Chapter II: Part 2

They were all quiet then for a few moments. The idea of anyone’s having lived in the Garden of Eden was quite too staggering. John particularly could not get things straight in his mind. Was Mary Christmas so old that, like the Garden of Eden, she was ageless? She who had seen the Tree of Life, was it not likely that she, too, had walked in the cool of the day with God and Adam and Eve?

“What’s the next oldest thing in your land, Mary Christmas?” It was Roger who asked this question. The Garden of Eden with Mary Christmas in it was too much for him. Like John, he could not get it clear, and he was hoping now for something less overwhelming.

“The next oldest thing?” repeated Mary Christmas, as though all time were passing in slow review before her. “A great mountain is the next oldest thing, the highest mountain in the world, almost, with snow on it all the year. It rises from the plain--so.” With her quick, brown fingers she gathered handfuls of the fallen petals and piled them on a flat, bare place near the tree trunk. The children helped her silently by scooping up more petals from among the grass and giving them to her. “So--it goes up from the plain into Heaven, white with snow. It is a holy mountain. It is where Noah landed with the ark, after the rain fell forty days and forty nights.”

“I know,” said Roger. “Mount Ararat. It’s in the Bible.”

“It’s in the geography, too,” said Cynthia.

“Ararat,” repeated Mary Christmas slowly. “Masis, my people call it. Well, Noah landed there after all the rain had fallen. One morning the ark stopped and shook them all. And there they were! The water began to go down--quickly--and there was my land--the oldest land in all the world!”

Again John was puzzled. Mary Christmas and her land were so inseparable that it almost seemed as though she must have been there to show its high pastures and clear waters to Shem, Ham, and Japheth, while Noah’s wife tidied up the ark before leaving it, and Noah anxiously loosed the beasts, clean and unclean alike, determined that this time there should be no hitch in the starting of a new world.

“What became of the ark?” asked Roger. He had a detail-loving mind. “The Bible doesn’t say.”

Mary Christmas looked at them all without replying. Perhaps she hesitated to supplement the Bible; perhaps she was preparing them for the effect of her answer.

“The ark is still there on the top of the mountain.” She spoke slowly and solemnly. “God keeps it there to make the people good. No one can see it, but it is there. When the moon shines on the mountain or the sun on certain days, there is its great shadow.”

“Oh, but, Mary Christmas! Still there, after all those thousands of years?”

“I tell you the truth,” said Mary Christmas. There was finality in her tone. “There is its shadow on the mountain-side.”

“Have you seen its shadow, Mary Christmas--you--yourself?”

“Yes,” said Mary Christmas. And then she did a strange thing. Raising her right hand to her head, she touched her forehead lightly with her fingers, then her breast, and then her shoulders from left to right, closing her eyes as she did so. Her still face awed the children. They had never seen that sign before.

“But what if anyone should climb the mountain to its very top?” they persisted, breaking the silence once she had opened her eyes. “Couldn’t they see it if it is there?”

“No,” said Mary Christmas. “Only someone holy could see it--someone very, very good. The Virgin Mary--or, perhaps, your father.”

Years afterward they were to laugh at the remembrance of Mary Christmas’ words and at the picture of Father Wescott toiling up Ararat with all the zeal which he had ever shown on the eve of a Republican victory. But now they were impressed only by the reverence in her voice. Good and wise as they had always known their father to be, they had never thought him fit for such celestial company.

“Once a saint, a holy man, tried to climb the mountain to see the ark,” continued Mary Christmas. “That was hundreds of years ago. His name was Saint Jacob. For three days he went up and up through the snow and ice. But each morning, when he woke from sleep, he found himself back at the same place where he had started the day before. Then an angel came to him with a great plank of wood. The angel told Saint Jacob that God would let no one walk on the top of the mountain, for it was sacred; but that He had sent the saint a piece of the ark as a reward for his patience. And now that wood is in the great church at Etchmiadzin.”

“Say it again, Mary Christmas,” they begged, forgetting Saint Jacob and the ark in this unfamiliar, ringing word. “Say it again--_please_!”

