The Bride of the Mistletoe Part 3

These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied no appet.i.te, they were ministers to no pa.s.sions; but with them the Christmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their boughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the spiritual hope of humanity would take its flight toward the eternal.

Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strange travelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encamped gypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll of field and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best of all, wrings from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for his fellows and builds out of his lonely doubts regarding this life his faith in a better one.

And central on this whole silent scene--the highest element in it--its one winter-red pa.s.sion flower--the motionless woman waiting outside the house.

At last he came out upon the step.

He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought were of what the weather was going to be. Then as he b.u.t.toned the top b.u.t.ton of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it to make it more comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand he gave a little pull at his hat--the romantic country hat; and he peeped out from under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties and old fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked so short under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight a disguise every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and she smiled back at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days gone by. But such a deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walked hurriedly down the hill toward the evergreens.

He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in him released itself the moment he had come into the open air. There was brutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and as his overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leaping out of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway down the lawn he halted and laid his hand heavily on her wrist.

"Listen to that!" he said. His voice was eager, excited, like a boy's.

On the opposite side of the house, several hundred yards away, the country turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them the rumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of the nearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over the country; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richer or poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of the Southern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those American carriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which went back to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; to the England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back through robuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyond this till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain.

They stood looking into each other's eyes and gathering into their ears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it all meant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they saw the whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: the atmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouring from its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fall ahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer along the little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight of window-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holiday excitements and secrecies. Somewhere in the throng their own two children were busy unless they had already started home.

For years he had held a professors.h.i.+p in the college in this town, driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academic year he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have been called to Northern universities: this change would mean the end of life here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in the house; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it.

More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the s.h.i.+eld, a writer of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, its meadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit of an entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene into the notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the world knows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace of American home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amber of sound.

This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low, old-fas.h.i.+oned, brown-walled, gray-s.h.i.+ngled house; with chimneys generous, with green window-shutters less than green and white window-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its walls their summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in the middle years of its strength and its honors; not needy, not wealthy, but answering Agar's prayer for neither poverty nor riches.

The two stood on the darkening lawn, looking back at it.

It had been the house of his fathers. He had brought her to it as his own on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across the country. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him in the carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfolding both of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the forest trees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, its privacies: and that had been Christmas Eve!

For her wedding day had been Christmas Eve. When she had announced her choice of a day, they had chidden her. But with girlish wilfulness she had clung to it the more positively.

"It is the most beautiful night of the year!" she had replied, brus.h.i.+ng their objection aside with that reason alone. "And it is the happiest! I will be married on that night, when I am happiest!"

Alone and thinking it over, she had uttered other words to herself--yet scarce uttered them, rather felt them:

"Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannot fail us became human. My love for him, which is the divine thing in my life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him on that night."

When the carriage had stopped at the front porch, he had led her into the house between the proud smiling servants of his establishment ranged at a respectful distance on each side; and without surrendering her even to her maid--a new spirit of silence on him--he had led her to her bedroom, to a place on the carpet under the chandelier.

Leaving her there, he had stepped backward and surveyed her waiting in her youth and loveliness--_for him;_ come into his house, into his arms--_his_; no other's--never while life lasted to be another's even in thought or in desire.

Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence of many had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he could gather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his arms and set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. As his warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under their mustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one little phrase--one little but most lasting and fateful phrase:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe_!"

Looking up with a smile, she saw that she stood under a bunch of mistletoe swung from the chandelier.

Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwards know that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness as the first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered them most clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to grow down into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself upon the life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been the green spot of verdure under life's dark skies--the undying bough into which the spirit of the whole tree retreats from the ice of the world:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

Through the first problem of learning to weld her nature to his wisely; through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeing some of them pa.s.s away; through the ambition of having him rise in his profession and through the ideal of making his home an earthly paradise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he came back,--upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of that mystical phrase:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

She turned away now, starting once more downward toward the evergreens. He was quickly at her side.

"What do you suppose Harold and Elizabeth are up to about this time?"

he asked, with a good-humored jerk of his head toward the distant town.

"At least to something mischievous, whatever it is," she replied. "They begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windows were lighted; they have seen the shop windows two or three times already this week: there is no great marvel for them now in shop windows. Permission to stay late may be a blind to come home early. They are determined, from what I have overheard, to put an end this year to the parental house mysteries of Christmas. They are crossing the boundary between the first childhood and the second. But if it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more just as it has always been; let it be so for my sake!"

"And I wish it for your sake," he replied heartily; "and for my purposes."

After a moment of silence he asked: "How large a Tree must it be this year?"

"It will have to be large," she replied; and she began to count those for whom the Tree this year was meant.

First she called the names of the two children they had lost. Gifts for these were every year hung on the boughs. She mentioned their names now, and then she continued counting:

"Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the family come Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor's children. Then the servants--long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow for the other children who are to make up the Christmas party: ten children have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten children will arrive. The ten will bring with them some unimportant parents; you can judge."

"That will do for size," he said, laughing. "Now the kind: spruce--larch--hemlock--pine--which shall it be?"

"It shall be none of them!" she answered, after a little waiting. "It shall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeer are harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts--fir. The old Christmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in it longest. And deepest mystery darkens the heart of it," she added.

"Fir it shall be!" he said. "Choose the tree."

"I have chosen."

She stopped and delicately touched his wrist with the finger tips of one white-gloved hand, bidding him stand beside her.

"That one," she said, pointing down.

The brook, watering the roots of the evergreens in summer gratefully, but now lying like a band of samite, jewel-crusted, made a loop near the middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on this island, aloof from its fellows and with s.p.a.ce for the growth of its boughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, tapering faultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered more years--a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurred with wildness and lapped by low was.h.i.+ngs of the planet's primeval ocean.

At each Christmas for several years they had been tempted to cut this tree, but had spared it for its conspicuous beauty at the edge of the thicket.

"That one," she now said, pointing down. "This is the last time. Let us have the best of things while we may! Is it not always the perfect that is demanded for sacrifice?"

His glance had already gone forward eagerly to the tree, and he started toward it.

Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went up close to the fir. With a movement not un.o.bserved by her he held out his hand and clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the fir seemed to stretch out to him recognizingly. (She had always realized the existence of some intimate bond between him and the forest.) His face now filled with meanings she did not share; the spell of the secret work had followed him out of the house down to the trees; incommunicable silence shut him in. A moment later his fingers parted with the green fingers of the fir and he moved away from her side, starting around the tree and studying it as though in delight of fresh knowledge. So she watched him pa.s.s around to the other side.

When he came back where he had started, she was not there. He looked around searchingly; her figure was nowhere in sight.

He stood--waiting.