CHRISTMAS BREAD[20]
Kathleen Norris
“But what time will your operation be over, mother?”
A silence. The surgeon opened three letters, looked at them, tore them in two, cast them aside, glanced at her newspaper, glanced at her coffee cup, and took a casual sip of the smoking liquid. But she did not answer.
“If you were thr-r-rough at ’leven o’clock—” Merle began again hopefully. She paid some attention to consonants, because until recently she had called through “froo,” and she was anxious to seem grown-up. “I could go to the hospital with Miss Frothingham,” she suggested, “and wait for you?”
“I thought Miss Frothingham was going to take you to Mrs. Winchester’s?” Doctor Madison countered in surprise, at last giving a partial attention to her little daughter. “Don’t you want to spend Christmas Day with little Betty?” she went on, easily, half-absently. “It seems to me that is a very nice plan—straighten your shoulders, dear. It seems to me that it was extremely nice of Mrs. Winchester to want you to come. Most people want only their own families on Christmas Day!”
She was paying small heed to her own words. “That band really did straighten her teeth,” she was thinking. “I must remind Miss Frothingham to order some more of the little smocks; she doesn’t look half so well in the blue-jacket blouses. How like George she is growing!... What did you say, Merle?” she added, realizing that the child’s plaintive voice was lingering still in the air.
“I said thatIwould like my own family, too, on Christmas,” the child repeated, half-daring, half-uncertain.
“Ring the bell, dear,” her mother said from the newspaper.
“I wish I didn’t know what you were going to give me for Christmas, mother!”
“You what?”
“I wish I didn’t know what you were going to give me!”
Silence.
“For Christmas, you know?” Merle prompted. “I love your present. I love to have a little desk all my own. It’s just like Betty’s, too, only prettier. But I would drather have it a surprise, and run down Christmas morning to see what it was!”
“Don’t say ‘drather,’ dear.”
“Rather.” With a gold spoon, Merle made a river through her cream of wheat in the monogrammed gold bowl and watched the cream rivers flood together. “What interests you in the paper, mother?” she asked politely.
“Why, they are going to have the convention in California next summer,” her mother said.
“And shall you go, mother?”
“Oh, I think so! Perhaps you and Miss Frothingham will go with me.”
“To hotels?”
“I suppose so.”
Merle sighed. She did not like large strange hotels. “Mother, doesn’t it seem funny to you that a patient would have his operation on Christmas Day? Couldn’t he have it to-morrow, or wait till Wednesday?”
The doctor’s fine mouth twitched at the corners. “Poor fellow, they only get him here to-morrow, Merle, Christmas morning. And they tell me there is no time to lose.”
Tears came into the little girl’s eyes. “It doesn’t seem—much—like Christmas,” she murmured under her breath. “To have you in the surgery all morning, and me with the Winchesters, that aren’t my relations at all——”
“Tell me exactly what you had planned to do, Merle,” her mother suggested reasonably. “Perhaps we can manage it for some other day. What did you especially want to do?”
The kindly, logical tone was that of the surgeon used to matters no less vital than life and death. Merle raised her round, childish eyes to her mother’s pleasant, keen ones. Then with a great sigh she returned to the golden bowl and spoon. Nothing more was said until Lizzie came in for the orders.
“Dear me, I miss Miss Frothingham!” said DoctorMadison then. “Tell Ada to use her own judgment, Lizzie. Tell her—you might have chicken again. That doesn’t spoil, in case I’m late.”
“You wouldn’t have a turkey, Doctor? To-morrow’s Christmas, you know.”
“Well—if Ada thinks so. I don’t particularly care for turkey—yes, we may as well have a turkey. But no pudding, and above all, no mince pie, Lizzie. Have something simple—prune whip, applesauce, I don’t care! Merle will be with the Winchesters all day, and she’ll need only a light supper. If there are any telephones, I’m at the hospital. Miss Frothingham will be back this afternoon.”
Then she was gone, and there was a long lonely day ahead of her small daughter. But Merle was accustomed to them. She went into the kitchen and watched Ada and Ada’s friend, Mrs. Catawba Hercules, until Miss Watson came. Then she had a music lesson, and a French lesson, and after lunch she posted herself at a front window to watch the streets and wait for pretty Miss Frothingham, who filled the double post of secretary and governess, and who had gone home yesterday to her sister’s house for a Christmas visit.
Outside was Christmas weather. All morning the streets had been bare and dark, and swept with menacing winds that hurried and buffeted the marketing and shopping women. But at noon the leaden sky had turned darker and darker, and crept lower and lower, and as Merle watched, the first timid snowflakes began to flutter whitely against the general grayness.
Then there was scurrying and laughter in the streets, bundles dampened, boys shouting and running, merry faces rouged by the pure, soft cold. The shabby leather-sheathed doors of St. Martin’s, opposite Merle’s window, creaked and swung under the touch of wet, gloved hands. Merle could see the Christmas trees and the boxed oranges outside the State Street groceries coated with eider-down; naked gardens and fences and bare trees everywhere grew muffled and feathered and lovely. In the early twilight the whole happy town echoed with bells and horns and the clanking of snow-shovels.