She repeated it, and they said it after her, against those days when they should retell her stories to one another and to all their friends.

“Have you seen the wood yourself, Mary Christmas, in the great church?”

“I have touched it with my hand,” said Mary Christmas, again pausing a moment to make that mysterious sign on forehead and breast. “Once, when I was a little girl like Mary and Cynthia, I was ill. I could not walk or play. My father took me to Etchmiadzin--a long journey in a donkey-cart. I remember how tired I got and how my bones ached. When we came to Etchmiadzin, we went straight to the great church inside the high walls. It was dark, with lights only at the great altar, and sweet smells everywhere. The priest there told me to place my hand on the wood. Then he made a prayer, and I was well again. On the way back home I sprang from the cart and ran ahead of the donkey. My father--he cried for joy!”

Mary and Cynthia looked at Mary Christmas’ hand, which lay in her lap, motionless for a moment, as she noted the effect of her story upon them. That long-fingered hand which was strained and knotted and bruised from the weight of her great bundle, which had yearned to hold an avenging weapon and to shed blood, which had woven birds and stars, tired sheep and climbing roses into their mother’s shawl--that hand had, years ago, touched a piece of the ark of Noah, and had felt within itself the quickening sense of returning health. The thought was too immense and far-reaching for them. They needed weeks and months to be able to comprehend it.

“In the church at Etchmiadzin there are other holy, sacred things,” continued Mary Christmas, her voice lingering over her words. “There is the head of the spear which the soldiers put into the side of our Lord. Then in a great silver box there is the hand of holy Saint Gregory. He was the saint who lived down a well for thirteen years.”

“For thirteen years!” cried Roger, disbelief punctuating his words. “In a well! Oh, Mary Christmas!”

“He did,” said Mary Christmas. “I tell you the truth just as they told it to me when I was a little girl. A wicked king cast him into the well because he would not give up his faith. And there he stayed, holding tight to the rocks so that he might not slip into the black, terrible water. There were serpents in that water. They reached their heads toward him! But when he made the sign of the cross they slipped back again. It was the same with all the other creeping things. They fled before that holy sign!”

“What did he eat all those years, Mary Christmas?”

“A widow woman who lived near the well lowered food to him in a basket every night at midnight. One night the king’s soldiers caught her. They would have put her to death if holy Gregory had not heard her cries and called from his well. They heard him call and mocked him. Then God sent an angel from Heaven who changed them all, and the king too, into wild boars, and threw a veil over the woman so that they could not find her.

“Then, when God knew that Gregory was good and patient enough to be a saint, He sent another angel to the wicked king’s sister, and commanded her to bring Gregory up out of the well. And when they lowered cords and drew the saint up, he was black like a man from Africa! The first thing he did was to put his hands on the horns of the boar who had been the king. The horns faded away, and the king came back. And Gregory said, ‘I am building a church for God in Etchmiadzin. Will you give gold and jewels?’ And the king said, ‘Yes.’”

“And the great silver box, Mary Christmas? What about that?”

Then Mary Christmas told them that when Saint Gregory died they cut off his right hand, which had wrought such wonders, and placed it in a silver box in the great church. The hand still wrought wonders, for when sick and suffering people and those who were troubled with care and sin came to Etchmiadzin and knelt and touched the box, they were healed. Then, she said, there was a certain good bishop who was much worried in his mind over an old sin in his boyhood--a sin which most persons would have forgotten. But he could not forget it. All his life he had wanted to atone for it in some more satisfactory way than just by holy living. When he saw the miracles wrought by the hand of the saint, he thought of the most satisfactory way in all the world.

One night, when all was still within the high walls of the cathedral square in Etchmiadzin, he laid aside his bishop’s robes and put on the gray gown and hood of a pilgrim. He went to the dark church with its dim altar lights, and took the silver box, which he wrapped in purple velvet and bound with cords of gold. Kneeling by the altar in the stillness, he consecrated himself to purity of thought and act and, with the aid of holy Saint Gregory, to the service of God among those who most needed Him.

