The Doctor's Christmas Eve

by James Lane Allen

He turned from the window, and going to his office set about the work of mending the sleigh-bells. For some reason he did this most quietly lest they should send any sound through the stillness of the house. Once as a bell tumbled out of its place, instinctively he put his hand over it as though it were human and he must silence its mouth of merriment. Sleigh-bells seemed out of place in these rooms; they threw their music into old wounds. When he had finished, he put them just inside the door of the small room opening toward the stable where his man could take them away without making any noise.

And now another sound caught the doctor's ear as he was washing his hands.

It was half past twelve o'clock; and his wife had entered the dining-room to begin some early preparations for dinner, and she was alone. She wished no maid to-day, apparently, at least not yet; and as she moved familiarly about there reached his ear—very low, sung wholly to herself—the melody of a ballad.

The doctor knew it—words and music: it was the Ballad of the Trees and the Master. In this the poet—a Southern poet who himself alike through genius and suffering had entered while on earth into the divine—in this the poet had represented the Son of Man as going into the woods when his hour was near; into the woods for such strength as the forest only may sometimes give us: the same forest out of which humanity itself had emerged when it began its troubled history of search for the ideal.

Thus her song was not of the Christmas Tree and of the Manger when Divine love arrives; but of the tree of the Crucifixion and of love's betrayal and sacrifice ere it goes away. It was not the carol of the whole happy world at this hour for Bethlehem, but the hymn of Calvary—the music of the thorn tree and of the Crown of Thorns.

And this from his wife on Christmas Eve!—not for his ear: not for any one's ear: but to herself alone.

As he listened, with an overmastering impulse he walked to the corner of the library and stood before her picture. He noticed that in the careless haste of holiday house-cleaning to-day the servant had left on the glass of the frame some finger-prints, some particles of dust. He brought a little moistened antiseptic sponge and a little red-cross gauze, and softly cleaned it as though he were touching a wound. Then he returned to the window and watched the snow falling and heard his wife's song through to the end.

It was she to whom he owed everything. It was she who, a few years after their marriage, having discovered herself to be an unloved bride, had thrown her whole agonized nature into the one remaining chance of winning his love as young wife and young mother. Having seen that hope pass from her, she had withdrawn from one tragedy into a lesser one: she had withdrawn from him. And so withdrawing, she held the whole power of ruining him. Divorce—open separation—and his career as a physician in that land would have been ended.

Instead, she too had come to his rescue. Slowly out of that too swift and pitiless a fate for her own life, she had begun to work for the success of his: it was of too much value to many to be brought to nothingness for the disappointment of one.

The doctor stood there, looking out at the snowstorm and thinking how all the people who could most have destroyed him had spared not themselves to make him happy and successful and useful.