The Bride of the Mistletoe Part 10

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

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

He quietly put it out.

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

This lamp poured its light through a lampshade having the semblance of a bursting crimson peony as some morning in June the flower with the weight of its own splendor falls face downward on the gra.s.s. And in that room this soft lamp-light fell here and there on crimson winter draperies. He had been living alone as a bachelor before he married her. After they became engaged he, having watched for some favorite color of hers, had had this room redecorated in that shade. Every winter since she had renewed in this way or that way these hangings, and now the bridal draperies remained unchanged--after the changing years.

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

She arose without his aid and pa.s.sed around him, moving toward her bedroom. With arms outstretched guarding her but not touching her, he followed close, for she was unsteady. She entered her bedroom and crossed to the door of his bedroom; she pushed this open, and keeping her face bent aside waited for him to go in. He went in and she closed the door on him and turned the key. Then with a low note, with which the soul tears out of itself something that has been its life, she made a circlet of her white arms against the door and laid her profile within this circlet and stood--the figure of Memory.

Thus sometimes a stranger sees a marble figure standing outside a tomb where some story of love and youth ended: some stranger in a far land,--walking some afternoon in those quieter grounds where all human stories end; an autumn bird in the bare branches fluting of its mortality and his heart singing with the bird of one lost to him--lost to him in his own country.

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

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

The silence began to weigh upon her.

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

On the other side the quiet preparations went on.

She heard him take off his coat and vest and hang them on the back of a chair. The b.u.t.tons made a little sc.r.a.ping sound against the wood.

Then he went to his dresser and took off his collar and tie, and he opened a drawer and laid out a night-shirt. She heard the creaking of a chair under him as he threw one foot and then the other up across his knee and took off his shoes and socks. Then there reached her the soft movements of his bare feet on the carpet (despite her agony the old impulse started in her to caution him about his slippers). Then followed the brushing of his teeth and the deliberate bathing of his hands. Then was audible the puff of breath with which he blew out his lamp after he had turned it low; and then,--on the other side of the door,--just above her ear his knock sounded.

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

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

The knocking sounded again.

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

There was no response but another knock.

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

"Was there anything you wanted?"

As no response came, the protective maternal instinct took greater alarm, and she crossed to the door of his room and she repeated her one question:

"Did you forget anything?"

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

He knocked.

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

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

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

VI. THE WHITE DAWN

Day was breaking.

The crimson curtains of the bedroom were drawn close, but from behind their outer edges faint f.l.a.n.g.es of light began to advance along the wall. It was a clear light reflected from snow which had sifted in against the window-panes, was banked on the sills outside, ridged the yard fence, peaked the little gate-posts, and buried the shrubbery.

There was no need to look out in order to know that it had stopped snowing, that the air was windless, and that the stars were flashing silver-pale except one--great golden-croziered shepherd of the thick, soft-footed, moving host.

It was Christmas morning on the effulgent Shield.

Already there was sufficient light in the room to reveal--less as actual things than as brown shadows of the memory--a gay company of socks and stockings hanging from the mantelpiece; sufficient to give outline to the bulk of a man asleep on the edge of the bed; and it exposed to view in a corner of the room farthest from the rays a woman sitting in a straight-backed chair, a shawl thrown about her shoulders over her night-dress.

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

She needed it.

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

Soon all over the Shield indoor merriment and outdoor noises would begin. Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was proud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields; whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this morning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly castled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from amid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the s.h.a.ggy uplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow's nest against the gray Appalachian wall--everywhere soon would begin the healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children--glad about themselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happy world. The many-voiced roar and din of this warm carnival lay not far away from her across the cold bar of silence.

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

Her father and mother! How she needed them at this moment: they had been sweethearts all their lives. One picture of them rose with distinctness before her--for the wounding picture always comes to the wounded moment. She saw them sitting in their pew far down toward the chancel. Through a stained gla.s.s window (where there was a ladder of angels) the light fell softly on them--both silver-haired; and as with the voices of children they were singing out of one book. She remembered how as she sat between them she had observed her father slip his hand into her mother's lap and clasp hers with a steadfastness that wedded her for eternity; and thus over their linked hands, with the love of their youth within them and the snows of the years upon them, they sang together:

"Gently, Lord, O gently lead us * * * * * *

"Through the changes Thou'st decreed us."

Her father and mother had not been led gently. They had known more than common share of life's shocks and violence, its wrongs and meannesses and ills and griefs. But their faith had never wavered that they were being led gently; so long as they were led together, to them it was gentle leading: the richer each in each for aught whereby nature or man could leave them poorer; the calmer for the shocks; the sweeter for the sour; the finer with one another because of life's rudenesses. In after years she often thought of them as faithful in their dust; and the flowers she planted over them and watered many a bright day with happy tears brought up to her in another form the freshness of their unwearied union.

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

From the moment of the night before when he had forced the door open and entered her room, they had not exchanged any words nor a glance.

He had lain down and soon fallen asleep; apparently he had offered that to her as for the moment at least his solution of the matter--that he should leave her to herself and absent himself in slumber.

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

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

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