He did not know just where he was going, Mary Christmas told them; but once he was outside the wall, some Power led him where It would. It took him far beyond cities and towns to high, wind-swept plains, where rough men wandered with their flocks and herds, and to secluded mountain villages whose people knew nothing of Etchmiadzin and its great church, and had never heard of the good saint. Among these people and in these villages the pilgrim lingered, and wherever he saw sorrow or sickness, he would take the silver box with its rich covering of purple and gold from beneath his shabby cloak and show it to those who needed help. Here the power of the saint was greater even than at Etchmiadzin, for those in suffering or anxiety needed but to look upon the box, and they were straightway healed.

Most wonderful of all, the saint gave his miraculous help not only to people but to animals and flowers. For once when the tired pilgrim rested on the top of a high, silent hill and sang a psalm to God, he chanced to see a lamb that had fallen and was caught between two rocks. Carefully placing the silver box on the hillside, he hurried to help the poor creature. But as he drew near, he saw to his amazement the rocks that held the lamb separate, and the animal spring to its feet and frisk away.

“And an old man told me once,” concluded Mary Christmas, looking at the rapt faces of the children, “what _he_ heard about the hand of holy Saint Gregory. He said that flowers and trees which wanted water in the hot summer would spring up afresh when the silver box was brought among them. So that wherever the pilgrim went, the valleys and hills blossomed and there was peace everywhere--just as on Ascension eve.”

“What’s Ascension eve, Mary Christmas?”

Mary Christmas looked at them in perplexed surprise, and then at the church spire, just visible through the blossoming trees. Evidently she was doubtful as to the sufficiency of New England Congregationalism in the nineties.

“It is the eve of the day when our Lord ascended into Heaven,” she said slowly. “On that night, in my country, at one moment which no one knows, all the water everywhere is still. Rivers and streams do not move. In that moment stones and flowers and stars and all creatures speak to one another. If you should hide in a cave in the mountain and hear them, you would never feel sadness any more.”

The tense softness of her voice as she said those last words mingled with the hum of bees in the quiet orchard. The children were silent as they looked at her, even the boys vaguely conscious that this was no time to speak. She leaned back against the gray trunk of the apple tree, her body relaxed, her quick hands listless in her lap, her mouth still and thoughtful. Only her eyes under their dark brows were not still. They were as though haunted by living flames that soared upward from the fire in her heart. Mary Wescott saw them burning there, and understood all at once that Beauty had kindled them--the irresistible, torturing loveliness that lies in ancient, lip-worn tales, consecrated forever by their own mystic grace and by the simple faith of a people’s childhood.

In mid-afternoon, when their mother called Mary Christmas to a lunch of sandwiches and milk before she should again take to the road with her great pack, the children followed her to the house, fairly dazed by all the unfamiliar things which they had heard. When she had gone, they would sort out all these bewildering events and persons and places and put them in orderly, well-kept mental niches, to be taken out and reviewed one at a time: the Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life; the ark and its one transcendent plank; Saints Jacob and Gregory; the penitent pilgrim with his silver box; Armenian hills and valleys in the single magic moment of Ascension eve. But now, overpowered by the wealth to which they had become the heirs, they could only stand and watch her as she ate her lunch and talked with their father and mother about the roads she would travel during the next few days and her prospects for the summer.

When, intent upon reaching a near-by town before the late June twilight should fade, she had gone upon her way in the lengthening afternoon shadows, and the children retold her stories to their father and mother, Mary Wescott, impelled by the desire to be alone, left them on the porch and hurried through the pasture to the boulder. Once she had climbed to the top and looked again at the crab-apple tree, now white with drifting bloom, the lump in her throat got the better of her and her eyes filled with tears. But no one can be quite sure that the crab-apple tree was the cause. It might have been the sad, haunting beauty of certain words of Mary Christmas, or the thought of one star calling to another across a wide Eastern sky.

