The Bride of the Mistletoe Part 2

"Here is a work," he said, "not written by a German or by any other man, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the sole purpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in the life of any woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; for a briefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, beneath everything else, he is to her--an Incident."

He turned and confronted her, not without a gleam of humor in his eyes.

"That did not trouble me," he said tenderly. "Those were not discords to me."

Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made no comment.

His own face grew grave. After a moment of debate with himself as to whether he should be forced to do a thing he would rather not do, he turned in his chair and laid down his pen as though separating himself from his work. Then he said, in a tone that ended playfulness:

"Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a year now I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and at this work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurred before in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied upon you and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And this apparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last. Now you come in and I tell you that the work is done--quite finished--without a word to you about it. Do I not understand?" he repeated. "Have I not understood all along? It is true; outwardly as regards this work you have been--the Incident."

As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she did not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web of his words from before her eyes--eyes fixed on larger things lying clear before her in life's distance.

He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:

"But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life's victories, did you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was never to explain? You had only one more day to wait! If patience, if faith, could only have lasted another twenty-four hours--until Christmas Eve!"

It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words had been heard in that house. He bent earnestly over toward her; he leaned heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her features with loyal chiding.

"Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?" he asked, "its secrets for you and me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!"

Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a woodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about the hidden life-buds of a young tree, m.u.f.fling it while the atmosphere near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender haze of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.

He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his desk and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to cover her picture with them.

"Stay blinded and bewildered there," he said, "until the hour comes when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand; you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident."

Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon had perceptibly waned in the room.

She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.

"It is getting late," she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning with which she had spoken before. "There is no time to lose."

He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of her arms, looking at her reverently.

But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the hands that were life, the arms that were love.

She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pa.s.s downward over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.

Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the hat softly on his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over her shoulder to him:

"Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?" she asked, with a struggling sweetness in her voice.

He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar:

"I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books."

"The trouble is," she replied, "the trouble is that the authors are right and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidents to each other in life," and she pa.s.sed out into the hall.

"Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe," he replied, "if we cared to look at it in that way; but we'd better not!"

He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly stopped b.u.t.toning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything that he had brought together from such distances of place and time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil that we have put our heart and strength in.

"Are you coming?" she called faintly from the hall.

"I am coming," he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he stopped again and looked back.

Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was on the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the moment that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the s.h.i.+p of Life, trying to tow her into some divine haven.

His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry any message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable children of the future the better for its s.h.i.+ning?

"Are you coming?" she called more quiveringly.

"I am coming," he called back, breaking away from his revery, and raising his voice so it would surely reach her.

II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET

She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the short frozen gra.s.s of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting to be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the doorway for his emerging figure.

"To-morrow night," he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his words, "to-morrow night you will understand."

"Yes," she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers, "to-morrow night I must understand. Until to-morrow night, then, blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be! Kind ignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or conjecture, come to me and console me!"

And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he should step forth.

It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.

The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-gra.s.s pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad, ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their harvest of nuts--primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.

Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the m.u.f.fled strokes of an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would be gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house. Near by was a thicket of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.

Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this season. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on posthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black rafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor over well-chosen chips.

Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled, rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.

On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble of which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn aftermath.

Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to the towns, helping to fill the farmer's pockets with holiday largess.

Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey and the quail--and crops trans.m.u.table into coin. They were in sight there--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil uplifted to human joyance.

One last thing completed the picture of the scene.

The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive verdure. Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor larch nor fir is native to these portions of the s.h.i.+eld; only the wild cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This a.s.semblage of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had been planted.

It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note of deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they waited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce which seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the dim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer skies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat when snows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward.