The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

For years the unhappiness of his domestic affairs—the withdrawal of his wife from him under his roof—had by insensible stages travelled as a story to all other homesteads in that region. In his own house it had always remained a mute tragedy: each of the two who bore the yoke of it made no willing sign; each turned toward their world the unbetraying countenance. And it must be remembered that half a century ago and less you might have journeyed inquisitively through the length and breadth of that land and have found probably not one case of divorce nor of separation without divorce: among that people marriage was truly for better or for worse—a great binding and unalterable sacrament of blended lives. If after marriage love's young dream ended, then you lived on where you were—wide awake; if all gorgeous colors left the clouds and the clouds left the sky, you stood the blistering sun; if it turned out to be oil and water poured together, at least it was oil and water within the same priceless cruet: and the perpetuity of the cruet was considered of more value to society than the preservation of a little oil and water.

No divorce then nor separation in his case; nor any voluntary vulgarization of the truth, and yet a widely diffused knowledge of this truth among neighbors, among his brother physicians, in county seats, and away down on that lower level of the domestic servants, the proudest experience of whose lives is perhaps the discovery of something to criticise in those far above them: is it not a personal triumph to level a pocket telescope on the sun?

And all this Dr. Birney had grown used to through Nature's kind indurations: all of us have to grow used to so much; and perhaps there is no surer test for any of us than how much we can bear. But in one of life's directions only—in the direction of his children—his outlook had hitherto been as refreshing to him as sunlight on the young April verdure of the land. In that direction had still been left him complete peace, because there still dwelt spotlessness.

But the father had long dreaded the arrival in his children of an age when they must commence to see things in their home which they could not understand or in fairness judge. He carried that old dread felt by so many parents that by and by the children will be forced to understand—and to misunderstand—the lack of something in the house. It was for this very reason that permission had the more gladly been granted them this year to celebrate their Christmas elsewhere; for this festival brings into relief as nothing else the domestic peace of a fireside or the discords that mar the lives of those gathered in coldness about its warmth.

And now the long expected had arrived. His conversation with his little boy that morning before the two children had darted off for their Christmas away from home had brought the announcement: the boy was at last mature enough to begin to put his own interpretation upon the estrangement of his parents. Moreover, the son now believed that he had found the father out, had penetrated to his secret; and the doctor recalled the words which had conveyed this youthful judgment to him:—

"If I should get tired of Elizabeth and wanted a little change and fell in love with another man's wife—"

There was the snow-white annunciation! There the doctor got insight into the direction that a young life tended to take! There was the milestone already reached by the traveller! That is, his son out of devotion to him had already entered into a kind of partnership in his father's marital unfaithfulness. The boy had laughed in his father's eyes with elation at his own loyalty.

These tidings of degeneracy it was that so arrested the doctor on this day. The influence of the house had at last reached the only remaining field thus far unreached; and now the seeds of suggestion had been dropped from one ripened life into new soil, sowing the world's harvest over again—that old, old harvest—of tares and tears. Hitherto his tragedy had been communicated to his own generation; now it had dropped into the next generation: it had been sown past his own life futureward.

The shock of this discovery had befallen him just when Dr. Birney had begun to extricate himself from his whole past; when he had begun to hope that it might somehow begin to be effaced, sponged away.

For although but four months had passed from that August afternoon to this December morning, a great change had been wrought in him.