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Title: Where the young child was
        and other Christmas stories

Author: Marie Conway Oemler

Illustrator: George Avison


        
Release date: May 20, 2026 [eBook #78711]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: The Century Co, 1912

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78711

Credits: David E. Brown and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHERE THE YOUNG CHILD WAS ***




  WHERE THE YOUNG CHILD WAS
  AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES


[Illustration: “Don’t you remember that this is Christmas Eve?”]




  WHERE THE
  YOUNG CHILD WAS

  AND ALSO
  THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUSE, THE YOUNGEST
  OFFICER, LINDEN GOES HOME, THE LITTLE
  BROWN HOUSE, THAT MAKES
  THE WORLD GO ROUND

  BY
  MARIE CONWAY OEMLER
  Author of “Slippy McGee,” “A Woman Named
  Smith,” “The Purple Heights,” etc.

  ILLUSTRATED BY
  GEORGE AVISON

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  THE CENTURY CO.
  1921




  Copyright, 1921, by

  THE CENTURY CO.

  Copyright, 1912, 1916, by Curtis Publishing Company
  Copyright, 1912, 1914, by Crowell Publishing Company
  Copyright, 1910, by Street & Smith Corporation
  Copyright, 1915, by International Magazine Company

  PRINTED IN U. S. A.




  WITH BEST WISHES
  FROM THE WRITER TO THE READER




ACKNOWLEDGMENT

For permission to reprint the stories comprising this volume thanks are
due to the following:


  “The Ladies Home Journal,” for “Where the Young Child Was,” and “The
  Youngest Officer.”

  “Harper’s Bazar,” for “The Spirit of the House.”

  “Ainslie’s Magazine,” for “Linden Goes Home.”

  “Woman’s Home Companion,” for “The Little Brown House,” and “That
  Makes the World Go Round.”




CONTENTS


                                       PAGE

  “WHERE THE YOUNG CHILD WAS”             3

  THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUSE                45

  THE YOUNGEST OFFICER                   75

  LINDEN GOES HOME                      123

  THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE                171

  “THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND”      209




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  “Don’t you remember that this is Christmas
  Eve?”                                            _Frontispiece_

                                                           FACING
                                                            PAGE

  “What are you doing out here? Trying to freeze?”             30

  “I think it must have been just here that Anthony
    Trescott kissed Lydia King”                                70

  He tried to hold on                                         106

  The bundle of rags on the threshold waited no
    further invitation                                        150

  Why, it was just such a little house as she had
    dreamed of                                                174

  “Such scenes shall not be repeated”                         230




“WHERE THE YOUNG CHILD WAS”


“Ain’t some folks lucky?” Mahany spoke to Captain Austin Hoban,
tramping up and down the desolate junction platform, and waved a huge
mittened paw toward the private car glowing with warm light through
the snowy dusk. “Look at them! Nothin’ on earth to trouble ’em. _They_
ain’t jackrabbited from pillar to Post for heaven knows why,” grumbled
the grizzled old sergeant bitterly. “_They_ ain’t got to dry-nurse a
lot of kid rookies that ought to be home hangin’ up stockin’s for their
poppas an’ mommas to fill on the sly, ’stead of bein’ took out on a
Christmas Eve for to be makin’ soldiers of, which I misdoubt heaven
ever meant the likes of such _for_.”

He was taking an offensively raw and youthful draft out to a Northwest
Post; Hoban, returning to that same Post after leave of absence, had
fallen in with him at this transfer point. They were waiting with such
patience as they possessed for the made-up train--engine, box-car,
coach of foreign miners, extra car for the soldiers, and now this
superfine private car, “Andrassah”--to start. Still grumbling, for it
was piercingly cold, Mahany went back to his charges.

Two furry shapes came out of the private car. Hoban paused idly,
and the arc-light shone full upon him. Whereupon one of the shapes,
bounding upon the platform, hurled himself into the captain’s arms.

“Hoban! What a bully surprise! What are you doing here--coming or
going? Come over and see Sally; we’re going to spend Christmas with
Buckleigh at the Two Bar B,” shouted Lieutenant Darrell Compton; and,
laying forcible hands upon his old friend, he dragged him forward.

Hoban, who would have fled from such a meeting as from the wrath to
come, found himself being presented to Buckleigh, who, for reasons of
his own, most greatly desired to find favor in the eyes of Lieutenant
Compton just then. A few questions, and he took the situation in hand;
hardly knowing whether to shrug or to swear, Hoban found himself,
despite protests, literally captured bag and baggage.

Five minutes later Buckleigh was presenting his chance guest to the
other members of his party--Trenton, the Pittsburgh man, he who makes
money ruthlessly and builds great hospitals; McLachlin, the New York
magnate; Dr. Edgar Bristow, the specialist, and his wife, a woman as
beautiful as an idol and, one suspected, costing quite as much to keep
properly panoplied; and Sally Compton, for whom alone Hoban really had
eyes and ears. She had been the toast of every post since she wore
pigtails and a sunbonnet and raced around the compound on her own
calico pony. It is a favorite army tradition that she winked at the
doctor when she was one hour old; and that, ere she had reached the
riper age of two years, the chaplain, the surgeon, two fat majors, and
a bald-headed general had proposed to her. For Sally Compton is, of all
heart-snatchers, the most alluringly, adorably, distractingly pretty.

Inwardly disturbed and raging, outwardly starry-eyed and sparkling,
Sally gave him her hand coolly enough; but the irony of the situation
was not lost upon her; the color deepened vividly in her cheeks. Fate,
she thought wrathfully, was certainly playing her a scurvy trick!

Sally knew only too well that this trip in the gorgeous “Andrassah”
to the Two Bar B Ranch, that most bepraised and advertised of all big
money-making places, was really only the last of the calculated moves
of Buckleigh’s game: a game by which, mesh after mesh, his net had been
closing upon her. Consummately had Buckleigh played it--with lavish
attentions, motors, yacht, private car, great ranch, casual-deliberate
hints betraying his ownership of this railroad, that mine, a bank
or so; ever impressing upon the army girl’s consciousness the sheer
enormous power of money--his money. Even the guests here to-night were
part of that scheme--millionaire, magnate, great specialist, famous
beauty, all summoned before her by a wave of Buckleigh’s magic hand.

Stout, baldish, suave, a hint of tigerishness underlying his slow smile
and lurking in his heavy-lidded eyes, Buckleigh bargained for youth and
beauty and charm. A man who left nothing to chance, she surmised that
he had planned even to the last detail just when and where and how the
final scene in this pleasant comedy should be staged; she meant to say
“Yes.”

And now, just when she was beginning to think she might school a
rebellious heart into a sensible mind’s acceptance of a thing so
altogether desirable as this great match, here had fate thrust upon
her the one man in all the world who made that decision taste of the
bitterness of death; dragged him in whom of all men she wished not to
see just then.

The car wheels presently began to grind out a diabolical rhythm:
“_Buckleigh’s buying Sally Compton! Buckleigh’s buying Sally Compton!_”

Out of the corner of her eye she glanced at Hoban’s handsome profile,
bent toward Adele Bristow. No, she reflected drearily, he had never
cared; that had been left for her. Darrell was lamenting that he must
part from Hoban in the morning, when Buckleigh’s car was to be picked
up by the regular express at a station farther on. Buckleigh, too,
was suavely sorry Captain Hoban couldn’t stop over at the ranch for
Christmas: he had planned a few festivities, he added.

Glancing at the over-magnificence of his car, Hoban had a pretty
accurate idea of what Buckleigh would make that Christmas at the Two
Bar B. “He’ll jolly well cram the earth into a gilt-paper cornucopia
and hand it over to Sally, with a sprig of holly and a fat smile,”
thought the soldier, who hadn’t anything but his name, his sword, and
his heart to offer her. “She’ll take it, of course. Who wouldn’t? It’s
too big a temptation for any mortal woman to withstand, I suppose.”
He knew that Buckleigh was “the millionaire Sally Compton’s dangling
around these days,” as a too-faithful friend had written. He wished
that he could honestly find it in his heart to like the man; but he
couldn’t.

Then the car wheels began to grind out a soothing tune for Hoban, too,
car wheels being the most totally depraved of all inanimate objects
when given half a chance to show what they can do: “_Sally’s going to
marry Buckleigh! Sally’s going to marry Buckleigh!_”

And all the while the night lowered and lowered, and the storm outside
gathered and gathered. All day it had been snowing--more heavily when
they had left the junction and plunged into the Wyoming hills; now the
storehouse of the snows opened doors and windows, and poured out its
garnered hoards.

In the rattling day-coach a Slovak miner was singing an endless
melancholy song, which rose and fell with the monotony of gray waves on
a desert shore. In the other coach the soldiers amused themselves as
best they might. But in the “Andrassah,” having concluded a veritable
triumph of a Christmas Eve dinner, they were somnolently content.
Better the stalled ox than the dinner of herbs; if you doubt it, ask
the ox.

“I remember,” said McLachlin, stretching himself lazily,
“somebody--seems to me it was Pliny, but I wouldn’t swear to it--saying
something about being able to enjoy a tempest on the sea more when
one happened to be on land. I’ve muddled it of course,” he added
good-humoredly; “but if you’ll look at that snow against those windows
you’ll gather my meaning.” For some time the train had been moving
more and more slowly; now, with a long scrunching of brakes, it stopped.

A worried conductor appeared. “Stalled freight ahead. Snow. Wired for
help. Have to wait a bit, gentlemen.”

“How long?” A frown darkened on Buckleigh’s forehead.

“Depends on how soon the plow gets here,” said the conductor.

“Do you mean to say,” exploded Buckleigh, “that _I’m_ to be held up
indefinitely for a dashed freight?”

“We can wire for a plow and have the freight pulled out, Mr.
Buckleigh,” said the conductor, dryly; “but even _you_ can’t give
orders to the Almighty to quit snowin’ when He feels like snowin’, and
have your orders obeyed.” He went out, grimly smiling.

“Quite so, Buckleigh, quite so!” said the Pittsburgh man, briskly.
“Job, thirty-eight, verse twenty-two.” He was a religious man, and
outside of business hours greatly respected the power of Providence.

“I do not seem, at any rate,” said Buckleigh, “to lack Job’s
comforters.” One might have thought he snarled.

Sally Compton laughed in his face. “Why, I thought you were too wise,”
she mocked him gently, “to kick against the pricks of the inevitable,
Mr. Buckleigh. Besides, we’re deliciously ‘comfy,’ and there’s no
immediate danger of our starving or freezing, is there?”

She felt that she had been given a respite, and that the inevitable
had been, at least for a little while, deferred. Her spirits rose
soaringly. But Buckleigh was displeased. He hated to have his plans
upset, and every detail of to-morrow had been prearranged, even as
scenes in a well-set play. Now, as things were, he doubted if they
reached the ranch before to-morrow night, even if then.

They were preparing to retire when the conductor came in hurriedly.
“Say, ain’t one of you gentlemen a doctor?”

“I am a physician,” said Bristow, suddenly alert.

The conductor whispered into the doctor’s ear. Bristow started,
whistled, scrambled into his fur coat, jammed his cap down over his
eyes, and the two hurried out.

Ten minutes later Bristow was back. Big, commanding, forceful, to the
finger-tips the able physician at work, he gave crisp orders. “Hot
water,” he directed Buckleigh; “gallons of hot water. Get busy, please.
Blankets, and two or three pillows. Adele, I shall need you. There’s a
girl out in that box-car--and her hour is upon her.”

Adele stared. “Why, Edgar, you know very well I’m without my maid; she
_would_ go home--just as we were starting, too. Horribly provoking, and
I’m what you might call helpless. If she were here you’d be welcome to
her services, of course.”

“I said I needed you,” said Bristow, curtly.

“Edgar! Good heavens, you must be mad! In a box-car? A strange woman?
No! I won’t! I can’t.”

“You will. You can. You’ve got to,” said he. “You’ll be useful for
once, whether you like it or not. I need you; and you’ll do what
I say this night, or I’ll know why.” He towered above her, eyes
gleaming, jaws set; almost his streaked gray mane bristled. He looked
magnificent; like, say, a thoroughly roused old lion.

His wife stared, and a most curious light flickered into her astonished
eyes. She rose, gracefully ignoring the shocked and startled faces.
“I’ll save you the trouble of taking me by the hair, Edgar,” she said
lightly. “You look quite capable of it. Just tell me what I’m to do.”

“Exactly what I tell you. Remember: If you scream I’ll box your ears,
and if you faint I’ll chuck you neck and crop into the snow. Get your
wraps. Where’s my black case, you, Jim, or whatever your name is? A
bundle of towels, Miss Compton, please. Buckleigh, look after that hot
water. Captain Hoban, you and Mr. Compton get those fellows in the cars
ahead quiet, and keep ’em quiet. That girl’s in a bad way.”

Sally helped Mrs. Bristow on with cloak and hood. Porters, loaded with
blankets and pillows, followed them. Hoban and Compton had already gone
through the cars ahead and the shouts and singing had suddenly ceased.

Trenton, with a very sober face, came over and sat down by Sally. “Oh,
my, my, my!” said he, nervously. “Poor thing, poor thing! Natural of
course; but--in a box-car--dreadful, dreadful!”

“All by herself!” Sally added.

Trenton drew a little closer.

“It--sort of comes upon me--unaware,” he whispered. “My wife died--like
that. Very young, poor thing! I was too. Not rich then. Poor--very;
but, my heaven, how happy! She was so pretty, my wife!” he added
wistfully. “I loved her a great deal, Miss Compton. But--she died,
and the baby with her. And that’s why,” he finished mildly, “I--build
hospitals.”

The little, cold, dry, moneyed man took on a new aspect. The girl
reached over impulsively and squeezed his bony hand, a swift, warm,
reassuring human pressure. “To thank you,” she whispered, “for the
women and the children your hospitals have helped and saved, because of
one sweet woman, Mr. Trenton.”

“I--loved her,” said he, simply. “And when all’s said and done, my
dear, that’s the biggest, greatest, most glorious thing in the world!”
A musing and remembering smile crept into his tired old eyes.

“From what I gathered from our sententious friend, the conductor,”
McLachlin was saying a little later, “the girl’s the wife of one of
your foreign miners, Buckleigh, going out to the Big Bend. He had to
come for a job, poor chap! and he couldn’t leave her behind; she has
no people in this country at all. So the railroad men, seeing how
things were with her, made her as comfortable as they could in the
box-car--and dashed decent of them, too, say I! They thought she’d be
able to reach the mine safely. The thing worries me; upon my word it
does! I can’t help thinking of the night my daughter’s little girl was
born, and how I sat in the library and hung on to my wife like a scared
kid. I got ten years older in that one night.” He got up abruptly and
began to tramp up and down, his hands under his coat tails. “I wish she
were over it!” he muttered.

Buckleigh watched him with cold scorn. He was disgusted and furiously
angry. It was bad enough, he considered, to be stalled here on the edge
of nowhere, with all his prearranged plans going awry. But that an
unknown and poverty-stricken woman should actually disrupt his party,
render distracted his exclusive guests, making them forget their own
exalted station, and behave as if they were of her common clay, struck
him as savoring of stark anarchy. Bristow, whose fees were enormous,
who was consulted by foreign royalty, had rushed out into the night
like the veriest country doctor, dragging, too, his wife with him;
Buckleigh hoped Adele would divorce him for it. Moreover, Bristow had,
without so much as a by-your-leave, coolly confiscated especially woven
blankets, down pillows, monogrammed linen, as if the woman’s need
had made them hers by simple right! He, Buckleigh himself, had been
suddenly pushed aside as one of no consequence, merely because the most
ordinary of human events was occurring to the most ordinary of human
beings.

Porters, bearing buckets of boiling water swathed in blankets to
preserve the heat, came and went. Sally Compton refused either to
entertain or be entertained; she sat silent; at times a slight tremor
passed over her; for Sally felt that the angels of life and death
walked abroad almost visibly that night.

Later Hoban came in, his shoulders thickly powdered. “Bristow says
she’s doing as well as can be expected,” he told them. “But--she’s
nothing but a slip of a girl, I understand. I was helping one of the
porters up with a bucket of hot water--and I heard--” He shook his head.

McLachlin nodded sympathetically. “I know. I remember when--my girl--”
He blew his nose violently.

Buckleigh grunted.

“My wife,” said Trenton, wistfully, “was a slip of a girl, too, and--so
pretty! Poor thing, poor thing!”

Buckleigh stared coldly.

Sally looked from one man to the other curiously. It struck her that,
stripped of a sudden of convention, each appeared as he was, with a
sort of elemental clarity and simplicity.

“You’ve no idea,” said Hoban, “the effect on those foreigners in the
front car. One of the Italians that can speak a little English told me
it was ‘like the Holy Night.’ Do you know what those chaps are doing?
They’re praying!”

McLachlin nodded; Trenton smiled understandingly; Buckleigh sneered.

Hoban’s face twisted oddly; he grinned and his eyes twinkled. “And the
sergeant,” he said, “has sent every man jack of his boys to bed without
undressing, and is sitting there with a pistol in each hand to make
sure they keep quiet.”

The hours crawled. An immense and waiting silence hung, it seemed to
Sally, over the whole snow-wrapped universe, knowing that something
very wonderful was about to occur. Buckleigh alone sat cold, impassive,
unmoved; so far as she could see he had not shown one slightest touch
of human sympathy. She watched him stealthily, with a growing fear. She
meant to marry Buckleigh of course; and one couldn’t expect everything;
but--

Released, at Hoban’s request, from the sergeant’s too-strict
surveillance, the soldiers had cleared a space under the trees outside
and, utilizing what they could find of dead timber, had built a fire,
which sputtered and hissed as the snow from the branches above melted
and ran down into it. Weirdly the flames lit up the towering hillsides,
the trees bent under their weight of snow, the half-buried trains and
the little frozen river beside which the track ran.

Sally, gazing out at the window, could distinguish Darrell, and
then Hoban’s taller figure. The very sight of Hoban gave her an odd
sensation of strength and comfort.

A cold gray light was beginning to grow when Bristow appeared in the
box-car door, collarless and with bared arms. He put up a great
forearm and rubbed it across his forehead. “As fine a little rascal,”
said he, “as I’ve ever seen.”

“Boy?” asked Hoban.

“Sure. Ten pounds. Lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows; ribs like a dray,
and a fist like a prizefighter’s! Some boy, believe me!” He sighed with
relief. “I had to haul his fool father away by the scruff or he’d be
crying over the girl’s feet yet. What!” he said, abruptly, to the pale,
boyish husband who approached him supplicatingly, “are you here again?
No, you can_not_ come blubbering over that girl just now! She’s all
right, I tell you, but I can’t have you disturbing her. Go away! Well,
you can come back in half an hour, then. Take him away, somebody.” He
looked after the handsome fellow, whom the sergeant dutifully led away
as one under tentative arrest, and his eyes twinkled; but his smile was
kind.

Later Sally begged, and was allowed, to visit the new arrival. In a
cleared space at one end of the car, lighted by an oil lamp and warmed
by a bucket brazier, on a cot covered with straw which showed under the
blankets and pillows, lay a Madonna-like Italian girl. Her beautiful
black hair, meekly parted on a pale brow, fell in two long braids over
her shoulders. She was pearly white, and her childish mouth sagged
somewhat. But out of the pale and weary face shone a pair of eyes so
sweet, so pure, so starlike, that Sally’s heart gave an upward bound at
sight of them.

The girl made a little, fluttering, welcoming motion of the hands,
smiling ever so faintly. They looked at each other steadily, the girl
who was going to marry Buckleigh, and the girl who was the wife of
one of Buckleigh’s miners. The sweet, shining eyes were telling Sally
something--that same something Trenton had told her while they waited:
that love is, after all, the greatest thing in the world. The girl
turned her head and spoke in a soft whisper. “She wants you to hold
the baby,” said Adele Bristow.

Mrs. Bristow’s Parisian gown, which she hadn’t had time to change, was
rumpled, and her magnificent red hair hung heavily down. There were
dark circles under her eyes, and she, too, was very pale. But, as one
who holds a hard-won treasure, she clasped the newly born against the
laces at her breast, smiling upon the downy black head. Even as she
smiled the baby nuzzled and whimpered. Bristow, over her shoulder,
laughed.

His wife, thrusting the baby hurriedly into Sally’s arms, turned upon
him like one at bay. A fiery color leaped into her cheeks, then faded,
leaving her paler than before. “Oh! You--you big, blind, blundering
brute!” she gasped. And she began to weep uncontrollably.

Sally thrust the baby into his mother’s waiting arms and stared at the
scene before her.

Adele had sunk to the floor, but Bristow, despite her struggles, had
lifted her and was holding her in his mighty grip. “There, there,
honey!” He tried to soothe her. “I guess I was pretty awful to you at
first, wasn’t I? But you stood by me like a brick, Adele, and I’m proud
of you. You’ll get your new limousine for last night’s work, my girl. I
tell you, I’m proud of you; you can be a real woman--when you like.”

“If you had ever really loved me,” she said stormily, “you’d know I
always wanted to be real.”

He looked down at her, his brows wrinkling in pained astonishment.
“Ever really loved you? Woman, I’m crazy over you!” he said fiercely.
“Haven’t I shown it plainly enough? Love you? Adele, I have loved you
so greatly that I haven’t even asked or expected you to love me in
return.”

“But that’s just the trouble!” she wailed. “For I do! You think I
care only for other things; and I have let you think so. But when the
child--turned to me--like that--and you--and you--oh, Edgar, Edgar!”

“I am twenty years older than you,” he reminded her. “I look like a
bear and--act like one sometimes, I’m afraid, Adele.”

His voice was so humble that Adele laughed and cried together. “All
that,” she agreed, “is quite true. Those are some of the reasons why
I--why I--fell in love with you; why I’m--why I’m--still in love with
you--Edgar--” for at that the big man had swung her clear off her feet.
“N-no, I don’t think you’re a bit too rough.--All right, you can buy me
another frock if you want to.--N-no, it’s not; your beard’s perfectly
beautiful, Edgar!”

The door slid open noiselessly and a black curly head looked in. Seeing
the coast clear, a lithe body followed; then the boyish husband was on
his knees beside the cot. Such a look as passed between the two young
creatures over their baby’s fuzzy poll!

Sally’s eyes stung with sudden uncontrollable tears. Love was, indeed,
the greatest thing in the world, only--she hadn’t got it. She was to
have, instead, all that the terrible power of money can summon up for
such as have the key of gold--splendid things, perfectly palpable
things, such as one can put one’s hands on. As if she had weighed and
tasted them, and found them wanting--dust and ashes--her living spirit
rose up within her at that moment and rejected them, crying aloud for
its larger and diviner heritage. She knew that Buckleigh had no part in
that heritage; the thought of him affected her like a nightmare; sheer
panic terror came upon her.

