THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE

BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN

AUTHOR OF "FLUTE AND VIOLIN, " "A KENTUCKY CARDINAL, " "AFTERMATH, " ETC. 

TO ONE WHO KNOWS

Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner. Mais ilfaut regarder beaucoup et songer à ce qu'on a vu. Voir: tout est là, et voir juste. J'entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeuxet non avec ceux des maîtres. L'originalité d'un artiste s'indiqued'abord dans les petites choses et non dans les grandes. 

Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n'a pas encoredécouverte et tâcher de l'exprimer d'une façon personelle. 

--GUY DE MAUPASSANT. 

PREFACE

Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprisedbeforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure northe purpose of The Novel. 

It is a story. There are two characters--a middle-aged married coupleliving in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature islocated; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment onemovement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoeveris introduced; and the time is about forty hours. 

A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected toappear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother arecharacters, and the family friend the country doctor; butsubordinately all. The main story concerns itself with the fourchildren of the two households. 

It is an American children's story:

"A Brood of The Eagle. "

During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published, entitled:

"The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation. "

The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete acycle of the theme. 

CONTENTS

 EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL

 I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET

 II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET

 III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES

 IV. THE WANDERING TALE

 V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES

 VI. THE WHITE DAWN

EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL

A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country. It has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some ofits outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for somecrisis in her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and soleft it lying as one of her ancient battle-pieces--Kentucky. 

The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunkdeep into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward thesunset. Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature, cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restlessfoam--the Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound abright river to the rim of silver. And where the eastern part risesloftiest on the horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, shepiled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves eresnowflakes fly and with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirsthrough the gladdening and the saddening year. Then crosswise over themiddle of the Shield, northward and southward upon the breadth of it, covering the life-born rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skinof verdure--a broad strip of hide of the ever growing grass. Sheembossed noble forests on this greensward and under the forests drewclear waters. 

This she did in a time of which we know nothing--uncharted ages beforeman had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, thoughtsto wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the samepower has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she broughthim forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has madeit sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace. Nor hasshe yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished withanything in the universe. While therefore she continues her will andpleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget theShield. 

She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man howlittle his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes uponthe shield of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like afalcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to herangered son. 

These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield ofAchilles and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:

Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead thebride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. Anassembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisenabout the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up oneafter another and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshlyploughed fields where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, theearth growing dark behind the share. The estate of a landowner wherelaborers are reaping; some armfuls the binders are binding withtwisted bands of straw: among them the farmer is standing in silence, leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vineyards with purplingclusters and happy folk gathering these in plaited baskets on sunnyafternoons. A herd of cattle with incurved horns hurrying from thestable to the woods where there is running water and wherepurple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with whitesheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing, their fingers on one another's wrists: a great company stands watchingthe lovely dance of joy. 

Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageantsof life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker ofold wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin andsilver, bronze and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on thethrobbing land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. Butthere with the old things she mingles new things, with the neverchanging the ever changing; for the old that remains always the newand the new that perpetually becomes old--these Nature allots to manas his two portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in what he isand go upward or go downward through all that he is to become. 

But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon thestately grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreadsover the length and breadth of it once every year now as best liked bythe entire people; and this is both old and new. 

It is old because it contains man's faith in his immortality, whichwas venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever greweffulgent before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because itcontains those latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which brieflyblossom out upon the primitive stock with the altering years and soonare blown away upon the winds of change. Since this spectacle, thisfestival, is thus old and is thus new and thus enwraps the deepestthing in the human spirit, it is never forgotten. 

When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of thewind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of aflowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fatteninggrain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnalemptiness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife, --all daysof the year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoeverof good or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget. 

When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seemsfarthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when thefields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turnswistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and themystery of his end, --then comes the great pageant of the wintersolstice, then comes Christmas. 

So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differingbut always identical mortals?

It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the oldpagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival whenthe hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It wasthe pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants ofan upper world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, andthe production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is nowthe festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortalchildren. It is now the new festival of man's remembrance of hiserrors and his charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly becomethe widening festival of universal brotherhood with succor for allneed and nighness to all suffering; of good will warring against illwill and of peace warring upon war. 

And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is thefestival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, itis on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many anage to many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen;setting forth man's pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that willnot stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds itsancient way upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light. 

This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield. 

I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET

A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country afew years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December. 

One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desknear his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing andturned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of hismental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through theevergreens. 

Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned therelike short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths andcustoms of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper, as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the largeone. It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in theclass of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries whichpossess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds. 

Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwritinglay thickly on the desk. A table in the centre of the room was strewnwith volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On thetops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representingscenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other printshanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the timesand places where they had been gathered, brought together in this roomof a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens. 

While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to besubmerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other ofthree picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly. 

Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy anda girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being wellenough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unrulyand disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of themlooked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American franknessand good humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy anddetermination. Apparently they already believed that the New World wasbehind them, that the nation backed them up. In a way you believedit. You accepted them on the spot as embodying that marvellousprecocity in American children, through which they early in lifebecome conscious of the country and claim it their country and believethat it claims them. Thus they took on the distinction of being asquad detached only photographically from the rank and file of thewhite armies of the young in the New World, millions and millionsstrong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnificent, toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for humanity--akinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God. 

The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years ofage. Her features were without noticeable American characteristics. What human traits you saw depended upon what human traits you sawwith. 

The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And thelashes were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornilyhedged about, somehow brought up before you a picture of autumnthistles--thistles that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had averitable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields, sure of their experience in nature, freighted with silence. 

Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were inthe summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beautyof blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men orwomen--they held a look of being just. 

The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lowerpart had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that littlebank of snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowingdesires of the mouth), the upper part would have given the impressionof reserve, coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that onelook--the garnered wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. Thewhole face being seen, the lower features altered the impression madeby the upper ones; reserve became bettered into strength, coldnessbettered into dignity, severity of intellect transfused into glowingnobleness of character. The look of virgin justice in her was perhapswhat had survived from that white light of life which falls upon youngchildren as from a receding sun and touches lingeringly their smilesand glances; but her mouth had gathered its shadowy tenderness as shewalked the furrows of the years, watching their changeful harvests, eating their passing bread. 

A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before herpicture: holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray ofthe cedar of the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. Whenhe had come in from out of doors to go on with his work, he had putthem there--perhaps as some tribute. After all his years with her, many and strong, he must have acquired various tributes andinterpretations; but to-day, during his walk in the woods, it hadbefallen him to think of her as holly which ripens amid snows andretains its brave freshness on a landscape of departed things. Ascedar also which everywhere on the Shield is the best loved offorest-growths to be the companion of household walls; so that eventhe poorest of the people, if it does not grow near the spot theybuild in, hunt for it and bring it home: everywhere wife and cedar, wife and cedar, wife and cedar. 

The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers withheads a little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures inwhich cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly Hebrewmaid. Glowing young American mother with four healthy children as hergifts to the nation--this was the practical thought of her thatriveted and held. 

As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy andgirl in each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces oftwo were on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her againand persuaded yourself that the expression of motherhood whichcharacterized her separated into two expressions (as behind a thinwhite cloud it is possible to watch another cloud of darkerhue). Nearer in time was the countenance of a mother happy with happyoffspring; further away the same countenance withdrawn a little intoshadow--the face of the mother bereaved--mute and changeless. 

The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two survivingchildren now followed through the world as their leader, sat with hisface toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared beforehis undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his positionas the minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him thatwas oftener in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanlytimes. A low powerful figure with a pair of thick shoulders andtremendous limbs; filling the room with his vitality as a heavypassionate animal lying in a corner of a cage fills the space of thecage, so that you wait for it to roll over or get up on its feet andwalk about that you may study its markings and get an inkling of itsconquering nature. 

Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had thrownhis overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of theroom and had dropped his hat upon his coat. It had slipped to thefloor and now lay there--a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly muchworn by young Southerners of the countryside, --especially on occasionswhen there was a spur of heat in their mood and going, --much the samekind that one sees on the heads of students in Rome in winter; light, warm, shaping itself readily to breezes from any quarter, to be doffedor donned as comfortable and negligible. It suggested that he had beena country boy in the land, still belonged to the land, and as a mankept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His shoes, one of whichyou saw at each side of his chair, were especially well made forrough-going feet to tramp in during all weathers. 

A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw yourinterpretation of him from farm life to the arts or theprofessions. The scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing againstthe clear-hued flesh at the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-likeedge of the shirt cuff, defining his powerful wrist and hand, strengthened the notion that he belonged to the arts or to theprofessions. He might have been sitting before a canvas instead of adesk and holding a brush instead of a pen: the picture would have beentrue to life. Or truer yet, he might have taken his place with thegrave group of students in the Lesson in Anatomy left by Rembrandt. 

Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to readthe page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big, masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executivehead--covered with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that whileeverything else in his appearance indicated that he was in the primeof manhood, the clipped hair caused him to appear still more youthful;and it invested him with a rustic atmosphere which went along verynaturally with the sentimental country hat and the all-weathershoes. He seemed at first impression a magnificent animal franklyloved of the sun--perhaps too warmly. The sun itself seemed to havecolored for him his beard and mustache--a characteristic hue of men'shair and beard in this land peopled from Old English stock. The beard, like the hair, was cut short, as though his idea might have been toget both hair and beard out of life's daily way; but his mustachecurled thickly down over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole effectthere was a suggestion of the Continent, perhaps of a former studentcareer in Germany, memories of which may still have lasted with himand the marks of which may have purposely been kept up in hisappearance. 

But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man's face, does much touncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thoughtsurely led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend togetherover some point on the human road, at which knowledge widens andsuffering begins to be made more bearable and death morekind. Perforce now you interpreted him and fixed his general workingcategory: that he was absorbed in work meant to be serviceable tohumanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of hisneighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller onhis farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the raceforever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows. 

He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped itsresponsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests. The look of the student left his face; over it began to play the softlights of the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for hisown place in the world; the student had become the husband andhouse-father. A few moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his workagain, his right hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to thepictures. 

The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he werebeing watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed. (He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that heis idolized. )

Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immenseoak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminderof vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, thestraining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcriesfor the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, animage of forest reflection. Once a small black-and-white sapsucker, circling the trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on alevel with the windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into theroom like steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on thewindow-sill, glanced familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest;but disappointed perhaps that it was not noticed, quoted its resignedgray phrase--a phrase it had made for itself to accompany the score ofgray whiter--and flitted on billowy wings to a juniper at the cornerof the house, its turret against the long javelins of the North. 

Amid the stillness of Nature outside and the house-silence of a loveguarding him within, the man worked on. 

A little clock ticked independently on the old-fashioned Parian marblemantelpiece. Prints were propped against its sides and face, illustrating the use of trees about ancient tombs and temples. Out ofthis photographic grove of dead things the uncaring clock threw outupon the air a living three--the fateful three that had been measuredfor each tomb and temple in its own land and time. 

A knock, regretful but positive, was heard, and the door opening intothe hall was quietly pushed open. A glow lit up the student's facethough he did not stop writing; and his voice, while it gave awelcome, unconsciously expressed regret at being disturbed:

"Come in. "

"I am in!"

He lifted his heavy figure with instant courtesy--rather obsoletenow--and bowing to one side, sat down again. 

"So I see, " he said, dipping his pen into his ink. 

"Since you did not turn around, you would better have said 'So Ihear. ' It is three o'clock. "

"So I hear. "

"You said you would be ready. "

"I am ready. "

"You said you would be done. "

"I am done--nearly done. "

"How nearly?"

"By to-morrow--to-morrow afternoon before dark. I have reached theend, but now it is hard to stop, hard to let go. "

His tone gave first place, primary consideration, to his work. Thesilence in the room suddenly became charged. When the voice was heardagain, there was constraint in it:

"There is something to be done this afternoon before dark, something Ihave a share in. Having a share, I am interested. Being interested, Iam prompt. Being prompt, I am here. "

He waved his hand over the written sheets before him--those cold Alpsof learning; and asked reproachfully:

"Are you not interested in all this, O you of little faith?"

"How can I say, O me of little knowledge!"

As the words impulsively escaped, he heard a quick movement behindhim. He widened out his heavy arms upon his manuscript and looked backover his shoulder at her and laughed. And still smiling and holdinghis pen between his fingers, he turned and faced her. She had advancedinto the middle of the room and had stopped at the chair on which hehad thrown his overcoat and hat. She had picked up the hat and stoodturning it and pushing its soft material back into shape for hishead--without looking at him. 

The northern light of the winter afternoon, entering through thelooped crimson-damask curtains, fell sidewise upon the woman of thepicture. 

