FOOTNOTES:
[4] From “Moriah’s Mourning” by Ruth McEnery Stuart. By permission of Harper & Brothers.
THE GIFT OF THE MANGER[5]
Edith Barnard Delano
Christine’s frail body bent slightly forward to meet the force of the gale. She kept her face lowered, shielded by her muff; yet now and again she raised it for an instant to glance upward at Norwood, with a bright flash of the eyes and a gleam of teeth. Invariably he met the look and warmed to it as to a flame, smiled back, or shook his head. To speak in the face of such a gale was all but impossible, yet once or twice she bent close enough to call in her sweet, high tones, “I love it! I adore it!”
It was at such times that he shook his head. He was keen enough for adventure, good sport enough to meet it halfway, to make the utmost of it when it came; but this—the snow, the early fall of night, the upward climb over roads tantalizingly but half remembered—this was more than he had counted upon, and, truly, more than he wanted. He was beginning to wonder whether, even for Christine’s sake, the journey were a wise one.
They had planned, weeks earlier, to take the noon train as far as River Junction, where his father, with the pair of sturdy grays, was to meet them for the eight-mile drive to the old home farm over the hills. But young doctors cannot always keep their best-laid plans, and Christine had waited in vain at the station while Norwood officiated at an entrance into the world and an exit therefrom—the individuals most concerned in both instances taking their own time. Christine, waiting beside the suit-cases, boxes, and parcels, whose number and variety of shapes unmistakably proclaimed Christmas gifts, had watched the express pull out of the station. Then, with a dull pounding at her temples and a barely controlled choking in her throat, she had gathered up the Christmas impedimenta and gone home. Norwood found her there an hour later, still dressed as for the journey, and sobbing wildly in a heap at the foot of the bed—his Christine, to whose courage during the past ten months his very soul had done homage many a time.
“I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” she had sobbed out at last, when the tenderness of his arms had begun to soothe her outburst of grief. “To be with your father and mother, to make Christmas for the poor old darlings, to work and keep busy all day—that was bad enough; but I could have done that——”
“I know, dear, I know,” he said, holding her firmly, his professional sense alive to every pulse in the racked body.
“But to stay here, where Teddy was last year—I cannot, I cannot!”
“Christine!” he besought her.
“Oh, Ned, I have seen him watch me tie up every parcel—I have heard him on the stairs—I have caught myself wondering which toys he would wish for this Christmas—and he isn’t here! I cannot bear it! I cannot stay here without him! I want my boy, my little boy—my baby! It is Christmas eve—and I want my boy!”
And this was his Christine who, during the ten months since the child had died, had faced the world and her husband with her head held high, with a smile on her lips and courage in the clasp of her hand! Not once before to-day had he heard her cry out in grief or rebellion—his Christine!
“Then we will not stay here,” he said. “We will go to the farm whether we have missed the train or not! We will go to the end of the world, or beyond it, if that will help!”
“Ned! What do you mean?” she cried, drawing back from his clasp to look up into his face.
“It is only a matter of sixty miles or so, and it isn’t yet two o’clock; we can make it with the big car!”
She sprang to her feet with a choking laugh, her hands on her throat, her eyes shining like stars of hope.
“Hurry!” she cried; and in scarcely half an hour they were on their way, the multitude of the Christmas bundles tumbled, helter-skelter, into the tonneau, she fur-clad and glowing beside him.
The big “sixty” stood up to its task, and the first part of the journey was as nothing. It had been one of those winters when autumn prolongs itself into December, when people begin to talk of a green Christmas, and the youngsters feel almost hopeless about sleds and skates; but to-day, Christmas eve, the children’s hopes had revived; a sudden drop in temperature, a leaden sky, an unwonted briskness among the sparrows—it might not be a green Christmas, after all.
That was one of the little things that Christine talked about along the way; and when the first few flakes of snow came wavering down she held out her muff, as if trying to catch them all, and laughed.
“Oh, see, Ned! We’ll snowball each other to-morrow!”
But he had replied, “Let’s hope that we shall have to postpone the snow-balling until we get to the farm, anyway. By Jove! I had forgotten how steep these roads were!”
“Don’t you remember them?” she asked. “Have you forgotten your way?”
He got the teasing note in her tone. “That’s all right,” he said, “but it has been many years since I came this way; and roadsides have a way of changing, even in Vermont; and with this storm coming along worse every minute, I am not anxious to negotiate them by dark.”