“No! I can’t! I can’t! Not for the whole world!” she thought. “Oh,
what’s happening to me, what’s the matter with me? I’m--I’m being
pushed outside of everything. I can’t take the money--and I can’t get
the love!”

For the first time in her pleasant life there had come to her a moment
wherein the spirit experienced its aloneness in the universe--saw all
the petty barriers it had built against that solitude crumble, because
they had not been fashioned of the one imperishable stuff.

Bristow and his wife had forgotten her presence, forgotten everything
save that they had found each other. The young Italian had eyes only
for his own; the little mother thought only of the sweet miracle which
exalted her above the earth. No, there was no place here for Sally. She
crept away.

The thought of meeting Buckleigh’s eyes just then was unbearable. She
couldn’t go back to the car. Everybody seemed to have retired. It was
very still. Down the track she could see the flare of the deserted
fire, and to this she made her way, grateful for the warmth and
solitude.

Over in the east the cold, gray light grew slowly. Indescribable
desolation weighed upon her. Oh, where was that Sally Compton who had
found life so pleasant such a little while ago, a girl whom every
one had seemed to care for? Gone, and all her gay careless surface
brightness gone with her! She huddled down on a log dragged into the
radius of the fire, pulled her furs farther up about her face, and wept
heartbrokenly.

“Sally Compton!” exclaimed a horrified voice. “What are you doing out
here? Trying to freeze? Who’s looking after you anyhow?” Hoban glared
at her indignantly.

“Nin-nobody,” gulped Sally, summoning her pride to her rescue and
trying not to sniff too audibly. “I’m qui-quite capable of ta-taking
care of myself, thank you!”

“You look like it!” said he scornfully. “Darrell’s just turned
in--thought you were in bed of course. Where’s Buckleigh? Why isn’t
_he_ looking after you, I’d like to know?” Jealousy lent his pleasant
voice an acrid note new to it.

Sally looked up at him listlessly. “If you’re going to be
disagreeable,” she suggested, “you can go away.”

Hoban hesitated. “Look here!” said he painfully, “I’d like you to
understand that my being here isn’t exactly my own fault. Darrell
didn’t know you’d be annoyed--and I couldn’t tell him, could I? And
then again, I couldn’t very well refuse to come without appearing
churlish and running the risk of hurting his feelings.”

“No,” agreed Sally lifelessly, “I don’t suppose you could.”

[Illustration: “What are you doing out here? Trying to freeze?”]

“Sally,” said he, flushing, “you have never given me a chance to ask
you why you seemed to suddenly dislike me--after we’d been--well, say,
friends. But I’ve wondered at times if you might have thought I was
chump enough to think you cared for me, when you didn’t. I never blamed
you for not caring; how could I? But what hurt was that you should
use such methods to prove it to me. I do not believe you ever acted
like that to any human being save only myself; why? For I am sure that
a sincere and honest affection, such as mine has always been for you,
could never be considered an insult. Yet you seemed to think so.” He
looked at her steadily, and there was that in his fine face which
carried conviction of truth. “I did believe for a time that you might
care. I hoped it with all my heart, because I cared so much myself.
I do not think that belief and that hope dishonored either you or
myself,” he ended with simple and manly dignity.

Something of her dumb and stricken misery came to him. His eyes grew
troubled. He drew a little nearer.

“Sally,” said he earnestly, “my love for you gives me the right to say
what I’m going to say: If you aren’t quite sure of the step before you,
hold back. Don’t imperil your happiness. I don’t say this because I
have any hope for myself, for I haven’t. But because I want more than
anything on earth to see you happy. And you needn’t be sorry for me,
when you come to think of it, Sally. I’m proud of loving you. I shall
be the better man for it.”

Sally sat bolt upright. His words went whirling through her head.
Because of idle rumors to which her own jealous fancy lent weight, she
had let him go. She had misjudged and misunderstood. He a flirt with
a waiting list! He vain and light! He sure that every girl he chose
to beckon to would come at his nod! Terrified that she might be only
one of many, she had indeed spared no pains to make him understand she
wished none of him; that had been the only solace to a smarting pride,
a wounded love. Hurt and indignant, he had gone.... And then Buckleigh
had come. She remembered Buckleigh’s cold, hard face, his eyes of
granite, when all others had been touched to a tender and human emotion.

Far, far away, from over the intervening hills, came a long faint
screech. The relief was coming. In a few hours, parting company at the
station farther on, Buckleigh’s car would be flying farther and farther
from Hoban, and nearer and inevitably nearer to the Two Bar B ranch and
those Christmas festivities so cleverly arranged for her benefit. The
two stared at each other.

“I hate to go away, never expecting to see you again, and not part
friends, Sally. It’s just a little hard on me, isn’t it? Won’t you be
friends at least?” pleaded the soldier.

Then Sally Compton spoke: “What I most wonder at,” said she severely,
“is the vast, immeasurable, terrifying, monumental stupidity of men!”

Hoban stared, as well as he might.

“The sheer, unbelievable, incredible stupidity,” Sally repeated firmly,
“of men. They just take things for granted--and they go away--and leave
things like that--and they haven’t even sense enough to come back and
find out if there isn’t some mistake--on their own part of course.
Under such circumstances and in the face of such stupidity,” she
demanded tragically, “what is a poor, bewildered girl to do?”

“Huh! I shouldn’t waste my good sympathy,” said Hoban dryly, “on the
poor, bewildered girl, if I were you. The poor, bewildered girl, as you
call her--” he fixed her with a stern, accusing eye--“usually sends the
man to Coventry--she and heaven alone know why; and when she’s got him
there safe and fast, why, she--marries a millionaire! Sensible, isn’t
she?”

“Oh! Does she though? _Only_ when she’s perfectly sure and certain that
the right man--I mean the other man--went to Coventry on his own hook,
Captain Austin Hoban, and stays there because he chooses to stay there.
Because he never cared. Sensible, wasn’t he?”

“A fat lot she knows about it,” said he derisively, “if _that’s_
all she knows! I hate to think any girl could be so downright
dyed-in-the-wool silly.”

“Do you?” said she tartly. “Well, she’s dyed-in-the-wool silly--to
match him, if you like!” Her temper was rising.

“Oh, what’s the difference, if only they’re happy fools together?” said
he wearily. “Sally,” his eyes pleaded for him, “I haven’t the ghost of
a right to ask you, of course, but--are you really going to marry that
fellow Buckleigh?” He couldn’t keep some of his pain from creeping into
his voice.

“You have no right in this world to ask me, of course,” she said with
asperity; “but, as you have asked me, why--I don’t mind telling you
that I haven’t been asked--yet.”

He considered that soothing “yet.” “Are you going to marry him?” he
demanded bluntly.

Sally’s temper flared. “I wonder,” said she spiritedly, “how you’d like
a little gentle cross-examination yourself? Let’s see: Are you going
to marry Colonel Arkwright’s daughter, Captain Hoban, or are you only
flirting? Aren’t you generally--flirting? People have told me so. And
you did flirt with me, you know!”

“Whoever told you that,” said he hotly, “told you a thumping lie! And
I was not flirting with you! You’ve had experience enough, I should
think, to be able to tell the false from the real. But that’s neither
here nor there. You haven’t answered my question: Are you going to
marry Buckleigh?”

“I told you he hadn’t asked me.”

“Are you going to marry Buckleigh?”

“How can I unless--”

“Are you going to marry Buckleigh?” inexorably.

“Well, then, _no_, if you will know!”

“Are you sure?”

“_Yes!_ There!” furiously.

“Well, then, are you going to marry me?”

“Why,” said she, scandalized, “you haven’t asked me.”

“If I do ask you, will you?”

“But you _haven’t_ asked me!”

“Well, I do now,” said he with vast patience. “Sally, I have always
loved you; I shall always love you. I thought once--and now something
bids me hope again--that you might care for me. Sally, if that hope is
true, will you marry me?”

“This,” murmured Sally wickedly, “is so sudden!” She glanced up at him
ensnaringly. “You must give me time to--”

“--waste on some other old bald-headed duffer of a millionaire while
I’m on tenterhooks?” said he grimly. “Nothing doing! Guess again!”

“I reckon,” said Sally meditatively, “that I’d better guess of course,
hadn’t I?”

“You mean you will?” His tone was incredulous.

“I mean,” said Sally bravely, “that I’d never, never be happy in this
world, or maybe in the next one either--if I couldn’t!” And then:
“Austin! For heaven’s sake, Austin! Somebody’ll see!”

“Let ’em!”

“Austin,” said she, against his cheek--“Austin, you mustn’t think too
much of me, really. I did believe all sorts of things against you;
I did behave abominably to you; I did intend to--to take what Mr.
Buckleigh offered. I thought you didn’t care and that I might as well
take all I could get--for myself. But--I heard Adele Bristow--say some
things to the doctor a while ago, and I saw that dear little Italian
girl looking at her husband over the baby’s head, and--I knew right
then I couldn’t. No, I just couldn’t. You understand?”

He held her closer. “We’ll have a Christmas party for that blessed baby
after a while, but just at present you’re going to be sent to bed.”
Then he bundled her up and carried her back to the car; and in the
shadow of the platform he kissed her again.

The porter, knocking at her door, awoke her some hours later. She
found everybody finishing a very late breakfast. A subdued joyousness
radiated from every face except Buckleigh’s.

“Everybody visits the Christmas baby!” said the doctor, buttoning his
greatcoat. “My wife’s already christened him ‘Noel,’ and his mother’s
made it ‘Noello.’ And, say, every man jack on the trams has chipped
in on his Christmas present. You three wise men from the east United
States want to chip in too?”

Buckleigh wrote a check perfunctorily. “To be saved up against the time
they’ll be striking in the mine,” said he cynically.

“The hair of the dog,” Bristow minded him, “is good for the bite. You
other Magi in on this?”

They were--so boyishly, so whole-heartedly that Sally’s heart was
lifted. After all, she reflected happily, it’s a good place, this
world, and people, when they forget things and remember they’re all
just folks together, come near being what God wants them to be.

“I owe that baby a good-sized bill, myself,” said the doctor, smiling
at his wife, who smiled back and slipped her hand in the crook of his
big arm.

Miners, soldiers, railroad men, fell into line behind the doctor and
his party. They massed around the sliding-doors, which the doctor
pushed aside.

  And when they were come ... they saw the young child with Mary
  his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had
  opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and
  frankincense, and myrrh.

One saw in the lamplighted interior, as in a cave’s mouth, outlined
by the glittering whiteness without, the straw-covered cot; beside it
a handsome, foreign, shepherd-looking man; on it a pale, pretty girl,
holding to her bosom a baby. At sight of all those eyes she flinched a
little, but, seeing them all so good and friendly and reverent, she
smiled, Madonna-wise, and spoke to her man.

Awkwardly, but with tender carefulness, he lifted the rosy child.
“Noel!” said the Italian softly, and held him high for all to see.

“Noel! Noel! Noel!” echoed the men outside, uncovered in the snow.

Bristow, blinking suspiciously, gave the Christmas offering, to which
all had contributed; and the little mother, with sweet wisdom, took
again her baby and laid his small hand upon the gift; then she held
up the wee fist, and the tiny fingers of a sudden outspread wide; one
might think they blessed. At that, in spite of the doctor, they cheered
him heartily.

Pushed forward by his mates, an Italian with a sweet and ringing
barytone began to sing for him the old, old, lovely Christmas hymn:

  “_Adeste, Fideles,
    Laeti, triumphantes!
    Venite, venite_, in Bethlehem!”

Adele crept closer to the big doctor’s side, to be encircled in his
arm. McLachlin, beaming, patted a soldier on the shoulder brotherly.
The Pittsburgh millionaire, with uplifted head, smiled dreamily, being
for a happy moment back again with the little lost wife of his youth.
And Sally Compton, her eyes full of exquisitely happy tears, put her
hand openly into Hoban’s, careless of who saw. How had she ever, ever
thought she could so trust it to any other?

“You see?” she whispered, looking up at him adoringly.

“I see,” he whispered back, and closed his hand upon her fingers
loverlike.

       *       *       *       *       *

Up and up and up, cleaving the dark skies, soaring, like the lark at
heaven’s gate:

    _Gloria! Gloria! In excelsis Deo!
  Venite, adoremus! Venite, adoremus! Venite, adoremus,
     Dominum!_




THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUSE




THE SPIRIT OF THE HOUSE


Trescott had planned a Christmas in Munich, an Easter in Rome. The war
changed that. Europe gone back to barbarism filled him with a horror
bordering upon physical nausea; he felt that he never wanted to see
Europe again.

He decided, instead, to go South. The Trescotts sprang from Carolina
stock, and there were certain old records, family traditions, which he
had long desired to trace to their fountainhead.

Famous at thirty-five, Trescott had yet remained a curiously aloof
and rather austere figure. Some far-off Irish foremother had lent his
dark face its delicate imprint of expectancy and dowered him with that
strain which gave to all his work, along with a dewy and delightful
freshness, a flavor of rose-scented and unforgotten yesterdays.

To this undercurrent of melancholy the Carolina landscape powerfully
appealed. This land of lonesome wide marsh margins, of dim desolate
forsaken fields, of broodings and moss-hung woods, appeared to him as
might a half-hidden face which has haunted one’s dreams. He wandered
over the coast country with an ever increasing delight.

The day before Christmas caught him upon one of these solitary and
endless tramps, glad enough to escape what he considered wearisome
festivities. It was past noon when he reached his destination--one
of those deserted old Carolina churches in whose grass-grown yards
the proudly named dead sleep forgotten. In a far corner he had paused
before a name which struck his keen eye pleasantly--_Lydia King_. For
this, he realized at once, was the very name the girl in his next book
must bear!

Even while he pictured what she should be, brown-haired, brown-eyed,
slim and gracious, the creative power came upon him. Furiously, working
at frenzied pressure, he got such as he could into his note-book,
dreading to lose the thread and praying for the failing light to hold.

The still gray afternoon rushed suddenly into dusk, as happens in
that land of little twilight, and with the dusk began a disconsolate
drizzle. Before him stretched strange roads, bordered by abandoned
rice-fields, eerily empty in the deepening dark. Where two weedy
by-paths crossed he stopped perforce; and as he hesitated, a little
faint light twinkled at the far end of the expanse upon his right.

Trescott sighed with relief; in Carolina one has only to stop at the
first house, generally, to be sure of a shelter for the night. For
what seemed an interminable distance the little byway led him, to stop
abruptly at a pair of iron gates, wide open between tall brick pillars.
A thick belt of cedars, swaying somberly in a rising wind, lay between
him and the great black bulk of the house beyond. Like the garden gate,
the house door stood open. The light which had led him came from a room
to the right of an enormous hall.

His hand was upon the iron knocker when a girl came out of the lighted
room, her trailing dress undulating about her slim body. As she neared
him her face grew out of the dark, oval-shaped, cream-colored as a
magnolia. With a gracious and welcoming gesture she beckoned him inside.

The great room, lighted only by unshaded wax candles in tall silver
sticks upon the high mantel, had the shadow as of a Rembrandt,
suggestive of rich depths. Out of it flickered the red glow of copper,
the brighter gleam of brass, a hint of the deep blue of old Delft;
outlines of old portraits appeared on the paneled walls; one divined
the satiny sheen, the majestic mahogany of old carved furniture.

Ruefully aware of his muddy shoes, his stained garments, so out of
keeping with this stately orderliness, he wished to explain, to
apologize, and looked up to meet glance to glance her intense and
luminous regard. All in brown she was, save for a lace-edged scarf,
and a white flower at her throat. The deep wilful dimple which marked
her chin matched her child’s mouth, rosy, arch, and virginal; but in
the shining eyes under the fine brow one glimpsed the spirit, proud,
flame-pure, indomitable.

She leaned toward him: “It took you such a long, long time to come!”
she sighed, and her clear eyes reproached him. Bewildered, stung with a
swift inexplicable pain, yet conscious of a mounting exaltation, sweet
and heady, he stammered:

“But I didn’t know you were here! Don’t you see? I couldn’t know?”

“Ah, but you did!” she insisted, with soft triumph. “That is why you
are here! I remembered--and you saw the light!” With a slim finger
against her lip, she looked up at him with smiling and mischievous eyes.

Gesture and glance stirred Trescott curiously; his mind went groping
after remembrance of both. Then, as in a lightning flash, he knew.
She who was the true spirit of all his effort, that Somebody who had
so long eluded him, was face to face with him at last! He knew, and,
meeting her steady and waiting glance he realized, with a great upward
surge of heart, that she also knew.

Full of a joyous wonder, he stammered:

“It is you! Why--why--it is you!” Then panic seized him and he trembled:

“And I might have missed that light!” he gasped. “Why--I saw it by the
merest accident!”

She shook her head. “No, you couldn’t. Don’t you remember, Anthony,
that this is Christmas Eve? Beautiful things happen at Christmas-time,
Anthony!”

Uplifted above wonder, that she should know and call him by name did
not in the very least surprise him; beautiful things, of course, have
to happen at Christmas-time!

“I knew,” said he, rapt and elate, “that you simply had to be
somewhere, Heart’s Delight! I knew that when my great hour struck, I
should find you. And oh, I have found you! I have found you!”

“The wonder of it!” Her voice was flute-like. “Oh, the great, beautiful
wonder of it, Anthony! How was it I ever, ever doubted? I shall never,
never doubt again!”

“I am not dreaming,” whispered Trescott, pale with emotion. “No,
nothing else ever has been, ever could be real for me save this, that
you are you. I have been looking for you, I have been loving you, all
my life. For you know, of course, that I must love you?”

“I knew it this long time since--while poor you went a-hunting it,”
said she, airily. “But say it again, Anthony; say, ‘Lydia, I love you!’”

He laughed whole-heartedly. “You Christmas miracle! What need to tell
you, when you know?” said he, fervently. “Lydia, Lydia, indeed I love
you!”

“If I had even for one moment doubted that,” she said gravely, “I
should not be listening to you to-night; perhaps you might not know
yourself!” Her eyes, shadowed, grew very old and wise. “But there have
been times when I--despaired, Anthony. Oh, the days, the nights, the
slow, slow empty years! And poor I so alone!” An immense weariness
enveloped her, sitting grotesquely upon her young sweetness. She
shivered; before his eyes her face grew pinched and sharp, and upon the
smooth brow came a pucker of pain. She drew away; and in an instant an
impassable barrier, delicate as moonlight, strong as adamant, seemed to
arise between them. He had the prescience as of a thing inevitable.

“Anthony!” said she, “I--I can’t explain even to myself just how I am
here to-night, no, nor how you came to me. But I do know it had to
happen. You will not forget?”

“How in God’s name could I?” he wondered. “Nor is there need of
explanation. Why, we love each other! How could I forget what I’ve been
trying to remember ever since I was born?”

“You will remember--always, Anthony? Oh, my dearest dear, be sure!”

“I am sure.”

“Then--never doubt--about to-night, Anthony--and me,” she said.

Shaken out of himself, he got to his feet and held out his arms.

“Who talks of doubt and of forgetting?” he cried. “We two _belong_.
Ah, don’t you see how great my need of you is? I want you, I love you!
Lydia, come; come now!” His outstretched arms pleaded for him.

“Do not touch me!” her gesture was almost repellent.

“Lydia!”

“I--I cannot!” she gasped again. Her voice trailed into a sobbing
whisper. “I remember--I had to find you--and that you had to come. But
beyond that--I never thought.”

“Well, think beyond that now, my child,” he insisted, conquering his
pained amazement. He added, with a gleam of playfulness, “Finding’s
keeping, Lydia.”

“Finding’s keeping--when one makes it so,” she said, still out of his
reach. “But now that you have found me, you must go. I cannot stay
longer. See, the rain has ceased, the moon is out.”

“Now? I am to leave you here--alone?”

“You are to leave me here--alone.”

“There is no word for me, no--no surety? What am I to think?”

“You must come,” she said, “here to King House, to-morrow, and take
what you find. See, where I put my finger in the heart of this middle
rose in the wreath just over the mantel? Come to-morrow and touch that
spot, Anthony, and take my gift. And--stand so, for one last minute,
Anthony, so that I may see your eyes and your lips and your black hair.
Then tell me good night and good-by.”

With a noble patience, without further question, he obeyed. In his
heart he knew he should never lose her: and was he not coming back,
to-morrow, for a gift from her?

Outside, in the wan light of a watery moon, the gaunt house among
the black cedars showed with tragic bleakness. The girl stood a slim
glimmering shape, in the dark doorway.

“Good-by!” she whispered, and it seemed to him he felt her touch him
once, lightly, before the darkness swallowed her. When he reached the
gate the light flickered out.

But unshaken and serene, as if he trod upon air, he walked through the
withered wet grasses, his forehead bare to the salt wind. The night
deepened; wider and wider grew the clear spaces in the sky, and light
upon shining light the cohorts of the stars swung into their ordered
and eternal places. Over in the east one glowed with a softer, larger
luster. Trescott smiled up at it.

“I know you now!” he said, “you’re the Star of Beautiful Things that
happen at Christmas!”

It had been to him rather a fable, hitherto, that old story of the
star; but to-night something of its hidden, tender meaning was clear
to him: along with the shepherds who had seen it shining upon Judean
fields, along with the Wise Men who had sought it, bearing in their
hands gifts of gold and myrrh and frankincense, the writer of books
felt himself following it, and knew himself nearer the Everlasting; for
that had come to him which made him understand, that which alone is
real, and permanent, and abiding, beyond doubt, above fear, stronger
than death: Love.

  Set me as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love
  is strong as death.... Many waters cannot quench love; neither can
  the floods drown it....

Oh, surely when the morning stars sing together it is thus they sing
before His face!

Odorous of wet woods, dappled with sunlight, the Christmas morning
broke, and Trescott, looking out at his window, saw a new heaven and a
new earth. An earth, too, which held a Christmas gift from her! So he
went forth to claim it.

The gate was still open; rusting upon broken hinges it hung upon the
ruined wall. He pushed his way through withered fennel, waist-high
grasses, thorny smilax, till King House lay before him. With the tides
of his blood freezing about his heart, Trescott opened the door and
tremblingly made his way to the mantel and groped for the carved rose
upon which--no, he had seen it with his eyes, he had not dreamed it--a
girl’s slim fingers had pressed.

In the heart of the rose a tiny knob moved, a little panel slid back
and within the small recess thus revealed lay a package in a velvet
case whose moldering string broke at his touch.

He found himself, presently, leaning weakly against one of the great
porch pillars. He was trembling violently; his mind whirled drunkenly;
but mechanically he clutched his Christmas present. When he could
command his senses again, he examined his gift--a small leather-covered
book, upon whose yellowed pages appeared delicate and tendrillar
writing. In the Christmas sunlight he sat down to read it.

