Part 8 (1/2)

Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest wors.h.i.+p: the New Year's day of the Druids.

A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is spread. In the midst of the a.s.semblage one figure towers--the Arch Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims annually sacrificed to the oak.

A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough, and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is Nature's emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are slaughtered in sacrifice.

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

Here he ended the story.

She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in bewilderment:

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

He smiled at her a little sadly.

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

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

”Ah!”

It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to her.

”I am sparing you, Josephine!”

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

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

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

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

She was aroused by some change in him.

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

”You will have to listen,” he said. ”It is better for you to know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be impossible for you to misjudge.”

”I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I do not understand you are judging yourself!”

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

The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its pa.s.sing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood ankle-deep in forestry.

This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had a.s.serted the earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she waited.