At the pressure of her body on the bed he opened his eyes and instantly looked to see what the whole truth was: how she had come out of it all, what their life was to be henceforth, what their future would be worth. But at the sight of her so changed—something so gone out of her forever—with a quick cry he reached his arms for her. She struggled to get away from him; but he, winding his arms shelteringly about the youth-shorn head, drew her face close down against his face. She caught at one of the braids of her hair and threw it across her eyes, and then silent convulsive sobs rent and tore her, tore her. The torrent of her tears raining down into his tears.
Tears not for Life’s faults but for Life when there are no faults. They locked in each other’s arms—trying to save each other on Nature’s vast lonely, tossing, uncaring sea.
The rush of children’s feet was heard in the hall and there was smothered laughter at the door and the soft turning of the knob.
It was Christmas Morning.
The sun rose golden and gathering up its gold threw it forward over the gladness of the Shield. The farmhouse—such as the poet had sung of when he could not help singing of American home life—looked out from under its winter roof with the cheeriness of a human traveller who laughs at the snow on his hat and shoulders. Smoke poured out of its chimneys, bespeaking brisk fires for festive purposes. The oak tree beside it stood quieted of its moaning and tossing. Soon after sunrise a soul of passion on scarlet wings, rising out of the snow-bowed shrubbery, flew up to a topmost twig of the oak; and sitting there with its breast to the gorgeous sun scanned for a little while that landscape of ice. It was beyond its intelligence to understand how nature could create it for Summer and then take Summer away. Its wisdom could only have ended in wonderment that a sun so true could shine on a world so false.
Frolicking servants fell to work, sweeping porches and shovelling paths. After breakfast a heavy-set, middle-aged man, his face red with fireside warmth and laughter, without hat or gloves or overcoat, rushed out of the front door pursued by a little soldier sternly booted and capped and gloved; and the two snowballed each other, going at it furiously. Watching them through a window a little girl, dancing a dreamy measure of her own, ever turned inward and beckoned to some one to come and look—beckoned in vain.
All day the little boy beat the drum of Confucius; all day the little girl played with the doll—hugged to her breast the symbol of ancient sacrifice, the emblem of the world’s new mercy. Along the turnpike sleigh-bells were borne hither and thither by rushing horses; and the shouts of young men on fire to their marrow went echoing across the shining valleys.
Christmas Day! Christmas Day! Christmas Day!
One thing about the house stood in tragic aloofness from its surroundings; just outside the bedroom window grew a cedar, low, thick, covered with snow except where a bough had been broken off for decorating the house; here owing to the steepness the snow slid off. The spot looked like a wound in the side of the Divine purity, and across this open wound the tree had hung its rosary-beads never to be told by Sorrow’s fingers.