  _18th Decembr., 1775_--You being a Birthday Present, and I eighteen
  this day, and so much of joyous Import crowding upon me, I do make
  you my most sweet Intimate secret, little Book; and what I may tell
  none else I shall set down within you. Haply some day I shall show
  you to _Him_, saying, “Such and such you did and said, Sir, on such
  and such a Day, when we two were young and first you knew you loved
  me! See, herein I did set the record for you that be nearer to me
  than mine own heart’s beating is!”

  These be grievous & troublous Times, like as, my Grandfather saith,
  were prophesied of old by Jeremy the Jew. In despite of which I
  cannot but be happy, for that _Anthony loves me_! O God, how good
  Thou art, that lettest Anthony love me!

  Yestreen I met with him in the green lane behind our House. I wore my
  brown stuff, for I bethought me he had said he ever liked russet upon
  a white-skinned maid. And the heels of my new silken shoon are red,
  and I thanked God I had had patience to crisp my hair.

  He was wondrous smart, in claret colour, being indeed but newly
  returned from London. God never made a likelier man, nor one so
  proper shaped. When in Holy Writ I read how that Jesse’s lad was
  ruddy and of a beautiful countenance, how that Saul was comelier and
  by the head and shoulders above all Israel, then thought I, these be
  like Anthony!

  He dismounted and walk’d beside me, leading of his horse; and before
  we turned out of the lane he had told me. Now what he said is printed
  upon my heart. Nor could I set it elsewhere, not even to your pages,
  little Book. I greatly Wish’d but Fear’d to say that ever had I lov’d
  him, yea, even when I was but a child in pinafores. That will keep.

  Beside our Gate he kiss’d me, and this will I remember even when I am
  old to heaven. Never shall I forget, not even if I be grown familiar
  with the glory before the face of our God.

       *       *       *       *       *

  _24th Decmbr._--Christmas Eve, and we Crowd’d to the Rafters, & much
  merrymaking. Anthony supp’d with us, and afterward drew my dear
  Father aside and spoke with him of me. My Father cry’d ’twas but
  yesterday I was a child a-learning of her horn-book at his knee;
  we might be betroth’d; but must e’en bide a while before wedding,
  for that the times are evil and War upon us. Then gather’d all the
  company about us & much kissing of me, and teasing, but my dear
  mother weeping.

  The men talk ever of War & how the land must be swept with a besom
  ere ever Freedom come. But I bethink me how God is above all War; and
  that Anthony loves me!

       *       *       *       *       *

  _5th Jany., 1776_--To Aunt Chatty’s to sup. No tea, but elegant
  plumb-cake. I greatly fear Eliza is a _Jealous Thing_, for she
  sniff’d most odious and catty & hop’d my fine gentleman, fresh from
  Lunnon, trifl’d not “with thy young affections, child.” I recall now
  that never did I love Eliza. An her husband--though I much doubt
  she comes by one--ever beats her soundly, I shall die in the firm
  faith she deserved it. Back in the tilbury with Anthony. Sure ’tis a
  beautiful world, in spite of some Elizas in it.

       *       *       *       *       *

  _3rd Febry._--He is gone, he & my Father. War has taken them. I saw
  him ride away from me and all my hope go with him; sure my soul
  itself did follow him a-whimpering. He waved his hat for a last
  farewell, and the sunlight was upon his beautiful countenance and his
  black hair.

  I wish my father had allowed us to wed. O God, I am afraid! I am
  afraid!

       *       *       *       *       *

  _1st March, 1777_--No word this many, many weeks.

  O God, remember me because of these nights! Weigh me in the balance
  with these black hours and see if all the errours of a thousand years
  could weigh equal with this, my misery!

       *       *       *       *       *

  _17th Octbr._--They have fallen. Both together. Marion hath sent a
  letter full of kind words and praise. To my poor mother came my lov’d
  and honour’d father’s last words, but for me only mine own little
  likeness taken from Anthony’s breast. I know not if he had time to
  send one last thought to meward.

  It has rain’d and rain’d and rain’d. And ever before me I see him
  lying and the cold rain drenching his hair.

  Oh, what is left to me, what? My gentle Mother shames me with her
  meek patience: _she_ saw her children cradled in my father’s arms.
  But I--what of me?

       *       *       *       *       *

  _Midsummer, 1780_--They ever bid me remember, Anthony, that I am
  still young and that many find me fair. They tell me ’tis not seemly
  for Youth to cherish Grief so fondly, that I must e’en look up and
  see in other eyes what once I saw in yours. They know me not, O my
  love!

       *       *       *       *       *

  _Mayday, 1782_--To-day have I sat up for the first time, after my
  long, long illness. Black Matty brought me at my bidding my litle
  mirrour, blubbering, poor wench! For indeed I am greatly changed.

  It pains me, I being so sadly altered, to look upon those pictured
  faces that are so smiling and so young. I am minded to lay those
  pretty semblances of what once we were in the little recess above the
  mantel, in that room which saw us Betroth’d. There shall they lie,
  with this little Book I was minded once to show you, in coming years!
  Alas, my heart!

       *       *       *       *       *

  _Octbr., 1782_--My own sweet love, in what I do know now to be
  these my last few days, a something grows within me of presage
  and of peace. I know that I shall find you, “For Love is strong
  as Death.... Many Waters cannot quench Love, neither can the
  floods drown it.” I do hold fast to that as to an anchor, and I am
  comforted. For still shall I be I, and you, you. So O my own love, so
  greatly lov’d, for a little space, good-bye!

There was no further entry. Trescott laid aside the yellowed pages,
and opened the other half of the package. The girl herself smiled up
at him, brown-haired, brown-eyed, rose-lipped, a wilful cleft marking
her little chin. One saw on the blackened gold true lover’s knot,
which formed the loop of the picture, her initials--_L. K._ From the
other frame, most gallantly attired, young, clear-eyed, very grave and
beautiful, another Anthony Trescott looked hopefully.

The hush that fell upon Trescott seemed to communicate itself to the
day itself. The very wind seemed to stand still in the cedars. Time
itself passed. Then, out of the heart of the holy silence, a girl
stepped, a girl all in brown, a motor bonnet swinging on her arm and
the sunlight full upon her shining hair. At sight of him sitting there
so sunk in revery, she stopped short.

“Anthony Trescott!” she breathed. And he looked up of a sudden and met,
glance to glance, her intense and luminous regard.

“Lydia--Why--Lydia!” he mumbled. Blackness swooped upon him as his
overwrought nerves snapped.

He came to, to find his head upon the girl’s supporting arm. She
was fanning him with a brown motor bonnet--a perfectly enchanting,
expensive, ultra-modern motor bonnet. But Trescott had no eyes for
anything save the rose-lipped face. He stared at her unblinkingly.

“Lydia,” said he, gravely. “I found it, dear, your Christmas present.”

“I wish to gracious I’d brought Aunt’s smelling salts!” said she,
anxiously, and fell to fanning him more vigorously.

“I thought,” said Trescott, sitting up, “that your message was all I
could expect. Lydia, I didn’t even dare to dream you would come. Oh,
you were right--beautiful things do happen at Christmas-time. For you
are here! Lydia, the wonder of it!”

“But the wonderful thing isn’t that I’m here, but that I should really
and truly find you here, Mr. Trescott!” said she, puzzled. “I’m awfully
sorry I startled you so; you wouldn’t hear me coming, of course, with
all this dead grass about, and I was right upon you before you saw
me or I saw you, either. Then you called my name, almost as if you’d
expected me, Mr. Trescott!” she finished shyly.

“How have you come, and why have you come, here of all places under
heaven, and to-day of all days in the year?” he wondered.

A dimple danced into her cheek, and her eyes danced with it.

“Why--I came, really and truly I came--on your account, Mr. Anthony
Trescott!” she said gaily. “Why do you look at me so strangely? It’s
very simple. Don’t you remember how in your own ‘The House of Their
Fathers’ you made _Regina_ visit, on a holy day, the house of her
ancestors, just to let the poor old faithful place know that she
cherished it? I thought it such a perfectly beautiful thing for Regina
to do, and I made up my mind I’d pay just such a visit to King House
one of these days. I’m one of the blood, you see: I was named for a
girl who used to live here.

“It just happened that my aunt decided to motor over in her new car
for a Christmas dinner with her favorite nephew and his wife and their
brand-new baby that we haven’t seen yet. She made me promise to come
along. Poor dear, she has such a horror of motor cars I wonder she ever
trusts herself in one. We stop ever so often, because she has nerves if
a chicken runs across the road, or there’s a curve; or anything. She
insisted we must stop for lunch at the very hotel you’re putting up at.
They boasted of it, of course. You’ve no idea how I felt! Why, I’d
been thinking for days and days and days of visiting this old place; I
dreamed of it last night, and I woke up thinking of it this morning.
But I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to run across you! It’s really
wonderful to find you here, now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Trescott, readily, “it is really wonderful, when one comes
to think about it.”

“I knew you at sight, of course,” she said, thrilled and kindling. “You
see, I’ve read every sin-gle sol-i-ta-ry thing you’ve ev-er written!
And I’ve got a full dozen or more of your pictures, all cut out of
magazines and newspapers. Of course I know you! But oh, however did
you happen to be here, right now? It--it seems like a lovely, happy
miracle!”

“Miracles,” Trescott informed her oracularly, “happen at
Christmas-time, which is exactly when they should happen. I may say
truthfully I came expecting to find you here too. And--here you are,
you see! And now will you please look at me directly and tell me, in
all truth, just exactly how Anthony Trescott appears to the eyes of
Lydia King?”

The rose in her cheek deepened vividly. Flame leaped into her glance.
“Why, Mr. Trescott, I think you are marvelous--quite the most wonderful
person in the whole world!” she blurted out naïvely, then blushed more
deeply because of her own words. Nevertheless she kept his eyes bravely.

“I remember,” she said, “the first day I ever read one of your books
and how it was like a voice I knew talking to me. And I remember the
first time I saw your picture. It--it jumped out of the page, and I
shut my eyes and counted ten before I could look at it again. Somehow
I’d known you were going to be like that, Mr. Trescott. Wasn’t it
curious? And I eat and drink your books and live with them, and dream
with them. I don’t very well see, then, how I could help thinking
you’re the most wonderful person alive--everybody else thinks so
too--or they should think so!”

Praise, fulsome and flattering, praise critical, had been showered upon
Trescott in his time, but this clean glowing living understanding was
as deep calling unto deep.

“We will dismiss ‘everybody else,’” he decided, “and consider only you
and me. Now sit down here beside me, for I have something to show you,”
and he laid the little book in her hand.

She read, and the radiance died from her; the eyes she lifted to his
were too old and sad and wise for her young mouth, her child’s dimple.

“I can hardly bear it!” she said in a stifled voice.

Trescott smiled consolingly. “All over and done with, Lydia. For you
are here--and I also,” he reminded her, and put the two pictures, so
fresh and smiling, in her palm.

She turned pearly white. “Why,--_they’re us_!” she gasped. They looked
at each other mutely. Then, in a low voice, he told her.

“We seem to have been caring and waiting and hoping a long, long time,
don’t we, Lydia?”

She sat very, very still, staring straight in front of her. And again
the wind ceased to move in the cedars, and over all the shining day
hung a waiting hush. Then, timidly, she put out her hand, and the man’s
closed upon it.

“Anthony!” her voice broke a little. “Anthony, are you--quite sure?”

“And you?”

“I want you,” she said, “to take back my picture. And to give me yours
once more. That’s how sure I am!” She turned to him a face sweet with
trust, bright with faith.

After a while, she roused herself from the dream into which, side by
side, both had fallen.

“Hadn’t we better go?” she ventured.

[Illustration: “I think it must have been just here that Anthony
Trescott kissed Lydia King”]

“My aunt is getting ready for another fit of nerves, right now, I know
it! Come on, the car’s waiting down the road, and we can make the hotel
in half an hour.”

They walked slowly, hand in hand; at the broken gate they stopped for a
moment.

“I think it must have been just here,” he said, “that--that Anthony
Trescott--kissed Lydia King.” And he looked down at her.

For a moment she hesitated; then youth, sheer dazzling joyous beautiful
youth, flashed into fire within her and swept her free of every vestige
of grief; a rosy finger flew to her lip and her eyes full of innocent
mischief smiled at him enchantingly. And, as his arms closed upon her,
“It’s--it’s a long, long time between kisses!” said Lydia King.




THE YOUNGEST OFFICER




THE YOUNGEST OFFICER


Junior’s consciousness of himself as an individual seems to have begun
upon the day when the major’s wife came out of his mother’s room, and,
finding him sitting lonesomely upon the stairs, sat down beside him and
gathered him into a tight embrace.

“Kindy,” said he, kindly but insistently pressing a fat forefinger
against her cheek, “you’re k’yin’. What you k’yin’ ’bout, Kindy?”

“Oh, precious little man!” murmured Mrs. Kennedy gulpingly. “And she so
young--and so beautiful--and so loved--and with you and the captain--”

The three-year-old wriggled his sturdy little body out of her embrace
and got on his feet. His small shoulders straightened, a trick he had
from his father. His clear and questioning eyes refused to be evaded.
“Vey said,” he whispered, “’at she was goin’ ’way, Kindy. Is she goin’
’way?”

“Junior,” began the major’s wife miserably, “Junior--”

“Is she goin’ ’way, Kindy?”

The major’s wife began to weep then because she couldn’t help it. And
somehow Junior understood. His gaze widened. “Is she ’fwaid to go,
Kindy?” he wondered.

“She--she--We haven’t told her, Junior,” quavered Mrs. Kennedy. She
beat her hands together softly, palm to palm. “We--we can’t tell her!
She--oh, my God!”

Junior pondered. It was characteristic of him that he usually knew what
to do--and did it. Before Mrs. Kennedy could seize upon him again he
had reached his mother’s room, where his father stood with clenched
hands and a face stony with agony. The colonel’s wife, a stout old
lady, sat in a chair, all in a pale heap. A doctor, compassionately
professional, conferred in a low voice with a nurse who held a
hypodermic syringe. The chaplain, with his face in his cupped hands,
prayed in a trembling whisper.

Junior paid no attention to these, but trotted up to the bed and took
his young mother’s limp hand in his own warm moist fingers. “Poo’
Muzzer,” he cooed. “Darlin’ Muzzer, ’peak to Duny.”

The great tragic eyes opened. Wanly she tried to smile.

Junior’s warm pressure tightened comfortingly. “Mustn’t be ’fwaid,” he
told her sweetly, while the helpless grown-ups watched him. “Booful
Muzzer, mustn’t be ’fwaid to go ’way.”

“Am I--going away?” she murmured.

Junior kept his steady baby glance on hers and nodded.

For a moment a spasm quivered across her face, and her eyes sought help
piteously; for she was very, very young. Then her eyes came back to
Junior’s, and, as if they had found what they sought, stayed there.

“Nothin’ to be ’fwaid of, sweetie Muzzer. Nothin’ to be ’fwaid of,”
said he, repeating in her hour of stress the lessons her simple faith
had taught him. “Dust teep tight hol’ on my han’ an’ go sleepy. It’ll
be all light then.”

She smiled again, more faintly but without a trace of fear. And so,
clinging to her baby’s hand, she went to sleep. It was “all light then.”

The major’s wife took the little hand gently away from Junior’s. To his
mind his mother had simply gone to the “lovely country”; she had told
him so herself. So she stayed in his memory, becoming in time shadowy
but very real and vital. And she left him, as a legacy, her love for
his father.

       *       *       *       *       *

The post mothered Junior, from the woman who washed his rompers to the
colonel’s wife, who did her best to spoil him. And every man in the
regiment was his sworn blood brother, whom he knew from the soul to the
shoe straps. He, as it were, embodied in his gallant little person the
esprit de corps of the army.

An education like Junior’s affects one very materially. When you know
that your great-grandfather fell at Malvern Hill and your grandfather
at El Caney, that your own, ownest daddy bears scars from San Juan--and
all in the service, in the same old regiment--why, you get a sense
of personal responsibility. The service looms very largely upon your
perspective. You learn to carry your head up, your eyes level, your
chin out, your back straight; to fight fair and to hit hard, and to
look every man in the eye. And you must never, never, never forget that
always and in all circumstances you’re an officer and a gentleman.
You’ve got to live up to yourself and the service.

Life was immensely interesting and livable. Junior didn’t know that the
word “unhappiness” existed until orders came for the regiment to go
into exile. In construing the word “unhappiness,” however, one learns
to estimate the value of its twin-sister word “duty.”

“Orders,” said the captain, looking very hard at Junior, “are to be
obeyed, without whimpering.”

Junior brought his hand to his forehead, sat stiffly erect, and used
all his endeavor to keep his chin from quivering. He did wink and he
did gulp a little, but on the whole his behavior was a credit to the
regimental system of instruction for a small boy who is going to be
a soldier himself some day--and he knew it. This helped further to
stiffen his backbone.

“Yes, sir,” he agreed gravely.

“My orders,” said the captain, “mean that I must leave you, Junior.
Your orders are to stay at home and be a credit to us. You’re the
youngest officer, you know, and you’ve got to represent us older
fellows. That’s a man-sized job; but I think you can hold it down,
don’t you?”

Junior considered. “I can try mighty hard to, sir,” said he, still more
erect.

The big captain reached out a long arm and caught up the little son. He
spoke with his face against the soft light hair: “You see, I’d have to
be sending you away from me pretty soon anyhow, Junior. You shouldn’t
be tagging around from post to post, half the time thick as thieves
with rookies. The women--God bless ’em!--have been so good that you
haven’t fared badly. But you ought to have a regular home. I know it.
Only--since your mother left us--I couldn’t bear to part with you. I
couldn’t bear to make you do without me, either. We’re all we’ve got,
you know, old chap.”

The little boy’s arm tightened about his father’s neck.

“I’d like to send you to my old school, to put you in training for
the Point. But I can’t do it yet, son. That’ll come later. Just now
I’d rather you’d be at home with somebody that’s kin to you. So I’ve
written your Great-Aunt Lydia, and she’ll come for you. I think she’ll
be glad to have you. I think she’s going to love you a lot as soon as
she knows you. You’re pretty decent, Youngest Officer,--thank God!
Anybody’d love you, let alone my good old aunt. And now--I’m going to
give you something, little son.”

He took from his breast pocket a light, fine gold chain from which
swung a little flat locket. When you pressed a spring it was as if a
tiny golden door opened to reveal an angel--so lovely, so pure, so
tender the face within. The captain kissed it with reverence, then he
pulled back Junior’s collar and clasped the little chain about his neck.

“You’re to wear this locket and chain,” said his father, “day and
night. It’s your talisman. You’re to remember that she’s with you;
proud and happy when you win out, Junior, sad and sorry when you
fail. Why, boy, you’re her son! You’ve got to live up to her and the
regiment. Don’t you ever forget that, my son. And--just hold on to me
tight for a while, old chap, won’t you?”

       *       *       *       *       *

In the days that followed it seemed to Junior that his pleasant world
was disintegrating. Faces that were as his landmarks vanished. Always
sad and tired, his father’s eyes were now heavy with the pain of
parting. Somehow as he clung silently to the big brown hand the little
boy’s mind went straight back to that day when another hand--a small
cold hand--had been taken from his clinging fingers. But he hadn’t
been trained militarily for nothing. He kept his chin up and he didn’t
cry--at least not until after lights were out.

A tall, thin, stately old woman came presently. Daddy called her “Aunt
Lydia” and kissed her withered cheek with real affection and respect.
He, too, had lived at her house when he was a little boy. She held
Junior firmly by the hand when the train pulled out and took the
Youngest Officer away from his regiment and his captain.

Now when you’ve been raised on a gun barrel, as it were, and your
rising up and your lying down have been at the bugle’s call, and
everybody from your colonel down calls you “Son” and loves you like
one, why, it’s rather like pulling you up by the roots--without
water--to plump you of a sudden in a calm, still, old New England
town with a calm, still, old New England lady who hasn’t been used to
a little boy for perfect ages, and the nearest soldiers those in the
grass-grown cemetery.

Aunt Lydia was painfully just and kind. You saw her see her duty and
do it. She had a way of fixing her eyes upon you and drawing her
lips together and saying in a missionary-to-the-heathen voice: “Good
Heavens! This child’s been allowed to run perfectly wild! Those awful
men! Oh, this must be seen to at once!” And it was.

Junior learned to close doors with terrifying gentleness, because
it seemed to Aunt Lydia a heinous thing to have them shut with the
slightest healthy slam. No; properly raised children open and shut
doors gingerly, as if, say, the doorknobs were loaded and might go
off; and they enter a room with becoming meekness of demeanor. Junior
also learned never, never to rush into the house. He wasn’t really
inclined to rush into the house, anyhow. When he had done so it was
only half-heartedly, just to pretend that there was something to rush
to. He learned to slide punctually into his place at table at one
minute to six, dinner being served on the stroke, and to sit through
the meal silently, being as silently served. This at first brought
poignant comparisons of gay riots with Mrs. Lieutenant’s frolicsome
four, and allowance of dessert with Mr. Lieutenant--sometimes with the
chaplain, sometimes with the fat, jolly major, always with Daddy. In
time, however, one becomes accustomed to everything, even to silence
at table. Aunt Lydia wrote to Daddy, cautiously admitting that the boy
was well-behaved, truthful, and hardly any trouble at all. Which is
praise indeed from a maiden lady.

Next to his father’s letters Junior’s greatest solace, friend, and
help was old McAndrews, who lived in two fascinating rooms over the
stable and managed Miss Lydia’s comfortable estate--and Miss Lydia.
There existed between these two a curious friendship. McAndrews, Junior
thought, was the oldest person alive. When Miss Lydia’s bedtime chapter
had been fifth Genesis Junior had glanced rather uneasily at McAndrews,
who seemed to him actually to visualize those long-lived gentlemen
whose many years Aunt Lydia was sonorously enumerating.

All of a ripe eighty, with a hale, ruddy face framed in a New England
snow of beard, McAndrews had known every Palmer born for three
quarters of a century. What tales of them he told Junior! Some of them
sailors, some of them soldiers, all of them men of action. Junior’s
Daddy was in his memory as a little boy, a youngster fresh from West
Point, a big brown fellow home from Cuba. And oh, more wonderful than
all, he had known Junior’s mamma, for she had lived within a few miles
of this self-same little town! She was, he said, the most beautiful
girl in the world. Even yet his voice broke a little when he talked
about her.

He used to take Junior by the hand and go trudging over the
country-side in heavenliest rambles. Every house called for a history
in detail, until once they passed a fine old place set back from the
road, embowered among many elms, and McAndrews, pausing, glowered at it
silently. He hadn’t intended to take Junior by the Holcomb house, and
he was angry with himself.