By this time Miss Frothingham was back again, and was helping Merle into the picturesque black velvet with the deep lace collar. Merle, sputtering through the blue embroidered cloth while her face was being washed, asked how Miss Frothingham’s little niece had liked her doll.
“Oh, my dear, she doesn’t get it until she comes down-stairs to-morrow morning, of course!”
“Will she be excited?” Merle asked, excited herself.
“She’ll be perfectly frantic! I see that your mother’s present came.”
“My desk. It came last night. I moved all my things into it to-day,” Merle said. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas when a person gets their presents two days before,” she observed.
“His presents. Her presents,” corrected the governess.
“Her presents. Will your sister’s little girls have a tree?”
“Oh, my, yes! It’s a gorgeous tree!”
“And did you see my cousins while you were there?”
Miss Frothingham nodded. Her married sister lived next to Doctor Madison’s brother, a struggling young engineer with a small family, in a certain not-too-fashionable suburb. There had been a difference of opinion regarding a legacy, between the physician and her brother some years earlier, and a long silence had ensued, but Merle took a lively interest in the little cousins of whom she had only a hazy and wistful memory, and her mother had no objection to an occasional mention of them.
“I saw Rawley—that’s the second little boy—playing with my niece,” Miss Frothingham said. “And I saw Tommy—he’s older than you—taking care of the baby. I think he was going to the grocery for his mother; he was wheeling the baby very carefully. But I think those children are going to have a pretty sad Christmas because their Daddy is very sick, you know, and they all had whooping-cough, and I think their mother is too tired to know whether it’s Christmas or Fourth of July!”
“Maybe their father’s going to die likemy father,” Merle suggested stoically. “I guess they won’t hang up their stockings,” she added suddenly.
For it had been reported that this was their custom, and Merle liked to lie awake in her little bed, warm and cosy on a winter night, and think thrillingly of what it would be to explore a bulging and lumpy stocking of her own.
Miss Frothingham looked doubtful. “I don’t suppose they will!” she opined.
Merle was shocked. “Will they cry?”
“I don’t suppose so. My sister says they’re extremely good children and will do anything to help their mother.”
“Maybe they’ll hang them up anyway, and they’ll be empty?” Merle said, wide-eyed.
But the governess had lost interest in the subject, as grown-ups so often and so maddeningly did, and was manicuring her pretty nails, and humming, so Merle had to abandon it for the moment.
However, she thought about it continually, and after dinner she said suddenly and daringly to her mother:
“The Rutledge children’s father is sick, and they aren’t going to hang up their stockings! Miss Frothingham said so!”
When this was said, she and Miss Frothingham and her mother were all in the attic. Merle had not been there for weeks, nor her mother for months, and it was enchanting to the child to find herself bustling about, so unexpectedly in this exciting atmosphere, which, if it was not typically Christmassy, was at least unusual. It had come about suddenly, as did much that affected her mother’s movements.
The doctor had arrived home at half-past four, and Miss Frothingham had lost no time in reminding her that the promised bundle for the New Year’s rummage sale for some charity was to have been readythis evening. Doctor Madison had said—did she remember?—that she had any amount of old clothing to dispose of.
“Oh, that attic is full of it!” Merle’s mother had said, wearily. “You know this was my grandmother’s house, and goodness only knows the rubbish that is up there! I’ve meant to get at it all some time—I couldn’t do it in her lifetime. What time is it? Suppose we go up there and get a start?”
There was twilight in the attic, and outside the dormer windows the snow was falling—falling. Merle performed a little pirouette of sheer ecstasy when they mounted the stairs. Her mother lighted the lights in a business-like fashion.
“Here, take this—take this—take this!” she began to say carelessly, picking one garment after another from the low row of ghostly forms dangling against the eaves. “Mr. Madison’s army coats——”
“But, Mrs. Madison, this is beautiful beaver on this suit—yards of it!”
“Take it—take it!” Merle’s equable mother said feverishly, almost irritably. “Here, I shall never wear this fur coat again, and all these hats—I suppose those plumes are worth something!”
She was an energetic, restless creature. The hard work strangely calmed her, and just before dinner she was settling down to it almost with enjoyment. The summons to the meal annoyed her.
“Suppose we come back to it and make a thorough job?” she suggested.
Merle’s heart leaped for joy.
“But you ought to be in bed, Kiddie,” her mother said, not urgently, when dinner was over.
“Oh, mother, please! It’s Christmas Eve!” Merle begged, with all the force of her agonized eight years.
So here they all were again, and the snow was still falling outside, and the electric lights on their swinging cords were sending an eerie light over the miscellaneous shapes and contours of the attic, now making the shadow of an old what-not rush across the floor with startling vitality, now plunging the gloomy eaves behind Merle into alarming darkness.
Pyramids of books were on the floor, magazines tied in sixes with pink cord, curtains, rugs, beds, heaped mattresses, trunks, boxes, the usual wheel-chair and the usual crutch—all the significant, gathered driftwood of sixty years of living was strewn and packed and heaped and hung about.
“Here, here’s a wonderful patent preserving kettle, do you suppose they could use that? And what about these four terrible patent rockers?”
