed; for how could the heart of a
grandfather withstand a toddling spectacle in pink calico that ran away
one day some two years later, in company with an adventurous dog, and
came down the mountain to the cabin in the Cove, squeezing through the
fence rails after the manner of his underfoot world, proceeding thence
to the house, where he made himself very merry and very welcome?
[Illustration: Old Quimbey and his grandson 151]
And when Tim mounted his horse and rode up the mountain with the
youngster on the pommel of the saddle, lest Evelina should be out of
her mind with fright because of his absence, how should he and old Mrs.
Kittredge differ in their respective opinions of his vigorous growth,
and grace of countenance, and peartness of manner? On the strength of
this concurrence Tim was induced to “'light an' hitch,” and he even sat
on the cabin porch and talked over the crops with Absalom, who, the next
time he went to town, stopped at the cabin in the Cove to bring word how
El-nathan Daniel was “thrivin'.” The path that Evelina had worn to
the crag in those first homesick days on the mountain rapidly extended
itself into the Cove, and widened and grew smooth, as the grandfather
went up and the grandson came down.