“What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful place!” said Junior, attracted
by the old mansion and its magnificent trees.

“Aye!” snarled McAndrews.

“I wish,” said Junior, “that I could climb up in those trees,
McAndrews, or roll in the grass beneath them. I like how this place
looks. Whose house is it?”

“That,” said the old man after a pause, “is the Holcomb house. And,” he
added, shaking his stick at it, “if it hadn’t belonged to an old devil
it might have sheltered a young angel. That door’s closed to you and
your father, boy; it was closed against your mother.”

McAndrews trudged along in grim silence for a while, and Junior, too,
had no words. His heart was beating fast. His mother had lived there
in that place! But why had those doors been closed against her and him
and Daddy? Junior couldn’t understand. Nobody at the post had ever told
him anything about her, save that she was very young and very, very
lovely. But of a sudden, as if he thought the little boy should know,
McAndrews began to tell him more.

She had been a great heiress, McAndrews said--that is, very, very rich.
Her papa and mamma had been very vain and proud of her, and they had
planned that she was to make what is called a great marriage: that is,
they wanted her to marry a man they knew who wished to marry her--a man
who had millions of dollars. But she had laughed and shaken her head.

Then came the Captain from El Caney, with a wounded leg and a great
grief upon him because of the gallant old father he had left behind.
Everybody had been nice to him and had been proud of the handsome young
man; but the nicest and proudest of all had been the most beautiful
girl in the world.

“Because,” said McAndrews, “those two just were made to love each
other. They couldn’t help it.”

But when the captain went to Aaron Holcomb to ask for the most
beautiful girl there had been a terrible to-do. They said he shouldn’t
have her; they said he wasn’t anything but a poor soldier with nothing
but his pay; they said she’d have to choose between nothing but a
soldier and them; and that she would have to marry another man, anyhow.
Then she had put her hand in the captain’s and chosen him. Neither
her father nor her mother had ever looked upon her face again, nor
named her name, nor given any sign when she wrote to tell them about
the little boy that presently came to live with her and the captain.
They hadn’t even given a sign when they were told that she had left
the little boy and the soldier. So the little boy really hadn’t any
grandparents, you understand. In the place that should have been his
they had put a little great-grand-niece, who was to get all that was
theirs.

“Ah!” said McAndrews angrily, “how could anybody think of casting out
an angel, and a soldier, and a little chap that was an honor to their
blood?” Moved out of himself, he dove into his pocket and gave Junior
his own treasured clasp-knife--for keeps!

That night when Junior opened the little locket he kissed with a
deeper tenderness her girlish face. And somehow, as if she had gently
whispered it into his soul, he began to be sorry for that sad, bad old
man and woman who had turned away from her and couldn’t ever call her
back again.

Junior couldn’t say that he was actually unhappy at Miss Lydia’s; she
was too really just and kind to make anybody truly unhappy. But he was
horribly lonely at times. He missed, as little boys do so acutely, just
lovingness. He couldn’t actually put it into words, you know; but he
wanted people to do things for him because they loved him and wanted
to, not because it was their duty.

There were many lessons and much studying to catch up, for Miss Lydia
said the child’s education had been, to say the least, peculiar and
irregular. Miss Lydia only knew some of the things Junior didn’t know;
she couldn’t guess the many fine and tender and beautiful lessons the
regiment had taught him, because she was a reticent old lady and Junior
a shy little boy.

With the first snows and the red sled McAndrews had bought for him
things picked up. He was getting along fairly well in the mazes of
modern learning. He hadn’t done anything that the regiment would blush
for. He had had, too, a few good gallant fights, in which he had borne
himself like a man of his hands, thereby winning the enthusiastic
friendship of those whom he had “licked.” Also just outside of the
small town was a particular hill high enough and breakneck enough to
satisfy even the most ardent little boy’s desire for thrills, and a
pond big enough to hold a whole townful of skaters. Junior began to
think that life, even outside of the post, may be pleasant enough--in
spots.

It was on the rather lonesome road leading to the pond that Junior
fell in with the Fairy at the close of a particularly freezing day.
The Fairy was obviously out of her element, but was just as obviously
delighted with the fact. Floundering waist-deep in drifts had draggled
her line furbelows; for she was most gorgeously “got up,” as a fairy
should be. One mitten had gone, leaving bare a little hand turned
purple from the cold. Under her furred cap her eyes were dancingly,
gaily blue,--almost as bravely, steadily blue as Junior’s. Escaped in
many an ensnaring curl, her hair was of an indescribably bright gold.
At sight of Junior and his sled she gave a squeak of delight, holding
out both hands.

Her name, she said, was Ga’sie. His? Oh, just Junior. Junior was really
hungry to have somebody call him that again. Aunt Lydia wouldn’t.
She disapproved of it. She said it wasn’t a name, it was a sort of
appellation. But Junior thought it brought the post and the colonel and
the major and the rookies and Daddy a little nearer. Somehow it made
him feel as if it were not himself, but some other little boy, when
people addressed him as “Bruce Palmer.” The Fairy, however, accepted
“Junior” beamingly. Only, as he himself had once done, she called it
“Duny.” Duny began to adore her right then.

He knew that the proper thing was to put her on his sled and haul her
home; but this she brought to naught by not knowing where home might
be. Junior at her bidding put her on his sled and hauled her about the
pond, wrapping her bare little hand in his own larger mitten. They had
a beautiful time, for never was a fairy more graciously delightful to a
little boy hungry for one.

Junior was sorry when a giant in livery dashed, panting, out of the
growing gloom and swooped upon the Fairy with exclamations of joy and
reproach. Not a word of gratitude was bestowed upon Junior; nothing
but a growling threat against bad boys that helped runaways.

“Duny finded me, nas’y man!” shrieked the Fairy, kicking with all the
force of her short legs. “I tummin’ ’den, Duny! Doo’-by! Doo’-by!”

Junior went home rather unwillingly. There wasn’t anybody there to play
with nor to snuggle against. Under the bleak gray sky, in the fading
light, Miss Lydia’s square brick house looked squarer and brickier than
ever; it didn’t look a bit warm and welcoming, but rather as if it
thrust out angular elbows to push one away. And the Fairy had been so
like Mrs. Lieutenant’s youngest that it made Junior’s eyes smart. If
crying weren’t “cowardy custardy” he could have cried copiously; but
the regiment discourages sniffling.

As it was he was a full seven minutes late for dinner, which waited
coldly for him, Miss Lydia rigidly resigned in her high-backed chair.
She didn’t say one word; she just looked at the clock and then at
Junior. And the clock spoke up for her: “Sev-en min-utes late for
din-ner! Sev-en min-utes late for din-ner!” The little boy’s ears
burned.

He didn’t mention the Fairy. He had never even mentioned the pond
itself. Miss Lydia had a fashion of worriedly wrinkling her brows,
pursing her lips, and asking aloud: “Should that child be allowed to
run about so much by himself? Is that pond”--or that hill, or that
road, or that anything else--“perfectly safe? Perhaps, Bruce, you would
better stay within calling distance of the house to-day.”

Within calling distance of the house was out of calling distance of
any reasonable diversion. Junior didn’t want to stay away from the
pond. She hadn’t said he couldn’t go, but then she might, after the
unaccountable fashion of grown-ups. Junior wisely held his peace.

For instance, he had been forbidden by McAndrews to go down the big
road curving by the Holcomb house. So although he desired above all
things to see the place where his mother had played as a little girl,
he didn’t go.

He had, too, an almost fearful curiosity to see those two who had lost
her. In his short experience everybody had been kind, so he couldn’t
believe that unkind and naughty folks can look just like ordinary
people. No, indeed. You can always tell the witch by her long nose and
her curved chin and her fierce eyes; and the ogre usually has sharp and
bloody teeth, hasn’t he?

His mother became to his mind like one of those beautiful and charming
princesses who are detained by a wicked king and queen, but who escape
and ride away on the crupper of the prince’s big black steed. And,
despite his fear of the old king and queen whom she had left, Junior
wanted to see that house in which she had grown up.

The place, he learned later, was open. The old king and queen were
staying there that winter, after an absence of years. Distant
cousins, nephews, nieces, and their wives and husbands and children
filled up the many big rooms, for they were to spend Christmas there.
Preparations for that great event were already under way on a huge
scale. Sleighs full of noisy, laughing folks dashed by Miss Lydia’s
house; wagons loaded with crates and bales and bundles went to and fro.
But the little boy who was the lost princess’s son flattened his small
nose against Miss Lydia’s diamond-paned windows, watched them wistfully
and had no place in their thoughts, their merrymakings or their hearts.
His very existence was quite as effectually ignored as it had always
been. But, somehow, keeping faith with his mother’s sweetness, Junior
didn’t feel ill treated or resentful; he only felt sorry.

“Poor things!” he said to her at night, “they haven’t got you any more;
and Daddy and I have.”

Because of a slight cold he had been strictly kept indoors of late,
and it palled upon him who was by nature free. If there had been any
small folks to keep him company he wouldn’t have minded so much, but
there wasn’t anybody. And oh, how he wanted to go out and find that
fairy again!

Aunt Lydia, as she said herself, wasn’t much of a hand for visiting.
She sent you fine clear jellies and flaky bread and cake and spicy
pickles and steaming broths by way of neighborliness, but she never
seemed to give you herself. So she wasn’t what you’d call really
sociable. People didn’t drop in to see Aunt Lydia and bring the
children and stay for tea. Good gracious, no! When they called they sat
stately on the horsehair parlor sofa, and pretended to be thawed out by
the frosty fire which had just been kindled, and talked about church
work, district visitin’ and the Woman’s Auxiliary. Junior thought at
first that this latter was something to wear; later he decided that
it was something akin to the rheumatism which stiffened Aunt Lydia’s
fingers, or the everlasting cold which made Mrs. Pepper’s voice like a
crow’s. It was uninteresting, however, anyway you looked at it. Junior
usually managed by polite degrees to slide out of the room. Once when
he had closed the door gently upon half an hour of Auxiliary he had met
the cat in the hall and promptly kicked her. This was one act for which
Junior afterward blushed. The cat got sleek on tidbits covertly fed to
her by way of expiation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Just before Christmas, the weather being then mild, Aunt Lydia
pronounced Junior’s cold cured and set him free. She was very busy with
Christmas cakes herself just then.

Junior made straight for the pond. Because of the thaw, the ice,
although not actually dangerous, was pretty thin in spots, and Junior
avoided these spots carefully. He knew that recklessness isn’t
bravery. When it comes down to risking your life--for other people’s
safety--why, you’ve just got to take it in your ten fingers and risk
it, that’s all. That’s the code. Otherwise you keep yourself in trust
and you are careful.

Over on the farther shore, under the shadow of the trees, the ice was
still thick and firm, and Junior flew up and down this shore until his
blood tingled joyously. The rapid flight made him almost forget for a
few minutes how horribly he wanted his Daddy, to hear him speak, to
hold his hand. Christmas had always been so gay at the post; this year
he was away from the regiment, and it came bitterly hard.

After a while he sat down, and, chin in hand, wondered about his
captain ’way over in the Philippines. Oh, wasn’t he missing Junior,
just as Junior was aching for him? And wasn’t he, too, feeling “all by
himself”? A big, big lump grew and grew and grew in the little boy’s
throat. You do miss people terribly just about Christmas-time, you
know. Despite pride and the regiment’s scorn of a cry-baby a full
half-dozen extra-sized tears ran bitingly down his cold cheeks.

And just then there fell upon his shoulder a small, light, friendly
hand.

“What you k’yin’ ’bout, Duny?” demanded the Fairy, thrusting the little
hand comfortingly into his. “Darlin’ Duny, don’t you k’y!” Of her own
accord she put up her rosy mouth and kissed him roundly. Junior didn’t
say a word. He couldn’t. But he put his arms about her warm little body
and snuggled her. She felt like a plaster upon his sore heart.

“Wanted to see you, Duny,” she said placidly, stroking his cheek.
“Ga’sie love Duny. ’Nen I yunned and yunned and yunned. Dot nas’y
Fräulein!” And she fetched a great sigh as if from a deeply afflicted
bosom; but her expression was so impish that Junior laughed aloud and
hugged her again.

A stout young woman broke through the screen of bushes behind them,
panting and indignant.

“_Ach_, thou naughty one! _Himmel_, but I have this day run!” she
gurgled. “Leave the boy and come away instantly.”

The Fairy turned into the Fury. Down came the small foot, stamping; the
mittened hands doubled, the face grew raging.

“I tummed to fin’ Duny. I want Duny. Duny take me home. You go ’way!”

But the Fräulein advanced, stretching out a determined hand.

“Shall thy mother and thy rich uncle ask for thee, naughty one, and I
answer that I left thee in the forest with a strange wild one of these
parts?” she demanded.

The Fairy backed off warily. In a second she was in full flight, flying
toward those danger signals in the center of the pond--signals which
meant nothing to her. And Junior, with an eagle swoop, flew after
her; but the Fairy was like one of her own elfin race and evaded his
clutching fingers, ignored his warning cries.

Just beyond the second pole she slipped, slid forward a few feet, the
thin ice crackling under her. Then the ice tipped and her bright head
disappeared. Junior found himself staring horror-stricken into the
black hole which had swallowed her. He waited for her to reappear, but
there wasn’t even a ripple on the surface of the black water which hid
her.

Sheer panic came upon him and by the very newness and terror of the
sensation he realized that for the first time in his life he was
scared, just plain scared. He was but nine. He wasn’t a particularly
good swimmer; even if he had been, one can’t swim under ice. There
wasn’t a rope nor any help near save the German woman screeching to
Heaven in her own tongue.

And then Junior remembered the regiment. Why, he held the honor of
the old regiment in the hollow of his hand! It was just as if he’d
heard his captain’s voice: “... the Youngest Officer ... representing
us older fellows....” And the face in his locket! His heart fell to
beating naturally. Off came skates, cap, shoes, jacket. Junior, with
his eyes wide open, disappeared after the Fairy.

One wouldn’t think that water could be so cold--so alive, as it were.
It seemed to Junior as he went under, groping for the child, that the
water had gripping fingers that caught at him, trying to hold him down.

There wasn’t much trouble in getting the Fairy, who had stayed down.
The only trouble was to get her back to the opening--and the ice was so
thin just there--and the water was above his head--

A million years marched over Junior’s head before he got it above
water, dragging the limp child up with him. With one hand he held her,
chin just above the surface; with the other he tried to hold on to the
edge of the ice. His choking cry was answered by a longer, louder,
shriller scream from the governess, a piercing cry that brought a
flying sleigh to a standstill a hundred yards down the road and sent
its two men occupants running toward the sound.

The Fairy was unconscious then, and heavier than lead in Junior’s
numbing grip. He barely managed to hold on. He doesn’t remember how
they pulled him out of those icy fingers which seemed to hold him. He
heard shouts; saw, as it were, a flash of fire before his eyes; felt
himself go, and then darkness came upon him.

Along with the Fairy he was bundled into the sleigh and rushed to a
house, whither doctors were wildly summoned, and a great hush fell upon
joyous Christmas preparations.

[Illustration: He tried to hold on]

Not a soul in his mother’s house knew him who should have been best
known and loved of all. They only knew that this strange child had at
the risk of his life saved little Grace’s, and a sense of gratitude
sent Mrs. Holcomb herself to the room where he had been brought.
She helped to remove his soaked and icy garments. She noticed then the
locket at his sturdy throat, and later, while the others were working
upon him, she took off the locket to see if by chance it might inform
her who he was.

Just as she smiled at Junior nightly, when he kissed her before he
went to sleep, so the little lost Princess smiled now, tenderly,
exquisitely, in her mother’s face.

The woman staggered; but she was a proud old woman, so she didn’t
scream aloud. Only, in a bound she was back by the bed, and all pale
and trembling looked down at her child’s child, and wondered why she
hadn’t known him at once. Oh, great and terrible link of Love, that
Time and Death might weaken but could not break! She knew him for blood
of her blood; she wanted to snatch up his beautiful unconscious body in
her arms, as if through him she might touch once more that other one.
It was as if God had drawn back a curtain and let her see the result
of her own pride and folly; as if his lost mother’s shadowy shape stood
beside him and looked at her and reproached her for what had befallen
him.

She gave a great cry at that and ran out of the room, with Junior’s
“talisman” in her hand. With a stirred and pale face she came up to her
husband, who, seated in the hall, waited for news of little Grace.

“Is Grace--” he began, alarmed at sight of her pallor. But she shook
her head impatiently. Grace was--Grace--dear and beloved of course, but
the other child was _hers_.

“The little boy!” she gasped. “Aaron, Aaron--the little boy! Come, come
at once!” And she dragged him to his feet.

Wondering if her mind were shaken he followed.

Junior was just giving faint signs of life under the doctor’s hand. His
thick light hair fluffed about his forehead in the curls he hated, and
his black lashes showed the marble of his cheek. But the brave little
face was one which a whole fighting regiment adored.

“Coming around now. But he’s had a tussle for it, the brave little
chap! Must have the grit of a man to hold out as long as he did,”
mumbled the doctor.

But the old lady paid no attention to the doctor. She just dropped on
her knees by the bed and took Junior’s hand in hers and kissed it.
She had ten years’ tears to shed, and they burst over the child in a
terrible flood.

The old man sank into a chair, his knees giving way beneath him. He
didn’t need to look into the locket thrust into his hand; he knew too
well whose unforgotten face looked out of its small gold door. So he
looked instead at the face on the pillow, a face to make any father
glad and proud. Presently the slow and awful tears of an old man who
has done wrong, and suffers for it, crawled into his eyes.

He and his wife were still with Junior when McAndrews, stern and
bitter, and Miss Lydia, in tears, came to demand the captain’s son.
Even the grief and remorse that met him couldn’t quite soften McAndrews.

“Give us the boy and let us go,” said McAndrews.

But the old lady kneeling beside Junior tightened her clasp. “Take him
away from us? Now?” she asked.

“And why not now when he’s naught to you?” asked McAndrews. For he was
touched to the heart about the lad, and angry and sore against these
people. “This roof,” he said stoutly, “is no place for the captain’s
son to bide under. He’s needin’ no care from them that never had aught
to give him, not even Christian kindness. Sir and Ma’am, keep you your
gold and your pride, and her you’ve put in his place and that he’s
given back to you. You’re welcome to them all. Miss Lydia and I, that
love him, will take and keep our little lad.”

The old man sitting sorrowfully beside the bed lifted his face and met
Miss Lydia’s gaze. All the pride and hardness had gone, leaving him
what he was in reality--a sad and sorry old man, lonely in his age and
his gray hairs.

“I am glad--that you have at least seen him; that he has been able to
render you so great a service,” said Miss Lydia, proudly. “Oh, such
a good, brave, gallant little soldier! It may ease your burden to
know him as he is--a credit to his father’s name--and to his mother’s
memory.”

McAndrews blew his nose fiercely then to conceal his feelings, and said
grumpily: “Let us take the child and go.”

But the doctor wouldn’t have it. He said McAndrews was a crazy old man
who talked as if he wanted to kill the child outright, after all the
trouble they’d had to pull him through.

When Junior woke up a brand-new, sun-bright, glittering day was getting
the earth ready for Christmas. But never in his life had Junior felt
so weak and tired as he did that morning. If it hadn’t been that a
strange new room caught his attention at once--and he a most curious
and observant little boy, bound to investigate everything new--he’d
have snuggled under the covers and gone right back to sleep.

Miss Lydia, however, had seen his eyes open and she spoke to him.
Her face wore a brand-new, sun-bright look too--a sort of unlocked,
doors-open look. She kissed him as if she’d been waiting to do it a
long time and was glad to have the chance, and she called him “Junior”
in a tone that widened his eyes.

Over Miss Lydia’s shoulder came two other faces: both old, both gray,
both sad and loving and entreating; both begging with their eyes for
Junior to look at them and be friends. They seemed nice old people, he
thought. The old man now--there was something in that old man’s hungry,
grim, stern, loving face that called to something just like it ’way
down deep in Junior.

“Why, he’s better, thank God! He’s all right! He’s all right!” said the
old man, and his eyes went right on claiming Junior.

But Junior was just then remembering things. Then came his first
words--the words of a youngest officer. “Is--is the Fairy all right?”
he asked anxiously.

“I suppose,” said the old man, smiling, “that you mean our little
Gracie. Oh, yes, she’s all right this morning, thanks to you.”

Junior’s hand went right up to the locket that had been replaced
about his throat. He gave a sigh of satisfaction; he knew that she’d
understand and be pleased.

“Oh, darling child!” said the old lady. “You have been so brave.”

Junior blushed a little, remembering that he had been frightened.

“Why, you have to,” he said simply. “You’re scared, you know; but you
mustn’t stop for that. _She’d_ feel pretty bad; and--there’s the
regiment.”

“The regiment?” The old man’s brows bunched, but he looked at the
little man with a great and growing pride; the pride, say, of an old
lion for a particularly promising cub.

“Ours,” explained the youngest officer and gentleman in it. “My
grandfather’s, who died at El Caney; my father’s and mine.”

“I see,” said the old man, thoughtfully. “I’d like, sir,” he added
respectfully, “to shake hands with you. For the regiment, you know.”

Junior got it the other way about. His mother’s own sunshiny smile
broke over his face and he put out a frank hand. But he couldn’t
understand why this old man should hold his hand so long and so tight,
nor why Aunt Lydia and the other old lady should turn aside their
heads, nor why tears should run down the old man’s cheeks. Also he
wished they’d tell him where he was and how he got there, and who they
were that seemed to claim him.

“My head,” he explained, “got sort of twirly and I can’t remember just
how I came here. Would you mind telling me, sir?”

“This,” said the old man, and his eyes seemed to bore right through
Junior, “is the Holcomb house. My name is Aaron Holcomb, and that lady
there is my wife.” And he drew her forward to stand beside him.

Astonishment and open disbelief struggled in Junior’s face. Why, this
was a _nice_ old man; and one might very, very easily love this old
lady. It simply couldn’t be these people who had driven “her” away!

“Aren’t there,” he wanted to know hopefully, “two Aaron Holcombs? Isn’t
there another one--not like you?”

The old man winced, for he couldn’t help reading in the child’s face
the meaning of that question. “No,” said he gravely, “there is just
one--myself.”

“Oh, no!” protested Junior. “Not you! You--you don’t look like
_that_!--either of you!”

So they stared at each other. And presently the child nodded, reaching
right down to the secretest bottom of that proud old heart. “I think,”
he said sweetly, “that you must have been awfully sorry and sad and
ashamed after you’d let her go. Because, you know, you couldn’t get her
back ever any more.”

