Alanson looked at the little mother in the trundle-bed, and she opened her eyes, disturbed by such scampering. The pet chickens were roused also, and Speckle crowed on his perch with a vigor which belongs only to the midnight of Christmas eve.
“Look there, Sweetness,” Wilda whispered kneeling. “Do you see what Lanson’s fixed for you? That’s a Christmas-tree.”
The mother’s eyes caught the Christmas-tree, and snapped with astonishment and delight. The tapers were dripping tallow, but firelight shone through the boughs, and all the wonderful hearts and yellow fruit hung like a fairy picture. Her grateful look finally sought Alanson, and he also knelt down, at the opposite side of the trundle-bed, and with reverence which brought a rush of tears to Wilda’s eyes, kissed Sweetness on the forehead.
Wilda furtively gathered her tears on her finger-tips, and hid them in her linsey dress, but she said impressively to Alanson,—
“Now, that kiss will make you a better man all your life.”
SERENA
Time, 1860
Serena Hedding drove through the gateway of her father’s farm, while her little son held the creaking gate open. Her vehicle was a low buggy, with room at the back for a sack of nubbins, which the scrawny white horse would appreciate on his return trip. The driver was obliged to cluck encouragement to him as he paused, with his head down, in the gateway; and before he had taken ten steps forward, before Milton could stick the pin back in the post-hole and scamper to his seat at her left side, she lived her girlhood over. She saw her father holding that gate open for camp-meeting or protracted-meeting folks to drive in to dinner with him. She saw Milton Hedding ride through to court her, and the scowl her father gave him; and the buggy which waited for her in the woods one afternoon, herself getting into it, and Milton whipping up his horse to carry her away forever.
The road wound, folding on itself, through dense woods. Nothing had changed about the road. She noticed that the old log among the haw saplings remained untouched. That log was a link binding her childhood to her girlhood. She sat on it to baste up the hem of her ridiculously long dress before going to school, her dinner-basket waiting near; and, coming home in the evening, she there ripped the basting out, lest Aunt Lindy should notice that her skirt did not flop against her heels, as proper skirts had done in Aunt Lindy’s childhood. Seated on that log, she and Milton had talked of the impossibility of their marriage, and decided to run away.
It was so near sunset that the woods were in mellow twilight. She heard the cows lowing away off, and a loaded wagon rumbling over the Feeder bridge. The loamy incense of this ancestral land was so sweet that it pained her. Soon the house would come in sight, and seem to strike her on the face. If they had altered it any, she did not know it. Was her father’s sick-bed downstairs, or did Aunt Lindy keep him above the narrow staircase? The slippery-elm tree she used to wound for its juicy strips started out at the roadside to give her a scarry welcome. Her fingers brushed her cheeks, and drew the black sunbonnet farther over them.