In mid-afternoon, when their mother called Mary Christmas to a lunch of sandwiches and milk before she should again take to the road with her great pack, the children followed her to the house, fairly dazed by all the unfamiliar things which they had heard. When she had gone, they would sort out all these bewildering events and persons and places and put them in orderly, well-kept mental niches, to be taken out and reviewed one at a time: the Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life; the ark and its one transcendent plank; Saints Jacob and Gregory; the penitent pilgrim with his silver box; Armenian hills and valleys in the single magic moment of Ascension eve. But now, overpowered by the wealth to which they had become the heirs, they could only stand and watch her as she ate her lunch and talked with their father and mother about the roads she would travel during the next few days and her prospects for the summer.

When, intent upon reaching a near-by town before the late June twilight should fade, she had gone upon her way in the lengthening afternoon shadows, and the children retold her stories to their father and mother, Mary Wescott, impelled by the desire to be alone, left them on the porch and hurried through the pasture to the boulder. Once she had climbed to the top and looked again at the crab-apple tree, now white with drifting bloom, the lump in her throat got the better of her and her eyes filled with tears. But no one can be quite sure that the crab-apple tree was the cause. It might have been the sad, haunting beauty of certain words of Mary Christmas, or the thought of one star calling to another across a wide Eastern sky.

The next day it rained. An east wind swept the last petals from the orchard trees, and drove them through the misty air into the drenching grass. Cynthia, returning in the rain from an errand for her mother, brought in one which clung close to her wet, pink cheek. Watching the storm from the library windows, they talked of Mary Christmas. What was she thinking of as she followed the coast road beneath the lowering rain-filled clouds? Was it of Saint Gregory, or the great, dim church where she had been healed, or of Raphael and little Mary in Erzerum? There was one place which they knew where the highroad ran just above the ocean, where on clear days one could see the Mount Desert hills lying like a sleeping giant against the blue horizon. Here, on days like this, the surf, driven by the wind, pounded at the foot of fog-wrapped cliffs; here, they felt sure, she would wish for Ascension eve when for one moment the waters are still.

VI
A GOOD SAINT AND A SILVER BOX

IN late September, when a blue haze veiled the hills beyond the harbor and so lay over the upland farms that one who did not know might easily think the land was kind, when woodbine flamed upon the stone walls and the still air sang with a hidden insect-chorus, Mary Christmas surprised and delighted them all by coming again. Her visit this time was brief,—she was on the trail of a rumor that some late summer-sojourners wanted laces,—but she stayed long enough to strengthen their faith in the stories of the miraculous relics at Etchmiadzin, and to convince them anew that she had become, in truth, the most wonderful person in all their world. Nor were they obliged to content themselves during that winter merely with conjectures as to what she was doing and with the tracings of her spring journeyings upon the map. Their father, returning from Augusta during the legislative season for a week-end at home, told them of meeting her one day on the city street, and of his embarrassment when, in the face of all the passers-by, she threw herself at his feet in the newly fallen snow quite as she had done on the library floor. She had, he said,—the country roads being impassable,—begun to ply a winter trade in handmade and imported articles among the larger towns along the railroad, and was already becoming, so his city friends told him, a familiar figure. Once again he saw her, this time in a coach of the train from Portland to Boston, whence he was traveling, much to the satisfaction of his family, to deliver a speech on Republican integrity before the McKinley Club of that city. Here again, prostrating herself as completely as the train aisle would permit, she hailed him as her savior, much to the amazement of the pop-corn boy, the conductor, and all the tired, self-centred persons who usually travel on trains.

The tidings bridged the long succession of cold and snow-blocked weeks which had kept her from them the year before, and brought her nearer. Moreover, in the games and plays which they had formed from her stories, her presence among them became almost tangible. Every child in the village knew those stories, which the Wescotts had retold with such generosity of detail and with no slight degree of superiority; and there was not one who would willingly refuse his services when a well was to be dug for Saint Gregory in the deepest snowdrift, or when a suitable plank must be procured for presentation to Saint Jacob, who patiently slumbered at the foot of some improvised Ararat.

Here were pastimes of which they never tired, pageants which the State of Maine in the late nineteenth or in any other century could not afford them. Here, as they ransacked their various attics for costumes, trained the dogs of the neighborhood to take the part of wild boars, instructed Saint Gregory in the art of crossing himself, and converted the Wescott stable into the Etchmiadzin church, they felt the lure of “stronds afar remote,” recognized, even if vaguely, the charm that forever lies in unfamiliar, echoing names of distant places, and dimly perceived a spiritual magic and romance that transcended religion as they knew it, as sunlight transforms a dull and barren room.

There was, it must be admitted, not a little honest doubt on the part of parents, both as to the advisability of these plays and games and as to the character and influence of this stranger within their gates who had inspired them. Were stories that dealt with saints and relics and a church with an altar suitable to the needs of a strictly Protestant community? Was there not sacrilege, or worse still, mockery, in this sign of the cross which every child who had at any time played the part of Saint Gregory could make with avidity? Was it not possible that such practices, even in play, might tend to entice children from that straight, narrow, and rather unembellished way which their fathers had so steadfastly and unquestioningly trod?

These queries, however, if not answered satisfactorily, were at least stilled by a kind of mutual confidence and dependence common to New England village life in the nineties—a dependence which afforded inestimable advantages both to the individual and to society. Pleading children of this period most commonly received from their parents one of the following replies:—