Aaron Holcomb flung out his hands with a groaning cry. “I was!” he
whispered. “I am! I am!” But his old wife came and took his arm.

“Don’t you think,” she said to Junior, “that you’d like to stay with
us, little grandson? We want you so much; and maybe--after a while,
dear--you’d even grow to love us.”

Junior considered. He liked these two old people already; they weren’t
in the least ogreish, but on the contrary very, very pleasant to look
at. He wanted to stay in his mother’s old home; he rather thought she’d
like him to stay there. But if he left Miss Lydia and McAndrews, who
had been so kind to him, wouldn’t the regiment think he’d flunked?
Would the regiment approve?

Miss Lydia herself settled the matter out of hand. “I have a piece of
Christmas news for you, Junior,” she said, with a very tender smile.
“Your father’s coming home on leave of absence--soon. And until he
comes I think you’d better stay right here and get acquainted with your
grandparents. Then you can _both_ stay with me.”

“All right!” said Junior, rather sleepily.

“He’s going to stay, Aaron. We can have him!” said his grandmother, and
she bestowed upon Miss Lydia a look full of gratitude.

“And play with the Fairy. I love the Fairy,” said Junior, more
drowsily. His eyelids couldn’t stay open; he went to sleep.

With immense pride and tenderness his grandfather bent over him.
Delicately he moved the fair head on the pillow and touched the ruffled
hair. Then he laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and kissed her as he
hadn’t kissed her since the Princess went away.

“Bone of our bone, Jenny, flesh of our flesh,” he said. “My
grandson--my little grandson!” He bent over and kissed Junior, and his
wife and Miss Lydia knew he was kissing Junior’s mother then too.

Even McAndrews, who had come to see his lad, hadn’t a word to say.

“Give me his father’s address, Miss Lydia,” the grandfather said
presently. “I’m going to cable my son to come home to us. And now you
women clear out. Jenny, you’re to fix--_her_ room for my grandson.
Miss Lydia, won’t you please help us to get his Christmas tree ready?
Sit down in the library and write out a list of the things you think
he might like--you help her, McAndrews, please. We’re to have the
big-best Christmas ever, Miss Lydia. Why, I want the whole town to come
here Christmas night and welcome my boy home.” He sat down and waved
his stick at them to leave him.

As they went out McAndrews grudgingly held forth his hand. “_I_ loved
him before _you_ ever clapped an eye upon him,” he said, surlily.

But Aaron Holcomb only shook his head. “That’s why I have to sit here
and get acquainted with him,” he said. “You see, he was born nine years
old to me. Besides, he might wake up and want something, and I’ve got
to pray, McAndrews, that that something’ll be me.”




LINDEN GOES HOME




LINDEN GOES HOME


Over the entire region, through which distracted beings wandered
like lost souls, there hung by day a column of smoke and by night a
pillar of fire. A calamity that one named Sherman--a vast, awful blue
thundercloud edged with crooked, bright gleams of bayonets--spread from
Atlanta to the sea.

Everybody was running; one’s destination did not seem to make much
difference, so long as it happened to be somewhere else. Then when one
reached somewhere else, folks were flying from there, too; so that
women and young children and old men and scared negro servants milled
around in a horrid circle of fear.

When her fleeing friends besought the little lady in black--not alone
for her own sake--to leave lone “Linden,” just off the Hardeeville
Road, she shook her head with the obstinacy of the meek. Wherefore they
went their ways and left her.

“I feel,” she remarked presently to old Cindy, “I feel as if I were
the only person left in the big, empty, lost world the day after the
Day of Judgment. Everything’s happened that could happen; everything’s
finished and done with.”

What she really meant was that _he_ had fallen. Understanding this,
Cindy reached over and soothingly patted her hand.

Only the master and mistress had never been afraid of Cindy; they had
always been kind to the gruesomely ugly old African. Cindy remembered;
and now that the other negroes had gone like chaff before the wind, and
the little desolate lady needed immediate help, Cindy marched unasked
up to the Big House and took capable charge.

So long as Cindy stayed in the Big House, no negro would willingly
cross its threshold. _Cindy was obi._ Dowered with evil power, in
the dark she dug baleful roots, and with these and the fearsome
“swamp-puppy,” cast spells and talked with h’ants. Her very appearance
inspired terror. She was nearly six feet tall, though age had somewhat
stooped her broad shoulders, and under her black turban her head was
quite bald. Her little red eyes were so deep-set that one felt rather
than saw their snake-bright glitter. From her blue gums (_blue-gummed
negroes are poison; if one should bite you, you would die_) projected
canine teeth of incredible length. When Cindy drew back her withered
lips, and her face, with its wrinkled forehead, and enormous nostrils,
twitched in silent laughter, one wished to run away. Only the gentle
eyes of the little mistress had ever looked with affection and trust
upon that grotesque mask.

When the disturbing rumor spread that they were coming toward Linden,
Cindy instantly decided to remove her mistress, willy-nilly, to some
place less lonely. There was in Columbia a favorite kinswoman, Mrs.
DeSaussure. They would go to her. Linden was left to its fate.

At Hardeeville an old man who had loved the master of Linden managed
to find a place in the overcrowded train for his widow, and big Cindy
crouched at her feet. At every station were dolorous crowds; and
long lines of vehicles, all piled with household effects, came and
went, moving endlessly, aimlessly, in a horrible confusion, as in a
nightmare. Always, in a cleared space upon the platforms, were narrow,
long pine boxes--waiting. Sometimes the old negroes who had come to
receive these boxes broke into lamentable cries and wailings. But the
white men and women took them away silently, being as silently watched
by the rows of sad faces in the train windows. The little lady in
black, looking upon them, gripped her hands together in her lap; she
also had received such a six-foot box from the front.

They reached Columbia at night; and here, too, was the nightmare of
people and things moving aimlessly, always, always moving, moving.

It was bitterly cold; there were no conveyances to be had, and the
little lady’s knees were trembling. She was shudderingly ill. An old
priest, noting her pitiful plight, came mercifully to Cindy’s aid. Upon
the threshold of the DeSaussure house, the moaning creature collapsed.

“I’m afraid,” said the priest to Mrs. DeSaussure, “that I can’t find
you a doctor. They’re pretty nearly all gone. But I’ll try. God help
us! God help us!” He wrung his hands, and disappeared, running.

No doctor came. But at dawn, in the bare, stripped drawing-room whose
hangings and carpets had long since been made into saddlebags, the
little boy who was the last of his race opened his huckleberry-blue
eyes.

“Poor--little--baby!” murmured his young mother faintly.
“Poor--poor--little--fatherless--baby! Never, never--to know--_him_!”
Two slow, cold tears crept down her white cheeks.

Aline DeSaussure bent over and kissed the child compassionately. This
frail old woman, whose diseased heart had rendered her hold upon
life purely tentative for many years, had yet, by the irony of fate,
survived her stalwart husband, her strong young sons. Over the baby’s
unconscious head, the two unhappy women looked at each other piteously.
Cindy looked at both, and muttered prayers not addressed to the white
man’s God. That God had come to Cindy along with slavery. Now the
opportunity had come to let them both go; the old pagan felt herself
free to return to her own gods, the old gods, the bush gods. It was a
great relief, as if one removed tormenting tight shoes and stretched at
ease one’s cramped and aching feet.

That day Columbia, stored with the treasures of half a State,
bursting with loot, was invested. Ominous hours dragged by, leadenly,
oppressively, with a sense of inevitable disaster overhanging and
imminent. In the middle of the night there arose of a sudden a glare;
and then upon all sides sounded the crackle of flames. Bells clanged;
dogs began to howl dismally. Shouts arose, and shrill and piercing
screams. One heard the frightened crying of children suddenly aroused
from sleep. As the flames spread, the light of burning buildings showed
unbelievable things, things grotesque and heroic and sometimes terrible.

In the Catholic Church, the orphans, hastily gathered, stood in a
huddled group, looking with frightened eyes at the pale, praying
sisters, and at the vestmented priest, who addressed with passionate
words and gestures certain grim-faced men in alien blue uniforms.

One of these men rapped out an order; the priest cried aloud; and then
the children, at a word from the sisters, began to move. They hurried
out into the frightful din and clamor of the streets, while behind
them church and convent began to burn. When the door fell in, one
glimpsed statues wrapped and writhing in flame, as the damned in the
Florentine’s hell. Columbia was a gigantic torch lighting up the black
night of war.

When the house on the corner was ablaze and thunderous knocks resounded
on the DeSaussure door, Cindy answered the summons.

“Who’s here?” There were bayonets beyond the voice, and Cindy looked
upon the group witheringly.

“White women’s hyuh, white men!” said she savagely. “Two uh dem--an’ a
new-come chile.”

“Get ’em out!” was the sharp order. “Get ’em out--or they’ll burn with
the house!”

Already the intruders were trampling through the rooms. They helped
themselves, rather whimsically, one thought, to whatever caught their
fancy; the owner looked on silently, with that disdainful and desperate
calmness with which intrepid souls face fate.

The baby and his mother were carried out, on a cot hastily piled with
such coverlets as could be snatched up, and set down in the nearest
clear space, a small square brilliantly lighted by the burning house
on the corner. The woman, who was extremely weak, had lapsed into
a merciful unconsciousness, but the baby squirmed and cried. Mrs.
DeSaussure, bareheaded, and with a worsted shawl about her thin
shoulders, sank down beside them. It was piercingly cold, and in the
grip of a bitter frost the torn and trampled streets were like iron,
over which swept a cruel February wind.

Toward dawn the woman on the cot opened her eyes.

“C-Cindy!”

“Yes, missis. Yes, chile.”

“I’m--I’m going.” Her stiff blue lips formed the words with difficulty,
but her eyes besought. “Promise--you’ll take the baby--back home--to
Linden. _Oh! God! God!_”

From a near-by street had come a hoarse and confused murmur of many
voices. Men in soiled uniforms tramped into sight. Capering negroes,
shouting, laughing, clapping, accompanied them. And of a sudden the
black people burst into an exultant and measured singing:

  “B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’! B-ab-y-lon’s a-fallin’!
     An’ de dar-kies gwine ter oc-cu-py de lan’!”

Bitten through by the teeth of the fire, the walls of the majestic old
house on the corner crashed down with a roar. Wild chant and wilder
figures swept by.

The little lady was shaken, head to foot, with a long, slow shudder.
A deep, deep sigh escaped from her bosom, and her head, crowned with
very heavy, bright hair, fell forward. Mrs. DeSaussure presently drew
the sheet up over her face. Under Cindy’s shawl, held close to her
flat black breast for greater warmth, the baby mewed with cat-like
plaintiveness.

The DeSaussure house had been adding its quota of illumination. As
they crouched upon the ground beside the cot, the two watchers could
see flames leap upward from its roof. When the roof fell in, Aline
DeSaussure moaned. It had sheltered generations; it had covered her
young wifehood, her lads’ childhood.

Presently, detaching itself from a chaotic background of smoke and
flame, there came a figure, clapping its hands, staring, screaming with
staccato laughter. Now she minced and bowed, smiling horribly, with
bitten lips. A torn velvet robe hung about her, soiled and disheveled.
She flung up her hands, and, catching the unbound black hair that
streamed about her, tore it, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Vainly clutching at the flying, fantastic figure, which always lightly
eluded her, stumbled and panted a fat black mammy, calling with
endearing and coaxing tenderness upon her stark nursling.

Aline DeSaussure looked with wide and anguished eyes upon the terrible
and tragic figure, but a little while since the honored, the beloved,
the beautiful; and it seemed to her that Carolina herself, distraught,
ruined Carolina, went by in the wind of the mad-woman’s passing. She
uttered a lamentable cry; her hands flew to her heart, rent by a mortal
pang; and, as if to shut from her sight that poignant vision, her eyes
closed.

Cindy lifted her to the cot and drew the sheet over both women, who
were so slim that they did not crowd each other on its one pillow. The
black woman stood looking down upon them reflectively.

“Ain’t scared uh dem white folkses’ God no mo’. Not me!” she grumbled.

An hour or so later, at a cabin in the outside country, Cindy got
some milk for the well-nigh famished baby. Her evil aspect, and
the significant bag now openly worn about her neck, commandeered
respect--and necessities. But she was warned that not only season and
weather, but ruin, starvation, and soldiers, lay between herself and
Linden.

Cindy smiled awesomely.

“I done got powerful spell tuh lan’ dis chile home,” she confided. “He
natchelly _’bleeged_ tuh git home. Uh-huh! I done call muh own ol’
big black god clean f’um Afficky ’count uh dis hyuh same chile.” She
paused, and added, with dark impressiveness: “Wouldn’t like ter be de
pusson tarrygatin’ _him-all_!”

With the speck of humanity snuggled in her shawl, Cindy set out.

What was given willingly, she repaid with charms; what was not, she
took--when there was anything to take. If milk was procurable, Cindy
nosed it out with a truffle-hound’s flair. But far too often there was
no milk; then the child fed upon teas made from simples gathered by the
roadside, or for days at a time he lived upon corn meal boiled into
a very thin gruel. By all the fancied laws of hygiene he should have
succumbed. He grew.

At night, in some lonely thicket under the open sky, the witch woman
would squat upon her heels beside a small fire of crossed sticks and
with a palmful of earth and another of water would mutter spells over
his bald, innocent head. If there were any powers Cindy failed to call
to his aid, it was because she had never heard of them; and Cindy was a
witch doctor’s daughter.

Once, indeed, she had dared to call Names that filled even her
rock-ribbed heart with cold, awful fear. That, however, had happened
upon a most auspicious occasion, in the full of the moon, and when she
had captured one of the last few cocks left in Carolina--a black cock,
young and perfect. For these Names must never be uttered unless one
has a black cock’s blood to offer. They will come then to eat the smell
of the blood, and also because of certain prayers and words. Now if
they are to be petitioned to grant their favor and protection to, say,
a young child, that child must be laid mother naked upon Mother Earth
between Father Fire and Sister Water. And his skin must be pricked a
certain number of times, until drops of blood appear. Three times,
then, shall the Names be named, with the Word of each for a sign.
And then--if they are pleased--they will put upon that child their
spell--and Earth and Fire and Water shall never harm him--and all his
life people must love him and serve him. It is a very good spell for
any child to have put upon him.

When one is burdened with a young and lusty baby for whom food
must be foraged far and wide over a war-swept country-side, one’s
progress is necessarily slow, particularly when one is past fourscore,
and overdriven old legs and lungs show signs of wearing out. The
indomitable old woman, despite all obstacles, had made each week’s end
find her a little nearer to Linden. But one evening at sundown she felt
herself suddenly fail, as an old horse fails in harness.

It was long past dark when Cindy reached the nearest shelter, a cabin
set down at the edge of a swamp. In the incredibly old, wrinkled, and
palsied man who opened the door, the conjure woman recognized one of
her own calling, and sighed with relief. _They_ had not failed her yet;
she had found in her extremity the very help she stood most in need of.

Long, long into the night, while the baby slept peacefully upon a bed
of gunny-sacks, Cindy and the old man communed. Presently Sally, one
of his two granddaughters, was called in, and upon a tuft of the black
cock’s feathers, dipped in blood and tied with a seven-knotted string,
the scared girl was made to swear that she would take the baby home to
Linden when Cindy was gone. Cindy, in fact, had managed to stay only
long enough thus to settle her affairs to the best of her ability. So
the baby passed into the slack hands of strange negroes.

They were very kind to him; negroes are, as a rule, kind to children.
But in that parlous time, with a cabinful of hungry children and no men
to help them, the women had neither means nor time to send the child
forward, much as they would have liked to obey their grumbling old
grandfather’s repeated urgings.

In the meantime the child slept beside the youngest black baby in an
overcrowded cabin; and presently he was learning to walk, by the simple
process of getting up when he fell down and falling down when he got
up, with many an unnoticed bump and bawl between. He grew fat and
rosy on corn-meal mush and bacon grease eaten from a tin plate with a
mouth-stretching iron spoon. The many little negroes taught him early
to talk. He was not a year old when he would lisp his name--Linden.
Cindy had so insistently mentioned Linden that they named him thus; he
had no other name. On the whole, he fared, perhaps, as well as most
babies fared just then in war-worn Carolina.

Through the big teamster who just then caught her fancy, Sally at
last saw her chance to keep her troublesome promise. The teamster, in
the employ of the Union forces, had seen the unravaged and prosperous
North, and he wished Sally to go thither with him. Colored Canaan did
not lie in the South. Zeke knew the men who were coming home--in rags
and tags, battered, scattered, maimed and halt and in driblets--_but
who were coming home_. And he rather thought he would prefer to
be somewhere else for a while. Sally was quite willing to go; but
first she must fulfil the promise wrung from her by her baleful old
grandfather and the black witch with the red eyes and gorilla teeth.
If she did not do what they had made her swear to do--_and that big,
awful old woman came up out of the swamp some night--with all those
teeth_--

Zeke hastily agreed that Sally had better keep her word; it is very
unsafe to meddle with witches’ doings. When his job of hauling timber
for the Government was finished, and the last money collected, they two
would take the child back to Linden and then turn their faces northward.

Linden, however, no longer belonged to the baby; for, by one of those
summary military transfers common in conquered provinces, it had been
declared confiscated, and so passed into the strong hands of John
MacLean.

Full of a fierce and fiery faith--and full of Scotch-Irish prejudice
and obstinacy as well--John had seen in the South a field ripe for a
great spiritual harvest, and had laid aside the gun to arm himself
with the gospel. Having valiantly helped to free enslaved bodies, he
started in just as valiantly and as stubbornly to free enslaved souls.

In that country of wrecked plantations, of ruined rice-fields and
roofless houses, calm Linden, fronting the bright May River, pleased
him. Save that it bore sad evidences of marauders and that a great
deal of the fine furniture had been either broken or stolen outright,
the house was intact. Once in secure possession, John settled down to
what he meant to make his life-work, and called in the lighthearted,
sensuous colored people to drink deep of the cold well of orthodox
Calvinism. They were appreciative: they wished to please the white
man who offered them, for the mere taking, Thirty-nine unbreakable
Articles; but they found the well-water unpleasant to the palate
and--slyly made a sieve of the dipper.

He opened for the colored children a school, in the stately dining-room
from whose walls arrogant patricians looked out of splendid frames; the
room’s marble mantel bore their carved escutcheon; beneath which one
read: “_Ad Astra_.” John thought that such stars as these slave-holding
gentry had looked to were evil ones. He smiled to see their painted
semblances look down helplessly upon the sons and daughters of Ham
learning their A B abs in the room of their feastings; and his dour
humor was tickled at the contrast between the grinning little negroes
and the fine, gay, bare-bosomed ladies, with slim, pointed fingers that
had never toiled and slim necks one might think would break under the
weight of heads crammed with such damnable pride.

He was very hopeful. When he saw his dusky audience swaying like barley
in the breeze of his words of sound counsel, John MacLean felt himself
glimpsing the mountain peaks of coming Canaan, rising, rosy-pink,
in the dawn. He was as yet unaware of the neat holes bored in his
gospel-gourd.

When he did finally begin to be aware of the nature and extent of the
leakage, he was seized with stern, wrathful impatience. It was very
difficult for him to view the subject in any clear perspective. He had
been at first too far off; and now, being too near, he put his eye
against the object he wished to study and so blinded himself. One could
wish that all reformers should take a preliminary course in optics.

Why should a race be so childishly frivolous, behave with such naked
and unshamed untruthfulness, at so great a turning-point in its career?
Perhaps, he reflected, it was because they had not as yet been taught
their value as human beings,--free human beings, with a part, and that
no mean part, to play in the world. Yes, that must be it. John began
to teach them their great value as human beings, very persistently and
insistently.

But if black faces beamed approval, when he went abroad among his
new neighbors white faces looked upon him with a cold and hostile
contempt. He had come in their most evil hour, and he had been allied
with those forces which had crushed the South. Therefore they judged
him even as they were judged by him. They were engaged in the most
frightful struggle in which any people can engage,--the struggle to
preserve the integrity and purity of a race in the midst of a world
turned topsy-turvy. They neither asked nor desired outside help or
counsel; they insisted upon their inherent right to manage their own
affairs in their own way. And it was in order to do this that they had
of late called into being a force born of desperation and duty--the
Klan--against which John MacLean thundered without fear, but not
without fanged and ravening reproach.

John could no more understand that movement than the men behind it
could understand _him_. With flashing eyes and compressed lips he had
listened to dark and wild tales, to whispered, fearful confidences, to
terrified comments.

Of the seed that burned bravely at market crosses, fell singing
fighting hymns on lonesome moors, starved unwhimpering in forgotten
dungeons,--he was devoid of fear. A man of his hands, his utmost
Christianity could not keep his blood from kindling joyously to a
rousing battle. He had no faintest notion of counseling meekness.
Bareheaded, on the front steps of Linden, he called the colored
country-side around him and advised them to get guns and to use them.
For himself, he said disdainfully, he had no tinge of fear; and he
asked them to remember that for such a cause as this had his old friend
John Brown died at Charlestown.

They left Linden glory-hallelujahing; it was John MacLean’s gauntlet
thrown down openly for all members of the outlaw Klan to see.

The Klan watched silently. And presently they decided that they
had most grievous ground of complaint against this cantankerous
carpet-bagger; a fact perfectly well known to Mr. MacLean, who, like
a particularly bad-tempered St. George in conflict with a particularly
devilish dragon, honed up the tongue of denunciation accordingly.

And, while the storm lowered over Linden, and the cruel, bleak winter
of direst want and woe drew near to one of those sad, sad Christmases
after the war, Zeke and Sally, with the little boy between them,
were journeying homeward by ox-cart express. The baby was simply and
chastely clad in a parti-colored shift worn next to his grimy skin, a
man’s old coat with the sleeves rolled up to allow his small arms free
play, and a battered and shapeless felt hat pulled down over his ears
in the effective fashion of an extinguisher. Of shoes he had none.
Cindy’s bag, sewed up in a very dirty piece of calico, was tied about
his neck; and his cheeks--such as one might glimpse of them under the
enshrouding headgear--bore upon them etchings done in wet points of
bread and molasses.

On Christmas Eve, in a chill and dreary twilight, they left the ox-cart
in a thicket and entered the path that leads through the pines to
Linden. Wet, swaying pendants of trailing moss, hanging from the huge
oaks that interspersed the pines, brushed against them with a clammy
and ghostly touch. Zeke and Sally, both nervous and silent, were filled
with exaggerated fears. All along the long road, terrible and wild
stories had been whispered, filling tellers and listeners alike with
apprehension.

They breathed deep with relief when at last Linden lay before them,
dark, quiet deserted, with closed doors and windows, and light showing
in one room only. Stepping noiselessly upon the pillared porch, Zeke
swung the sleeping baby off his shoulder and plumped him down with his
back against the closed door. Linden had come home.