Years had passed since the picture had been made. There were changesin her; she looked younger. She had effaced the ravages of a sadderperiod of her life as human voyagers upon reaching quiet port repairthe damages of wandering and storm. Even the look of motherhood, ofthe two motherhoods, which so characterized her in the photograph, haddisappeared for the present. Seeing her now for the first time, onewould have said that her whole mood and bearing made a singledeclaration: she was neither wife nor mother; she was a woman in lovewith life's youth--with youth--youth; in love with the things thatyouth alone could ever secure to her. 

The carriage of her beautiful head, brave and buoyant, brought beforeyou a vision of growing things in nature as they move towards theirsummer yet far away. There still was youth in the round white throatabove the collar of green velvet--woodland green--darker than thegreen of the cloth she wore. You were glad she had chosen that colorbecause she was going for a walk with him; and green would enchain theeye out on the sere ground and under the stripped trees. Theflecklessness of her long gloves drew your thoughts to winterrather--to its one beauteous gift dropped from soiled clouds. Aslender toque brought out the keenness in the oval of her face. Fromit rose one backward-sweeping feather of green shaded to coral at thetip; and there your fancy may have cared to see lingering the lastradiance of whiter-sunset skies. 

He kept his seat with his back to the manuscript from which he hadrepulsed her; and his eyes swept loyally over her as shewaited. Though she could scarcely trust herself to speak, still lesscould she endure the silence. With her face turned toward the windowsopening on the lawn, she stretched out her arm toward him and softlyshook his hat at him. 

"The sun sets--you remember how many minutes after four, " she said, with no other tone than that of quiet warning. "I marked the minutesin the almanac for you the other night after the children had gone tobed, so that you would not forget. You know how short the twilightsare even when the day is clear. It is cloudy to-day and there will notbe any twilight. The children said they would not be at home untilafter dark, but they may come sooner; it may be a trick. They havethreatened to catch us this year in one way or another, and you knowthey must not do that--not this year! There must be one more Christmaswith all its old ways--even if it must be without its old mysteries. "

He did not reply at once and then not relevantly:

"I heard you playing. "

He had dropped his head forward and was scowling at her from under hisbrows with a big Beethoven brooding scowl. She did not see, for sheheld her face averted. 

The silence in the room again seemed charged, and there was greaterconstraint in her voice when it was next heard:

"I had to play; you need not have listened. "

"I had to listen; you played loud--"

"I did not know I was playing loud. I may have been trying to drownother sounds, " she admitted. 

"What other sounds?" His voice unexpectedly became inquisitorial: itwas a frank thrust into the unknown. 

"Discords--possibly. "

"What discords?" His thrust became deeper. 

She turned her head quickly and looked at him; a quiver passed acrossher lips and in her eyes there was noble anguish. 

But nothing so arrests our speech when we are tempted to betray hiddentrouble as to find ourselves face to face with a kind of burnished, radiant happiness. Sensitive eyes not more quickly close before ablaze of sunlight than the shadowy soul shuts her gates upon theadvancing Figure of Joy. 

It was the whole familiar picture of him now--triumphantly painted inthe harmonies of life, masterfully toned to subdue its discords--thatdrove her back into herself. When she spoke next, she had regained theself-control which under his unexpected attack she had come nearlosing; and her words issued from behind the closed gates--as througha crevice of the closed gates:

"I was reading one of the new books that came the other day, the deepgrave ones you sent for. It is written by a deep grave German, and itis worked out in the deep grave German way. The whole purpose of itis to show that any woman in the life of any man is merely--anIncident. She may be this to him, she may be that to him; for abriefer time, for a greater time; but all along and in the end, atbottom, she is to him--an Incident. "

He did not take his eyes from hers and his smile slowly broadened. 

"Were those the discords?" he asked gently. 

She did not reply. 

He turned in his chair and looking over his shoulder at her, he raisedhis arm and drew the point of his pen across the backs of a stack ofmagazines on top of his desk. 

"Here is a work, " he said, "not written by a German or by any otherman, but by a woman whose race I do not know: here is a work the solepurpose of which is to prove that any man is merely an Incident in thelife of any woman. He may be this to her, he may be that to her; fora 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 hiseyes. 

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

Her eyes rested on his face with inscrutable searching. She made nocomment. 

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

"Do I not understand? Have I not understood all the time? For a yearnow I have been shutting myself up at spare hours in this room and atthis work--without any explanation to you. Such a thing never occurredbefore in our lives. You have shared everything. I have relied uponyou and I have needed you, and you have never failed me. And thisapparently has been your reward--to be rudely shut out at last. Nowyou come in and I tell you that the work is done--quitefinished--without a word to you about it. Do I not understand?" herepeated. "Have I not understood all along? It is true; outwardly asregards this work you have been--the Incident. "

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

He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:

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

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

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

Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from awoodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself aboutthe hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmospherenear by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tenderhaze of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred. 

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

"Stay blinded and bewildered there, " he said, "until the hour comeswhen 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 winterafternoon had perceptibly waned in the room. 

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

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

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

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

She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downwardover his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache. Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the cat softlyon his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she putout one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profileover 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 sleevewith a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind thecollar:

"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 areright and the books are right: men and women _are_ only Incidentsto each other in life, " and she passed out into the hall. 

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

He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenlystopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over thebooks, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final surveyeverything that he had brought together from such distances of placeand time. His work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush ofloneliness, came over him as it comes upon all of us who reach thehappy 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 hestopped again and looked back. 

Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he wason the commons where the race encamps; he was brother to all brotherswho join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the momentthat through his hands ran the long rope of the world at whichmen--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to towher into some divine haven. 

His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry anymessage? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth, with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerablechildren of the future the better for its shining?

"Are you coming?" she called more quiveringly. 

"I am coming, " he called back, breaking away from his revery, andraising 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 theshort frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expectingto be joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixedon the doorway for his emerging figure. 

"To-morrow night, " he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in hiswords, "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! Kindignorance, enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control orconjecture, come to me and console me!"

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

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

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

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

Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had justbeen shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of earsready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshlyto remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in agenial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many afull-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at thisseason. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of allfarms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken onposthumous honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the blackrafters home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavorover 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 stubbleof which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpnessfor the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into thedrills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumnaftermath. 

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

Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: themistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of heartymen--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkeyand the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sightthere--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned intoofferings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soiluplifted 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-dayand lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the oliveverdure. Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce norlarch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wildcedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblageof evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they hadbeen planted. 

It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their noteof deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscapethis dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky theywaited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and sprucewhich seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; thedim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summerskies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat whensnows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward. 

These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished thepicture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfiedno appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them theChristmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape theirboughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires thespiritual hope of humanity would take its flight toward the eternal. 

Thus then the winter land waited for the oncoming of that strangetravelling festival of the world which has roved into it and encampedgypsy-like from old lost countries: the festival that takes toll offield and wood, of hoof and wing, of cup and loaf; but that, best ofall, wrings from the nature of man its reluctant tenderness for hisfellows and builds out of his lonely doubts regarding this life hisfaith in a better one. 

And central on this whole silent scene--the highest element in it--itsone winter-red passion flower--the motionless woman waiting outsidethe house. 

At last he came out upon the step. 

He cast a quick glance toward the sky as though his first thought wereof what the weather was going to be. Then as he buttoned the topbutton of his overcoat and pressed his bearded chin down over it tomake it more comfortable under his short neck, with his other hand hegave a little pull at his hat--the romantic country hat; and he peepedout from under the rustic brim at her, smiling with old gayeties andold fondnesses. He bulked so rotund inside his overcoat and looked soshort under the flat headgear that her first thought was how slight adisguise every year turned him into a good family Santa Claus; and shesmiled back at him with the same gayeties and fondnesses of days goneby. But such a deeper pang pierced her that she turned away and walkedhurriedly down the hill toward the evergreens. 

He was quickly at her side. She could feel how animal youth in himreleased itself the moment he had come into the open air. There wasbrutal vitality in the way his shoes crushed the frozen ground; and ashis overcoat sleeve rubbed against her arm, there was the same leapingout of life, like the rubbing of tinder against tinder. Halfway downthe 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, thecountry turnpike ran; and from this there now reached them therumbling of many vehicles, hurrying in close procession out of thenearest town and moving toward smaller villages scattered over thecountry; to its hamlets and cross-roads and hundreds of homes richeror poorer--every vehicle Christmas-laden: sign and foretoken of theSouthern Yule-tide. There were matters and usages in those Americancarriages and buggies and wagons and carts the history of which wentback to the England of the Georges and the Stuarts and the Henrys; tothe England of Elizabeth, to the England of Chaucer; back throughrobuster Saxon times to the gaunt England of Alfred, and on beyondthis till they were lost under the forest glooms of Druidical Britain. 

They stood looking into each other's eyes and gathering into theirears the festal uproar of the turnpike. How well they knew what it allmeant--this far-flowing tide of bounteousness! How perfectly they sawthe whole picture of the town out of which the vehicles had come: theatmosphere of it already darkened by the smoke of soft coal pouringfrom its chimneys, so that twilight in it had already begun to fallahead of twilight out in the country, and lamp-posts to glimmer alongthe little streets, and shops to be illuminated to the delight ofwindow-gazing, mystery-loving children--wild with their holidayexcitements and secrecies. Somewhere in the throng their own twochildren were busy unless they had already started home. 

For years he had held a professorship in the college in this town, driving in and out from his home; but with the close of this academicyear he was to join the slender file of Southern men who have beencalled to Northern universities: this change would mean the end oflife here. Both thought of this now--of the last Christmas in thehouse; and with the same impulse they turned their gaze back to it. 

More than half a century ago the one starved genius of the Shield, awriter of songs, looked out upon the summer picture of this land, itsmeadows and ripening corn tops; and as one presses out the spirit ofan entire vineyard when he bursts a solitary grape upon his tongue, he, the song writer, drained drop by drop the wine of that scene intothe notes of a single melody. The nation now knows his song, the worldknows it--the only music that has ever captured the joy and peace ofAmerican home life--embodying the very soul of it in the clear amberof sound. 

This house was one of such homesteads as the genius sang of: a low, old-fashioned, brown-walled, gray-shingled house; with chimneysgenerous, with green window-shutters less than green and whitewindow-sills less than white; with feudal vines giving to its wallstheir summery allegiance; not young, not old, but standing in themiddle 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 hisown on the afternoon of their wedding several miles away across thecountry. They had arrived at dark; and as she had sat beside him inthe carriage, one of his arms around her and his other hand enfoldingboth of hers, she had first caught sight of it through the foresttrees--waiting for her with its lights just lit, its warmth, itsprivacies: and that had been Christmas Eve!

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

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

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

"Of old it was written how on Christmas Night the Love that cannotfail us became human. My love for him, which is the divine thing inmy life and which is never to fail him, shall become human to him onthat night. "

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

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

Then as if the marriage ceremony of the afternoon in the presence ofmany had meant nothing and this were the first moment when he couldgather her home to him, he had come forward and taken her in his armsand set upon her the kiss of his house and his ardor and his duty. Ashis warm breath broke close against her face, his lips under theirmustache, almost boyish then, had thoughtlessly formed one littlephrase--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 ofmistletoe swung from the chandelier. 

Straightway he had forgotten his own words, nor did he ever afterwardsknow that he had used them. But she, out of their very sacredness asthe first words he had spoken to her in his home, had remembered themmost clingingly. More than remembered them: she had set them to growdown into the fibres of her heart as the mistletoe roots itself uponthe life-sap of the tree. And in all the later years they had been thegreen spot of verdure under life's dark skies--the undying bough intowhich 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 hiswisely; through the perils of bearing children and the agony of seeingsome of them pass away; through the ambition of having him rise in hisprofession and through the ideal of making his home an earthlyparadise; through loneliness when he was away and joy whenever he cameback, --upon her whole life had rested the wintry benediction of thatmystical phrase:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

 * * * * *

She turned away now, starting once more downward toward theevergreens. 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 distanttown. 

"At least to something mischievous, whatever it is, " shereplied. "They begged to be allowed to stay until the shop windowswere lighted; they have seen the shop windows two or three timesalready this week: there is no great marvel for them now in shopwindows. Permission to stay late may be a blind to come homeearly. They are determined, from what I have overheard, to put an endthis year to the parental house mysteries of Christmas. They arecrossing the boundary between the first childhood and the second. Butif it be possible, I wish everything to be kept once more just as ithas always been; let it be so for my sake!"

