“If the Wescott children do, you may.”
“If Mrs. Howe lets Lucy and William, I’ll let you.”
“Wait and see if the Parker children go.”
That the stories and games told and inspired by Mary Christmas were not considered harmful by the Wescott parents was sufficient reason for their toleration, if not for their sanction, by other heads of families. As for Mary Christmas herself, the initial suspicion which her sudden and outlandish appearance had bred among them had died an early death. The reception and confidence accorded her by the Wescotts, her tragic story, which appealed especially to those fired by foreign missionary zeal, and above all the good reports of her conduct on the road, of her honesty, industry, and kindness to children, which were circulated freely by those having relatives in the more open country, all bore witness to her worthiness as an occasional companion.
So the children played on undisturbed. While the snow covered the fields, they enacted Saint Jacob, his toiling, unsuccessful ascent of Ararat, and the visit from the plank-bearing angel; and in the first thaw they used the moist, easily packed snow for the construction of Saint Gregory’s well, the home of the kind widow, and a rather diminutive palace of the wicked king. In the summer, reënforced by all the children within a wide radius, they ran screaming through the open fields, now as hordes of barbarians, devastating the land of Mary Christmas, now as bloodthirsty Turks, bent on massacre. But the acknowledged favorite was the story of the journey of Mary Christmas, sick, in the donkey-cart to Etchmiadzin and of her healing in the great church. This they played again and again with William Howe’s big Newfoundland as the donkey, Cynthia and Mary alternately as the sick child and her anxious mother, Roger as the priest in the church, and William himself, on account of his necessary provision for the journey, as the joyous father. When John looked wistful at having no part, they made him the little brother, who with the mother welcomed his sister’s glad return home, under the old tamarack tree at the bottom of the field.
Curiously enough, perhaps, they did not play the penitent pilgrim, though it would seem that his triumphant journey with Saint Gregory’s hand beneath his cloak might have afforded the best sort of dramatic material. Whether it lacked for them a certain concrete vividness which the other stories held, or whether, actuated by some strange, instinctive reserve, not unknown to childhood, they forbore to portray in visible form the many miraculous deeds wrought by the hand of the saint, one will never know; but the older members of the company never proposed its performance, and its stirring details were kept alive among them only by oral tradition.
And yet, although the players, as a whole, never presented the journeyings of the good bishop, the story was enacted by one of their number, who, going alone after the manner of the pilgrim himself, wrought his holy deeds in the silence of the snow-covered woods and pastures. That one was Cynthia Wescott. Since Mary Christmas had first told her stories, she had held this one as the tale of tales; and as the months in their quick succession left her longer and more awkward in arms and legs and more wondering and wistful in heart, its loveliness haunted her until it hurt by its very grace and beauty.
Cynthia, it will be readily perceived, was growing up. No blossom-laden tree had flashed suddenly upon her inward vision,—Fate, perhaps, had been kinder to her sister,—but certain disturbing questions and indistinct, reluctant perceptions had gleamed for a moment across her ready imagination, and then had faded away before she could see them clearly. They were the growing pains of her mind, though she did not know that. One day she felt the weight of coming years; the next the ecstasy of their hidden secrets. Into her life, she would have said could she have found words to describe it, there had crept a kind of rhythm, now quick and joyous with melody, now slow and sad in its cadences. It was all quite unexplainable, and at times most bewildering. And when on Christmas eve at the concert in the church she discovered all at once that John, reciting a piece, in a velvet suit, skillfully fashioned from the discarded parlor lambrequin, was something to cry over instead of to smile at as the others were doing, as she had always done before, she understood that the clear, orderly days of her little girlhood had gone away. Nor could she then know that they would return to her after many years, clear, orderly, luminous, their certain rhythms in harmonious accord.
Thus it happened that on a clear February morning, while the others were coasting down the long hill, Cynthia played the part of the pilgrim. Clad in red hood and mittens and in her red coat with its long cape, which so effectually hid the necessary box with its supernatural powers, she hurried to the stable and through its big, yawning doors into the snow-covered fields which led almost directly to the woods and high pastures. The crust of the snow was hard enough to bear her weight, and she hurried on until she was beyond the reach of the eyes and ears of those in the immediate neighborhood. Once within the shadow of the trees, she stood beneath a great pine, almost shamefaced over her yielding to the desire to come on such an errand. But the stillness of the woods, broken only by the occasional cry of a bluejay or the swish of pine boughs in the wind, reassured her in her purpose, and she began the journey of the pilgrim with his silver box.
As she grew older, she always held among the confused and crowded impressions of her childhood the clearest memory of that winter day; of the bright silence of the woods, and of herself going softly through the trees, across a frozen swamp with the brown marsh grass protruding above its smooth, white hummocks, over wide stretches of pasture, and stopping here and there to draw from beneath her red cape the wonder-working box and to present it before the suffering eyes of some stricken animal or tired wayfarer. She heard, too, as the years came and went, the sound of her own childish voice, clear and high in the still air, reciting the words with which Mary Christmas’ mellowed, ringing tones had endowed the pilgrim and which she supplemented by others of her own:—