“’Fraid cat,” she laughed, and then cried: “Oh, see! The snow is coming! It’s coming, coming, coming!”
It had come, indeed, on the wings of a quick, wild gust; its particles cut like bits of ice, and presently flew in swirling eddies beside the car and in front of it, and, for all their speed, built itself into little drifts wherever a curve or crevice or corner made a possible lodging-place. It pierced their barrier of windshield and curtains, and heaped itself on their fur wrappings, until swept away again by a new fierce breath of the storm. Then it was that Christine’s cheeks flamed, but she bent forward to meet the force of the wind, and now and again turned to call up to Norwood that she loved it.
Night fell almost with the swiftness of a stage curtain, blotting out the distant hills, the pastures, the fields, and scattered houses; blotting out at last even the roadsides, its blackness emphasized by the ever-swirling, steadily descending snow. Once or twice Norwood stopped the car and got out to reconnoiter. Christine felt his uneasiness by means of that sixth sense of wifehood; yet all the while, by another of wifehood’s endowments, she rested secure, serene in the feeling that all was well and must continue well with her man at the wheel; while side by side with his own feeling of uneasiness, Norwood was proud of his wife’s courageous serenity, unaware in his masculine simplicity that her courage had its fount of being in himself.
Nobly the big car responded to their demand upon it, yet they had gone not more than a few miles beyond the last recognized sign-post when it began to show symptoms of reluctance, of distress. Norwood muttered under his breath, and once more Christine turned a laughing face toward him.
“It’s a real adventure,” she cried. “I do believe you are lost!”
Norwood’s answering laugh held no merriment. “You are not so bad at guessing,” he remarked, dryly. “Suppose you try to guess the way!”
Her keen eyes were peering forward through the veil of snow. “Here we come! I think I see a house ahead of us,” she said. “We can ask our way of the people who live there.”
“They won’t know,” said Norwood, with a man’s pessimism. “Probably foreigners. Half the old places around here are bought up by people who can’t speak English and don’t know anything when they can.”
“Oh, you just don’t want to ask questions,” said Christine. “Men always hate to! I never can see why!”
The day had held many things for him; now his nerves were beginning to jump. “All right, we’ll ask,” he said, shortly.
The car, in its inanimate way, seemed glad enough to stop. “I will run in and ask,” said Christine, and Norwood was already busy over some of the mysterious attentions men love to bestow upon their engines.
“All right,” he said, without raising his head.
But in a moment she was back. “It isn’t a house, Ned! It’s only a barn!”
Still bent over his engine, he replied: “House probably across the road. They often fix them that way up here.”
But in another moment or two she was calling to him, above the voice of the gale: “Ned! Ned! There has been a fire! It must have been quite lately, for the snow melts as it falls on the place where the house was! How horrible to think of those poor people, burned out just before Christmas.”
At that he stood up. “Burned out, is it? They may be camping in the barn. We’ll see if we can’t rout them out.”
He went back a step or two and reached over to his horn, sending forth one honking, raucous blast after another. “That ought to fetch them,” he said.
There was, indeed, an answering sound from the barn—trampling of hoofs, the suffering call of an unmilked cow. Christine went toward the denser blackness, which was the door.
“Hoo—hoo!” she cried. “Is any one here?”
She held a little pocket flash-light in her hand, and threw its light here and there through the interior darkness. Norwood, still busy with his engine, was not aware when she went within; he was busy with mind and fingers. But all at once he sprang into a fuller activity—the activity of the man who hears the one cry that would recall him from another world; his wife had called to him, had cried aloud a wordless message which held wonder and fear, bewilderment, and—a note of joy?
He ran around the car into the open doorway of the barn. The air of the vast space within was redolent with the scent of stored hay, the warm, sweet breath of beasts, the ghost of past summers, the promised satisfaction of many a meal-time. He could hear the movement of the animals in the stalls; the roof of the barn arched far above in cavelike darkness; in a quick flash of memory there came to him the story of another cave where patient beasts were stabled; and this was Christmas eve....
Far back in the gloom there shone a tiny light. He was curiously breathless. “Christine!” he called, a quick, foolish fear clutching at his heart, “Christine!”