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

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

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

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

"Harold and Elizabeth are four. You and I make six. After the familycome Herbert and Elsie, your best friend the doctor's children. Thenthe servants--long strong bottom branches for the servants! Allow forthe other children who are to make up the Christmas party: tenchildren have been invited, ten children have accepted, ten childrenwill 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. "Itshall be the Christmas Tree of the uttermost North where the reindeerare harnessed and the Great White Sleigh starts--fir. The oldChristmas stories like fir best. Old faiths seem to lodge in itlongest. 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 ofone 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 nearthe middle point of the lawn, creating a tiny island; and on thisisland, aloof from its fellows and with space for the growth of itsboughs, stood a perfect fir tree: strong-based, thick-set, taperingfaultlessly, star-pointed, gathering more youth as it gathered moreyears--a tame dweller on the lawn but descended from forests blurredwith wildness and lapped by low washings of the planet's primevalocean. 

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

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

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

Descending, they stepped across the brook to the island and went upclose to the fir. With a movement not unobserved by her he held outhis hand and clasped three green fingers of a low bough which the firseemed to stretch out to him recognizingly. (She had always realizedthe existence of some intimate bond between him and the forest. ) Hisface now filled with meanings she did not share; the spell of thesecret work had followed him out of the house down to the trees;incommunicable silence shut him in. A moment later his fingers partedwith 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 freshknowledge. So she watched him pass around to the other side. 

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

He stood--waiting. 

The valley had memories, what memories! The years came close togetherhere; they clustered as thickly as the trees themselves. Vacant spotsamong them marked where the Christmas Trees of former years had beencut down. Some of the Trees had been for the two children they hadlost. This wandering trail led hither and thither back to the firstTree for the first child: he had stooped down and cut that close tothe ground with his mere penknife. When it had been lighted, it hadheld only two or three candles; and the candle on the top of it hadflared level into the infant's hand-shaded eyes. 

He knew that she was making through the evergreens a Pilgrimage of theYears, walking there softly and alone with the feet of life's Pitiesand a mother's Constancies. 

He waited for her--motionless. 

The stillness of the twilight rested on the valley now. Only from thetrees came the plaintive twittering of birds which had come in fromfrozen weeds and fence-rows and at the thresholds of the boughs werecalling to one another. It was not their song, but their speech; therewas no love in it, but there was what for them perhaps corresponds toour sense of ties. It most resembled in human life the brief thingsthat two people, having long lived together, utter to each other whentogether in a room they prepare for the night: there is noanticipation; it is a confession of the unconfessed. About him nowsounded this low winter music from the far boundary of other lives. 

He did not hear it. 

The light on the landscape had changed. The sun was setting and asplendor began to spread along the sky and across the land. It laid aglory on the roof of the house on the hill; it smote the edge of thewoodland pasture, burnishing with copper the gray domes; it shonefaintly on distant corn shocks, on the weather-dark tents of the hempat bivouac soldierly and grim. At his feet it sparkled in rose gleamson the samite of the brook and threw burning shafts into the gloom ofthe fir beside him. 

He did not see it. 

He did not hear the calling of the birds about his ears, he did notsee the sunset before his eyes, he did not feel the fir tree theboughs of which stuck against his side. 

He stood there as still as a rock--with his secret. Not the secret ofthe year's work, which was to be divulged to his wife and through herto the world; but the secret which for some years had been growing inhis life and which would, he hoped, never grow into the open--to beseen of her and of all men. 

The sentimental country hat now looked as though it might have beenworn purposely to help out a disguise, as the more troubled man behindthe scenes makes up to be the happier clown. It became an absurdity, amockery, above his face grave, stern, set of jaw and eye. He was nolonger the student buried among his books nor human brother to toilingbrothers. He had not the slightest thought of service to mankind leftin him, he was but a man himself with enough to think of in the battlebetween his own will and blood. 

And behind him among the dark evergreens went on that Pilgrimage ofthe Years--with the feet of the Pities and the Constancies. 

Moments passed; he did not stir. Then there was a slight noise on theother side of the tree, and his nature instantly stepped back into hisoutward place. He looked through the boughs. She had returned and wasstanding with her face also turned toward the sunset; it was verypale, very still. 

Such darkness had settled on the valley now that the green she woreblent with the green of the fir. He saw only her white face and herwhite hands so close to the branches that they appeared to rest uponthem, to grow out of them: he sadly thought of one of his prints ofEgypt of old and of the Lady of the Sacred Tree. Her longbackward-sweeping plume of green also blent with the green of thefir--shade to shade--and only the coral tip of it remained stronglyvisible. This matched the last coral in the sunset; and it seemed torest ominously above her head as a finger-point of the fading light ofNature. 

He went quickly around to her. He locked his arms around her and drewher close and held her close; and thus for a while the two stood, watching the flame on the altar of the world as it sank lower, leavingemptiness and ashes. 

Once she put out a hand and with a gesture full of majesty andnobleness waved farewell to the dying fire. 

Still without a word he took his arms from around her and turnedenergetically to the tree. 

He pressed the lowest boughs aside and made his way in close to thetrunk and struck it with a keen stroke. 

The fir as he drew the axe out made at its gashed throat a sound likethat of a butchered, blood-strangled creature trying to cry out toolate against a treachery. A horror ran through the boughs; thethousands of leaves were jarred by the death-strokes; and the top ofit rocked like a splendid plume too rudely treated in a storm. Then itfell over on its side, bridging blackly the white ice of the brook. 

Stooping, he lifted it triumphantly. He set the butt-end on one of hisshoulders and, stretching his arms up, grasped the trunk and held thetree straight in the air, so that it seemed to be growing out of hisbig shoulder as out of a ledge of rock. Then he turned to her andlaughed out in his strength and youth. She laughed joyously back athim, glorying as he did. 

With a robust re-shouldering of the tree to make it more comfortableto carry, he turned and started up the hill toward the house. As shefollowed behind, the old mystery of the woods seemed at last to havetaken bodily possession of him. The fir was riding on his shoulder, its arms met fondly around his neck, its fingers were caressing hishair. And it whispered back jeeringly to her through the twilight:

"Say farewell to him! He was once yours; he is yours no longer. Hedandles the child of the forest on his shoulder instead of hischildren by you in the house. He belongs to Nature; and as Naturecalls, he will always follow--though it should lead over the precipiceor into the flood. Once Nature called him to you: remember how hebroke down barriers until he won you. Now he is yours no longer--saygood-by to him!"

With an imbued terror and desolation, she caught up with him. By amovement so soft that he should not be aware, she plucked him by thecoat sleeve on the other side from the fir and held on to him as hestrode on in careless joy. 

Halfway up the hill lights began to flash from the windows of thehouse: a servant was bringing in the lamps. It was at this hour, injust this way, that she had first caught sight of them on thatChristmas Eve when he had brought her home after the wedding. 

She hurried around in front of him, wishing to read the expression ofhis eyes by the distant gleams from the windows. Would they havenothing to say to her about those winter twilight lamps? Did he, too, not remember?

His head and face were hidden; a thousand small spears of Naturebristled between him and her; but he laughed out to her from behindthe rampart of the green spears. 

At that moment a low sound in the distance drew her attention, andinstantly alert she paused to listen. Then, forgetting everythingelse, she called to him with a rush of laughter like that of hermischief-loving girlhood:

"Quick! There they are! I heard the gate shut at the turnpike! Theymust not catch us! Quick! Quick!"

"Hurry, then!" he cried, as he ran forward, joining his laughter tohers. "Open the door for me!"

After this the night fell fast. The only sounds to be heard in thevalley were the minute readjustments of the ice of the brook as itfroze tighter and the distressed cries of the birds that had roostedin the fir. 

So the Tree entered the house. 

III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES

During the night it turned bitter cold. When morning came the sky wasa turquoise and the wind a gale. The sun seemed to give out light butnot heat--to lavish its splendor but withhold its charity. Moist fleshif it chanced to touch iron froze to it momentarily. So in whiter landthe tongue of the ermine freezes to the piece of greased metal used asa trap and is caught and held there until the trapper returns or untilit starves--starves with food on its tongue. 

The ground, wherever the stiff boots of a farmhand struck it, resistedas rock. In the fetlocks of farm horses, as they moved shivering, balls of ice rattled like shaken tacks. The little roughnesses ofwoodland paths snapped off beneath the slow-searching hoofs offodder-seeking cattle like points of glass. 

Within their wool the sheep were comforted. 

On higher fields which had given back their moisture to the atmosphereand now were dry, the swooping wind lifted the dust at intervals anddragged it away in flaunting yellow veils. The picture it made, beingso ill-seasoned, led you to think of August drought when thegrasshopper stills itself in the weeds and the smell of grass is hotin the nostrils and every bird holds its beak open and its wingslifted like cooling lattices alongside its breast. In these veils ofdust swarms of frost crystals sported--dead midgets of the deadNorth. Except crystal and dust and wind, naught moved out there; nofield mouse, no hare nor lark nor little shielded dove. In the nakedtrees of the pasture the crow kept his beak as unseen as the owl's;about the cedars of the yard no scarlet feather warmed the day. 

The house on the hill--one of the houses whose spirit had been blowninto the amber of the poet's song--sent festal smoke out of itschimneys all day long. At intervals the radiant faces of childrenappeared at the windows, hanging wreaths of evergreens; or theirfigures flitted to and fro within as they wove garlands on the wallsfor the Christmas party. At intervals some servant with head andshoulders muffled in a bright-colored shawl darted trippingly from thehouse to the cabins in the yard and from the cabins back to thehouse--the tropical African's polar dance between fire and fire. Byevery sign it gave the house showed that it was marshalling its wholehappiness. 

One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oaktree beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under thehearth-stones and whose boughs were outstretched across the roof, seemed to writhe and rock in its winter sleep with murmurings andtossings like a human dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream. Imagination might have said that some darkest tragedy of forests longsince gone still lived in this lone survivor--that it struggled togive up the grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame. 

The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept acrossthe upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; andtoward sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began tofall. Not the large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late inspring upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller oneswhich drop too soon on dim wild violets in November woods, but wintersnow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes. 

 * * * * *

It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield. 

Softly the snow fell upon the year's footprints and pathways ofchildren and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted. Moresoftly upon too crowded asylums for them: houses of noonday darknesswhere eyes eagerly look out at the windows but do not see; houses ofsoundlessness where ears listen and do not hear any noise; houses ofsilence where lips try to speak but utter no word. 

The snow of Christmas Eve was falling softly on the old: whose eyesare always seeing vanished faces, whose ears hear voices gentler thanany the earth now knows, whose hands forever try to reach other handsvainly held out to them. Sad, sad to those who remember loved onesgone with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!

But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses haveceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve tothem! Dark its snow and blinding!

 * * * * *

It was late that night. 

She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp--the onlylight in the room. Her face, always calm in life's wisdom, butagitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her, rested clear-cut upon the darkness. 

She placed the lamp on a table near the door and seated herself besideit. But she pushed the lamp away unconsciously as though the light ofthe house were no longer her light; and she sat in the chair as thoughit were no longer her chair; and she looked about the room as thoughit were no longer hers nor the house itself nor anything else that shecared for most. 

Earlier in the evening they had finished hanging the presents on theTree; but then an interruption had followed: the children had brokenprofanely in upon them, rending the veil of the house mysteries; andfor more than an hour the night had been given up to them. Now thechildren were asleep upstairs, already dreaming of Christmas Morn andthe rush for the stockings. The servants had finished their work andwere gone to their quarters out in the yard. The doors of the housewere locked. There would be no more intrusion now, no possibleinterruption; all the years were to meet him and her--alone. For Lifeis the master dramatist: when its hidden tragedies are ready to utterthemselves, everything superfluous quits the stage; it is theessential two who fill it! And how little the rest of the world everhears of what takes place between the two!

A little while before he had left the room with the step-ladder; whenhe came back, he was to bring with him the manuscript--the silentsnowfall of knowledge which had been deepening about him for ayear. The time had already passed for him to return, but he did notcome. Was there anything in the forecast of the night that made himfalter? Was he shrinking--_him_ shrink? She put away the thoughtas a strange outbreak of injustice. 

How still it was outside the house with the snow falling! How stillwithin! She began to hear the ticking of the tranquil old clock underthe stairway out in the hall--always tranquil, always tranquil. Andthen she began to listen to the disordered strokes of her ownheart--that red Clock in the body's Tower whose beats are sent outwardalong the streets and alleys of the blood; whose law it is to bealternately wound too fast by the fingers of Joy, too slow by thefingers of Sorrow; and whose fate, if it once run down, neverafterwards either by Joy or Sorrow to be made to run again. 

At last she could hear the distant door of his study open and closeand his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing andtramp he brought himself toward her!--with what self-unconsciousnessand virile strength in his feet! His steps entered and crossed hisbedroom, entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood therebefore her in the parlor doorway, a few yards off--stopped andregarded her intently, smiling. 

In a moment she realized what had delayed him. When he had gone awaywith the step-ladder, he had on a well-worn suit in which, behindlocked doors, he had been working all the afternoon at the decorationsof the Tree. Now he came back ceremoniously dressed; the rest of thenight was to be in her honor. 

It had always been so on this anniversary of their bridal night. Theyhad always dressed for it; the children now in their graves had beendressed for it; the children in bed upstairs were regularly dressedfor it; the house was dressed for it; the servants were dressed forit; the whole life of that establishment had always been made to feelby honors and tendernesses and gayeties that this was the night onwhich he had married her and brought her home. 

As her eyes swept over him she noted quite as never before how theseanniversaries had not taken his youth away, but had added youth tohim; he had grown like the evergreen in the middle of the room--withincrease of trunk and limbs and with larger tides of strength surgingthrough him toward the master sun. There were no ravages of marriedlife in him. Time had merely made the tree more of a tree and made hisyouth more youth. 

She took in momentary details of his appearance: a moisture likesummer heat along the edge of his yellow hair, started by the bathinto which he had plunged; the freshness of the enormous hands holdingthe manuscript; the muscle of the forearm bulging within thedress-coat sleeve. Many a time she had wondered how so perfect ananimal as he had ever climbed to such an elevation of work; and thenhad wondered again whether any but such an animal ever in life does soclimb--shouldering along with him the poise and breadth of health andcausing the hot sun of the valley to shine on the mountain tops. 

Finally she looked to see whether he, thus dressed in her honor, thusbut the larger youth after all their years together, would return hergreeting with a light in his eyes that had always made them sobeautiful to her--a light burning as at a portal opening inward forher only. 

His eyes rested on his manuscript. 

He brought it wrapped and tied in the true holiday spirit--sprigs ofcedar and holly caught in the ribands; and he now lifted and held itout to her as a jeweller might elevate a casket of gems. Then hestepped forward and put it on the table at her elbow. 

"For you!" he said reverently, stepping back. 

There had been years when, returning from a tramp across the country, he would bring her perhaps nothing but a marvellous thistle, or abrilliant autumn leaf for her throat. 

"For you!" he would say; and then, before he could give it to her, hewould throw it away and take her in his arms. Afterwards she wouldpick up the trifle and treasure it. 

"For you!" he now said, offering her the treasure of his year's toiland stepping back. 

So the weight of the gift fell on her heart like a stone. She did notlook at it or touch it but glanced up at him. He raised his finger, signalling for silence; and going to the chimney corner, brought backa long taper and held it over the lamp until it ignited. Then with alook which invited her to follow, he walked to the Tree and began tolight the candles. 

He began at the lowest boughs and, passing around, touched them one byone. Around and around he went, and higher and higher twinkled thelights as they mounted the tapering sides of the fir. At the top hekindled one highest red star, shining down on everything below. Thenhe blew out the taper, turned out the lamp; and returning to the tree, set the heavy end of the taper on the floor and grasped it midway, asone might lightly hold a stout staff. 

The room, lighted now by the common glow of the candles, revealeditself to be the parlor of the house elaborately decorated for thewinter festival. Holly wreaths hung in the windows; the walls weregarlanded; evergreen boughs were massed above the window cornices; onthe white lace of window curtains many-colored autumn leaves, pressedand kept for this night, looked as though they had been blown therescatteringly by October winds. The air of the room was heavy withodors; there was summer warmth in it. 

In the middle of the room stood the fir tree itself, with its topclose to the ceiling and its boughs stretched toward the four walls ofthe room impartially--as symbolically to the four corners of theearth. It would be the only witness of all that was to take placebetween them: what better could there be than this messenger ofsilence and wild secrecy? From the mountains and valleys of the planetits race had looked out upon a million generations of men and women;and the calmness of its lot stretched across the turbulence of humanpassion as an ancient bridge spans a modern river. 

At the apex of the Tree a star shone. Just beneath at the firstforking of the boughs a candle burned. A little lower down a crossgleamed. Under the cross a white dove hung poised, its pinionsoutstretched as though descending out of the infinite upon someearthly object below. From many of the branches tiny bells swung. There were little horns and little trumpets. Other boughs saggedunder the weight of silvery cornucopias. Native and tropical fruitswere tied on here and there; and dolls were tied on also with cordsaround their necks, their feet dangling. There were smiling masks, like men beheaded and smiling in their death. Near the base of theTree there was a drum. And all over the Tree from pinnacle to baseglittered a tinsel like golden fleece--looking as the moss of oldSouthern trees seen at yellow sunset. 

He stood for a while absorbed in contemplation of it. This year at hisown request the decorations had been left wholly to him; now he seemedsatisfied. 

He turned to her eagerly. 

"Do you remember what took place on Christmas Eve last year?" heasked, with a reminiscent smile. "You sat where you are sitting and Istood where I am standing. After I had finished lighting the Tree, doyou remember what you said?"

After a moment she stirred and passed her fingers across her brows. 

"Recall it to me, " she answered. "I must have said many things. I didnot know that I had said anything that would be remembered a year. Recall it to me. "

"You looked at the Tree and said what a mystery it is. When and wheredid it begin, how and why?--this Tree that is now nourished in theaffections of the human family round the world. "

"Yes; I remember that. "

"I resolved to find out for you. I determined to prepare during whathours I could spare from my regular college work the gratification ofyour wish for you as a gift from me. If I could myself find the wayback through the labyrinth of ages, then I would return for you andlead you back through the story of the Christmas Tree as that storyhas never been seen by any one else. All this year's work, then, hasbeen the threading of the labyrinth. Now Christmas Eve has come again, my work is finished, my gift to you is ready. "

He made this announcement and stopped, leaving it to clear the air ofmystery--the mystery of the secret work. 

Then he resumed: "Have you, then, been the Incident in this toil asyesterday you intimated that you were? Do you now see that you havebeen the whole reason of it? You were excluded from any share in thework only because you could not help to prepare your own gift! That isall. What has looked like a secret in this house has been nosecret. You are blinded and bewildered no longer; the hour has comewhen holly and cedar can speak for themselves. "

Sunlight broke out all over his face. 

She made no reply but said within herself:

"Ah, no! That is not the trouble. That has nothing to do with thetrouble. The secret of the house is not a misunderstanding; it islife. It is not the doing of a year; it is the undoing of theyears. It is not a gift to enrich me with new happiness; it is alesson that leaves me poorer. "

He went on without pausing:

"It is already late. The children interrupted us and took up part ofyour evening. But it is not too late for me to present to you somelittle part of your gift. I am going to arrange for you a short storyout of the long one. The whole long story is there, " he added, directing his eyes toward the manuscript at her elbow; and his voiceshowed how he felt a scholar's pride in it. "From you it can pass outto the world that celebrates Christmas and that often perhaps asks thesame question: What is the history of the Christmas Tree? But now mystory for you!"

"Wait a moment, " she said, rising. She left the package where it was;and with feet that trembled against the soft carpet crossed the roomand seated herself at one end of a deep sofa. 

Gathering her dignity about her, she took there the posture of alistener--listening at her ease. 

The sofa was of richly carved mahogany. Each end curved into a scrolllike a landward wave of the sea. One of her foam-white arms rested onone of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small tableon which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of itprofuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of herfavorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her thisafternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozenmessenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down thewall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her backwere cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her pianostood and on it lay the music she played of evenings to him, or playedwith thoughts of him when she was alone. And other music also whichshe many a time read; as Beethoven's Great Nine. 

Now, along this wall of the parlor from window curtain to windowcurtain there stretched a festoon of evergreens and ribands put thereby the children for their Christmas-Night party; and into this festoonthey had fastened bunches of mistletoe, plucked from the walnut treefelled the day before--they knowing nothing, happy children!

There she reclined. 

The lower outlines of her figure were lost in a rich blackness overwhich points of jet flashed like swarms of silvery fireflies in sometoo warm a night of the warm South. The blackness of her hair and theblackness of her brows contrasted with the whiteness of her bare armsand shoulders and faultless neck and faultless throat bared also. Notfar away was hid the warm foam-white thigh, curved like Venus's of oldout of the sea's inaccessible purity. About her wrists garlands of oldfamily corals were clasped--the ocean's roses; and on her breast, between the night of her gown and the dawn of the flesh, coral budsflowered in beauty that could never be opened, never be rifled. 

When she had crossed the room to the sofa, two agedhouse-dogs--setters with gentle eyes and gentle ears and gentlebreeding--had followed her and lain down at her feet; and one with athrust of his nose pushed her skirts back from the toe of her slipperand rested his chin on it. 

"I will listen, " she said, shrinking as yet from other speech. "I wishsimply to listen. There will be time enough afterwards for what I haveto say. "

"Then I shall go straight through, " he replied. "One minute now whileI put together the story for you: it is hard to make a good shortstory out of so vast a one. "

During these moments of waiting she saw a new picture of him. Understress of suffering and excitement discoveries denied to calmer hoursoften arrive. It is as though consciousness receives a shock thatcauses it to yawn and open its abysses: at the bottom we see newthings: sometimes creating new happiness; sometimes old happiness istaken away. 

As he stood there--the man beside the Tree--into the picture enteredthree other men, looking down upon him from their portraits on thewalls. 

One portrait represented the first man of his family to scale themountains of the Shield where its eastern rim is turned away from thereddening daybreak. Thence he had forced his way to its centralportions where the skin of ever living verdure is drawn over therocks: Anglo-Saxon, backwoodsman, borderer, great forest chief, hewingand fighting a path toward the sunset for Anglo-Saxon women andchildren. With his passion for the wilderness--its game, enemies, campfire and cabin, deep-lunged freedom. This ancestor had a lonely, stern, gaunt face, no modern expression in it whatsoever--the timelessface of the woods. 

Near his portrait hung that of a second representative of thefamily. This man had looked out upon his vast parklike estates hi thecentral counties; and wherever his power had reached, he had used iton a great scale for the destruction of his forests. Woods-slayer, field-maker; working to bring in the period on the Shield when thehand of a man began to grasp the plough instead of the rifle, when thestallion had replaced the stag, and bellowing cattle wound fatly downinto the pastures of the bison. This man had the face of hiscaste--the countenance of the Southern slave-holding feudal lord. Notthe American face, but the Southern face of a definite era--less thannational, less than modern; a face not looking far in any directionbut at things close around. 

From a third portrait the latest ancestor looked down. He with hiscontemporaries had finished the thinning of the central forest of theShield, leaving the land as it is to-day, a rolling prairie withremnants of woodland like that crowning the hilltop near thishouse. This immediate forefather bore the countenance that began todevelop in the Northerner and in the Southerner after the Civil War:not the Northern look nor the Southern look, but the American look--anew thing in the American face, indefinable but unmistakable. 

These three men now focussed their attention upon him, the fourth ofthe line, standing beside the tree brought into the house. Each ofthem in his own way had wrought out a work for civilization, using thewoods as an implement. In his own case, the woods around him havingdisappeared, the ancestral passion had made him a student of forestry. 

The thesis upon which he took his degree was the relation of modernforestry to modern life. A few years later in an adjunct professorshiphis original researches in this field began to attract attention. These had to do with the South Appalachian forest in its relation toSouth Appalachian civilization and thus to that of the continent. 

This work had brought its reward; he was now to be drawn away from hisown college and country to a Northern university. 

Curiously in him there had gone on a corresponding development of anancestral face. As the look of the wilderness hunter had changed intothat of the Southern slave-holding baron, as this had changed into themodern American face unlike any other; now finally in him the nationalAmerican look had broadened into something more modern still--the lookof mere humanity: he did not look like an American--he looked like aman in the service of mankind. 

This, which it takes thus long to recapitulate, presented itself toher as one wide vision of the truth. It left a realization of how thepast had swept him along with its current; and of how the future nowcaught him up and bore him on, part in its problems. The old passionliving on in him--forest life; a new passion born in him--humanlife. And by inexorable logic these two now blending themselvesto-night in a story of the Christmas Tree. 

But womanlike she sought to pluck out of these forces somethingintensely personal to which she could cling; and she did it in thiswise. 

In the Spring following their marriage, often after supper they wouldgo out on the lawn in the twilight, strolling among her flowers; sheleading him this way and that way and laying upon him beautifulexactions and tyrannies: how he must do this and do that; and not dothis and not do that; he receiving his orders like a grateful slave. 

Then sometimes he would silently imprison her hand and lead her downthe lawn and up the opposite hill to the edge of the early summerevening woods; and there on the roots of some old tree--the shadows ofthe forest behind them and the light of the western sky in theirfaces--they would stay until darkness fell, hiding their eyes fromeach other. 

The burning horizon became a cathedral interior--the meeting of love'sholiness and the Most High; the crescent dropped a silver veil uponthe low green hills; wild violets were at their feet; the mosses andturf of the Shield under them. The warmth of his body was as the day'ssunlight stored in the trunk of the tree; his hair was to her like itstawny bloom, native to the sun. 

Life with him was enchanted madness. 

He had begun. He stretched out his arm and slowly began to write onthe air of the room. Sometimes in earlier years she had sat in hisclassroom when he was beginning a lecture; and it was thus, standingat the blackboard, that he sometimes put down the subject of hislecture for the students. Slowly now he shaped each letter and as hefinished each word, he read it aloud to her:

"A STORY OF THE CHRISTMAS TREE, FOR JOSEPHINE, WIFE OF FREDERICK"

IV. THE WANDERING TALE

"Josephine!"

He uttered her name with beautiful reverence, letting the sound of itfloat over the Christmas Tree and die away on the garlanded walls ofthe room: it was his last tribute to her, a dedication. 

Then he began:

"Josephine, sometimes while looking out of the study window a springmorning, I have watched you strolling among the flowers of the lawn. Ihave seen you linger near a honeysuckle in full bloom and question theblossoms in your questioning way--you who are always wishing to probethe heart of things, to drain out of them the red drop of theirsignificance. But, gray-eyed querist of actuality, those fragranttrumpets could blow to your ear no message about their origin. It waswhere the filaments of the roots drank deepest from the mould of adead past that you would have had to seek the true mouthpieces oftheir philosophy. 

"So the instincts which blossom out thickly over the nature of modernman to themselves are mute. The flower exhibits itself at the tip ofthe vine; the instinct develops itself at the farthest outreach oflife; and the point where it clamors for satisfaction is at thegreatest possible distance from its birthplace. For all theseinstincts send their roots down through the mould of the uncivilized, down through the mould of the primitive, down into the mould of theunderhuman--that ancient playhouse dedicated to low tragedies. 

"While this may seem to you to be going far for a commencement of thestory, it is coming near to us. The kind of man and woman we are toourselves; the kind of husband and wife we are to each other; the kindof father and mother we are to our children; the kind of human beingswe are to our fellow beings--the passions which swell as with sap thebuds of those relations until they burst into their final shapes ofconduct are fed from the bottom of the world's mould. You and Ito-night are building the structures of our moral characters uponlife-piles that sink into fathomless ooze. All we human beings dip ourdrinking cups into a vast delta sweeping majestically towards the seaand catch drops trickling from the springs of creation. 

"It is in a vast ancestral country, a Fatherland of Old Desire, thatmy story lies for you and for me: drawn from the forest and from humannature as the two have worked in the destiny of the earth. I havewrested it from this Tree come out of the ancient woods into the houseon this Night of the Nativity. "

He made the scholar's pause and resumed, falling into the tone of easynarrative. It had already become evident that this method of tellingthe story would be to find what Alpine flowers he could for her amidAlpine snows. 

He told her then that the oldest traceable influence in the life ofthe human race is the sea. It is true that man in some ancestral formwas rocked in the cradle of the deep; he rose from the waves as theislanded Greeks said of near Venus. Traces of this origin he stillbears both in his body and his emotions; and together they make up hisfirst set of memories--Sea Memories. 

He deliberated a moment and then put the truth before her in a singlepicturesque phrase:

"Man himself is a closed living sea-shell in the chambers of which thehues of the first ocean are still fresh and its tempests still aresounding. "

Next he told her how man's last marine ancestor quit one day the seanever again to return to the deep, crossed the sands of the beach andentered the forest; and how upon him, this living sea-shell, soft toimpressions, the Spirit of the Forest fell to work, beginning to shapeit over from sea uses to forest uses. 

A thousand thousand ages the Spirit of the Forest worked at thesea-shell. 

It remodelled the shell as so much clay; stood it up and twisted andbranched it as young pliant oak; hammered it as forge-glowing iron;tempered it as steel; cast it as bronze; chiselled it as marble;painted it as a cloud; strung and tuned it as an instrument; lit it upas a life tower--the world's one beacon: steadily sending it onwardthrough one trial form after another until at last had been perfectedfor it that angelic shape in which as man it was ever afterwards tosob and to smile. 

And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and enteredthe forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappearedat the edge of the forest the creature it had made. On every wall ofits being internal and external forest-written; and completelyforest-minded: having nothing but forest knowledge, forest feeling, forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith; so that in all it coulddo or know or feel or dream or imagine or believe it wasforest-tethered. 

At the edge of the forest then this creature uncontrollably impelledto emerge from the waving green sea of leaves as of old it had beendriven to quit the rolling blue ocean of waters: Man at the dawn ofour history of him. 

And if the first set of race memories--Sea Memories--still endurewithin him, how much more powerful are the second set--the ForestMemories!

So powerful that since the dawn of history millions have perished asforest creatures only; so powerful that there are still remnant raceson the globe which have never yet snapped the primitive tether andwill become extinct as mere forest creatures to the last; so powerfulthat those highest races which have been longest out in the open--asour own Aryan race--have never ceased to be reached by the influenceof the woods behind them; by the shadows of those tall morning treesfalling across the mortal clearings toward the sunset. 

These Master Memories, he said, filtering through the sandlikegenerations of our race, survive to-day as those pale attenuatedaffections which we call in ourselves the Love of Nature; theseaffections are inherited: new feelings for nature we have none. Thewriters of our day who speak of civilized man's love of nature as adeveloping sense err wholly. They are like explorers who shouldmistake a boundary for the interior of a continent. Man's knowledge ofnature is modern, but it no more endows him with new feeling thanmodern knowledge of anatomy supplies him with a new bone or his latestknowledge about his blood furnishes him with an additional artery. 

Old are our instincts and passions about Nature: all are ForestMemories. 

But among the many-twisted mass of them there is one, he said, thatcontains the separate buried root of the story: Man's Forest Faith. 

When the Spirit of the Forest had finished with the sea-shell, it hadplanted in him--there to grow forever--the root of faith that he was aforest child. His origin in the sea he had not yet discovered; thescience of ages far distant in the future was to give him that. Tohimself forest-tethered he was also forest-born: he believed it to behis immediate ancestor, the creative father of mankind. Thus theGreeks in their oldest faith were tethered to the idea that they weredescended from the plane tree; in the Sagas and Eddas the human raceis tethered to the world-ash. Among every people of antiquity thisforest faith sprang up and flourished: every race was tethered to someancestral tree. In the Orient each succeeding Buddha of Indianmythology was tethered to a different tree; each god of the laterclassical Pantheon was similarly tethered: Jupiter to the oak, Apolloto the laurel, Bacchus to the vine, Minerva to the olive, Juno to theapple, on and on. Forest worship was universal--the most impressiveand bewildering to modern science that the human spirit has ever builtup. At the dawn of history began The Adoration of the Trees. 

Then as man, the wanderer, walked away from his dawn across the agestoward the sunset bearing within him this root of faith, it grew withhis growth. The successive growths were cut down by the successivescythes of time; but always new sprouts were put forth. 

Thus to man during the earliest ages the divine dwelt as a bodilypresence within the forest; but one final day the forest lost theImmortal as its indwelling creator. 

Next the old forest worshipper peopled the trees with an intermediaterace of sylvan deities less than divine, more than human; and long hebeguiled himself with the exquisite reign and proximity of these; butthe lesser could not maintain themselves in temples from which thegreater had already been expelled, and they too passed out of sightdown the roadway of the world. 

Still the old forest faith would not let the wanderer rest; and duringyet later ages he sent into the trees his own nature so that the woodsbecame freshly endeared to him by many a story of how individuals ofhis own race had succeeded as tenants to the erstwhile habitations ofthe gods. Then this last panorama of illusion faded also, andcivilized man stood face to face with the modern woods--inhabitatedonly by its sap and cells. The trees had drawn their bark close aroundthem, wearing an inviolate tapestry across those portals through whichso many a stranger to them had passed in and passed out; andhenceforth the dubious oracle of the forest--its one reply to allman's questionings--became the Voice of its own Mystery. 

After this the forest worshipper could worship the woods no more. Butwe must not forget that civilization as compared with the duration ofhuman life on the planet began but yesterday: even our ownIndo-European race dwells as it were on the forest edge. And theforest still reaches out and twines itself around our deepestspiritual truths: home--birth--love--prayer--death: it tries tooverrun them all, to reclaim them. Thus when we build our houses, instinctively we attempt by some clump of trees to hide them and toshelter ourselves once more inside the forest; in some countrieswhenever a child is born, a tree is planted as its guardian in nature;in our marriage customs the forest still riots as master of ceremonieswith garlands and fruits; our prayers strike against the forest shapedhi cathedral stone--memory of the grove, God's first temple; and whenwe die, it is the tree that is planted beside us as the sentinel ofour rest. Even to this day the sight of a treeless grave arouses someobscure instinct in us that it is God-forsaken. 

Yes, he said, whatsoever modern temple man has anywhere reared for hisspirit, over the walls of it have been found growing the same leaf andtendril: he has introduced the tree into the ritual of every laterworld-worship; and thus he has introduced the evergreen into theritual of Christianity. 

This then is the meaning of the Christmas Tree and of its presence atthe Nativity. At the dawn of history we behold man worshipping thetree as the Creator literally present on the earth; in our time we seehim using that tree in the worship of the creative Father's Son cometo earth in the Father's stead. 

"On this evergreen in the room falls the radiance of these brieftapers of the night; but on it rests also the long light of thatspiritual dawn when man began his Adoration of the Trees. It is theforest taking its place once more beside the long-lost Immortal. "

Here he finished the first part of his story. That he should addressher thus and that she thus should listen had in it nothing unusual forthem. For years it had been his wont to traverse with her the groundof his lectures, and she shared his thought before it reachedothers. It was their high and equal comradeship. Wherever his mindcould go hers went--a brilliant torch, a warming sympathy. 

But to-night his words had fallen on her as withered leaves on amotionless figure of stone. If he was sensible of this change in her, he gave no sign. And after a moment he passed to the remaining part ofthe story. 

"Thus far I have been speaking to you of the bare tree in wild nature:here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you thatthey too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over intothe service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds theseForest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid itsbranches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you ineach case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything onthe Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room. "

It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him andnever afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoewould have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himselfunexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She wouldmeet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of theYears! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where atraveller must arrive, she waited for him there. 

He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forestworshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it hisofferings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists inoffering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man hadlearned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitivecustom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but duringthat immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to setone stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--theonly cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it wasprayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate theChristmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship ofprimitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself. 

And now he began. 

With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of thefir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star ofBethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on theNight of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But moderndiscoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four orfive thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as theyhave been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping thissame star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as theysearched for the incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as thestar of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in thosedim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, forlove of some Chaldean Elizabeth--both he and she blown about thedesert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records thestar and the Tree are brought together as here side by side. And thestory of the star leads backward to one of the first things that manever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of theheavens floating in the depth of space--light that he wanted but couldnot grasp. 

He touched the next object on the Tree--the candle under the star--andwent on:

Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages havingcaught this light--having brought it down in the language of his mythfrom heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as havingbecome a star in his hand--the candle: the star worshipper had nowbecome also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to thefire worshippers of ancient Persia--those highlands of the spiritseeking light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merelyborrowed from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination;but the use of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, nowalso the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having noother altar. Far down toward modern times the temples of the oldPrussians, for example, were oak groves, and among them a hierarchy ofpriests was ordained to keep the sacred fire perpetually burning atthe root of the sacred oak. 

He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under thecandle--and went on:

"To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys sawand the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that agethought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Pauland the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. TheMagdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out atthe foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third centuryafter Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christiansymbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity ofEgypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire oflife which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross hehas ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man ascrucified as the image of humanity. And thus ages before Christ, cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance, among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made withthe trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three theycut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood. "

He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on thetree--the dove under the cross, and went on:

"In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white doveof the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when theheavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends, overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific whitedove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol ofreproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed tomanifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divinemother of nature is often represented with this dove as havingactually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here againforest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured inthe oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wingsan omen. "

On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story ofeach backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each wasentwined with forest worship. 

He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, hesaid, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship ofthe vine. And vine worship was forest worship. Moreover, in the sameoak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and theirtinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boybeats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worshipof Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man's firstwritten music in forgotten China. In the first century of theChristian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhistsculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship ofthe sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the serviceof forest faith. 

He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram'shorn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and usedalso to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vineitself--the forest's first goblet. 

He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldestof all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learnedto shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could atleast bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring, the wild fruit of autumn. 

He kept on until only three things on the Tree were leftuninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her thathe had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were themost trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them mostclearly could be traced the presence of great law running through theprogress of humanity. 

He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping itlike a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course ofages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forestworship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everythingmost precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice andself-sacrifice. Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of thesacred tree with gold and ornaments. Herodotus relates that whenXerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and hadit honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that whenRomulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung richspoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom ofdecorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we canmeet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleeceand in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Now the customhas dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mocksacrifice for the real. 

He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind theirmockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificingprisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forestworship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this tohave been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. In the courseof time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mockcountenance replaced the real. 

He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others, its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificingchildren in forest worship. How common this custom was the earlyliterature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounterthe trace of it in Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by thecommand of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slayinghis son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been wellestablished. In the case of Jephthah's daughter the sacrifice wasactually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate ofIphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world's mercy; in herstead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac's case, wasaccepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against theinhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock forthe real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of theChristmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive ritesonly these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of theinnocent. 

He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All thelittle stories, like pathways running backward into the distance andever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forestworship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart. 

And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:

"Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Treeis all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper couldnot worship without giving, because to worship is to give: thereforehe brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts, remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were hissacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since, the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed thebetter to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst tothe best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, itwould still have to worship what is highest in human nature and soworshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrificebecome the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offerup what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankindhas ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its ownCalvary. "

He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited herappreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and withouta word. But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as alistener who wakens from a long revery. 

"Have you finished the story for me?" she inquired. 

"I have finished the story for you, " he replied without betrayingdisappointment at her icy reception of it. 

Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head, turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throatshowed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays ofmistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:

"You have not interpreted this, " she said, her mind fixed on that soleomission. 

"I have not explained that, " he admitted. 

She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest towardthe manuscript on the table across the room. 

"Have you explained it there?"

"I have not explained it there. "

"But why?" she said with disappointment. 

"I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine. "

"But why, Frederick?" she inquired, startled into wonderment. 

He smiled: "If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story. "

"But why do you not wish to tell me the story?"

He answered with warning frankness: "If you once saw it as a picture, the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your lifedarkly. "

She protested: "If it is dark to you, why should I not share thedarkness of it? Have we not always looked at life's shadows together?And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to usand dark things but half as dark?"

He merely repeated his warning: "It is a story of a crueler age thanours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids. "

She answered: "So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left totake seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink fromthe forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs notprinted in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put inlibraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since whenmust I begin to dread anything in books? Or anything in life? Andsince when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have alwayslooked at it with four eyes?"

"I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, thingsto see with two, and things to see with none. "

With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched themistletoe. 

"Tell me the story of this!" she pleaded as though she demanded aright. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, theyclosed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of thewhite pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder andwere broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap. 

He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either, he now saw, would give her pain. 

"Happily the story is far away from us, " he said, as though he werehalf inclined to grant her request. 

"If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as youbrought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and thedove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!"

He held back a long time: "You who are so safe in good, why knowevil?"

"Frederick, " she cried, "I shall have to insist upon your telling methis story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know. Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; giveeach heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth betruth!"

He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was achange in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself intothe narrative of the historian:

"Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries beforePalestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glisteningby the blue Ægean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--theliving images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournfuleternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites inthe temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the littlechildren who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brownsoldiers of Cæsar's legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in thesacred grove of Dodona, --where the motions of oak boughs wereauguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divinemessages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divinemeanings, --in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls ofEphesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To thesouth Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far outtoward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dreadvolcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often asfilled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum, with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around thebreathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered. 

"Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps, lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Cæsar who was to conquerit; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle ofBritain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak onebough--the mistletoe. "

He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had inthe early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it wasthe tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. In Greece it was thetree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italyit was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and ofmankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperialCæsars. After the Cæsars had passed, it was the oak that MichaelAngelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the SistineChapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--thereas always the chosen tree of human desire. In Britain it was thesacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priestsperformed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with suchceremonies and sacrifices as there. 

Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forestworship: the New Year's day of the Druids. 

A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on theirway to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has beenfound with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As theexcited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries ofreverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet isspread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the ArchDruid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his owneye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victimsannually sacrificed to the oak. 

A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He isclad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a goldenpruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it isblessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that eachone so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing ofwhich it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which havenever hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and areslaughtered in sacrifice. 

Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left toitself, and the New Year's ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from theoak is at an end. 

Here he ended the story. 

She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her browsknitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment inbewilderment:

"But why did you call that a dark story?" she asked. "Where is thecruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it willnever throw a dark image on my mind: New Year's day--the winterwoods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquetbeneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robedpriest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs themistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece willbe blessed in life's sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should liketo paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven's covenant withher under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished towithhold such a story from me?"

He smiled at her a little sadly. 

"I have not yet told you all, " he said, "but I have told you enough. "

Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Underher breath one word escaped:

"Ah!"

It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown toher. 

"I am sparing you, Josephine!"

She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned thewood in her clutch. 

"Are you sparing me?" she asked in a tone of torture. "Or are yousparing yourself?"

The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxedgrasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmlypicked it up. 

"I am going to tell you the story, " he said with a new quietness. 

She was aroused by some change in him. 

"I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!"

"You will have to listen, " he said. "It is better for you toknow. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer thebane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will beimpossible for you to misjudge. "

"I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that Ido not understand you are judging yourself!"

He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himselfup. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the rightnot to be pried into--not even by the nearest. 

The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearerto the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough beingthus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of hisshoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious handof the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificialtawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch onhim--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let itspassing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turnedhis head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floorlikewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stoodankle-deep in forestry. 

This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made ofit a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the oldforest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral foresttether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted theearlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart shewaited. 

He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; thefirst sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:

"Listen, Josephine!"

She buried her face in her hands. 

"I cannot! I will not!"

"You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from myother work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of ourpeople and trying to trace them back to their origin and firstmeaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forestsurvivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play andpastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross fainttraces of what were once vital realities. 

"Among these there has always been one that until recently I havenever understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard ofeverywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under themistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I havealways thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back tosome ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know. "

In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her. 

It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not thefirst day of the year--the New Year's day of the Druids when theycelebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer, perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty ofthe woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon isjust silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under thetrees. The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from thespot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing, singing, singing. 

Lifting itself above the smaller growths stands the young manhood ofthe woods--a splendid oak past its thirtieth year, representing itsyouth and its prime conjoined. In its trunk is the summer heat of theall-day sun. Around its roots is velvet turf, and there are wildviolet beds. Its huge arms are stretched toward the ground as thoughreaching for some object they would clasp; and on one of these arms asits badge of divine authority, worn there as a knight might wear thecolors of his Sovereign, grows the mistletoe. There he stands--theForest Lover. 

The woods wait, the shadows deepen, the hush is more intense, themoon's rays begin to be golden, the song of the nightingale grows morepassionate, the beds of moss and violets wait. 

Then the shrubbery is tremblingly parted at some place and upon thescene a young girl enters--her hair hanging down--her limbs mostlightly clad--the flush of red hawthorn on the white hawthorn of herskin--in her eyes love's great need and mystery. Step by step shecomes forward, her fingers trailing against whatsoever budding waysidething may stay her strength. She draws nearer to the oak, searchingamid its boughs for that emblem which she so dreads to find and yetmore dreads not to find: the emblem of a woman's fruitfulness whichthe young oak--the Forest Lover--reaches down toward her. Finding it, beneath it with one deep breath of surrender she takes her place--thevirgin's tryst with the tree--there to be tested. 

Such is the command of the Arch Druid: it is obedience--submission tothat test--or death for her as a sacrifice to the oak which she hasrejected. 

Again the shrubbery is parted, rudely pushed aside, and a manenters--a tried and seasoned man--a human oak--counterpart of theForest Lover--to officiate at the test. 

 * * * * *

He was standing there in the parlor of his house and in the presenceof his wife. But in fealty he was gone: he was in the summer woods ofancestral wandering, the fatherland of Old Desire. 

_He_ was the man treading down the shrubbery; it was _his_feet that started toward the oak; _his_ eye that searched for thefigure half fainting under the bough; for _him_ the bed of mossand violets--the hair falling over the eyes--the loosened girdle--thebreasts of hawthorn white and pink--the listening song of thenightingale--the silence of the summer woods--the seclusion--the fullsurrender of the two under that bough of the divine command, to escapethe penalty of their own death. 

The blaze of uncontrollable desire was all over him; the fire of hisown story had treacherously licked him like a wind-bent flame. Thelight that she had not seen in his eyes for so long rose in them--theold, unfathomable, infolding tenderness. A quiver ran around his tensenostrils. 

And now one little phrase which he had uttered so sacredly yearsbefore and had long since forgotten rose a second time to hislips--tossed there by a second tide of feeling. On the silence of theroom fell his words:

"_Bride of the Mistletoe!_"

The storm that had broken over him died away. He shut his eyes on thevanishing scene: he opened them upon her. 

He had told her the truth about the story; he may have been aware orhe may not have been aware that he had revealed to her the truth abouthimself. 

"This is what I would have kept from you, Josephine, " he said quietly. 

She was sitting there before him--the mother of his children, of thesleeping ones, of the buried ones--the butterfly broken on the wheelof years: lustreless and useless now in its summer. 

She sat there with the whiteness of death. 

V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES

The Christmas candles looked at her flickeringly; the little whitecandles of purity, the little red candles of love. The holly in theroom concealed its bold gay berries behind its thorns, and the cedarfrom the faithful tree beside the house wall had need now of itsbitter rosary. 

Her first act was to pay what is the first debt of a fine spirit--thedebt of courtesy and gratitude. 

"It is a wonderful story, Frederick, " she said in a manner whichshowed him that she referred to the beginning of his story and not tothe end. 

"As usual you have gone your own way about it, opening your own pathinto the unknown, seeing what no one else has seen, and bringing backwhat no one else ever brought. It is a great revelation of things thatI never dreamed of and could never have imagined. I appreciate yourhaving done this for me; it has taken time and work, but it is toomuch for me to-night. It is too new and too vast. I must hereafter tryto understand it. And there will be leisure enough. Nor can it lose bywaiting. But now there is something that cannot wait, and I wish tospeak to you about that; Frederick, I am going to ask you somequestions about the last part of the story. I have been wanting to askyou a long time: the story gives me the chance and--the right. "

He advanced a step toward her, disengaging himself from the evergreen. 

"I will answer them, " he said. "If they can be answered. "

And thus she sat and thus he stood as the questions and answers passedto and fro. They were solemn questions and solemn replies, drawn outof the deeps of life and sinking back into them. 

"Frederick, " she said, "for many years we have been happy together, sohappy! Every tragedy of nature has stood at a distance from us exceptthe loss of our children. We have lived on a sunny pinnacle of ouryears, lifted above life's storms. But of course I have realized thatsooner or later our lot must become the common one: if we did not godown to Sorrow, Sorrow would climb to us; and I knew that on theheights it dwells best. That is why I wish to say to you to-night whatI shall: I think fate's hour has struck for me; I am ready to hearit. Its arrow has already left the bow and is on its way; I open myheart to receive it. This is as I have always wished; I have said thatif life had any greatest tragedy, for me, I hoped it would come when Iwas happiest; thus I should confront it all. I have never drunk halfof my cup of happiness, as you know, and let the other half waste; Imust go equally to the depth of any suffering. Worse than thesuffering, I think, would be the feeling that I had shirked some ofit, had stepped aside, or shut my eyes, or in any manner shown myselfa cowardly soul. "

After a pause she went over this subject as though she were notsatisfied that she had made it clear. 

"I have always said that the real pathos of things is the grief thatcomes to us in life when life is at its best--when no one is toblame--when no one has committed a fault--when suffering is meted outto us as the reward of our perfect obedience to the laws of nature. Inearlier years when we used to read Keats together, who most of all ofthe world's poets felt the things that pass, even then I was wonderingat the way in which he brings this out: that to understand Sorrow itmust be separated from sorrows: they would be like shadows darkeningthe bright disk of life's clear tragedy, thus rendering it lessbravely seen. 

"And so he is always telling us not to summon sad pictures nor playwith mournful emblems; not to feign ourselves as standing on the banksof Lethe, gloomiest of rivers; nor to gather wolf's bane and twist thepoison out of its tight roots; nor set before us the cup of hemlock;nor bind about our temples the ruby grape of nightshade; nor countover the berries of the yew tree which guards sad places; nor think ofthe beetle ticking in the bed post, nor watch the wings of the deathmoth, nor listen to the elegy of the owl--the voice of ruins. Notthese! they are the emblems of our sorrows. But the emblems of Sorroware beautiful things at their perfect moment; a red peony justopening, a rainbow seen for an instant on the white foam, youth notyet faded but already fading, joy with its finger on his lips, biddingadieu. 

