Part 12 (1/2)

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

The low-burnt candle did not penetrate far into the darkness of the immense parlor. There was an easy chair near her piano and her music.

After playing when alone, she would often sit there and listen to the echoes of those influences that come into the soul from music only,--the rhythmic hauntings of some heaven of diviner beauty. She sat there now quite in darkness and closed her eyes; and upon her ear began faintly to beat the sad sublime tones of his story.

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

And so, it had seemed to her, is that ever living world which we sometimes call the field of human life in its perpetual summer. It is run through by many different laws; governed by many distinct forces, each of which strives to control it wholly--but never does.

Selfishness blows on it like a parching sirocco, and all things seem to bow to the might of selfishness. Generosity moves across the expanse, and all things are seen responsive to what is generous. Place yourself where life is lowest and everything like an avalanche is rus.h.i.+ng to the bottom. Place yourself where character is highest, and lo! the whole world is but one struggle upward to what is high. You see what you care to see, and find what you wish to find.

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

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

The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldaea; the candle bore it to ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe to Britain,--and all brought it to Christ,--Christ the latest world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of all for all.

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

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

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

Taking her candle, she pa.s.sed back into her bedroom and screened it where she had screened it before; then went into his bedroom.

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

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

”But never again to you! Let the stillness of nature fall where there must be stillness! Peace come with its peace! And the room which heard our whisperings of the night, let it be the Room of the Silences--the Long Silences! Adieu, cross of living fire that I have so clung to!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!--Adieu!”_

She remained as motionless as though she had fallen asleep or would not lift her head until there had ebbed out of her life upon his pillow the last drop of things that must go.

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

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

She had plaited her hair in two heavy braids, and down each braid the gray told its story through the black. And she had brushed it frankly away from brow and temples so that the contour of her head--one of nature's n.o.blest--was seen in its simplicity. It is thus that the women of her land sometimes prepare themselves at the ceremony of their baptism into a new life.

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

Then she approached the bed. As she did so, she turned back midway and quickly stretched her arms toward the wall as though to flee to it.

Then she drew nearer, a new pitiful fear of him in her eyes--the look of the rejected.

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

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

”A Merry Christmas!”