The baby was quite used to cold and darkness, but not at all used to
being left alone and supperless. He called softly: “Thally! Thally!”
But “Thally” did not come back. His lip trembled; tears filled his
eyes; the vague, formless fear of aloneness assailed him, and lifting
up his voice he cried loudly.

The door was hastily opened by a big, fair, bearded man who held a
candle in one hand and shaded his keen blue eyes with the other. The
bundle of rags upon the threshold waited no further invitation than the
opened door, but trotted into the hall, his small bare feet pattering
on the uncovered floor. A sleeve of the coat unrolled and flapped
beside him emptily, grotesquely.

Whether the outlandish waif were black or white John could not for the
moment tell; in truth, it mattered little, all children being dear
to him. He ushered his small visitor into a room warm with fire and
candlelight, and removed the evil odored coat, the shapeless hat.
Periwinkle eyes, white brow, gold hair, revealed themselves.

“And where will _you_ be from?” John wondered.

“Thally gone. Thally leave Linden,” said the baby gravely, shaking his
head over Thally’s defection.

“And who’s Sally, now?”

But the child had imparted all the information at his command. Sally
was Sally, and Sally had gone and left him. He patted the big man’s
hand to make him understand.

The big man was absurdly grateful for that friendly, light touch. He
had been feeling most horribly alone; he had, in all truth, felt that
same vague honor of aloneness which had made the child cry out at his
door. The house was quite deserted, save for himself, the cook having
gone into Bluffton for the night, on Christmas business of her own. But
the emptiness that John recognized was not so much in the house as in
himself, the inevitable result of social ostracism.

[Illustration: The bundle of rags on the threshold waited no further
invitation]

The Bible opened at random, which he had been reading when the cry at
his door interrupted him, had given him for his pains the lugubrious
eighty-eighth:

  Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made me
  an abomination unto them....

  Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, _and_ mine acquaintance
  into darkness.

The words stung him. For he was most absolutely cut off from his kind,
a thing calamitous for a white man. The evil, greedy carpet-baggers
exploiting ignorant ex-slaves, making of them political pawns upon the
bloody chess-board of the South, filled him with a stern disgust and
anger; and he viewed the ex-slaves’ former owners very much as, say, a
biblical Jew might have viewed Baal worshipers overthrown, hewed hip
and thigh by the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. He said, therefore,
in substance:

“Gentlemen, I am everybody’s enemy.”

And they replied unanimously: “For this, be anathema.”

And already the light, volatile natures, the easy, pilfering morality,
the irresponsible, gay inconsequence of the pupils and protégés for
whom he labored had begun to chafe and fret his own honest and truthful
nature. He had no thought, however, of giving up a fight just begun.
But to keep him sweet he needed communion with his equals.

That the wee visitor, come mysteriously out of the dusk of Christmas
Eve, should be a white child touched him curiously and tenderly. Blood
is thicker than water. He did not love the black babies less but the
white baby more.

Moreover, the white baby was looking at him with starry eyes full of
the sweetest trust and friendliness. And John did so greatly need trust
and friendliness just then. One may have very, very, very little,
and still not be without some inward and sure staff of comfort and of
hope; but, oh, to be alone and hated, without love, without intelligent
sympathy, without friendliness--on Christmas Eve!

The childless man felt his heart melt in his bosom, remembering old,
tender stories of that dear Baby of the Star, who at times delights to
reveal himself to sad men on pilgrimage; and always in the guise of the
beggar and of the lowly whom he loved.

On the table, beside the big Bible, stood the remains of John’s supper.
The child pointed to it eagerly, for he was very hungry.

“Linden wan’ thuppeh.”

Linden! Why, the child’s name was Linden! What a pleasant and curious
coincidence!

Having supped, the baby yawned, looking about him for a good spot to
curl up and go to sleep, like a puppy with a full stomach. He decided
upon the hearthrug. But John’s bachelor neatness and cleanliness were
scandalized at the bare idea of any human creature going to sleep
anywhere in such a shocking state of grime. He wished that Viny, the
cook, were there to help him; but she was not, and John rolled up his
sleeves and set himself seriously to the task, fearsome to any man, of
getting a thoroughly dirty child thoroughly clean. The one discolored
garment made him shudder, as he consigned it to the fire. Cindy’s bag
was laid upon the table for later investigation, and he handled it as
gingerly as if he had seen the old black woman mumbling her spells with
its aid.

Linden enjoyed the warm water hugely. He splashed and shouted and
laughed, and grabbed at the soap, and worried the wash-rag; and he
howled only when John, with more zeal than deftness, soaped his eyes
and mouth. It was a drastic scouring, but there presently emerged from
it a sweet and rosy cherub, hard to be recognized as the dirty little
grub of an hour since.

When he had been trussed in an undershirt by way of a nighty, and the
room decently put to order again, Master Linden decided that the nice
big man should sing him “nighty-night”; he stood on tiptoes to be taken
up and rocked.

“Thing by-bye,” he urged, settling himself comfortably in the crook
of a big arm, and the big arm that was all too empty closed about him
hungrily, instinctively, God having made all big arms for the great
purpose of cuddling soft, snuggling little bodies. An inexpressible,
exquisite sense of fatherhood welled up in John’s heart. He pressed his
face down against the damp curls. He began to sing:

  “God rest you, merry gentlemen! Let nothing you dismay.
   For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born on Christmas Day.”

The baby, with half-closed eyes, crooned a tuneless tune to the fire,
his hand patting John’s arm. Then he went to sleep in the arms of the
man who had taken his inheritance, and was held close and lovingly.
Reluctantly John laid him down upon the sofa and covered him with a
blanket brought from his own bed.

He had time then to examine the extremely dirty little bag tied with
knotted string, and to marvel at the unchancy plunder it contained.
But he whistled when, from the midst of the conjure stuff, there came
to light the rings Cindy had taken from a dead hand. With them was
a man’s very handsome and heavy gold watch-fob, stamped with a coat
of arms--the same arms blazoned upon the marble mantels and over the
great doors of Linden. John stared at the jewel almost unbelievingly.
Then he stole over and looked long and earnestly upon the sleeping
baby, and saw how race and breeding marked every lovely line of him.
John knew him now, bone of the bone and blood of the blood of those
proud patricians whose portraits still hung upon the walls of their
despoiled home, men and women allied to the lordliest names of England
and of France. Eh, but this was a bonny baby! In his secretest heart
the dour, doughty Puritan adored his strength and grace and comeliness.

When he had taken over Linden for the glory of the Lord, John had
heard, of course, of the little widow and her flight to Columbia; also
he knew that there had been an heir expected. But the little widow was
dead, and no one had heard of any child surviving. Yet--here he was!

Who had brought him home, or why, or how, John never knew; but he was
quite, quite sure Who had sent him, and he had no thought of refusing
the heavenly gift. He would have thought such a refusal sacrilegious,
he who saw the hand of the Almighty in all his affairs, shaping his
destiny and guiding his days. With all humility and willingness and
gratitude, he took over his new stewardship and all that it implied.
He sat by the fire, and, full of a happy awe, dreamed and planned.
There was a far, fair future in which he and this child, viewing the
great work they should do together, might, too, say reverently: “What
hath God wrought!” He smiled; he was no longer alone.

His Christmas present presently stirred in his sleep, woke, and sat up.

“Wanterjinkerwater!” said he plaintively. “Dimmyjinkerwater!”

Vain of the delightful fact that he so readily understood this angelic
lingo, John got the water, eager to wait fatherlily upon his child.
The little man drank slowly, with long and deliberate pauses between
little sips. Then he stuck his fat fingers in the glass, paddled them,
laughed, and looked up at John with bright, mischievous eyes.

And even then sheeted figures were dismounting from sheeted horses
before the pillared porch of Linden. They moved soundlessly, as might
the phantoms they resembled, and their appearance, in that lonely place
and hour, was such as froze the blood. Under the tall leader’s hand the
great hall door swung open, for in his surprise at the child’s entrance
John had forgotten to draw the bolts. Soundlessly they moved down the
wide hall toward the room from which light issued. The leader opened
this door, too.

Candles and firelight dancing on the walls; upon the table nothing
worse than bread and milk and an open bible. And John himself,
kneeling, smiling fatherlily upon a rosy and roguish elf who paddled in
a glass of water and laughed gleefully.

The child saw them first, and gasped. At that John looked up and knew
his fate was upon him. Rage shook him head to foot, and he would have
rushed upon them, unarmed as he was, but--one could not endanger a
child’s life in such a mêlée of killing as must ensue. He got to his
feet and faced them, disdaining words, without a trace of fear, but
with eyes blazing with bitter contempt. Twenty pairs of eyes cold with
condemnation looked back at him, the carpet-bagger, the preaching
fire-brand, the enemy. The tall leader beckoned, an imperious and
menacing gesture. John shrugged his shoulders, a grim, scornful smile
curling his lips.

“So much mummery for one lone man’s murder!” said he, bitingly.

Something in that tense, electric atmosphere troubled the young child’s
spirit. He slipped off the sofa, and as the big undershirt tripped him,
and John, with a quick gesture, stooped to raise him, the little man
gripped the big one with warm, moist fingers. He frowned disapprovingly
at the things in the doorway.

“Go ’way, boogermans!” he ordered, with pretty imperiousness. “Go ’way!”

When the boogermans failed to go, the baby wished John to take him up
in his arms. But John shook his head regretfully. His brows puckered
then as the problem of the child’s fate presented itself. He looked
about desperately, praying for an inspiration for the child’s sake.
Then, holding up his hand impressively, he addressed the tall leader,
and told of the child’s coming, of what Cindy’s bag contained.

But the baby himself, after vainly twitching his friend’s trouser leg,
began to roar dismally, with the fearless lack of restraint that is a
baby’s most potent weapon. John and his visitors looked at one another,
not so much with hate as with perplexity. There was a thing to be done;
but, in the doing, what of the baby?

“And _you’re_ of his kin and his race!” spat John, with sudden
exasperation. “Christmas Eve--and an innocent roused from his sleep
to witness murder! Could you find no fitter time for your devil’s
prankjankins than the birth-night of the Lord?”

Nobody answered. In sheer desperation, John went on his knees to
comfort the wailing child, and as the baby strangled his sobs on the
big man’s breast, they in the door looked on through the slits of forty
eyeholes.

“If you can dare to handle innocence with bloody hands--if there’s one
among you that’s a father--take the child home to some woman to-night,
for the love of God!” said John. And gently he put the child aside. “It
goes sore against my grain to part with you, my bonny man,” he said
softly and regretfully. “I looked to be a father to you. But the will
of God be done! Never yet did John MacLean gainsay a decree of his
Maker. And in my Maker’s name I beseech my murderers to deal fairly
with you after I am done away with, and to put you into possession of
what must be yours. Stay!”

He fished a stubby pencil from his pocket, drew a chair to the table,
seated himself calmly, and on the fly-leaf of his Bible made his brief
will, leaving Linden to the child. When he had signed and dated it, he
rose and nodded.

“That will make it surer,” said he, with a satisfied smile.

And all the while the baby, refusing to be lightly put aside, clutched
at his knees, protesting against such neglectful treatment with raised,
tearful eyes and heartbroken sobs.

“And now,” said John to his gentlemen-in-waiting, “there is but one
thing more.” He fished a handful of small change from his pocket, bowed
to them, and laid the money on the table. “You will be so kind,” he
said politely, “as to buy with this some little baubles to please him?
It’s Christmas, remember--Christmas! I think it would ease me in my
extremity to remember I had made the wee thing happy on Christmas!” He
straightened his shoulders at that, and his head went up. “And now I’m
ready,” said he calmly.

Once more he had to put aside the clutching little hands as he bent
to kiss the child’s fair head. With a firm and manly tread, he walked
toward the men, who were already moving through the hall. The door shut
upon the baby’s wails.

“God forefend he’ll set himself on fire!” said John anxiously. “You
might hurry,” he suggested as they stepped upon the porch.

Night hung over the dark earth, wet with rain and sweet with woodsy
odors. Above the dim, slim pines clouds scurried about, trying to clear
a space in the sky for a few timid Christmas stars. One caught, too,
the salty sweetness of the tide-water. John drew a deep, deep breath,
filling his lungs with it.

At the foot of the steps, ghostly horses drifted up to meet ghostly
riders. Their movements were very deliberate.

“And the child alone with fire!” snarled John, and stamped his feet.

The tall leader spoke in a slow, low voice, and instantly the men
mounted and began to move off. From the house came a muffled cry,
and John sucked his teeth sympathetically. Dear baby,--so bright and
brave and beautiful, so loving and loyal and like the Holiest Baby of
all--good night, good night, and good-by!

The masked horsemen, drifting into the shadows of the pines, melted
into the night. Then the leader drew near and laid a firm hand upon his
captive’s shoulder.

“Ah can’t spare any of my men to-night to tend babies,--not even
white babies,” he remarked in a soft, pleasant voice. “Didn’t reckon
_you_ ever had time to tend babies--white babies--either.” He paused
meditatively. “Ah don’t believe,” he murmured, “Ah don’t believe that
God A’mighty was just projeckin’ when He sent that little chap hyuh
to-night of all nights to you of all men. No, suh, Ah don’t believe it!
Aftuh you’ve had him a spell--and learned to use yo’ white man’s eyes,
you everlastin’ fool, you--you’ll understand it’s because of him and
his mothuh and his sistuh--that the Klan’s hyuh.”

He walked down the steps and swung a lithe leg over his mount.

“If Ah were you, Ah’d go on back in the house and keep that little chap
from burstin’ himself cryin’,” he said casually.

Once in the saddle, he leaned forward and waved a slim, capable
hand--such a hand as had gripped by the hair of its drowning head the
safety of a race and held it alive above a black flood. A note of
amused and tolerant understanding, of a new respect and kindness, crept
into his soft, dangerous voice.

“_Merry Christmas!_” said he, genially, and was off.

John’s throat, which had not tightened at the thought of a rope collar,
felt of a sudden a big, aching lump crowd into it. He swallowed
tolerance and understanding gulpingly; the underlying kindness helped
them go down--and stay down.

“M-merry Christmas!” he found himself stammering.

And as the flying horseman vanished, he ran back to the warm and
lighted room and gathered the weeping spirit of Christmas into fatherly
and consoling arms.




THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE




THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE


The senator’s wife was returning from the very smartest of afternoon
affairs; her white-haired and fresh-colored loveliness had charmed
and delighted the most famous and fastidious of diplomats, and the
Chinese minister had expressed frank amaze at the magical youthfulness
of the American Grandmother; as she stepped into her car the magically
youthful rose still blew in her cheeks.

To avoid a crush, her chauffeur had made a detour, swung down two or
three residential streets, slipped through the region of fashionable
boarding-houses, and turned into a side street, quiet, tree-shaded,
peaceful, as if, like the birds, it were going to bed with the sun. On
a corner, with a hedge between it and another small house next door,
stood the Little Brown House.

The chauffeur wasn’t speeding then, so the senator’s wife had a chance
really to see the place. It was quite as if the Little Brown House had
seen her first, and called out friendlily, as one may to one’s own.

She came out of her pleasant self-satisfaction with a start; as usual
she had been telling herself that she hadn’t failed _him_; that step
by step she had kept the pace set by his boundless ambition. An
international figure now, the West had hammered him out of her giant
forge--one of those wonderful Americans about whom, some day in the far
future, not the Great American Novel alone, but the greatest epic of
the entire race is going to be written. Not the least of his successes
was the fact that for forty years he had retained the single love and
adoration of his wife; she was proud of him with an almost terrible
pride.

There had been times when she had wanted to pause, and catch breath,
and rest; but always he had been marching upward, and she had gone
with him. Once she had thought that afterward--when, say, the children
had grown up and settled--they two might grow peacefully and gently
old together, in the evening of their day. But that dream had been
foregone; she had but grown old youthfully, wonderfully, with a
ripening beauty. Now it was only at times, when, disrobed and massaged,
she was at last alone, that she admitted she was--tired.

Her social secretary--and _she_ knew her social centers like the palm
of her hand--said that the senator’s new house was the one perfect
house in all America, and those affairs at which his wife presided the
most delightful outside of Vienna. She never knew that, deep down in
the other woman’s soul weariness, a longing for simpler things, stung
at times like a nettle.

But when her car rolled slowly by the Little Brown House something
broke in her breast; something became alive and fluttered as with
wings. Why, it was just such a little house as she had dreamed of,
always, in her secretest dreams! It was a pity, she thought, that a
great “For Sale” sign was nailed on the front porch, and that all the
windows were closed. Little brown houses should never, never be spoiled
by “For Sale” signs, and their windows should always be open.

She was going to dine at the White House that night, in a Paris gown,
wearing the pearls that the senator had lately given her. And--she
would come home weary. She wished that for just one night out of these
gold-and-glory public nights they two might linger over a small table
whose simple meal was lighted by the lamp of home. Oh, just for once
to be only a gray-haired man and his gray-haired wife, in life’s calm
closing day, looking steadfastly out into the fading sky, in whose
deepening twilight would presently shine, like a beacon, the evening
star! No light save that, and the bedtime candle; no noise, no glitter;
no great orchestra, only the dear every-day music of the tea-kettle,
and the cricket, and the settling log.

[Illustration: Why, it was just such a little house as she had dreamed
of!]

The car swung around a corner; the Little Brown House was left behind.
She had left behind so much, she thought. Old neighbors, old faiths,
old friends, old simplicities. She had advanced, but to what? What, of
all the great essentials, had she gained? In all this success, what was
hers--to _keep_?

At dinner she met her youngest daughter, married to a title incidental
to a big blond Englishman of unimpeachable morals and a goodly
rent-roll. The other daughter, Milly, had married the millions of
Kilian van Cuypt. Dick, the only son, had married a virtually penniless
Virginian, but Dick’s wife brought connections. The children had all
done well: she was satisfied with things as they were; but at dawn she
admitted again that she was tired, too tired to sleep.

The Little Brown House crept into her mind soothingly. In the room
shaded by that one great tree the lights would long since have been
out. That would be a very simple room; the toilet articles wouldn’t be
of crystal and of hammered gold, for instance; there would be no inlaid
and priceless furniture: it would be just dear and clean and cozy;
after a quiet day one might pass there a quieter night.

She wondered what it would be like, living in a little brown house.
Whimsically she lay awake and furnished it, room by room. At first she
failed to note the significance of her omissions, the curious sense of
rest and freedom which the mere thought of eliminating a great retinue
of servants gave her. Little brown houses haven’t room for retinues;
one had perhaps a little maid whom one really knew, and in whose
affairs one was interested. It occurred to her that she knew just about
as much of the lives of _her_ servants as she knew about the man in the
moon. But in little brown houses one might come into pleasant human
contact with one’s few necessary helpers. She surmised that this was
the right way, the good way, the Galilean Carpenter’s way.

_The Carpenter!_

Her thoughts drifted back to her girlhood’s churchgoing, the
churchgoing of people in little homes, who have sometimes not enough,
sometimes just enough, but never, oh never, too much. Of a sudden she
remembered her mother’s sweet untrained soprano, her father’s stern
bass:

  “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
   The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide!”

And her mother had had but one best cashmere; her father a sacred suit,
religiously laid out on the bed of a Sunday morning!

There had been Wednesday-night prayer-meetings; she had gone, a little,
little girl, holding tight to the hired girl’s hard, kind hand. She
wondered, with a tightening of the heart, what had become of Martha.
Perhaps she was some gray-haired grandmother to-night; perhaps Martha
too slept under the stars and the night wind and the grass, in a corner
of that old cemetery wherein, lying very close together, her own father
and mother rested.

How calm and serene those two time-worn faces had been! The simplicity
of their lives and their faith seemed to make a deeper gulf between
her and them than death or years. As in a dream she remembered the
quavering voice of their oldest friend reading over them:

  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, ... the love of God, ... the
  fellowship of the Holy Ghost....”

Ah, but to them these things had been the real and the essential--“the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” To her
they had been for many a year but empty echoes, to which one listened,
if one listened at all, with polite inattention and unemotion.

And then she thought with astonishment, “Why, perhaps _they_ succeeded,
who held fast to things they were never to lose; perhaps it is _we_ who
fail--we who have only the things we can touch with our hands.” In her
carved and lace-hung bed, which had cost more than all the furniture in
her father’s house, she began to weep softly; but as if those tears had
cleared her vision she saw what she might do.

The senator was more than scrupulous about his wife’s more than liberal
allowance; if was a very easy matter for her to purchase the Little
Brown House. Never, she thought, had the mere possession of any one
thing given her so much pure pleasure.

It wasn’t, however, the sort of house you can furnish by a wholesale
order at the nearest furniture store. No, indeed; you have to hunt
carefully for things to put into little brown houses. Piece by piece
the senator’s wife found her belongings: here an old dresser, there an
old chair or an older table; all good and solid and beautiful, with
the beauty of being _lived with_.

She was tired of the pitiless bright glare of electricity; so on her
dining-table stood a softly shaded family lamp. The sort of lamp _you_
used to sit beside once, long ago, while your brother and your sister
studied their lessons near by, and your mother, a stocking of yours on
her hand, looked up, smiling, from time to time to answer your many
questions; and your father twinkled over his glasses and his paper at
all of you. You remember now, don’t you? You wouldn’t take anything
life might offer, for just that memory, would you? And isn’t it strange
that, looking back at them now that they’ve gone, just these simplest
memories seem somehow the holiest?

Upstairs the bedrooms, all in freshest dimity, and smelling of lavender
and rosemary, begged you to come in and lie down and rest a while. And
you didn’t need to look at the Unrevised Version on a stand by the bed
to know that they were rooms you could _pray_ in. On the wall in the
front room hung, in a blackened frame, a sampler, a nice moral sampler,
with an edging of painfully prim flowers, “Work’d by Anne Alice Hardy,
Aged 12 Yrs.” Anne Alice was the senator’s wife’s mother; and the
sampler had lain for years at the bottom of a trunk, because, among the
notable pictures on the walls of the great new house, there wasn’t room
for anything so crude.

When with loving exactitude the Little Brown House of dreams had been
wrought into reality the senator’s wife drew a long breath of relief.
She said with a smile and a sigh:

“Now I need flowers, and a cat, and a canary, and a friend.”

Getting flowers, and a cat, and a canary do not present difficulties;
getting a friend does. The senator’s wife knew exactly what she wanted;
she knew that the Little Brown House must spell happiness, and home,
and hope to any who were to dwell therein.

Face after face flitted through her mind, to be dismissed. The social
secretary? _She_ despised little brown houses! The senator’s wife began
to wonder if, perhaps, people do not build great houses more to please
social secretaries, and visitors, and butlers, and footmen, and maids,
than to live and be happy in themselves!

