“Whom can she mean?” said I helplessly. For I have no acquaintance who has a bird shop though I have always thought that bird-shop proprietors must be charming people.
“It’s probably somebody with parrots on her bonnet,” Hobart suggested helpfully.
I hurried across the hall, noting how the holly wreaths showed bright in the mirrors as if the pleasantest things were about to happen. For in dim light a mirror does not merely photograph. It becomes the artist and suggests. And a mirror wreathed with holly on the day before Christmas is no more like an ordinary mirror than an ordinary woman is like a bride.
This thought was in my mind as I entered the library and found Eunice Wells, whose “piety and love of learning and incomparable courage in bearing sorrow” had drawn her to us no more than had her helplessness and her charm. And suddenly I understood that there are some women who seem always like brides, moving in an atmosphere apart, having something of joy and something of wistfulness. With Eunice the joy was paramount so that I knew now what Nichola had meant by the “canaries singing in her head till it shows through.” But my heart smote me, for it seemed to me that that joy was a flower of renunciation instead of the flower of youth. And how should it be otherwise? For there beside her chair lay her crutch.
“Ah,” I cried, “you are just in time, my dear, for a cup of tea and a nutcake with no frosting. And Merry Christmas—Merry Christmas!”
I shall not soon forget her as she looked lying back in Pelleas’ big chair, all the beauty of her face visible, hidden by no mask of mood; and in her cheek a dimple like the last loving touch in the drawing of her. I had never seen an invalid with a dimple and some way that dimple seemed to link her with life.
“Besides,” I continued, “I’ve a friend whom I want you to meet—a man, a youngish man—O, a Merry-Christmas-and-holly-man, to whom I am devoted. Come in as you are—the tea ruins itself!”
“Ah, please,” Eunice begged at this, “will you forgive me if I sit here instead while you go back to your guest? I would far rather be here and not talk to—to strangers. You will not mind?”
“Do quite as you like, dear child,” I replied, for this atrocious ethics is the only proper motto for every hostess.
So, her wraps having been put aside, I made her comfortable by the fire with magazines, and a Christmas rose in a vase. And I went away in a kind of misery; for here was one for whom with all my ardour I could plan nothing. Her little crutch would bar the way to any future of brightness. I had a swift sense of the mockery that Christmas holly may be.