"And so with all my happiness about me, I wish to know life'stragedy. And to know it, Frederick, not to infer it: _I want to betold_. "

"If you can be told, you shall be told, " he said. 

She changed her position as though seeking physical relief andcomposure. Then she began:

"Years ago when you were a student in Germany, you had a collegefriend. You went home with him two or three years at Christmas andcelebrated the German Christmas. It was in this way that we came tohave the Christmas Tree in our house--through memory of him and ofthose years. You have often described to me how you and he in summerwent Alpine climbing, and far up in some green valley girdled withglaciers lay of afternoons under some fir tree, reading and drowsingin the crystalline air. You told me of your nights of wandering downthe Rhine together when the heart turns so intimately to the heartbeside it. He was German youth and song and dream and happiness toyou. Tell me this: before you lost him that last summer over thecrevasse, had you begun to tire of him? Was there anything in you thatbegan to draw back from anything in him? As you now look back at thefriendship of your youth, have the years lessened your regret forhim?"

He answered out of the ideals of his youth:

"The longer I knew him, the more I loved him. I never tired of beingwith him. Nothing in me ever drew back from anything in him. When hewas lost, the whole world lost some of its strength andnobility. After all the years, if he could come back, he would find meunchanged--that friend of my youth!"

With a peculiar change of voice she asked next:

"The doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor, yourclosest friend now in middle life. You see a great deal of the doctor;he is often here, and you and he often sit up late at night, talkingwith one another about many things: do you ever tire of the doctor andwish him away? Have you any feeling toward him that you try to keepsecret from me? Can you be a perfectly frank man with this friend ofyour middle life?"

"The longer I know him the more I like him, honor him, trust him. Inever tire of his companionship or his conversation; I have nodisguises with him and need none. "

"The children! As the children grow older do you care less for them?Do they begin to wear on you? Are they a clog, an interference? HaveHarold and Elizabeth ceased forming new growths of affection in you?Do you ever unconsciously seek pretexts for avoiding them?"

"The older they grow, the more I love them. The more they interest meand tempt away from work and duties. I am more drawn to be with themand I live more and more in the thought of what they are becoming. "

"Your work! Does your work attract you less than formerly? Does itdevelop in you the purpose to be something more or stifle in you theregret to be something less? Is it a snare to idleness or a goad totoil?"

"As the mariner steers for the lighthouse, as the hound runs down thestag, as the soldier wakes to the bugle, as the miner digs forfortune, as the drunkard drains the cup, as the saint watches thecross, I follow my work, I follow my work. "

"Life, life itself, does it increase in value or lessen? Is the worldstill morning to you with your work ahead or afternoon when you beginto tire and to think of rest?"

"The world to me is as early morning to a man going forth to hiswork. Where the human race is from and whither it is hurrying and whyit exists at all; why a human being loves what it loves and hates whatit hates; why it is faithful when it could be unfaithful and faithlesswhen it should be true; how civilized man can fight single handedagainst the ages that were his lower past--how he can developself-renunciation out of selfishness and his own wisdom out ofsurrounding folly, --all these are questions that mean more andmore. My work is but beginning and the world is morning. "

"This house! Are you tired of it now that it is older? Would yourather move into a new one?"

"I love this house more and more. No other dwelling could take itsplace. Any other could be but a shelter; this is home. And I care morefor it now that the signs of age begin to settle on it. If it were aruin, I should love it best!"

She leaned over and looked down at the two setters lying at her feet. 

"Do you care less for the dogs of the house as they grow older?"

"I think more of them and take better care of them now that theirhunting days are over. "

"The friend of your youth--the friend of your middle age--thechildren--your profession--the world of human life--this house--thedogs of the house--you care more for them all as time passes?"

"I care more for them all as time passes. "

Then there came a great stillness in the room--the stillness of alllistening years. 

"Am I the only thing that you care less for as time passes?"

There was no reply. 

"Am I in the way?"

There was no reply. 

"Would you like to go over it all again with another?"

There was no reply. 

She had hidden her face in her hands and pressed her head against theend of the sofa. Her whole figure shrank lower, as though to escapebeing touched by him--to escape the blow of his words. No wordscame. There was no touch. 

A moment later she felt that he must be standing over her, lookingdown at her. She would respond to his hand on the back of her neck. He must be kneeling beside her; his arms would infold her. Then with akind of incredible terror she realized that he was not there. At firstshe could so little believe it, that with her face still buried in onehand she searched the air for him with the other, expecting to touchhim. 

Then she cried out to him:

"Isn't there anything you can say to me?"

Silence lasted. 

"_Oh, Fred! Fred! Fred! Fred_!"

In the stillness she began to hear something--the sound of hisfootsteps moving on the carpet. She sat up. 

The room was getting darker; he was putting out the candles. It wastoo dark already to see his face. With fascination she began to watchhis hand. How steady it was as it moved among the boughs, extinguishing the lights. Out they went one by one and back into theirdarkness returned the emblems of darker ages--the Forest Memories. 

A solitary taper was left burning at the pinnacle of the Tree underthe cross: that highest torch of love shining on everything that haddisappeared. 

He quietly put it out. 

Yet the light seemed not put out, but instantly to have travelledthrough the open parlor door into the adjoining room, her bedroom; forout of that there now streamed a suffused red light; it came from thelamp near the great bed in the shadowy corner. 

This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance ofa bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with theweight of its own splendor falls face downward on the grass. And inthat room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winterdraperies. He had been living alone as a bachelor before he marriedher. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favoritecolor of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Everywinter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings, and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged--after the changingyears. 

He replaced the taper against the wall and came over and stood beforeher, holding out his hands to help her rise. 

She arose without his aid and passed around him, moving toward herbedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, hefollowed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom andcrossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keepingher face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closedthe door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with whichthe soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, shemade a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profilewithin this circlet and stood--the figure of Memory. 

Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tombwhere some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a farland, --walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all humanstories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of itsmortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him--lostto him in his own country. 

On the other side of the door the silence was that of a tomb. She hadfelt confident--so far as she had expected anything--that he wouldspeak to her through the door, try to open it, plead with her to openit. Nothing of the kind occurred. 

Why did he not come back? What bolt could have separated her from him?

The silence began to weigh upon her. 

Then in the tense stillness she heard him moving quietly about, getting ready for bed. There were the same movements, familiar to herfor years. She would not open the door, she could not leave it, shecould not stand, no support was near, and she sank to the floor andsat there, leaning her brow against the lintel. 

On the other side the quiet preparations went on. 

She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back ofa chair. The buttons made a little scraping sound against the wood. Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and heopened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking ofa chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up acrosshis knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her thesoft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony theold impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Thenfollowed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of hishands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out hislamp after he had turned it low; and then, --on the other side of thedoor, --just above her ear his knock sounded. 

The same knock waited for and responded to throughout the years; sooften with his little variations of playfulness. Many a time in earlysummer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing somebird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood--that tap ofheart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear. 

Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though herflesh were but will and spirit. When he knocked again, she was acrossthe room, sitting on the edge of her bed with her palms pressedtogether and thrust between her knees: the instinctive act of a humananimal suddenly chilled to the bone. 

The knocking sounded again. 

"Was there anything you needed?" she asked fearfully. 

There was no response but another knock. 

She hurriedly raised her voice to make sure that it would reach him. 

"Was there anything you wanted?"

As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greateralarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated herone question:

"Did you forget anything?"

Her mind refused to release itself from the iteration of that idea: itwas some _thing_--not herself--that he wanted. 

He knocked. 

Her imagination, long oppressed by his silence, now made of his knocksome signal of distress. It took on the authority of an appeal not tobe denied. She unlocked the door and opened it a little way, and oncemore she asked her one poor question. 

His answer to it came in the form of a gentle pressure against thedoor, breaking down her resistance. As she applied more strength, thiswas as gently overcome; and when the opening was sufficient, he walkedpast her into the room. 

How hushed the house! How still the world outside as the cloud wove indarkness its mantle of light!

VI. THE WHITE DAWN

Day was breaking. 

The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behindtheir outer edges faint flanges of light began to advance along thewall. It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted inagainst the window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged theyard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery. There was no need to look out in order to know that it had stoppedsnowing, that the air was windless, and that the stars were flashingsilver-pale except one--great golden-croziered shepherd of the thick, soft-footed, moving host. 

It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield. 

Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal--less asactual things than as brown shadows of the memory--a gay company ofsocks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to giveoutline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and itexposed to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a womansitting in a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shouldersover her night-dress. 

He always slept till he was awakened; the children, having stayed uppast their usual bedtime, would sleep late also; she had the whitedawn to herself in quietness. 

She needed it. 

Sleep could not have come to her had she wished. She had not slept andshe had not lain down, and the sole endeavor during those shatteredhours had been to prepare herself for his awakening. She was not yetready--she felt that during the rest of her life she should never bequite ready to meet him again. Scant time remained now. 

Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises wouldbegin. Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of itssize, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town wasproud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields;whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads thismorning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudlycastled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder fromamid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the shaggyuplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow's nestagainst the gray Appalachian wall--everywhere soon would begin thehealthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children--glad aboutthemselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happyworld. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival lay not faraway from her across the cold bar of silence. 

Soon within the house likewise the rush of the children's feet wouldstartle her ear; they would be tugging at the door, tugging at herheart. And as she thought of this, the recollection of old simplethings came pealing back to her from behind life's hills. The yearsparted like naked frozen reeds, and she, sorely stricken in herwomanhood, fled backward till she herself was a child again--safe inher father's and mother's protection. It was Christmas morning, andshe in bare feet was tipping over the cold floors toward theirbedroom--toward her stockings. 

Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they hadbeen sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose withdistinctness before her--for the wounding picture always comes to thewounded moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward thechancel. Through a stained glass window (where there was a ladder ofangels) the light fell softly on them--both silver-haired; and as withthe voices of children they were singing out of one book. Sheremembered how as she sat between them she had observed her fatherslip his hand into her mother's lap and clasp hers with asteadfastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus over their linkedhands, with the love of their youth within them and the snows of theyears upon them, they sang together:

 "Gently, Lord, O gently lead us * * * * * * "Through the changes Thou'st decreed us. "

Her father and mother had not been led gently. They had known morethan common share of life's shocks and violence, its wrongs andmeannesses and ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered thatthey were being led gently; so long as they were led together, to themit was gentle leading: the richer each in each for aught wherebynature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; thesweeter for the sour; the finer with one another because of life'srudenesses. In after years she often thought of them as faithful intheir dust; and the flowers she planted over them and watered many abright day with happy tears brought up to her in another form thefreshness of their unwearied union. 

That was what she had not doubted her own life would be--withhim--when she had married him. 

From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door openand entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance. He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offeredthat to her as for the moment at least his solution of thematter--that he should leave her to herself and absent himself inslumber. 

The instant she knew him to be asleep she set about her preparations. 

Before he awoke she must be gone--out of the house--anywhere--to saveherself from living any longer with him. His indifference in thepresence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touchand glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life'svalleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing thewhole truth, know it she should: all this left her wounded and stunnedas by an incredible blow, and she was acting first from the instinctof removing herself beyond the reach of further humiliation andbrutality. 

Instinctively she took off her wedding ring and laid it on his dresserbeside his watch: he would find it there in the morning and he coulddispose of it. Then she changed her dress for the plainest heavy oneand put on heavy walking shoes. She packed into a handbag a fewnecessary things with some heirlooms of her own. Among the latter wasa case of family jewels; and as she opened it, her eyes fell upon hermother's thin wedding ring and with quick reverence she slipped thaton and kissed it bitterly. She lifted out also her mother's locketcontaining a miniature daguerreotype of her father and dutifully fedher eyes on that. Her father was not silver-haired then, butraven-locked; with eyes that men feared at times but no woman ever. 

His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbedher exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she, coarsely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, openedher front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, andpassed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place thenext day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; thechildren wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiryat neighbors' houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--theblack ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:

"My daughter!"

Passionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answeredhim. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her bloodtook fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. Shestopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel. 

She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into itsplace with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in themiddle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding tothat power of low suggestion which is one of anger's weapons, shebegan to devise malice. She went to a wardrobe and stooping down tookfrom a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away undereverything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindledcrewel shawl, --sometimes worn by superannuated women of a formergeneration; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, shehad loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to herugliness and decrepitude. 