Apply to the pastor of her church? But he too was one for whom
the bigger houses are built. Her friends? Fashionable friends
are--acquaintances. They would smile to one another, with lifted
eyebrows, over their bridge-tables, if they knew.

Her husband? Never, never, never he: he was with all his heart and soul
a man of his times; never was he to know that the high place he had
coveted and won for her wasn’t her ideal realized.

The Little Brown House remained closed, and dark at night when a
friendly light should have streamed through its windows. Every time
she walked through its homy rooms--rooms which seemed to be complaining
of not being allowed to be home--the Little Brown House asked
reproachfully:

“You who have so much, haven’t you one, just one real friend you can
share my simple secret with? Why, those you regard as utter failures
can call in friend and neighbor to share their joys and sorrows! Do you
know why? Because Just-Enough, and more often Not-Enough, draw folks
together brotherlily; but Too-Much cuts you off from your kind.

“Why do you come, senator’s wife, to me, who am only a little brown
house, and keep me empty? You must share me--or leave me!”

Among her charities were several Homes for women--women that haven’t
any homes of their own, and that nobody on earth wants in theirs. Her
name figured on their lists of patronesses and on their many boards.
And while the social secretary attended to all the mere business
details, and she had but to sign the necessary checks, she made it a
rule to appear at each annual function, exquisitely gowned, smiling,
affable, a being from another sphere almost.

The price that one insensibly pays for Too-Much is that one insensibly
forgets one is just folks; the whole great toiling wonderful terrible
race becomes to one--the common people. Just as if all that has been
created in our common universe hadn’t been made by our common God for
His common people!

The senator’s wife, naturally enough, had drifted into this common
error. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel kindly; why, she wished to
help--with checks. But she simply couldn’t imagine that people who had
nothing at all could be just like herself. So she had never looked at
any one face among all these faces to know it from its fellows: these
were just the faces of old women in Homes.

It was only because the Little Brown House was so insistent in its
demands, making her thoughtful, that she found herself watching at one
of these sad receptions the strong, serene face of Anne O’Driscoll.
Moved by a sudden impulse, she approached the middle-aged woman, who
was looking about her with the merry courage of Irish eyes.

“I hope,” she began, “that you’re happy here?”

Anne O’Driscoll’s voice hadn’t the usual complacent sureness of the
grateful reply.

“My two eyes,” said she, after a pause, “went back on me last winter,
an’ I could sew no more. I’m too old to find payin’ work, though I’m
too young, I’m thinkin’, for _this_. But I’m grateful for the shelter,
ma’am, for I’d been alone and sick.”

“Alone and sick!” The sheltered and beloved woman shuddered slightly.
“I’m sorry, Mrs.--Mrs.--”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am, but I’m used to it--the being alone--for a
good many years. An’ I’m no Mrs., but just Anne O’Driscoll.”

“You aren’t unhappy here, at least?”

“I’d be less so, ma’am, if I’d the hopes of gettin’ work, an’ my cat
Blinkie back. I minded losin’ Blinkie most of all, I think. Ah, he was
a fine cat, an’ more knowin’ than most folks, Blinkie was!”

“And you couldn’t bring him here? Why, the very idea, wanting and not
being able to keep--just a _cat_!”

“Why, ma’am,” said Anne gently, “you couldn’t expect the Home to take
you an’ your cat too. Just think now, if we’d all be allowed to bring
what we liked with us--this one a cat, and t’other one a dog, and
another one a parrot, might be! Oh, no ma’am, it wasn’t to be expected;
so I let Blinkie go to the grocer on the corner’s wife, that’d always
wanted him. If you’re to keep things yourself you must have a home
that’s yours to keep them in.” There wasn’t the faintest trace of
bitterness in her voice.

An old woman, plain, unlettered; an old cat that she couldn’t keep:
could anything be more _banal_? But Anne looked something like her own
old aunt, her father’s sister, dead these many years.

“May I,” said the senator’s wife, “call you Anne?”

“Why, of course, ma’am, if you like.” Anne was neither flustered nor
flattered by the great lady’s notice, just simply and pleasantly
responsive.

“Anne,” said the lady after a pause, “Anne, don’t you think you’d like
a really, truly home, where you’d grow old gently and in peace and
surety, with enough work to make things worth while, and not enough
money to spoil things, and a cushion in the sun for Blinkie, and
flowers in the windows--and--somebody else to help, Anne?” Her voice
was a bit breathless.

“There’s women,” said Anne softly, “that’s born to ache for a home all
their days, an’ never do they find nor keep it. I’m one of ’em.”

The senator’s wife wondered a little at herself. She had known Anne but
a few minutes; Anne was a plain woman, a woman in a Home, and she knew
that she was going to tell Anne all about the Little Brown House; and
Anne would understand!

“Will you come with me to-morrow, Anne, to see a little brown house
that needs somebody--and I think that somebody’s you--to take care of
it?”

Over Anne’s face fell an autumn fairness of emotion. She lifted humid
eyes.

“To-morrow, then!” said the senator’s wife, delicate finger on lip.
“And remember, it’s a secret, Anne.”

She came for Anne in her big new car, and together they went over the
Little Brown House. Anne fingered the table-cloths and towels and
bed-linen lingeringly, and laid her hand on the shining tables with a
loving touch.

“You like it, then?” asked the senator’s wife. Anne began to cry
for answer. And after the senator’s wife, seated beside her on the
chintz-hung sofa, had explained things, Anne took the white hand in her
brown one.

“Dear heart! To think you were like that all along, underneath, an’ me
thinkin’ you weren’t anything but just a fine lady!” she wondered. “I’m
thinkin’ it’s a grand thing, now, to be a fine lady, because women’s
women; that’s all they be--thank God!” She lifted her head, and the
other woman saw, not admiration nor flattery nor envy, but love, real
love, look at her out of the eyes of a friend.

As they shut the door of the Little Brown House after them, they heard
through the open windows of the house next door the painfully measured
splashing of “Silvery Waves” spilled over a piano by childish fingers.

“Why, we’ve got neighbors!” said the senator’s wife gaily. “I’d
forgotten _that_. And we’re neighbors too, aren’t we? Anne, after a
while you must send things over on a tray, and we hope they’ll be
neighborly and just drop in when they can. Isn’t it nice, Anne? And
after they’ve called on you, you must tell me all about them. I hope
they’ve got _little children_. We’ll give their little girl a doll, and
their boy a train of cars, won’t we? My little grandson dotes so on
trains of cars!”

When she could come, between whiles, she found herself in the midst of
a pleasant neighborhood life; and all about her were the soft noises
and sights and smells of home. Anne’s pride in the place was almost
piteous. How clean and sweet it was; how everything was polished, and
how it shone and twinkled; but nothing was fussy and not-to-be-used!
The neighbors whom she began to meet knew and accepted her as the Lady
Who Came to See Anne. They didn’t wonder she liked to come to see
Anne: they liked to come too.

Next door was a mother of six. They had all come over to see Anne, and
Blinkie had purred over the baby. Anne had given all of them little
cakes that bound them to her forever. She was going to have the whole
noisy, hungry, beautiful brood of them once a week to tea. Anne reveled
in their company.

“You know,” she told the senator’s wife, “I’d never much of a home at
best, Miss Barbara, me bein’ out all day, workin’. So I’d no chance of
knowin’ little children, except I’d see them on the street, an’ have
to take out my love o’ them in passin’. Why, I’ve known me to be happy
for a whole long day because a little thing in its carriage waved its
hand an’ gave me a smile, passin’ by. Now, thanks be to God an’ you,
I’ve got a real home, an’ a chance to have them about me a bit, though
they’re none o’ my own. I look forward all week to the time they’ll
come, an’ the noise they’ll make, an’ the joy o’ them, an’ the way
they’ll look, an’ talk, an’ laugh. Miss Barbara, I’m thinkin’ this is
the kind of a house that _likes_ to have children under its roof; and
there’ll be more an’ more o’ them comin’ by an’ by. An’--you wouldn’t
be mindin’ if I called in, one or two at a time, the old women that’s
got to stay on in the Home, Miss Barbara? They’re tired, sometimes, of
just havin’ to keep alive, an’ a day here’d hearten them, maybe. I’d
like to share.”

The senator’s wife looked about her. It _was_ the sort of house that
likes to shelter the young and call in the old and the poor for warmth
and kindliness.

“Have them all, Anne. And tell me all about it afterward. You dear,
dear woman, you!”

“I’d most forgotten to tell you about the Westerner, hadn’t I? The
lady next door brought him first, Miss Barbara, him bein’ a great
friend o’ the children’s. An’ he’s the clearest-eyed, softest-spoken,
brownest-faced man ever I clapped my two eyes on. Right around the
corner from us he is, him keepin’ house by himself, except for the
passel o’ men that’s always comin’ to set with him. I ain’t one
for praisin’ up men-folks’ housekeepin’, Miss Barbara; so one day
I upped an’ sent him a tray--a big heavy one at that, jest to show
him! He brought it back himself, him havin’ no servant, an’ he was
that kind an’ sociable I took to him like the children do. I like
Westerners--they’re so just _themselves_, ain’t they? He’s real glad
we’re neighbors, he says, an’ him an’ his friends’ll be glad to be of
any service to us. I told him us bein’ women-folks an’ the best cooks,
they’d better come over an’ neighbor with us holidays. The nicest man
ever I knew, Miss Barbara--it’s him fixed our kitchen-window shelves.”

The senator’s wife smiled appreciatively, then went up-stairs for her
usual half-hour of quiet thought and rest by that shaded window.
Outside the day was rather dark, and the tree was bare now to the
autumn winds. She sat with her hands in her lap, thoughtfully. The
senator hadn’t been so well of late. He looked, she thought, more gray
and old.

“Why, it’s getting so we just see each other going up and down stairs!”
she thought indignantly and sorrowfully. “We’re getting old too, Hugh
and I are. Oh, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair. We aren’t even sharing any
more--I _can’t_ share his work, and he _won’t_ share my house!”

That was perhaps the most strenuous winter either of them had known.
They crossed each other’s orbits frenziedly. At her affairs he showed
his fine worn face for a few dutiful minutes, then disappeared. And
when at times they did go out together, the usual tactful hostess,
following immemorial custom, separated them.

In the midst of this mad swirl Christmas drew near. To the senator’s
wife Christmas had come to mean merely a long list of gifts, dutifully
checked over with her secretary: you gave just as you received; you
had to. You knew that from the housekeeper down every one in the house
must be remembered; the secretary saw to it that they were. There was
no planning; no hiding of things half done when somebody came into the
room; no mysterious hints nor smiles; no air of subdued eagerness; no
tender sacrifices that make gifts doubly precious.

But at the Little Brown House things were different. Anne had made with
her own skilful hands something for everybody: for the little Maid Who
Helped; for the Mother of Six and her brood; for the old women from the
Home; for the Man around the Corner, who was so glad to be neighborly;
and for the senator’s wife. Anne even had a tree; and they were all to
come for a while on Christmas eve, except, perhaps, Miss Barbara.

“I wish,” said Anne, looking up from the cake she was whisking
together, “that you’d put on your plainest frock. Miss Barbara, and
come. It’d make Christmas more like Christmas as it ought to be for
me.” Her eyes implored the senator’s wife with so much of love and
longing that the heart in her warmed anew to Anne.

“The senator and I have simply got to attend our daughter’s Christmas
Eve reception, but I think, by close management, I _might_ get
here--from half-past six until nearly nine, say. And I could drive
home and dress, and nobody be the wiser for my pleasantest Christmas
secret!” She thought for a moment, and laughed like a girl: “Anne, I’m
coming!”

The senator was to accompany her to their daughter’s. She knew that
until then she wouldn’t see him; she knew, too, that some beautiful and
costly gift, chosen with exquisite care, would be lying by her plate on
Christmas morning. No, he wasn’t forgetful, nor neglectful, any more
than she herself; he was only--too busy.

It was quite half-past seven when she reached the Little Brown House on
Christmas Eve. When she opened the door she knew that Christmas itself
had arrived before her; for the house was alive with young children,
as all self-respecting houses would be if they had the chance. You
heard the children’s shouts, and their mothers’ worried admonitions,
and Anne’s cheerful, “There, there, let ’em be! It’s Christmas Eve, an’
Christmas Eve’s children’s eve. Ay, my dearies, laugh, do! An’ when
Miss Barbara comes we’ll open that settin’-room door; an’ then you’ll
see what you’ll see--bless you!”

“Miss Barbara” came in to be swallowed in a warm sea of joyous
welcomings. She wore what she considered a plain dress; but the Mother
of Six, and the women with her, looked upon its lustrous folds almost
with awe; only the baby disregarded it, and sat upon it, and kicked
his feet against it unconcernedly.

The sitting-room door had been opened; they were in the midst of
gift-giving, and receiving, and exclamations when the doorbell rang.

“That,” said Anne, pausing, with the Baby’s jumping-jack in her hand,
“will be that Westerner from ’round the corner. I’ll let him in, Miss
Barbara; he’ll want to stay with the children here for a while, I know.”

The senator’s wife heard the front door open and close, and men’s feet
in the hall, and the Westerner saying in his pleasant out-of-doors
voice full of the burr of R’s:

“Here’s a bunch of real holly, and some real mistletoe to hang up;
and here’s my oldest friend along with me--he’s an old friend of
those kids, too. We’ve brought you a few things to add to the tree
for ’em. Say, now, it sure makes us two old chaps feel right good and
Christmassy to get in here with you women and kids to-night!”

Anne and the Westerner came in together. The other man followed more
slowly, looking about him with merry eyes. He was a very, very big man,
and he seemed to fill the whole doorway in which he stood. Then the
children saw him, and shouted rapturous welcomings; and he returned
these with somewhat of a tender wistfulness in his smile.

From her sofa the senator’s wife looked up; their eyes met,
incredulously. She rose to her feet, putting down the baby.

But Anne had advanced to him, holding out a friendly hand.

“I know you’re the Big Man That Plays with the Children!” she said
cordially. “I’m sure glad to meet you at last, Neighbor; welcome, an’ a
Merry, Merry Christmas to you!”

He returned her greeting cordially; then the senator’s wife came
forward. Her eyes were large.

“You!” said she faintly. “You--neighbor--playing with children. You
here!”

“You!” said the senator. “Here to-night--why, Barbara, my dear!”

“I come--when I can find time--Anne keeps house--” she began.

He nodded. “I go around to Jack’s--when I can find time. One’s got to
have a few friends one can visit, don’t you think?”

The baby set up a great wail, because he was a baby, and he had had
enough of presents, and play, and grown-ups; and he wanted to go home
and be put to bed. The Mother of Six picked him up, and her friends
gathered the rest of the brood and their belongings together and
carried them off, with many Christmas wishes tossed back and forth.

Anne beckoned the Westerner into the dining-room and pointed to the
table.

“No real gentlemen,” said she, “will refuse to fall to an’ help eat up
a lady’s pie that she’s made with her own hands for Christmas.”

“I am,” said the Westerner, “a long-fanged wolf on pie. An’ if you’ll
cut yours in just halves, I’ll be everlasting grateful to you, ma’am.”
And he sat down, turning his back upon the sitting-room door.

The senator and his wife came to each other slowly, he looking down
upon her whimsically, she looking up at him with eyes of pure wonder.

“Why, Barbie, is there ever any reading a woman? I’d never guess that
you’d come visiting a little house like this--”

“This little house,” said she, “is mine: I bought it. I’ve wanted just
this little house all my life, and I wasn’t honest or brave enough to
tell you so.”

“I thought,” said the senator, “that it was the other sort of house you
wanted, Barbie. That’s why I built it--for you.”

“I did want it and I do want it--for you,” said his wife. “That’s why
I let you build it. But I want this for _me_--to get rested in, to be
folksy in.”

A slow twinkle grew in the senator’s eyes.

“Barbara,” he said, “you ought to see Jack’s house, around the corner!
A mighty nice little house. I’ve been going there for a long time.
Didn’t you ever guess I might like to be just folksy too, Barbie?
There’s no tiresome bunch of servants tagging at your heels at Jack’s.
You can sit down in your shirt-sleeves and smoke a cuddy, if you want
to; you can wait on yourself without shame and reproach--think of
that! Do you know what Jack had for supper to-night? Fish-chowder, and
pan-bread, and coffee that’d make your hair curl! Gee, it was good!

“You see,” he went on thoughtfully, nodding his head, “I like to go to
Jack’s because I get rested there--he’s a man. I can quarrel with him,
even! Now you know I’ve loved you, and you alone, all my life, Barbie;
it’s for you I wanted--the top-notch. But I--get tired at times. I
want to loaf a little, and be folksy too. And you, Barbie--you?”

“I also,” said the senator’s wife with a girl’s laugh. She put her
arms about his neck and clung to him. “Oh, Hugh, my dear, don’t you
see, we’ve come together again! Hugh, we’ve come together, close! It
wasn’t the big house, nor the too-muchness: it was that we didn’t know,
Hugh, and we couldn’t take time to find out! All these years--and I
didn’t know the real You until to-night; all these years, and you had
to stumble by chance into the Little Brown House, on Christmas Eve, and
find the real me.”

He kissed her with a young delight that shook his years from him, and
straightened his shoulders, and kindled his face; so, for a while, they
held each other.

“I wonder,” he said presently--“Barbie, I wonder if you or any other
woman can keep a secret?”

She waved her hand about the room by way of reply.

“Why, of course you can, all of you!” said the senator. “There’s no
end to the wonder of women! Well, now, Barbie, here’s the secret: I’m
to take a two weeks’ rest after New Year’s, and dodge everybody. I’d
thought of running out West--but, say, let’s just cone right here to
this little house of yours, and get acquainted all over again, Barbie.
I feel as if I didn’t half know you, anyhow. Will you come, dearest
dear?”

“I’ll come,” she said with shining eyes. “Hugh, Hugh, I’m beginning
to fall in love with you all over again--and I fifty-seven and a
grandmother!”

The senator took out his watch. “There’s the girl’s reception,
Barbie--we’ve got to fly,” he said regretfully. “Is the car to come for
you?”

“Oh, let’s tell Anne to send it back, and we’ll walk home,--as we used
to--remember?--when a callow fledgling of a country lawyer courted and
married a penniless district school-teacher?”

He nodded, wrapping her carefully in her sables. Anne and the Westerner
asked no questions, expressed no surprise, made no comments: they were
just such friends as that! They shook hands with a warm and loving
pressure, and wished a million Merry Christmases with all their heart.
And the Little Brown House breathed after them a message of peace and
of understanding; and overhead the sky was thick with stars--one,
larger and brighter than the others, dominating a great clear space.

They walked along together, hand in hand. The great holiday crowd
jostled them, and they, being afoot, knew themselves a part of it and
caught its spirit, and were glad. After a while the senator glanced up
and called her attention to the biggest star.

“The same old star!” said he softly.

“And we together under it!” she answered happily.

“Why come to think of it, so is everybody else!” said the senator with
a hint of reverence.

“So is everybody else!” she repeated. “And that,” she added, “is just
what makes Christmas _Christmas_!”




“THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND”




“THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND”


If I hadn’t loved Willy more than any girl had ever loved any man
before, I should never, never, never have had the wild courage to
marry him, on account of my mother; and if Willy hadn’t adored me to
distraction, he would never, never, never have had the temerity to
marry me, on account of his father. Not that there was anything in
the least objectionable about Willy’s father, or about my mother, who
are about as dear, delightful angels as one shall find this side of
Elysium. But--divided, they stood; united, they simply fell upon each
other, tooth and claw!

When Willy passed the little millinery shop in West 127th Street, with
the big “Valleau et Cie.” above the door, and glancing in saw the
“Cie.”--who was only little me--sitting with head bent over the bunch
of red roses which was to adorn a stunning hat, he stopped dead short
and stared with all his blue, honest, German eyes,--the very nicest
eyes that ever were. And I looked up and stared back with my French
black ones. From that moment neither of us had the faintest doubt but
that the good God had meant us for each other. It was just like that!
One minute before, and I had had no thought but of making a fine hat,
and Willy had had no thought but of hurrying on to his luncheon; and
the next moment the eternal, beautiful miracle had happened, snatching
us out of every-day ordinary 127th Street and plumping us into
Paradise, an Adam and Eve who didn’t know each other’s name.

After that my days were divided into the hours of waiting for a tall,
fair young man to pass and fix me with his fine eyes, and the hours in
which I reflected upon that glance. And then one day he marched in,
very straightforward and serious, and told Maman and me who he was and
all about himself, in a direct and manly way that won her respect at
once. When we knew more of him Maman agreed that he was a very charming
young man,--irreproachable, a desirable _parti_ for a dowerless
demoiselle like me. Only, in our dear, splendid America one does not
have to have a _dot_ to make a fine marriage.

When we were betrothed Willy had at once brought his father to see us.
Willy looks up to his father as one does to Providence. He considers
this old man with the big bald head and the white beard and the
twinkling blue eyes quite perfect. When he says “My father” it is with
an air of pride and affection that makes one’s heart glow. One cannot
but smile tenderly to see these two looking upon each other with such
naïve delight, and to hear with what happiness this father says “My
son.”

The old Herr Roeder is organist and choirmaster in the Lutheran
Church, where Willy himself plays the violin and sings in a pleasing
counter-tenor. Willy is a bank clerk, and as good an American as one
shall find in a week’s march. But his father is what Maman at once
said was “effusively, emphatically, offensively Teutonic.” Maman said
that if Willy’s father had been present upon the day when le bon Dieu
finished making the heavens and the earth, he would have stamped upon
both “_Made in Germany_”--as a guarantee of worth.

You see, Maman’s father and grandfather had been Lorraine soldiers in
1870. Indeed, her grandfather had fallen fighting. And when Lorraine
had been taken away from France, her father’s French heart couldn’t
beat happily under German rule. So presently he picked up himself
and his motherless young daughter--who was Maman--and came over to
New York. He was a mender and maker of clocks and watches,--a mild,
amiable, fiery man with stooped shoulders upon which his white hair
fell. I used to sit in his shop and hear his endless stories of bloody
and bitter fighting in the streets and houses of Alsatian mountain
towns, and of sorties and surprises and reprisals in the pleasant
country of Lorraine. The big clocks upon the wall would go “tick, tick,
tick,” solemnly; and Maman would hold her sewing in her lap and murmur,
“_Une crime! Une crime!_” remembering what her childish eyes had seen.

