All these things the Wescotts gathered for themselves on that sixth Mary Christmas day—gathered with a ready sympathy for Mary Christmas that helped to quell their own disillusionment. Mary and Cynthia, escaping to their own room after dinner while their father and mother talked with their guest and while John and Roger introduced Raphael more or less apologetically to the baseball team, confided to each other their only remaining hope, that Mary Christmas could not, for the blinding glory of her dreams, see in Raphael what they saw. What might happen, they wondered, if she did see in one quick, all-illuminating flash or in a hundred more slow, more cruel perceptions the unloveliness in him, so apparent to them all! Then the light that went before her like a pillar of fire, that made her forgetful of tired feet, that impelled her to sing songs and to tell stories to children—might it not vanish into unutterable darkness?
But Fate was kind to Mary Christmas and reassuring to Mary and Cynthia. Surely no all-illuminating flash revealed Raphael to his mother, and, if the perceptions came, they were slow and far less cruel than they might have been. To her, Raphael, in spite of his derision of their country, his shiftiness, his nagging, and his gum, was heir to the wealth of ages and, in some mysterious way which would later be revealed to them, the certain avenger of his father’s cruel death. She did concede, it is true, to his nagging, and, to the Wescott mind, in a deplorable measure; for in the spring following his visit she appeared in a rusty green suit, many sizes too large for her, and in a red, daisy-trimmed hat, which she wore so insecurely pinned to her dark hair that it sat upon one ear in a most rakish manner. But the gold coins she never relinquished.
That year, too, the vision of the pushcart became a reality. It was red, with the stout, well-oiled wheels of which she had dreamed; it boasted the protective rubber covering, which on fair days folded neatly under its shining body; it had compartments of all sizes with hinged covers, and, for those which carried the most valuable of her wares, padlocks with tiny keys. Her pride in it and her repeated assurances that the labor of her journey was now depleted by half atoned in some degree for the loss of the gold-laced bodice and for the advent of the red hat.
It was on this visit that they noted the deepening lines around her nose and mouth, and a perceptible, if slight, dulling of her eyes that had so burned and glowed through all the years they had known her.
“You’re tired, Mary Christmas,” said Father Wescott. “Stay at home this winter and let the town trade go.”
And John, drawing his mother into the pantry on the pretext of an afternoon lunch, confessed, in a burst of anxious confidence, that he, for one, was worried.
But Mary Christmas laughed at them as she adjusted her new hat, which immediately became unadjusted when she stooped to lift the handle of the pushcart. She must work winter and summer, she said; it cost a lot to keep a family of three in a real house. There was pride in her voice, however, when she told John, who pushed the cart up the hill for her, how Raphael was now standing on the street corners and selling papers in shrill calls like a real American boy, and how deftly and quickly the fingers of little Mary went in and out of the frames that held the laces.
VIII
SHOWERS OF GOLD AND PEARLS
THUS it came about in Wescott history that those bright years of childhood when things were things and those troubled later years when the same things could not be bounded by their own neat selves became a kind of tapestry shot through and through with colored threads. Blue, purple, red, gold, and silver, they deepened and glowed—the colors of music and poetry, of magical words and ancient tales, of romance and high endeavor, of distant places and strange peoples, of sacrifice and holiness. Into the texture of their lives Mary Christmas had woven those threads in hues that were fadeless against time and circumstance.
Not that the four Wescotts interpreted their love for Mary Christmas or their debt to her in terms of colored threads in tapestry. That was to come later. They only knew that for years she had added to their lives a vividness and a completeness which had not been there before she came. They knew, too, that she had entwined herself inextricably within the fabric of their existence because of her connection with certain occurrences, which, it is quite safe to say, seemed at the time of their happening of more tremendous import than all the quiet hours beneath the orchard trees.