She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively aroundher shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and liftingit off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. Sheturned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the hugelidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drewa rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put herforefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding placesunder the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let thesehang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefullynourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to lookyoung--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into thewastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other soably, had wrought in her. 

She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare ofthe lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him inexultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in hishouse--_his_ house. 

After a while a darker mood came over her. 

With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about theroom. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where itwould be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamberwas heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--withfurtive look to see whether he observed her. 

A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay. 

Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations wasAnglo-Saxon blood of the world's fiercest; floating in the tide of itpassions of old family life which had dyed history for all time intragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; butfiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. Athousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sittingbeside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleagueredcastle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelinedcasement and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blondhair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouthreddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of herswhom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thussitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than themoon's dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled awayfrom his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousandyears ago: some mother of hers. 

It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteersso often to take its place. The best and the worst--these are thesole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making:hence life's spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, everpresent about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing thebest as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to thestandard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one maythink of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the storythat it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far:how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many atime they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabitsuch a privileged highland. 

During the first of these hours which stretched for her into thetragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from aheight of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages tothe lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance oras the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as isunfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed thegrateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evilprompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to bejustification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she wasdragging herself out of life's quicksands upward to some rock, wherethere might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness. The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatredis born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needsnot to wait for training in order to know how to destroy. 

He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in itsfaithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled mostpoignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the factthat the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountaintops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwellingnear regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestableto her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and nowhis whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of wordsabout the growth of the world's spirit--about the sacrifice of thelower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her theinvocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carriedthe Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger ofImmortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality. 

Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him withspurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment whenhe had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment shemight tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of hisunworthiness. 

And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so thedevil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide. 

Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds booncompanions. And at one period of the night she began to look back uponher experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it asa story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as thefirst stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way intothe care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into theconfidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and thatreceive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novelsof the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent yearsstudied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation's press, thenation's science of medicine, the nation's science of law, thenation's practice of religion, and the nation's imaginative literaturewere all at work with the same national omen--the decay of theAmerican family and the downfall of the home. 

Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country hadincredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands wherethe older traditions of American home life still lay like foundationrock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaitedher; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom theworld first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places ofrefuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whosemisfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted thenovelists. 

She was one of them. 

They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman whounable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walksinto it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere underanother name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memoryor to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving tothe world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remainsto her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; thewoman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating, half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman whowelcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and thecessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy toservants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herselfand sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care ofhouse, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her valueas at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman whoendeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with freshfascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the maleinstinct to keep one's own though little prized lest another acquireit and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the otherwoman: they swarmed about her, she identified each. 

And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from theircompanionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ shoulddiscover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for awhile withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman whowhen so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waitingsomewhere near. 

The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was thecountry doctor, her husband's tried and closest friend, whose childrenwere asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years_her_ secret had been--the doctor. When she had come as a brideinto that neighborhood, he, her husband's senior by several years, wasalready well established in his practice. He had attended her at thebirth of her first child; never afterwards. As time passed, she haddiscovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This haddealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and hewelcomed the wound. 

Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises fromthe turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleepalongside her, she could hear the doctor's buggy passing on its way tosome patient, or on its return from the town where he had patientsalso. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road ofhis life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darknessand beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he wasout there. 

Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed whereher husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward thedoctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing withhim. 

Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and envelopedit. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old losthuman paths. 

The endless night scarcely moved on. 

 * * * * *

She was wearied out, she was exhausted. There is anger of suchintensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations thatare its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame, and being unfed, it dies out. Moreover, it is the destiny of aportion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very nobility fromwinning low battles; these always go against them: the only victoriesfor them are won when they are leading the higher forces of humannature in life's upward conflicts. 

She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neithermoral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundlessplain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is likethe radiance of the storm-winged sky. 

And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figuresappeared--her children. Hitherto the energies of her mind hadgrappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memoriesthat decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories beganwith her children. 

She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening itwith the palm of her hand, started upstairs. 

There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rearstairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and thebroad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habitshe started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drewback. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of theYears. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrinkfrom a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes therest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, butdeepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there inthe middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledgeof good and evil which at Creation's morning had driven Woman fromParadise. 

She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house, but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if heshould awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seekher--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--thedrift back to the old mooring. )

Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear ofremembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up tothe last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seekher. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room toroom for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong hissearch. But one day some two years before this, when she had enteredhis study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for hiswriting desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on, making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands;she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in;she knew it was the beginning of the end. 

The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre ofthe bedchamber. 

When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he haddone or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself. Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; theold touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, morefor work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness ofreserve; she seeing Nature's movement yet refusing to believe it; thenat last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridalnight as the hour of the ordeal. 

If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?

She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her righthand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There wasa turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle raysfell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on astep, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, herelbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyssof the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!

She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surroundinglifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happinessoverflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them towardher by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realmswhich nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struckinto speechlessness long æons past. 

She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden God of Hours; she hadoften feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of itshe would pin inside the walls little clusters of blossoms as votiveofferings: if it would only move faster and bring him home! The usualhour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She hadsymbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for thechildren--the three in one--the trinity of the household. 

She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her. 

The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him, up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: allis well!

It was the first sound that had reached her from any source duringthis agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outsidehumanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds ustogether as long as possible and then separates us and goes on itsway--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which weldsthe sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separatesands and sends the level tide softly over them. 

Once for him, once for her, once for the children! She took up thecandle and went upstairs to them. 

For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two littlegirls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and inanother room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turnedon one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fistoutside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would bedivided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife;and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would thendrop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing whatbefalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she wouldthen realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incidentto her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature's impartialeconomy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she mustbear with his mother's whims and ways. Her daughter would caution herhusband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The verystudy of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in themas the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as asearchlight of her failings. 

He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of hisdiscussing her with any human being. Even though he should some daydesert her, he would never discuss her. 

She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with heragainst the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strengthfrom her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. But now shebegan to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her. Could he have recognized the situation without rendering itworse? Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck athim? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not haveleft a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung inher ears unceasingly? To pass it over was as though it had neverbeen--was not _that_ his protection?

She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed herchild in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor'schildren--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by therear stairway. 

She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she hadplaced the lamp--near the manuscript--and she sat down and looked atthat remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there. 

He had made her the gift of his work--dedicated to her the triumphs ofhis toil. It was his deep cry to her to share with him his wideningcareer and enter with him into the world's service. She crossed herhands over it awhile, and then she left it. 

The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of theimmense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music. After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to theechoes of those influences that come into the soul from musiconly, --the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. Shesat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her earbegan faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story. 

One of her delights in growing things on the farm had been to watchthe youth of the hemp--a field of it, tall and wandlike and tufted. Ifthe north wind blew upon it, the myriad stalks as by a common impulseswayed southward; if a zephyr from the south crossed it, all headswere instantly bowed before the north. West wind sent it east and eastwind sent it west. 

And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which wesometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It isrun through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces, each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does. Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all thingsseem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across theexpanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Placeyourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche isrushing to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, andlo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. Yousee what you care to see, and find what you wish to find. 

In his story of the Forest and the Heart he had wanted to trace butone law, and he had traced it; he had drawn all things together andbent them before its majesty: the ancient law of Sacrifice. Of old thehigh sacrificed to the low; afterwards the low to the high: once thesacrifice of others; now the sacrifice of ourselves; but always inourselves of the lower to the higher in order that, dying, we maylive. 

With this law he had made his story a story of the world. 

The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldæa; the candle bore it toancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; thedove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore itto Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus andRome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoeto Britain, --and all brought it to Christ, --Christ the latestworld-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving ofall for all. 

The story was for herself, he had said, and for himself. 

Himself! Here at last all her pain and wandering of this night ended:at the bottom of her wound where rankled _his problem_. 

From this problem she had most shrunk and into this she now entered:She sacrificed herself in him! She laid upon herself his temptationand his struggle. 

 * * * * *

Taking her candle, she passed back into her bedroom and screened itwhere she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom. 

She put her wedding ring on again with blanched lips. She went to hisbedside, and drawing to the pillow the chair on which his clothes werepiled, sat down and laid her face over on it; and there in that shrineof feeling where speech is formed, but whence it never issues, shemade her last communion with him:

_"You, to whom I gave my youth and all that youth could mean to me;whose children I have borne and nurtured at my breast--all of whoseeyes I have seen open and the eyes of some of whom I have closed;husband of my girlhood, loved as no woman ever loved the man who tookher home; strength and laughter of his house; helper of what is bestin me; my defender against things in myself that I cannot govern;pathfinder of my future; rock of the ebbing years! Though my hair turnwhite as driven snow and flesh wither to the bone, I shall never ceaseto be the flame that you yourself have kindled. 

"But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where theremust be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heardour whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--theLong Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clungto!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!"_

She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or wouldnot lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon hispillow the last drop of things that must go. 

She there--her whitening head buried on his pillow: it was Life'sCalvary of the Snows. 

The dawn found her sitting in the darkest corner of the room, andthere it brightened about her desolately. The moment drew near whenshe must awaken him; the ordeal of their meeting must be over beforethe children rushed downstairs or the servants knocked. 

She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid thegray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it franklyaway from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one ofnature's noblest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that thewomen of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony oftheir baptism into a new life. 

She had put on a plain night-dress, and her face and shoulders risingout of this had the austerity of marble--exempt not from ruin, butexempt from lesser mutation. She looked down at her wrists once andmade a little instinctive movement with her fingers as if to hide themunder the sleeves. 

Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway andquickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it. Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the lookof the rejected. 

So she stood an instant and then she reclined on the edge of the bed, resting on one elbow and looking down at him. 

For years her first words to him on this day had been the world's bestgreeting:

"A Merry Christmas!"

She tried to summon the words to her lips and have them ready. 

At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes andinstantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come outof it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their futurewould be worth. But at the sight of her so changed--something so goneout of her forever--with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. Shestruggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringlyabout the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against hisface. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it acrossher eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her. The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears. 

Tears not for Life's faults but for Life when there are nofaults. They locked in each other's arms--trying to save each other onNature's vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea. 

The rush of children's feet was heard in the hall and there wassmothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob. 

It was Christmas Morning. 

 * * * * *

The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward overthe gladness of the Shield. The farmhouse--such as the poet had sungof when he could not help singing of American home life--looked outfrom under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human travellerwho laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders. Smoke poured out ofits chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oaktree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing. Soon aftersunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of thesnow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; andsitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a littlewhile that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence tounderstand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summeraway. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun sotrue could shine on a world so false. 

Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovellingpaths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red withfireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat, rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternlybooted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, goingat it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancinga dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to someone to come and look--beckoned in vain. 

All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the littlegirl played with the doll--hugged to her breast the symbol of ancientsacrifice, the emblem of the world's new mercy. Along the turnpikesleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and theshouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across theshining valleys. 

Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!

One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from itssurroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off fordecorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slidoff. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity, and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never tobe told by Sorrow's fingers. 

The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backwardacross the sadness of the Shield. One by one the stars came back totheir faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinginglamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little roundmats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost alow Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; andbetween those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers andchildren assembling for the party. 

Late into the night the party lasted. 

The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went toashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and therobust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of ourlife. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate anddrank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to gofaster than the music. 

The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on theChristmas Tree--the handing over to this person and to that person ofthose unread lessons of the ages--little mummied packages of the lordof time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced thoseburnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were whitenow. 

Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene!Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house:hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughingand talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to thedoctor's wife--faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be theAmerican wife and mother in the home of the poet's dream: thespiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life's snowas it never lifts itself from the face of the _Jungfrau_ amid thesad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!--herself the_Jungfrau_ among the world's women!

The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takesplace there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the Statewhich is also a song of the Nation--its melody of the unfallen home:with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated atthe piano--the others upholding her like a living bulwark. 

There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of:those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than theembodied--the Guests of the Imagination. 

The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambersarm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that presentscene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree theWraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naughtof those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to filltheir places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapesthat bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these wereLife's Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils andlook out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them andrelapse into their compassionate vigil. 

But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filledthe entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through therooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckonedher to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered backpeeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognitionran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms aroundher. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked pasther one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly. 

This was the Shape:

In the great bedroom on a spot of the carpet under thechandelier--which had no decoration whatsoever--stood an exquisiteSpirit of Youth, more insubstantial than Spring morning mist, yet mostalive; her lips scarce parted--her skin like white hawthorn shadowedby pink--in her eyes the modesty of withdrawal from Love--in her heartthe surrender to it. During those distracting hours never did she movenor did her look once change: she waiting there--waiting for some oneto come--waiting. 

Waiting.