* * * * *

The next day it rained. An east wind swept the last petals from the orchard trees, and drove them through the misty air into the drenching grass. Cynthia, returning in the rain from an errand for her mother, brought in one which clung close to her wet, pink cheek. Watching the storm from the library windows, they talked of Mary Christmas. What was she thinking of as she followed the coast road beneath the lowering rain-filled clouds? Was it of Saint Gregory, or the great, dim church where she had been healed, or of Raphael and little Mary in Erzerum? There was one place which they knew where the highroad ran just above the ocean, where on clear days one could see the Mount Desert hills lying like a sleeping giant against the blue horizon. Here, on days like this, the surf, driven by the wind, pounded at the foot of fog-wrapped cliffs; here, they felt sure, she would wish for Ascension eve when for one moment the waters are still.

VI

A GOOD SAINT AND A SILVER BOX

In late September, when a blue haze veiled the hills beyond the harbor and so lay over the upland farms that one who did not know might easily think the land was kind, when woodbine flamed upon the stone walls and the still air sang with a hidden insect-chorus, Mary Christmas surprised and delighted them all by coming again. Her visit this time was brief,--she was on the trail of a rumor that some late summer-sojourners wanted laces,--but she stayed long enough to strengthen their faith in the stories of the miraculous relics at Etchmiadzin, and to convince them anew that she had become, in truth, the most wonderful person in all their world. Nor were they obliged to content themselves during that winter merely with conjectures as to what she was doing and with the tracings of her spring journeyings upon the map. Their father, returning from Augusta during the legislative season for a week-end at home, told them of meeting her one day on the city street, and of his embarrassment when, in the face of all the passers-by, she threw herself at his feet in the newly fallen snow quite as she had done on the library floor. She had, he said,--the country roads being impassable,--begun to ply a winter trade in handmade and imported articles among the larger towns along the railroad, and was already becoming, so his city friends told him, a familiar figure. Once again he saw her, this time in a coach of the train from Portland to Boston, whence he was traveling, much to the satisfaction of his family, to deliver a speech on Republican integrity before the McKinley Club of that city. Here again, prostrating herself as completely as the train aisle would permit, she hailed him as her savior, much to the amazement of the pop-corn boy, the conductor, and all the tired, self-centred persons who usually travel on trains.

The tidings bridged the long succession of cold and snow-blocked weeks which had kept her from them the year before, and brought her nearer. Moreover, in the games and plays which they had formed from her stories, her presence among them became almost tangible. Every child in the village knew those stories, which the Wescotts had retold with such generosity of detail and with no slight degree of superiority; and there was not one who would willingly refuse his services when a well was to be dug for Saint Gregory in the deepest snowdrift, or when a suitable plank must be procured for presentation to Saint Jacob, who patiently slumbered at the foot of some improvised Ararat.

Here were pastimes of which they never tired, pageants which the State of Maine in the late nineteenth or in any other century could not afford them. Here, as they ransacked their various attics for costumes, trained the dogs of the neighborhood to take the part of wild boars, instructed Saint Gregory in the art of crossing himself, and converted the Wescott stable into the Etchmiadzin church, they felt the lure of “stronds afar remote,” recognized, even if vaguely, the charm that forever lies in unfamiliar, echoing names of distant places, and dimly perceived a spiritual magic and romance that transcended religion as they knew it, as sunlight transforms a dull and barren room.

There was, it must be admitted, not a little honest doubt on the part of parents, both as to the advisability of these plays and games and as to the character and influence of this stranger within their gates who had inspired them. Were stories that dealt with saints and relics and a church with an altar suitable to the needs of a strictly Protestant community? Was there not sacrilege, or worse still, mockery, in this sign of the cross which every child who had at any time played the part of Saint Gregory could make with avidity? Was it not possible that such practices, even in play, might tend to entice children from that straight, narrow, and rather unembellished way which their fathers had so steadfastly and unquestioningly trod?

These queries, however, if not answered satisfactorily, were at least stilled by a kind of mutual confidence and dependence common to New England village life in the nineties--a dependence which afforded inestimable advantages both to the individual and to society. Pleading children of this period most commonly received from their parents one of the following replies:--

“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:--

“‘Art thou ill, my brother? Look upon the hand of the holy Saint Gregory, which the Lord hath sent unto thee.’”