She answered with another wordless call that was partly an exclamation of wonder, partly a crooning. Blundering forward, he could see the dim outline of a form—Christine’s form—kneeling in the dimness that was sparsely lighted by the pocket-light which she had dropped on the floor beside her. It was scarcely more than the space of a breath before he was at her side, yet in that space there had arisen another cry—a cry which he, the doctor, had also heard many times before. He felt as though he were living in a dream—but a dream as old as time.
“Ned, it’s a baby! Look! Here, alone, in the manger!”
It was, truly, a manger beside which she knelt; and she held gathered closely in her arms a child which was now crying lustily. Norwood spoke, she answered, and together they bent over the little form. It had been warmly wrapped in an old quilt; it was dressed in a queer little dress of brilliant pink, with strange, dark woolen underthings the like of which Christine had never seen before. Its cradle had been warm and safe, for all the gale without, and it had slept there peacefully in the manger until the honking horn and this strange woman had brought it back to a world of very cruel hunger.
Norwood laughed aloud as its little waving, seeking fists closed on one of his fingers. “Good healthy youngster,” he said; “three or four months old, I should say.” Then he added, “Hey, old man, where are your folks?”
At that Christine held the baby more closely to her breast. “Oh, I suppose it does belong to some one,” she said. “But, oh, Ned, I found it! Here in the manger—like the Christ-child! It seemed to me that I found something I had lost, something of my own!”
Norwood felt the danger of this sort of talk, as he mentally termed it, and hastened to interrupt. “Sure you found it!” he said. “That’s just what the baby is trying to tell you, among other things. He cries as if he were starved. Can’t you keep him quiet? Lord! how he yells!”
But Christine had sprung to her feet with the baby still held closely to her in all its strange wrappings. She was staring into the blackness of the barn. There must have been a new sound, for Norwood also turned quickly.
“Who’s there?” he called. He had taken Christine’s light from the floor and now flashed it toward the sound.
“All a-right! I mak-a de light,” a voice called; and with the careless noisiness of one who feels himself at home, the new-comer stumbled toward a shelf near the door and presently succeeded in lighting a dingy lantern. It revealed him to be, as Norwood had foreseen, a person distinctly un-American; and as they drew nearer his features disclosed themselves, though undoubtedly old, as of that finished adherence to type which is the result, perhaps, of the many-centuries-old Latin ideal of human perfection—the type as distinct and clear-cut as a Neapolitan cameo.
“Well,” said Norwood, jocularly, “quite a fire here, I see!”
The Italian raised shoulders and palms in that gesture of his race, alike disclaiming all responsibility and at the same time imploring the blessings of a benign Providence. “Oh, de fire, de fire! He burn all up; he burn up everyt’ing!”
By gesture and broken words he made the story plain. “Dis-a morn’ Maria send-a me to River—you know, River. I tak-a de horse; I go. I come back. I see-a de smoke, de smoke away up. I whip-a de horse. I come! Dio mio! De smoke! He flame up, up. I whip-a de horse. I come to de hill. I see Maria run out of de house wit’ de babee in her arm. She tak-a de babee to de barn and she run-a back. She run-a back to Stefano. Stefano he in bed. He in bed one mont’, two mont’, t’ree mont’—no can move. I whip-a de horse some more. I jump down. I t’ink I go too for Stefano. Ma! Dio mio!” Again the gesture imploring Heaven. “De house, de floor, he go, he come down. Maria, Stefano, all—all come down, all go! Dio!”
He had made it graphic enough. They could see the quick tragedy of it, the wild rush of the mother taking her baby to its cradled safety in the manger, her dash back to the bedridden husband, the flames, the quickly charred timbers of the old house, the crashing fall....
Christine could feel the blood rush back to her heart; her forehead, her lips, were as cold as if an icy hand had been laid upon them; she trembled, and strained the baby to herself as if it could still the sympathetic pain at her heart. Norwood, seeing her distress, moved closer, drew her into the curve of his arm; her head bent to his shoulder, and he could feel her silently crying. Before the revelation of the pitiful tragedy they were momentarily speechless; then Norwood began to question the man.
“But the neighbors? Why did no one come to help?”
The sidewise bend of his head, the opening fingers of his gesture, spoke as plainly as the Italian’s words. “No neighbor! Far away over de mount’. No can-a see! Far away!”
“He means that the nearest neighbors were too far off to see the fire,” Norwood explained. “It’s likely enough, in these hills!” Again he asked: “But the barn? Why didn’t the barn burn, too?”
