CHAPTER XIX.
CHRISTMAS AGAIN.
he missive in Lucy’s hand was no simple workman’s clumsy bill. It was a sheet of blank paper.
“What can this mean?” said Lucy, turning it about, while Miss Latimer and Tom watched her.
“You may be sure it ought to be the bricklayer’s bill, but that he has put in the wrong piece of paper,” observed Miss Latimer.
“Or it may have come from that stupid fellow we found in the area,” said Tom. “Perhaps his next tipsy fit has taken this form, and he is under the delusion that he has written a letter to Jane Smith.”
“That is not unlikely,” Lucy admitted, still turning the paper about. “The letter has been posted at this district office, and there is no maker’s name on the envelope. Anyhow, there it goes,” and she tore it in two and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.
“I wonder if Clementina would notice the strange-looking letter,” said Miss Latimer. “I’m always afraid of something stirring her superstitions and making her take flight to her Highland hills on the score that ‘Babylon’ is too terrible a place to stay in.”
That was all. It was but a nine minutes’ wonder. Yet they remembered it afterwards.
Early in December there came a letter from Mrs. Grant in Peterhead. Lucy and the captain’s wife had kept up a slight correspondence during their husbands’ absence on the Slains Castle. Each had always written to apprise the other of any news she had received. Once or twice, indeed, when unexpected opportunities for ship’s letters had arisen, the busy captain had contented himself with sending a message to his wife viâ his passenger’s home epistle. Mrs. Grant had always promptly and cordially acknowledged these curtesies on Lucy’s part. But she was not naturally a letter-writing woman. Her missives were always of the briefest, and never until now had she taken the initiative.
Mrs. Grant’s letter seemed, on the face of it, both as cheerful and as brief as usual. She “supposed Lucy had heard nothing lately, as she knew she would have let her know if she had.” “Sailing vessels are often out of their reckoning for weeks and weeks,” she added. She dropped a word of congratulation that Lucy’s own welcoming day was assuredly near at hand now, and of half-comic self-condolence that hers was so much farther off. “In my case, too, one suspense is no sooner over than another begins,” she wrote. “But that’s the lot of the sailor’s wife, and I know it was all in my bargain when I took the captain.”
There certainly seemed nothing in that letter to alarm Lucy, and she marvelled at a strange uneasiness which she felt stirring within her. Was she intuitively aware of some anxiety on the part of Mrs. Grant, which she had studiously kept out of her words? Lucy wrote a prompt reply, saying that she had heard nothing yet, but was daily looking for tidings. She tried to make her letter cheerful, and wondered whether Mrs. Grant, in her turn, would read anything between the lines.
Lucy scarcely liked to think of the approaching Christmas Day. If Charlie had returned, it would be a day of supreme joy; if timely sea news came in, it would be one of gladdest thanksgiving. But if——! There Lucy paused, and turned aside as from a great mist advancing to enfold her. Yet she must make her little plans to be fit for the fulfilment of her hope. Not to do so, would seem like creating an omen of prolonged separation and anxiety. So she and Miss Latimer sent out a Christmas bidding to Mr. Somerset, Lucy saying with pathetic playfulness that under the circumstances she scarcely knew whether she ought to issue her invitations in her own name only or with Charlie’s joined thereto. “For he may be among us on that day yet,” she added. Writing down her hope seemed to make it more tangible.
Mr. Somerset called in reply to Lucy’s invitation. He told her that in accepting it, he was accepting a real kindness. Without it, this Christmas might have been very lonely and desolate for him. His old landlord lay at the point of death, and consequently the whole household was saddened and absorbed.
“How much sadness there is in the world!” sighed Lucy. “And how terrible it is that there is a sort of consolation in realising that one is not the only burdened and anxious soul. It seems a selfish and cruel feeling to find comfort in that thought!”
Mr. Somerset looked up brightly.
“Yes, it seems so,” he said. “I used to think so, and probably it is so in the spirit in which the idea may sometimes be suggested and received. Yet I have learned to understand that it does not have a selfish and cruel origin. I think I have discovered what the idea springs from, and how it is that such a thought may really soothe and strengthen. After all, what is the very depth of woe—its unendurable sting?”
Lucy mused.
“I think it is the failure of our faith,” she said gently. “The chilly feeling that God has let go of us and that there are none to help.”
“Exactly so,” answered Mr. Somerset, “and I daresay all of us have known that feeling more than once. It calls our very humility and littleness to its aid, so that we ask, ‘Who am I that God should remember me?’ But can any sane mind look upon another, the lowest, the worst and the most abject, and deliberately say, ‘Who is he that God should remember him?’ I think not. We can feel that would be the vilest blasphemy against God. It would at once strip God of all that makes Him good, ay, or great either, with that wonderful greatness, before which earth’s highest and lowest and best and worst are all the same. No, Mrs. Challoner, in realising the fellowship of others in suffering, we at once realise that God must know all about it, and that there must be some wise purpose in it, and if so for that other, then for ourselves too.”
“Did not some philosopher say that death, being universal, could be no evil?” asked Lucy.
“I think it was the poet Schiller said so,” returned Mr. Somerset, “and I believe it is the consciousness of this, however little realised, which keeps life brave and bright and sane in the perpetual presence of death. The ‘solidarity of humanity,’ though the phrase is one which they may scarcely understand, is the secret treasure of the humble. It never occurs to them to be surprised and shocked when those evils befall them which they always knew befell others. In their eyes ‘it is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth to Him good,’ always ‘good,’ you may observe. ‘It is all in the day’s work,’ they tell one, when their lot is hardest.”
Lucy thought of Mrs. May, and of the strength and comfort she had gathered, more than a year ago, from that good woman’s calm outlook on events, and her fixed conviction that there is inward strength at command sufficient to lift us elastic after any outward blow. It seemed to Lucy that she too might rise equal to the sublime suspenses and sorrows of life if only her strength and spirits were spared the perpetual corrosion of petty cares and worries which fretted them away as moths consume a garment. Then the wiser reflection came—that neither were such petty cares and worries special to her; they too entered into every lot; one could not doubt that brave cheery Mrs. May had her full share. The same inward strength must be as ready and able to bear the perpetual little trials as the occasional great ones, if only we invoke it and know how to use it. The great ocean of Divine love and strength is always waiting to flow into our smallest trials, if we would but hold them ready.
Once more the Institute holidays began. Lucy had now made arrangements for continuing her services there into the next year, under a running “quarter’s notice.” She had in readiness all her little gala preparations with which to greet Charlie’s return, however unexpected it might happen to be.
Of late she had seen very little of the Brands. She knew that Jem had made a great success in some of his speculations. In newspapers she saw that his name was held in prominent place at “financial” meetings, and she noticed mention of Florence as among the guests at showy social functions. Taking up a “society paper” by chance, she actually read an account of her sister’s toilette! To Lucy’s ideas, such a thing was an indecent intrusion into the affairs of a private lady. When Florence called on her, elate over all these things, she could not congratulate her, and Lucy felt that her simple silence chafed Florence. Even as the boy-boarder, poor Tom, “degraded” Lucy in Florence’s eyes, so, from Lucy’s standpoint, these vanities degraded Florence. The sisters were drifting ever further apart. Lives with aims and aspirations diametrically opposed cannot keep together, however household love and the memory of old associations may yearn that they should do so. Nay, the more these struggle against the separating tide, the more ghastly is their shipwreck likely to be. There is “a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.” The most poignant tragedy of life comes in just here. For whatever love has ever been, will persist, and has to learn to rest patient in the faith that “God seeketh again that which is passed away.”
Christmas morning came. Miss Latimer had her Christmas offering of daintily hemmed net ruffles, just the sort of thing which Lucy had now no time to make. There was the usual budget of Christmas letters and parcels. A book for Hugh, from “his father’s friend Wilfrid Somerset,” sent by post, because Mr. Somerset knew that a “post parcel for his very self” would bulk so largely in a child’s delight; and a magnificent hand-painted glove and handkerchief sachet in white satin from Jem and Florence.
What significance there was in those gifts! Miss Latimer and Mr. Somerset gave with theirs a wee bit of themselves, the kind consideration for a tired woman’s inability to serve herself, and for the eager vanity of a little child. But that costly and delicate sachet could have had no proper place in the little house with the verandah at any time, and certainly could have no function in the life of a working woman-artist, who bought no gloves but dark “suedes,” and who could scarcely find time or spare energy to dust her books! Lucy expressed a desperate admiration of the thing’s delicate beauty, and so did Miss Latimer. There was nothing else to say. Each knew the other was not deceived as to her estimate of the thoughtlessness of such a gift.
“But poor Florence means to be so kind,” Lucy urged upon herself. “That is in her taste, and it would suit her own white-and-gold bedroom. She cannot realise the difference between us! We always used to have everything alike. And she means to be kind!”
Lucy secretly pressed a yearning kiss on the soft white thing, ere she refolded it in its dainty papers, from which, she knew, it would not be taken again for a long time. They rend us terribly, do these thoughtless favours in which a kind intention seems to blunder. Possibly this pang of remorse for seeming ungraciousness and ingratitude might sometimes be lessened if we could look deeper into the matter. It might have been spared to Lucy had she known that Florence had neither chosen nor even bought this gift. It had been sent to Florence herself, but she had just received another, much handsomer, so after writing a gushing note of thanks to the donor, she had promptly forwarded it to Lucy!
Mr. Somerset himself arrived in due time. Lucy sat amid her little circle with a smiling face, but they all felt that she must feel a keen disappointment that, after all, she still remained the sole head of the household. They pressed upon her all the cheer possible.
“After all, the weary waiting time is all behind you,” said Mr. Somerset. “Only fancy if last year you could have felt as you may now, that all which remains is but a few days more or less.”
“We’ll have to be quite sure that we recognise Mr. Challoner when he appears,” put in Miss Latimer playfully, pointing to Charlie’s portrait over the fireplace. “Remember he has had long voyagings through sunny seas even since that was taken, and his present self may be as much of an improvement on that as that is on the pale invalid who went away.”
“You have made a supreme effort to win this triumph, Mrs. Challoner,” remarked Mr. Somerset. “It may all seem easy to you now it is ending so beautifully. But you made the effort in the dark, not knowing how it might end.”
“But it was right to do, and that was Lucy’s part, and the disposing of it is God’s,” said Miss Latimer. “We must not do evil that good may come. But we must do right, however its ending may seem to us.”
“But possibly right is somewhat different with different people,” remarked Mr. Somerset. “What was right for our friend here to do was an action right only in those as brave and capable as she is.”
“I am no casuist,” returned Miss Latimer. “My idea of right is that it is what each person knows he or she ought to do and can do.”
“Ah, but there is a great deal in that ‘can do,’” smiled Mr. Somerset.
“None know what they can do till they try,” retorted Miss Latimer.
“Dr. Ivery has been so kind,” said Lucy. “He had sent two or three times to inquire after Charlie’s progress. So when I got that photograph I thought I ought to let him see it. I said I hoped he would excuse me for bringing it, but I thought it might help him what to advise in similar cases, and he said, ‘Yes.’” Lucy broke off abruptly with a little laugh and a heightened colour.
Mr. Somerset and Miss Latimer also laughed. They both guessed what Lucy did not choose to tell them, that the doctor had said he would often be happy to prescribe such a cure if the patient were but provided with such a wife to help him to carry it out!
“All this is very well,” said Tom Black, assuming a grumbling tone. “But I should look forward to Mr. Challoner’s coming with much more delight if I did not fear that it will end my days here; he will want all his house for himself!”
Lucy laughed very sincerely now.
“Charlie’s coming will bring you nothing but good, Tom,” she observed, “and you know that well enough. You have been a great help to me, and Charlie will be even more grateful than I am. But there is something for which we can all be grateful together, at the very present moment—to wit, that no poor Jessie Morison is spoiling the peace of this Christmas Day. I was in the kitchen half an hour ago, and Clementina has got everything most conscientiously in order.”
“Nevertheless she’s something of a spoil-sport,” put in Tom. “I wonder if it takes any nourishment out of one’s food when the cook is always sighing?”
Hugh had been perched up in the window, watching cabs which were bringing Christmas guests to the neighbours. At this instant he turned, crying—
“Something is the matter opposite. Policemen!”
They all rushed to the window.
“Is it a chimney on fire?” asked Miss Latimer.
“There is no smoke,” said Lucy.
(To be continued.)