“‘Death, flee away from this poor creature, in the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of Hosts!’”

It was from that day, she knew, that the love of words came to suffuse her life with its radiance, tuning her ears to cadences of sound, charming her eyes with the ecstasy of light and color, delighting her imagination by opening gates into far fields. Had the lips of countless thousands in their age-long life endowed them with music? Had the visions, evoked by them centuries ago, lingered within their syllables?

From that day as the penitent pilgrim in the still, white wood she became a worshipper at their shrine, repeating to herself again and again the sentences and phrases which Mary Christmas had first endeared to her and which had stayed to take up their own places in her heart:--

“‘The Lord be merciful unto thee.’”

“‘In the blessed name of Saint Gregory and of the Lord of
Hosts.’”

Single words, too, began to hold a charm for her, words quite free from their context, but never alone because of the pictures they called forth. _Silent, holy, high, garden, old_--what magic lay within each one of them!

_Old_ was, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas loved _old_. Upon her lips it opened the gates of ancient cities, led one over desolate, hoary plains and hot, sand-swept deserts, carried one to remote gardens within gray, crumbling walls, brought before one’s eyes a time-worn, weary land. Cynthia came to cherish those three letters as one cherishes a rare jewel which in changing lights gives forth changing colors. In fact, she grew so ardent in her love for them that she felt personally aggrieved when John at the breakfast table, his father being absent, cried in a sudden declaration of independence:--

“I hate this nasty old porridge! I won’t eat it!”

VII

A PILLAR OF FIRE

The opening years of the new century found Mary and Cynthia within the white-columned academy and in daily verbal conflict with Orgetorix, chief of the Helvetians, Catiline, and the Ten Thousand Greeks with their interminable parasangs; Roger mightily concerned with “Thanatopsis” and cube root; and John under the initial spell of the burial of De Soto in the dark Mississippi. They found Mrs. Wescott still true to sulphur and molasses, blue serge, and a nine o’clock bedtime, and Mr. Wescott still a victim during the summer months of that distressing habit already fully described, and an all-the-year supporter of the party which had brought forth a Lincoln and inspired a McKinley--the party whose bedrock principles of conservatism and integrity must safely weather its present rather drastic and impulsive leadership. And they found Mary Christmas still a traveler of the coast roads from the drifting of apple blossoms in early June to the falling of the leaves in late October.

Nor had those years wrought many changes in Mary Christmas. Except for some white threads in her dark hair and the deepening of certain lines about her nose and mouth, she was outwardly as she had been on that memorable first visit. She still wore the gold coins in her ears and the red silk handkerchief, shifted her black bundle from one hip to the other with surprising agility, and persisted in falling upon her face at the initial approach of Mr. Wescott. She was still an inexhaustible treasure-house of stories, each year adding others to those first and best beloved, of the ark and Ararat, of the ancient saints and the pilgrim, and of that holy city, Etchmiadzin. Her eyes under their dark brows had not lost their restlessness. Now they burned with anguish over the sufferings of her land, now glowed with the sad loveliness of the tales which she told, now gleamed with ominous revenge at the hated name of Turk, which, although the children were forbidden to use it in her presence, occasionally found its way to her ears. Falling petals and the drying of the country roads still were heralds of her coming; indeed, those early days in June when orchard blossoms drifted through the bright air had come to be known in the Wescott family and among the other children of the village as Mary Christmas days.

And yet the opening years of that new century found Mary Christmas in ways of pleasantness which the late nineties had been reluctant to promise her. Indeed, she might well have cried with the Psalmist, perchance of her own hill pastures: “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Slowly but steadily she had built up a reputation for herself among a people by nature skeptical of the “foreigner,” and in districts far from Utopian for peddlers of all sorts. Although she had in no small measure the shrewdness of her race, all suspicion of dishonesty, rife upon her early appearance, had been dispelled by an openness in her business dealings, almost childlike in its simplicity. Attendant upon this was a ready understanding of the whims and prejudices of her customers, a happy faculty which forbade the tenacity of the average seller, but was quick to suggest a substitute for whatever was refused. Aiding these assets to good business and yet transcending them all was her larger, more bountiful self, which, once met with on the common way, was never to be forgotten, and which now, as then, beggars all attempts at description.