“No burn-a de barn; de wind dat-a way—” He made an expressive gesture. “De wind-a blow! De barn no burn.”
“That’s plain enough,” said Norwood. “Well, I am mighty sorry for you, my friend. What can we do to help you? What are you going to do with the baby?”
The old man seemed to become aware for the first time of the child in Christine’s arms. “Where you fin’-a heem?” he asked.
“My wife found him, back there in the manger where the poor mother laid him for safety, I suppose. What are you going to do with him?”
“Me not-a do! He not-a my babee!”
“Good Lord, man! He is some relation to you, isn’t he? Your grandchild, perhaps?”
“Ma! No-o! Maria, Stefano, come from Ascoli! Me”—tapping his breast in a magnificent gesture—“Me Siciliano!”
Christine looked up and gave a little eager cry. “You are not related? He isn’t your baby, then, and you don’t want him?”
“Wait, dear! Make sure, first, before you set your hopes too high.” Norwood understood what was passing in her mind, and he added to the old man: “You are not related? What are you doing here, then?”
Again the typical shrug. “Stefano no can work; he much-a seeck! Me come along. Maria, Stefano, dey tell-a me, ‘You stay mak-a de mon. Stefano get-a well, you can-a go!’ So me stay, two week, t’ree week, maybe!”
Norwood thought quickly in silence for a moment; then he asked the man, “Do you know where Squire Norwood lives?”
The man nodded vigorously: “Big-a house, white house; over dere—two, t’ree mile.”
“Can you show us the way?”
“Si!”
“Then come on! We will give you a lift and a place to sleep in.”
He led his wife and the child, now sleeping, as many centuries before another had led a woman and a sleeping babe; the beauty and wonder and mystery of it was not changed, not lessened because he led them through the snow on a modern dispeller of distance, instead of through burning wastes on a patient beast. She had taken the child from a manger on this Christmas eve; and it seemed a very gift of God.
The distance to Squire Norwood’s house was only a matter of a few miles; yet it must have been an hour later when the two old people stood framed in the lamp-lighted door, hurriedly opened in response to the call of the motor’s horn.
“What’s this? what’s this?” his father’s hearty voice called out. “Thought ye were coming by train, and mother just broke down and cried when I come back without ye.”
Bareheaded, the snow no whiter than his hair, he stepped out toward the dark, big shape of the car, which loomed enormous through the falling snow; then he turned to stare after the shape which moved so swiftly past him and up to the shelter of the old wife’s arms. Doubtless there were hurried words, questions, answers; but the fact of the mere existence of the baby seemed to be enough for the two women—one so lately new to grief, the other so nearly beyond it for all time. They stopped, then passed within; the lighted doorway was empty.
“I swan! Where’d ye get that baby?” the old man asked of his son.
Norwood explained; his father was quick with self-reproach that such a tragedy had transpired so near, while he, the friendly “Squire” of the countryside, should have been all unaware of it.
“Summer-time I might have driven home that way; mother and me often stopped to see how Stefano was coming along. But winters we always use the state road. It’s longer, but better going. Sho! Mother will feel dreadful bad. She got to be real fond of Mareea, what with the baby coming, and after. Mareea used to tell as how they hadn’t any folks, poor young things!”
“Are you sure of that?” asked Norwood, sharply. “Could not Christine—could we have the baby?”
His father’s eyes held a sharp question, then became quickly misty. “I am sure; but as selectman I can make it sure for ye beyond question.”
The men’s hands clasped; the squire coughed, and Norwood’s doctor-sense was aroused.
“Why, father, you are standing here without your hat! You go right in, and I’ll put the car in the barn. I guess we can give this man shelter over Christmas, can’t we?”
It was, perhaps, some three hours later, after his mother had worn out all her persuasion in trying to coax them to eat to four times their capacity; and after they had exhausted every detail of talk about the fire and the tragedy; and after they had disposed the beribboned parcels to be opened in the morning; and after Norwood had lifted his mother fairly off the floor in his good-night “bear hug”—it was after all of this that Norwood followed Christine up to the big south room, with its white-hung four-poster, and found her kneeling over the old mahogany cradle which had been his own. The old clock in the hall below struck twelve.
Christine arose, and laid her cheek against her husband’s arm. “It is Christmas,” she said; and the baby, sleeping, smiled.