My dear gay artist father died when I was very little, and, like most
artists, he left us nothing but his cherished memory. So Maman and I
lived with my grandfather, and were very happy until he, too, died.
Then Maman opened the millinery parlor in the shop where the clocks
and watches used to tick. Although she is astonishingly clever and our
shop had “Imported French Hats” on its sign, we didn’t make much more
than our living. But we were grateful and happy, putting our love of
beauty and our joy in life and work into folds of ribbon and chiffon
and clusters of flowers which were to make other women look pretty.

Maman is really more like a sister than a mother, she is so gay and
charming. Her hair framing her rosy face is of that cottony, shining
whiteness which is so rare and lovely, and her eyes are the brown,
sparkling, animated eyes of a girl. She stands about five feet high in
her shoes; and I am sure she would be enchanting and ensnaring if she
lived to be a thousand, she has so much sheer power of personality.
But--she is very temperamental. And she remembered cruel things she had
seen and heard, even as Willy’s father remembered. Although Willy’s
lovableness had disarmed her, and she loved him, Maman simply detested
Germans in general. And although Herr Roeder had at once taken me
into his big, warm, kind heart, he loathed French people as a rule.
Maman shrugged her shoulders, and Willy’s father wrinkled his nose.
One wouldn’t dream what immense and baleful powers of insult lie in
shoulder and nose, until they had witnessed a performance by Maman and
Willy’s father. They disliked and distrusted each other with a fire
and fury which threatened to consume our happiness. I think Maman was
jealous that I should care so much for Willy’s father, too; and Willy’s
father disliked the thought that his son should so greatly admire my
charming Maman.

I shall never forget the night Willy made in their rooms a little feast
in honor of our betrothal. Maman was silent and depressed. She would
have been perfectly horrified at the bare thought of my remaining
unmarried, but she was averse to having me go out of her life just yet
and into Willy’s--and his father’s.

Her eyes, roving critically about the stiff, bare, clean dining-room,
met of a sudden the insulting stare of Prince Bismarck, looking
forbiddingly out of a big oak frame,--grim, military, formidable.
She gave an involuntary shudder of distaste and aversion. But Willy’s
father, with a proud and sweeping gesture, and in a voice one might use
to name Deity, said reverently:

“Bismarck!!”

“Brute!” said Maman. “Despoiler of France! Ah, mon Dieu! How I abhor
that ill-favored visage of adamant!”

Herr Roeder stroked his beard tolerantly. “Ach, well!” he admitted
soothingly, “one cannot blame you so greatly: he was one to trounce you
thoroughly, the great Chancellor!”

I could almost see Maman’s hair rise, and I trembled. Echoes of old
songs, of old tales, firelighted memories, floated through my mind.

“I forgive him,” said Maman, gently, “for the evils he helped to
inflict upon my stricken country. Besides,” she added piously, “one
should even be sorry for him, now that he is undoubtedly in hell,
thank God!”

It was turn for Willy’s father’s hair to rise, and I am sure that if he
had had any it would have stood on end. Only, he is bald. His face grew
purple, as if he were threatened with apoplexy.

“He is in the bosom of God!” he said with violence. “In hell! A man
like that!”

“A man like that!” repeated Maman. “_Hein!_” and she and Herr Roeder
locked eyes like horns.

“Madame!” stammered Willy, imploringly. “Dear Madame! Will you
not--Madame, I beg of you to take a slice of seed-cake! Father, let me
beg of you to offer our honored guest a slice of seed-cake. Do! It is
such fine seed-cake!”

“Do, dear Maman!” I besought. She shrugged her shoulders, but a smile
dimpled her lips and her eyes danced.

“Very well, my dears: I will have a slice of this fine seed-cake,” she
agreed. It was really very good indeed, and she said so, graciously.

“It is good German cake,” said Willy’s father, complacently. “For other
peoples the messy cooking, yes; but for the good, plain, sensible,
satisfying, body-building cooking, always it is the German which is the
best. Ach! The gosling-stew of Germany! With dumplings!” He looked up
at the ceiling ecstatically, as one who sees a beatific vision.

“Do not, I beseech you, forget the soup!” said Maman, gravely. “The
fine water, with a thimble-ful of vegetable-parings floating upon the
surface. Ah! The soup of Germany! Without seasoning!” She, too, looked
up at the ceiling, with a droll naughtiness to make one giggle.

Willy had never been separated from his father, any more than I from
Maman, and to break that tender intimacy, which a lifetime’s love and
service had built up, seemed to us intolerable. We could not bear the
thought of leaving them alone. We had, in truth, so much love that
it spread out and embraced everything and everybody, and we thought
that our parents’ great affection for us would in time make them more
tolerant of each other.

And so Willy and I were married, in St. Agatha’s parsonage, with Maman
and Herr Roeder looking on. Maman had made my frock herself, not
allowing any one else to put a hand to it, and it was a dress to dream
over and put away and cherish. When Father Bazin had read the service
which united us, Willy’s father put his arms around us both: he kissed
Willy. “For your mother, my son, my dear, dear son!” said he, tenderly.
“Ach! If she were only here to welcome our sweet new daughter! Always
she longed for a daughter! But I will love you for myself and for her,
too, my pretty Leontine!” He kissed me then, so fatherly that a great
wave of affection flowed over my heart for him. But Maman only wept.

We all settled down together in a new bright apartment, up in the
120’s. Maman had sublet the rooms over our shop, which she still
retained; and as our new home was only a few blocks away from our old
one, she wasn’t much inconvenienced going to and fro. It is true that
the new rooms were small, and that Father’s piano and music racks and
arm-chair took up most of the sitting-room, just as Bismarck and Von
Moltke took up most of the wall space in the dining-room, which they
seemed to dominate. I was so glad to make Willy’s father happy that I’d
have welcomed those pictures if both had been twins. It was delightful
to me to see him at his piano, singing _lieder_ sentimentally, or
roaring out a drinking chorus at the top of his voice. He had, too, a
pipe some two or three feet long, with a little ridiculous china bowl
on the end of it, to which he was particularly devoted. Because I kept
his jar full of his pet tobacco, and never meddled with his music, he
praised me as an angel, pulling my ears, rumpling my hair, and kissing
me smackingly on both my cheeks, while Willy looked on, pleased and
happy.

But the pipe gave Maman a headache; she couldn’t, she said, abide the
German fare I was learning to make, from Willy’s mother’s cherished
recipe book, given me as a treasure upon a state occasion. She hated
_lieder_. She said they were jellyfishy squishysquashy things, all
sentiment and bereft of sense. She accepted the big pictures in the
dining-room with a bad grace. She said their ungracious visages spoiled
her appetite and gave her indigestion. And then she bought a fine
new record of the “_Marseillaise_” for her victrola, as an offset to
“_Die Wacht am Rhein_,” which Father liked occasionally to sing in the
evening, in a lusty voice that carried a full block.

  “_Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,
    Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein!_”

shouted Father.

  “_Aux armes, citoyens! formez vos bataillons!
        Marchons, marchons!
    Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!_”

shrieked the victrola belligerently, upon the heels of it.

That was the real beginning of overt and covert hostilities. Father
felt himself affronted upon his most vulnerable points--his music and
his affections. The most jovial and kindly of men, he couldn’t forgive
that; he brought heavy artillery to bear upon his nimble antagonist,
who skirmished lightly about and around him, attacking him upon all
sides at once, until he was forced to retreat in raging disorder. Willy
and I had to stand by, distressed and helpless.

“If only my mother would even try to appreciate your father!” I wept
upon Willy’s shoulder.

“If only my father would be his true agreeable self to your mother!”
Willy lamented to me. We were both exquisitely unhappy, because there
lowered above the little home a heavy storm-cloud, liable at any moment
to burst forth into thunders and lightnings of wrathful remarks and
exploding retorts discourteous. If Willy had been less angelic, he
would have been horribly cross; but he was strong and good enough to be
patient as Job and meek as Moses.

“We will bear with them both,” I told Willy. “It may be that some day
you or I may be alone, like them, in a child’s house, and we shall need
love and patience then, too, my dearest. So let us now give both to
these two people who are so dear to us.”

I am sure we tried to. But Maman complained bitterly and with tears
that I loved “that ruffianly old German” better than I loved her; and
Father said Willy had forgotten his own sainted mother and loved in her
stead a saucy French jade knee-high to a duck and with the temper to
shame the devil’s mother-in-law.

Willy and I were caught between the upper and the nether millstones.
It wasn’t that they didn’t love us; they did, passionately. I am sure
Father would have died for me, a thousand times; I am sure Maman loved
Willy as her own son. She said his mother had evidently been an angel,
as, despite his horrible old father, she had been able to endow him
with her perfect disposition. And when I at first ventured to speak up
timidly in behalf of the hot-tempered, kind-hearted old man, Maman made
a thin red line of her pretty mouth, shrugged her shoulders up to her
ears, flashed at me a glance of flaming disdain, and marched off to her
own room, locking me out.

“I have but one favor, one last favor, to ask of you, my child,” she
said, before shutting the door upon me. “Let me be dead before you give
to me grandchildren that resemble little dressed Christmas pigs--and
named Karl Johann. I could not support that indignity.”

I went back to the kitchen to look after the pot-roast with herbs which
simmered upon the back of the range, and I reflected sorrowfully that
we should have all been so much happier for only a little reasonable
kindness! I suppose I cried a little over the stove about the Christmas
pigs named Karl Johann. Oh, Maman, how could you! I said not a word to
Willy, however; and when Maman wouldn’t come to table, complaining that
she simply couldn’t endure the fumes of Father’s pipe to-night, Willy
himself carried her in a tray, with a rose laid upon it which he had
brought home. She thanked him somewhat shamefacedly.

“Willy,” said she, “I’m very, very glad my child had the good sense
to love you and the good fortune to marry you. And I’m still gladder,
Willy, that it is I, and not the good little Leontine who has the bad,
bad, bad temper.” She kissed him and gently pushed him out of the room.

“Ah!” said Willy to me, regretfully, “such a kind heart, with so
much love! If only we could make her happy!” I am sure my own heart
crowded up into my eyes then to look out at Willy; and I dropped the
basting-spoon and flung my arms around him in a passion of gratitude.
Willy held me for a long minute.

“So!” said Father, entering on tiptoes, and putting his arms about us
both. “So! Son! Daughter. I--” His voice broke. He kissed us quickly
and ran out.

I think they honestly tried to avoid quarrels; but they possessed to an
unusual degree the power of arousing each other’s antagonism and anger;
and so they did little else than quarrel. Maman’s merry chatter, her
lighthearted insouciance, left her. She wore a dissatisfied face, and
she took to staying longer at the shop, coming home I hate to think
how unwillingly. Father’s loud laughter was a thing of the past; he
looked bewildered, as one who expects and dreads rebuffs. He no longer
roared out drinking-songs, and the piano was too often closed.

I had taken a severe cold and had to remain in bed, and so Maman left
the shop in charge of her assistant and remained at home with me. I
required very little attention; and she took this opportunity to give
our apartment a particularly thorough cleaning, which, indeed, it
didn’t need. But Maman had the French passion for dustlessness.

She really doesn’t make the nerve-racking uproar most superclean people
raise when they clean and polish and shine what is already clean and
polished and shining. Not she! In cap and dust-apron she whisks from
one thing to another, giving everything an extra touch; and the light
sound of her little feet is pleasant to hear, as a child’s footsteps
about one’s house. So I lay back in satisfied half-consciousness,
until she came to the dining-room. When she was polishing Bismarck’s
picture she broke into irrepressible speech:

“_Ja! Ach! Ich! So! Gewiss!_” she mocked, in an irresistibly funny
imitation. “_Kolossal!_” Then: “Iron-faced animal!” said she,
viciously. “Cruel, cold, arrogant Prussian! It is your overbearing
spirit which animates this unhappy house and blights my one child’s
affection for me!” The cake of scouring-soap came down with a
resounding crack, followed by a still more ominous crack. Maman had
brought more force to bear than she intended, and the cake went right
through the glass and came down on the Chancellor’s broad nose. Maman
gave a little scream, and just at that inopportune moment Father
stalked in.

“Infamous!” he roared. “Miserable Frenchwoman! You should be locked up
in jail for such an outrage!” He stamped with his feet so violently
that the broken glass fell out of the frame with a loud shivering
crash. Maman jumped aside.

“Assassin!” said she, passionately. “Do you deliberately try to murder
me? Ah! You would like to, brute of a German!”

“Little anarchist! To wreck my picture--my fine, noble picture!”
stormed Father. “It is dastardly!”

“I did not deliberately break it; it was an accident--”

“To drive her revengeful fist upon his honored countenance!” gritted
Father. “Demoniac!”

“Beast!” hissed Maman, quivering with rage. “Is it not enough for you
to steal from me my only child’s affection but you must also insult me
with brutal doubts upon my truthfulness, and then try to murder me with
broken glass?”

“Horrible woman! You estrange from me my son, my only son, prevent your
daughter from loving me, wreck my home and my peace of mind, and then
smash my beautiful picture!”

“Oh! This German is insufferable!” exclaimed Maman, in a suffocating
voice. “Frightful old man! It is you, you, who blight this house!”

“Madame! I love my children. You, Madame, love nothing but your own
way. You have the devil’s own temper, Madame. It is you, you, who make
us all wretched.”

I got out of bed then, and in my dressing-gown, trembling, sick at
heart, came and stood between them.

“Father! Maman! Allow me to love you both without making you and Willy
and myself frightfully unhappy. Ah! You are killing me!” I sank into a
chair and wept uncontrollably. They watched me in stricken silence.

[Illustration: “Such scenes shall not be repeated”]

“Monsieur,” said Maman in a subdued voice, after a long and painful
pause, “it is not you, not I alone, but both of us, who make our
beloved children weep. We must remedy this.” She patted me on the
shoulder and then assisted me to rise. “Calm yourself before Willy
comes home and is troubled, my child,” said she quietly, though she was
very pale. “There! Go back to bed. Such scenes as this shall not be
repeated, I promise you.”

I went over to Father, who had sunk dejectedly into a chair, with his
arms hanging down lifelessly, and kissed him timidly upon the cheek.
He looked at me unhappily, but said not a word. _Ah, le bon Dieu!_ Why
do we make one another thus miserable, when at the best and longest we
have such a little, little while to stay!

That night, when Father had gone out, Maman came into my room, where
Willy was sitting beside my bed.

“My children, I have a thing to say to you,” she said seriously.
“I am going to leave your house. No! Do not protest. Do not do me
or yourselves the injury to wish me to remain. My mind is made up,
irrevocably. You know the tenants of my flat above the shop are
leaving the city. I shall at once move back into my own house, which I
should never have left. It was a grievous thing for me to come to you,
my dears, for no one should be a useless fifth wheel upon another’s
domestic coach. You should have your chance to be happy--alone. Forgive
me, forgive me, for having made you unhappy! You see, Leontine is my
only child, and her father--” She turned her head aside for a moment.
But Willy leaned over and took her hand, consolingly.

“You are quite right, little Mother,” he said, truthfully. “It would
be as great a wrong to you as to us to wish you to remain, when you
are not happy with us. But do you realize why you are unhappy here,
Mamanchen? It is because you are too young and too pretty to play
second fiddle in anybody else’s house, even Leontine’s.”

Maman laughed through her tears. “Willy!” she cried, “you might have
been a Frenchman!”

When Father was told, he nodded his head. “I, too, go,” he said
bluntly. “She is right for once, that odious woman. For there is no
room in the new nest for the old birds; they crowd the youngsters, and
for themselves they make starvation. Sing and fly by yourselves, my
children. That will make me happy. Only--do not fly too far away from
thy old father, Willy!”

So Maman went back to the rooms over the shop and was too busy to allow
herself to be unhappy, even if she were inclined to be; and Father took
two pleasant rooms near us, and went right on with his music lessons.
Maman was to come on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Father on Mondays and
Thursdays, with an alternate Sunday for each; thus they would escape
the unpleasantness of meeting each other in our house.

It was pleasant to have such a darling little place as Maman’s flat to
visit. Now that she was alone she gave full rein to her own individual
taste, and never did any little place look daintier, more homelike and
simple and charming than Maman’s rooms. And Maman herself! Under our
astonished and delighted eyes Maman grew younger. She arranged her
thick white hair ravishingly, with fleecy curls about the ears; she
manufactured for herself enchanting little hats with hints of lilac in
them, and she evolved frocks of a chic to make one gasp. She was witty
as only a Frenchwoman can be; she was pretty as only an American is.
Then she began to skip her evenings with us; she began to visit us, not
as a pleasure only to herself, but as a pleasure and a privilege to us.

As for Father, the change in him was of a longer growth, but it
was none the less certain and sure. He began to do without us. He
looked brushed and groomed and well-fed and prosperous and jovial. He
developed a taste in ties that made us marvel. His ragged beard had
been Vandyked into a trimness which clipped ten years off his age, and
his clothes were modern and dignified.

It was our turn now to suffer a little wholesome neglect, for our
parents _were_ neglecting us. They were seeking--and, what is more,
finding--other objects of absorbing interest outside of our dear selves
that loved them so much; they were living their own lives in their own
fashion, without so much as a by-your-leave from either of us.

When our dear adored baby was born they behaved as distractedly as any
well-brought-up grandparents could, however. They were extravagantly
delighted. Never was there so exquisite a baby! Maman said that I had
been an adorable baby myself, but that I simply wasn’t to be compared
with _this_ angel. Father remembered that Willy had been a very nice
baby, too, but not to compare to our baby, who, judging from the
magnificent formation of his head, would undoubtedly grow up to be a
statesman. Poor, dear, red, wrinkled little statesman, with no language
at his command save a squeal, and never a hair to his precious head!

The baby had come to us at Thanksgiving--that good, beautiful American
holiday of ours that I so greatly love--so it was almost Christmas
before I was able to take him out, myself. Willy and I had decided that
his first visit should be to his grandmother; we would take him to see
her on Christmas Eve, all snugly wrapped up. And we would then go to
Father on Christmas morning. It was to be a beautiful surprise.

To tell the truth, for the last week or ten days we had seen very
little of Maman or of Father, either. They were so busy with their own
affairs.

We knew that Maman had intended to dismiss her assistants early, close
the shop, and spend Christmas Eve at home; she could afford to be so
independent, for those charming hats of hers were beginning to sell
for good prices. At dusk, then, we wrapped our little baby up snugly
and tucked him among his carriage cushions, took our presents, and
started out. We were both in a glow of pride and happiness when we
reached Maman’s. Her windows were lighted, so we knew she was at home.

She met us at the door with a cry of pleasure; then she ushered us into
her living-room, calling in a gay, glad voice:

“See who’s here! See who’s here!”

A big man in a brand-new smoking-jacket got up out of the new Morris
chair in which he had been making himself comfortable.

“Ha! Our children!” said Willy’s father gaily, and fell upon us.

We could only gasp, and stare. The room was lovely with Christmas
greens, and Maman herself was a vision in a red gown, with red satin
slippers on her little feet and a vivid Poinsettia in her beautiful
white hair. On a new mahogany stand was a powerful bust of--who but
the Chancellor himself, a gay holly wreath adorning his beetling brows!

“Father!” gurgled Willy. “Maman!” I echoed weakly, and almost fell into
a chair.

Willy’s father shifted his small grandson very tenderly to his
shoulder, and beckoned to Maman, who came and stood beside him, slipped
her small hands about his big arm, and laughed at our bewilderment.

“My surprise for you, my children!” said she.

“It is like this,” said Father, gravely. “I came one night to Madame,
forced by loneliness and repentance, to beg her pardon for driving her
out of her child’s home. I found her sad and lonely, even as I was; but
how good the little home she had made for herself looked to me, who had
none! And we consoled each other. She loved my son and I adored her
daughter, and thus we fell into kind talk and discovered that each was
better than the other had thought. And how heavenly a meal she set
before me, seasoned with such wit! It is true that there are no cooks
and no wits on earth like the French!

“Afterward I came again--and yet again. And we discovered that we were
not so very old--not too old to be young--and that there was much, very
much, in life, for both of us. We decided to share, to help each other.
I taught her much of German, she explained to me much of French, and
the great immortal ones of our countries healed us with their divine
art.”

He paused to rub his cheek softly against the baby’s bald head. “Ach!
She is a wonderful woman--wonderful!” he said, with a vast pride. “Dear
little child, if thou wilt but take after thy wise, beautiful, witty,
perfect, ever-to-be-adored grandmother, thou wilt be the greatest of
men!” he told the baby.

Maman laughed like a girl. “What I most admire about the best Germans,”
she said thoughtfully, “is their fine domestic sentiment. They have
such tender hearts, which they are at times wise enough to show. Ah,
Willy, how I rejoice, for my dear child’s sake, that you so greatly
resemble your good father!”

“And so,” continued Father, comfortably, “our love for our children
having made us hate each other, their love for each other and for us
made us love each other. I found I was unhappy away from Madame. Madame
discovered that she was happy only in my company. Do you think the
young alone are capable of love? No, no! While there is life there is
love. So Madame and I propose to make for ourselves a home, a fireside,
where we shall sit, loving each other and our children, until our good
Herr Gott removes us to a better Home. Your mother, Leontine,” he added
to me, “is a remarkable woman, a perfectly marvelous woman! Wonderful,
my child, wonderful! It is not to be told how I adore this angel of a
woman!”

“You are going to be married?” Willy’s voice was all but hysterical.

“We were married,” said Maman calmly, “three days ago. Your father,”
she told Willy, “is a very masterful man. He would have it so, without
fuss and without explanations; and I was glad to please him.”

Father pointed to the holly-wreathed bust.

“My dear wife’s first Christmas present to me!” he said happily.

“Yes,” said Maman, with unabashed serenity, “Johann has labored to
explain his real character to me. Johann loves and respects him, so
there must be something to be said for the man, although I of course
deplore the fact that he thought he had to be harsh to my dear country.
But we are both good Americans. _This_ is our country. Remembering
that, why should we waste our time quarreling about foreign statesmen?”

“Now you shall hear _my_ little gift to my dear wife,” said Father,
proudly. Still holding the baby, who seemed perfectly content to
snuggle on his shoulder, he marched over to a magnificent graphanola
and slipped in a fine new record. Under the Chancellor’s mighty nose
rose the soul-stirring, martial magic of the “Marseillaise.” We
listened with delight, until it ceased. Then Maman, with a glance of
affection and gratitude at Father, put in another record. Flooding
the little Christmas-decked room came a beautiful blending of men’s
and women’s and children’s voices, singing the old, old, lovely, holy
Christmas hymn.

  “Oh, come ye, oh, come ye, to Bethlehem!”

We all drew closer together, feeling our hearts in unison; and
remembering the Holiest Baby of all, we looked down upon our own little
baby very tenderly.

“My dearest children,” said Maman, with her hands clasped around
Father’s arm, “I have to beg of you a favor, a great favor: for my
best Christmas gift, promise me to name my little adored grandson Karl
Johann!”




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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