She put Cis at assorting these gifts, and, being a girl herself who was to be but twenty-two on this same Christmas, she enjoyed her task.
Mr. Lancaster often dropped in after dinner, and not infrequently to dine. They all three drew up before the vast hearth, with its jolly fire lighting up Cicely’s red hair, turning it to gold-with-copper-alloy on its surface coils; making a dark warmth below its surfaces, like a low fire on a forge.
Cis did not talk much, but she listened, and, listening, found new worlds opening out before her. Both Miss Braithwaite and Mr. Lancaster had been much about Europe; they knew unfrequented corners of it as one knows the places beloved in childhood.
“Do you remember, Anselm?” Miss Braithwaite would begin, and then would follow eager reminiscences of dear, queer, crooked streets; a shrine in a cathedral; a room in an ancient palace, or, more delightful still, a sleeping village and the sweet ways of its peasants all informed with faith, the realization of God, and utter trust in Him.
Or Mr. Lancaster would exclaim: “Oh, Miss Miriam, do you recall that little wounded kid which we saw the summer you and I met in the Tyrol, and how its sad-eyed little owner carried it—at such an effort!—out to the Calvary on the hillside, and laid it at the foot of the crucifix? There was faith that the God Who suffered to save souls would also pity His small four-footed creatures!”
“Indeed I could not easily forget it, Anselm! It was so sweet, and so piteous,” Miss Braithwaite had answered. “I’ve always been most thankful that you came along just then! I am sure that there is one young creature in Switzerland who will carry to the grave the conviction that, together with the guardian angels, Americans are the instruments of God’s mercy in answer to prayer! What a happy child that was when you bound up the kid and set its leg!”
Cicely, sitting silent on her side of the fireplace, raised her eyes and met Mr. Lancaster’s look, like a boy’s who has been found out in gentleness, always more mortifying to an American lad than detection in naughtiness—together with her impressions of life amid venerable, yet vividly existent faith, she was getting the revelation of two beautiful souls, the elderly woman’s, the twenty-seven years younger man’s, who knew and loved these things because they were part of them.
Sometimes something came up in these desultory, aimless talks which made Mr. Lancaster spring up, take a book from the shelves—Miss Braithwaite seemed to know exactly where to send him for any volume of the three thousand or so in this room—turn to a passage or a poem bearing on what had just been said, and read it aloud.
This was almost the best of all. Anselm Lancaster had a beautiful, flexible voice; he had been an Oxford man and had brought home with him the perfect modulations and pronunciation of English which Oxford gives her sons, and he read with the feeling that an artist and lover of literature brings to a book. Cis, listening, felt that her education was just beginning; she realized what Miss Braithwaite had meant when she suggested to her that she should spend this winter in this way. Heretofore she had learned facts; now she was learning what the facts stood for, what had called them into being, and no array of facts can compare with this knowledge. It is the clothing of the dry bones which are meaningless until the spirit prophesies to them and makes them alive.
Best of all, though, were those times when Anselm Lancaster went over to Miss Braithwaite’s piano, standing with its narrow end toward a book-filled corner, its keyboard toward the room, and, there in the shadow, played such exquisite music that it obliterated conscious thought, leaving no room for anything but the delight of harmonies. It was hard to go on working at these times. Miss Braithwaite’s work would fall into her lap, her face rest upon her hand while she gazed into the fire with eyes that seemed to look beyond the bounds of flesh, her expression unutterably wistful. Cis, who did not understand what she heard as Miss Braithwaite did, yet was engulfed by it. Never in her short life had anything so seized her as did this music, yet, while in the elder woman it woke the longing that nothing on earth can satisfy, in the girl it called out new resolution to live and to do.