She manifested, even to dull people, an almost overwhelming prodigality of nature. Her energy was tireless and apparently incapable of consumption. It carried her over miles of country, sometimes in a drenching rain, and left her at nightfall at the back door of some upland farm, whose unwilling inhabitants grudgingly offered her the hayloft as a bedchamber and in an hour were taking down the newspapers from the windows of the spare room. It lent a buoyancy to her tired feet when during her first months as a traveler she had left the main road for an outlying house, only to be turned away at the gate. It prompted her in long stretches of woodland to sing the folk songs of her people--songs of Vartan, who saved Armenia from the worship of fire, and of the Virgin, on whose festival the ripening grapes are blessed by a holy cross. It made her never too tired to talk or to play with children. In its gracious strength she dreamed dreams and saw visions: dreams of the day when she should bring her children to this kind, new land; visions of herself, behind a red pushcart with stout, well-oiled wheels, convenient apartments for small accessories, and a thick rubber cover, protective against bad weather. Who shall say that it sprang from a superabundance of physical well-being alone? Surely such power breathed of the spiritual, and suggested the generosity of God on the day of her creation.

Thus it happened that after five summers in the country and five winters in the towns the dream of dreams came true, and Raphael Christmas and his sister Mary arrived from Erzerum. What excitement there was in the Wescott family and in the Wescott village, when on a Mary Christmas day, just five years from the first, this great announcement was proudly made under the apple trees! Even Mary and Cynthia, with their braids turned under and college only two years away, were thrilled to their finger-tips, and John and Roger refused to let Mary Christmas go on her way until she had promised to bring Raphael with her the following spring.

But Raphael Christmas, it must be confessed, was a sore disappointment. When, the news of his mother’s approach having been brought to them by the doctor in his carriage, they ran to meet her up the hill, and saw a tall, awkward boy in clothes like their own, they were all conscious of a sinking feeling within themselves. No imagination, even of the most leaping and vivid variety, could see in this overgrown lad, who shifted uneasily from one side of the road to the other, threw stones at sparrows, and was impolite to his mother, one who had lived in the Garden of Eden and had looked upon Mount Ararat with its light-touched shadow of the ark. Not the most friendly feeling in the world could transform his dark, thin face, with its shrewd black eyes and its total lack of all those qualities which made his mother’s beautiful, into the welcome one of a valued, if infrequent, companion.

Swift Americanization, a process at that time relatively unhampered by theories, had left its marks on Raphael Christmas. A year at school in Portland had taught him many things. Among the most outstanding of these were an astounding command of American slang of a range and versatility known to few natives, the art of chewing gum noisily and continuously, and the most rampant desire to lose as soon as possible all traces of his foreign birth. This longing prompted him to an almost continual nagging of his mother. Her red silk handkerchief, the gold coins in her ears, and her gold-laced bodice annoyed him. His playfellows in Portland laughed at them and taunted him. Whenever his quick eyes saw money pass into her hands from the sale of anything, he began his questions.

“There’s money, Ma! For a dress, ain’t it--a real dress, and a hat? Yes?”

“There’s money! You buy a hat now, and take out the coins?”

He had grown quickly to dislike all references to Armenia, and only tolerated his mother’s fervent hopes that he might some day avenge his father’s death, because he liked the picture of himself, knife-armed, and giving blood for blood.

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.

