A Christmas Recognition.
We were old-fashioned people at Aldred, and Christmas was our special holiday. The house was always filled with guests, not such as many of our grander neighbors asked to their houses, but such as cared for good old-fashioned cheer and antiquated habits. Not all were relations, for we never asked relations merely on account of their kinship, according to the regulation mixing of a conventional Christmas party, but among our own people were many whose presence at our Christmas gatherings was as certain as the recurrence of the festival itself. Among them was a great-aunt, a soft, mild old lady, always dressed in widow's weeds, but with a face as fresh as a girl's, and hair white as the snowy cap she wore to conceal it. She had not come alone, for her adopted son was with her, the promised husband of her only child, dead years ago. He had left his own home and people, like Ruth, for the lonely, childless woman whom he was to have called mother, and remained her inseparable companion through her beautiful and resigned old age. There were, besides these, a young girl whose aspect was peculiar and attractive, and whose manner had in its mixture of modesty and self-reliance a piquancy that added to the fascination of her person. She had come with a distant cousin of hers, a widow of a different type from our dear old relative, and whose object in chaperoning Miss Houghton must have been mixed. She was small, blonde, coquettish, and thirty-two, though no one would have taken her for more than twenty-five. She looked soft, pliable, irresolute, and tender, and men often found in her a repose which was a soothing contrast to her cousin's energetic, peculiar, somewhat eccentric ways; only it was the repose yielded by a downy cushion, and people wearied of it after a while. The secret of the apparent partnership between these two opposite natures was perhaps this: the widow had a rich jointure, and was an excellent parti, while her cousin was portionless. Miss Houghton was thus doubly a foil to Mrs. Burtleigh.
I shall not speak of the other guests in detail, with the exception of one whom it would be impossible to overlook. He was a man nearer forty than thirty-five, good-humored and careless to all appearance, a hard worker in the battle of life, a cosmopolitan philosopher, and one of those handy, useful men who can sew on a button, cook an omelet, and kiss a bride as easily and unconcernedly as they gallop across country or horsewhip a villain. He had been in Mexico, surveying and engineering for an English railroad company, and he had spent some years in the East as the land-agent of a progress-loving pacha. Europe he knew as well as we knew Aldred, while the year he had been absent from us had been filled by new and stirring experiences in Upper Egypt. But I forget; we have yet to speak of many little details of Christmas-tide which preceded the gathering in of the whole party.
The kitchen department was, of [pg 449] course, conspicuous on this occasion. This included the village poor, who were regularly assembled every day for soup until Christmas eve, when each household received a joint of beef and a fine plum-pudding. Some of us went round the village in a sleigh, and distributed tea and sugar as supplementary items. It was a traditional Yule-tide, for the snow lay soft, even, and thick over the roads, as it but seldom does in England; then, the school was visited and solidly provisioned, the children were invited to a monster tea with accompaniment of a magic-lantern show, after which the prizes were to be distributed, as well as warm clothing for the winter season. Nothing was said of the Christmas-tree, as that was kept as a surprise.
The decoration of house and chapel was a wonderful and prolonged business, and afforded great amusement. Holly grew in profusion at Aldred, and a cart-load of the bright-berried evergreen was brought to the house the day preceding Christmas eve. The people we have made acquaintance with were already with us, and vigorously helped us on with the preparations. Such fun as there was when Miss Houghton insisted upon crowning the marble bust of the Indian grandee, Rammohun Roy, with a holly wreath, and when Mrs. Burtleigh gave a pretty, ladylike little cry as she pricked her fingers with the glossy leaves! The children of the house and those of another house in the neighborhood (orphan children whose gloomy home made them a perpetual source of pity to us) were helping as unhelpfully as ever, but what of that? It was a joyous, animated scene, and, still more, a romantic one; for the traveller, who had claimed a former acquaintance with Miss Houghton, now seemed to become her very shadow—or knight, let us say; it is more appropriate to the spirit of a festival so highly honored in mediæval times. The chapel, a beautiful Gothic building, small but perfect, was decorated with mottoes wrought in leaves, such as “Unto us a Son is born, unto us a Child is given,” and Gloria in excelsis Deo, etc., while festoons of evergreens hung from pillar to pillar, and draped the stone-carved tribune at the western end with a living tapestry. Round the altar were heaped in rows, placed one higher than another, evergreens of every size and kind, mingled with islands of bright camellias, the pride of the renowned hothouses of Aldred. White, red, and streaked, the flowers seemed like stars among dark masses of clouds; and, when we lit a few of the tall candles to see the effect, it was so solemn that we longed for the time to pass quickly, till the midnight Mass should call forth all the beauty of which we had seen but a part.
These decorations had been mainly the work of the traveller (whom, in our traditional familiarity, we called “Cousin Jim”) and of our other friend, the adopted son of our old aunt; but, though their brains had conceived, it was Miss Houghton's deft fingers that executed the work best. The last touch had just been put to an immense cross of holly which was to be swung from the ceiling, to supply the place of the rood that in old times guarded the choir-screen. A star of snow-white camellias was to be poised just above it, and a tall ladder had been put in readiness to facilitate the delicate task. Miss Houghton stood at the foot, one arm leaning on the ladder, the other holding aloft the white star. Her friend was halfway up, bearing the great cross, when he suddenly heard a low voice, swelling gradually, intoning the words of the Christmas hymn:
Adeste fideles,
Læti triumphantes;
Venite, venite in Bethlehem: