The Bride of the Mistletoe

by James Lane Allen

She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its place with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in the middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to that power of low suggestion which is one of anger’s weapons, she began to devise malice. She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took from a bottom drawer—where long ago it had been stored away under everything else—a shawl that had been her grandmother’s; a brindled crewel shawl,—sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her ugliness and decrepitude.

She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places under the mass of her black hair two long gray locks and let these hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully nourished look of youth from her face—dropped the will to look young—and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it—into the wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, assisting each other so ably, had wrought in her.

She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his house—his house.

After a while a darker mood came over her.

With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat—with furtive look to see whether he observed her.

A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.

Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was Anglo-Saxon blood of the world’s fiercest; floating in the tide of it passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered castle—the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined casement and putting before her the manly beauty of him—the blond hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth reddening in his slumber under its curling gold—some mother of hers whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the moon’s dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand years ago: some mother of hers.

It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers so often to take its place. The best and the worst—these are the sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making: hence life’s spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far: how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit such a privileged highland.

During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was dragging herself out of life’s quicksands upward to some rock, where there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness. The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.

He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven hoof should have been found on noble mountain tops—that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of the world’s spirit—about the sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the higher—this cant now became to her the invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.