They early learned that she was a safe repository for secrets and a valued counselor in times of storm and stress; and although her visits were confined to that anticipated one of early June and an occasional second in October, which they could never entirely depend upon, they found her more than once the one thing needful. Indeed, Roger and John, with other of their associates, never forgot her sudden and unlooked-for appearance and the quick relief it engendered on a certain Saturday morning of September in Roger’s thirteenth year. They were gathered in disheartened council on Mary Wescott’s boulder, in a final and desperate effort to discover some means of averting from themselves the just deserts of a forbidden line of conduct, which, in this case, had to do with some pear trees, an angry farmer, stones, and broken windows. Retribution seemed inevitable. They were silently picturing the chastened glances which they would exchange at church the next morning in an attempt to discover whose fate had been most unendurable, when around a bend in the path at the foot of the boulder came Mary Christmas, taking her favorite short cut through the pasture. Surely here was visible proof of a beneficent Providence, who was not deaf to frenzied prayers, and who caused His rain to fall alike upon the just and upon the unjust!

It was no easy matter to disclose all the miserable details of the affair to Mary Christmas, whose piercing black eyes sought out every jot and tittle of the truth; but hope, so long deferred, spurred them on, and they spared themselves nothing, secure at least in the knowledge that a general confession to her was, when compared with acknowledgment made alone and unaided before grieved and disillusioned parents, of two evils most certainly the lesser. They needed five dollars, they told her, after their consciences were, for the time being, freed--just five hundred times the amount which Roger had unearthed from his pockets, and which was the sole wealth among them. They named the sum with hesitation; it was appallingly large in those days; but it was the necessary aggregate which must be extorted from them by sundown if their parents were to remain in ignorance.

“I see,” said Mary Christmas, once the miserable tale was told, her stern, sharp eyes scrutinizing each guilty face. “I see.” Surely the first person singular, present indicative of that simple verb had never before been burdened with such weighty disapproval!

Then she produced the five dollars, which was wrapped with other bills, quite bewildering to the boys, in folds of white cloth and hidden deep within her gold-laced bodice; but she did not give it to them until she had exacted from each a twofold promise of upright living in the future and of reimbursement from their own earnings in the spring. Sitting at the foot of the boulder in the middle of their circle, she made a swift reckoning of the amount due her from each boy, which amounts she wrote on slips of paper, a separate slip for the pocket of each blouse. Only to John she gave none, considering him more sinned against than sinning, and warning them all against leading those younger than themselves into wrongdoing. Him she kept with her, reluctant as he was for once to stay, while she sent the others, in whose breasts relief was fast conquering repentance, on a two-mile journey through the woods to apologize to the farmer and to pay their just indebtedness.

Be it said to her credit that she collected the five dollars, even to the uttermost farthing. It was returned to her the following spring, as she had demanded, by boys who approached her singly from every conceivable hiding-place along the road and proffered hard-earned coins in bits of dirty paper. Be it said, too, that two months after the incident by the boulder, her own conscience troubling her by the thought that she might have wronged him who had been for so long her friend, she wrote a full account of it to Mr. Wescott, confessing freely her part as protector, but asking that, if possible, the children be not punished. Mr. Wescott smiled over Mary Christmas’ letter, which he shared with Mrs. Wescott in the seclusion of the library. It lacked the ease and growing accuracy of her speech, and was, in parts, with its self-abasement and anxious queries, inexpressibly funny. Then, because he was conservative in parenthood as well as in politics, he said not a word to John and Roger, though he did contrive that winter to put in the way of his older son more than the usual opportunities for earning an honest penny.

There were other affairs of far less serious nature in which Mary Christmas played the part of a confidante and friend, not to the Wescotts alone but to many other children in their village and in other villages along the coast of Maine. So many in fact were there that these pages cannot attempt to chronicle them; but one other they must relate because of its immediate importance to at least one of the Wescotts, and its later tremendous significance to the family at large.

That year in the life of Mary Christmas which so stupendously marked the advent of the pushcart and the red hat marked in the lives of Mary and Cynthia Wescott their graduation from the academy. Orgetorix, chief of the Helvetians, and the wholly infamous Catiline had given place to Æneas, his aged father Anchises, and his little son Ascanius, and Cyrus the Younger with his ten thousand Greeks had marched both up and down, moving on at last to make way for Achilles, sulking in his tent. Reciting their carefully prepared essays in the church to the village at large, the one on “Clara Barton, Her Life and Work,” the other a clarion call to achievement, entitled “_Trans Alpes Italia Est_,” they were not in the least unaware that their white graduation frocks eclipsed all the others by reason of the yards of lace which embraced their shoulders in a kind of bertha, and which from waist to hem encircled their wide skirts. Mary Christmas, with the help of little Mary, had woven that lace through the long winter evenings in Portland, and had sent it as a forerunner of her own arrival. When she came, pushing the red cart down the hill, and again drawing the anxious attention of the Wescotts by the deepening lines in her face, the graduation was a thing of the past, and the hearts of Mary and Cynthia were beating excitedly at the thought of college in the fall.

But it was not only the thought of college which was quickening the heart of Mary Wescott in those early days of her nineteenth year; and this Mary Christmas discovered on the late afternoon of the day when she said good-bye to John and set forth along the familiar road. Reaching the bars which heretofore had given her access to the short cut through the pasture, she stopped, realizing for the second time that day that a pushcart has its disadvantages. But desiring a drink from the spring that bubbled up at the foot of the boulder, and a glimpse of the freshness of the woods before she must again take to the dusty highway, she drew the red cart to the side of the road, carefully lifted her new skirt to escape the roughness of the gray fence-poles, and crawled between the bars. A few steps through the alders and over the moist green hummocks, starred here and there with the blue of violets, and she emerged into the path that led to the boulder and the spring.

She did not drink from the spring, however, thirsty though she was, nor was she conscious of the freshness of the woods with their sun-flecked shadows; for there on the boulder above her, and facing the vista that afforded a sight of the crab-apple tree, sat Mary Wescott with her bright head resting against the dark shoulder of William Howe--the selfsame William who had once played the part of Mary’s father in the Etchmiadzin miracle, and who had but just returned triumphant after a year with the Alma Mater of Mr. Longfellow and Father Wescott.

Mary Christmas leaned against the great rock in sheer surprise. The realization that Mary Wescott was a little girl no longer was in itself a shock; and this outward and visible sign that a new door in life had suddenly swung wide for her was quite too overwhelming. Entirely unprepared for both, Mary Christmas stood still and vaguely discerned as through a mist what the two on the rock saw with such intensity--the white tree with its full-blown, drifting blossoms. She did not hear their whispered confidences, did not know that Mary Wescott was finding it the easiest and most satisfying thing in the world to tell William how the crab-apple tree had made her feel and to receive from him the perfect assurance that he had felt exactly the same way! She was concerned solely, once she had come to herself, with the question of whether she could reach the shelter of the alders without attracting their notice. Then William bent his head toward Mary, for he was all at once seized with the most absurd idea that there were secrets in the corners of her mouth; but in that instant, instead of assuring himself that he was right, he caught sight of Mary Christmas’ red hat. For that hat had been designed to arrest, even at such a moment as this, the most wandering attention.

It is, perhaps, just as well not to describe all that followed--the confusion, the embarrassment, the confession, the explanations, the pleas for secrecy. It is quite enough to say that William, standing with his arm around Mary in the shadow of the great boulder, led the conversation, as was entirely fitting and proper, and that Mary Christmas, in spite of earlier misgivings, the result no doubt of surprise, felt her heart warm toward him as he professed his intentions the most honorable in the world and maintained his decision to interview Father Wescott as a gentleman should, just as soon as another year of college should have added dignity and certainty to their dream. Mary Wescott, on her part, cried a little, as I believe girls did on similar occasions a quarter of a century ago, absurd as it doubtless was; and then as the lengthening shadows foretold the evening light, Mary Christmas gave her promise and her blessing. They all went back to the pushcart together, where Mary Wescott straightened the red hat and perked up the daisies. It was all in vain, however; for when Mary Christmas again started on her way, the hat lurched in such reckless abandon that Mary and William both wished the daisies had been allowed to retain their former modest expression.