“Oh, Mrs. Madison, I imagine they would be only too delighted! Their idea is to open a regular store, you know, and make the sale permanent. But ought you——”
“I ought to have done it years before! But Doctor Madison—” His widow’s breast rose on a sharp sigh; she lost the words for a second. “Doctor Madison and I never lived here, you know,” she resumed. “And I stayed abroad for years after his death, when Merle was a baby. And for a long time I was like a person dazed—” She stopped.
“I had my work,” she resumed, after a pause. “It saved my reason, I think. Perhaps—perhaps I went into it too hard. But I had to have—to do—something! My grandparents died and left me this place and the Beachaways’ place, but I’ve had no time for housekeeping!”
“I should think not, indeed!” Miss Frothingham said, timidly respectful.
These fingers, that could cleave so neatly into the very stronghold of life, that could touch so boldly hearts that still pulsated and lungs that still were fanned by breath, were they to count silver spoons and quilt comforters?
The governess felt a little impressed; even a little touched. She did not often see her employer in this mood. Kind, just, reasonable, interested, capable, good, Doctor Madison always was. But this was something more.
“I had no intention of becoming rich, of being—successful!” the older woman added presently, in a dreamy tone. She was sitting with the great spread of a brocaded robe across her knee. Her eyes were absent.
“All the more fun!” Miss Frothingham said youthfully.
“I was alone—” Mary Madison said drearily and quietly, in a low tone, as if to herself. And in the three words the younger caught a glimpse of all the tragedy and loneliness of widowhood. “Doctor Madison was so wise,” she began again. “I’ve alwaysthought that if he had lived my life would have been different.”
“You lost your parents, I know, and were you an only child?” Miss Frothingham ventured, after a respectful silence. But immediately the scarlet, apologetic color flooded her face, and she added hastily: “I beg your pardon! Of course I knew that you have a brother—I know Mr. Rutledge and his wife!”
“Yes, I have a brother,” the doctor answered, rousing, and beginning briskly to assort and segregate again. The tone chilled her companion, and there was a pause.
“Your brother is Tommy’s and Rawley’s and the baby’s father,” Merle broke it by announcing flatly.
Her mother looked at her with an indulgent half-smile. She usually regarded Merle much as an amused stranger might have done; the odd little black-eyed, black-maned child who was always curling herself into corners about the house. Merle was going to be pretty, her mother thought to-night, in satisfaction. Her little face was blazing, her eyes shone, and she had pulled over her dishevelled curls a fantastic tissue-paper cap of autumn leaves left from some long-ago Hallowe’en frolic her mother could only half-remember.
“What do you know about them?” she asked good-naturedly. “You never saw them!”
“You told me once about them, when I was a teeny little girl,” Merle reminded her. “When we were inthe cemetery you did. And Miss Frothingham told me.”
“So there’s a third child?” Doctor Madison asked, musing. Miss Frothingham nodded.
“A gorgeous boy. The handsomest baby I ever saw!... John,” she said.
“John was my father’s name. Sad, isn’t it?” Doctor Madison asked after a silence during which she had folded the brocade and added it to the heap.
“A costumier would buy lots of this just as it stands,” Miss Frothingham murmured by way of answer.
“I mean when families quarrel,” persisted the doctor.
“Oh, I think it is very sad!” the secretary said fervently.
“We were inseparable, as children,” Mary Madison said suddenly. “Tim is just a year younger than I.”
“You’re not going to give away all these beautiful Indian things, Doctor?”
The doctor, who had been staring absently into the shadows of the attic, roused herself. “Oh, why not? Merle here isn’t the sort that will want to hoard them! I loathe them all. It was just this sort of rubbish——”
She had risen, to fling open the top of one more trunk. Now she moved restlessly across the attic, and Merle, who did not know her mother in this mood, hopped after her.
“It was just this sort of rubbish, little girl,” Mary Madison said gently, one of her thin, clever hands laidagainst the child’s cheek, “that made trouble between—your Uncle Timothy and me. Just pictures and rugs—and Aunt Lizzie’s will.... Well, let’s get through here, and away from these ghosts!”
“I wishwehad three children,” Merle said longingly. “You had your brother. But I haven’t any one! Did you hang up your stockings?”
“Dear me, yes! At the dining-room mantel.”
“Then I would hang mine there, if I—hanged—it,” Merle decided.
“But we have the big open fireplace in the sitting-room now, dear. We didn’t have that when we were little, Timmy and I.”
“But I’d drather in the dining-room, mother, if that’s what you did!”
“Here are perfectly good new flannels—” Miss Frothingham interposed.
“Take them. But Merle,” the doctor said, a little troubled, “I would have filled a stocking for you if I had known you really wanted me to, dear. Will you remind me, next Christmas, and I’ll see to it?”
“Yes, mother,” Merle promised, suddenly lifeless and subdued. “But next Christmas is so—so far,” she faltered, with watering eyes and a trembling lip.
“But all the shops are closed now, dear,” her mother reminded her sensibly. “You know my brother and I never had a quarrel before,” she added, after a space, to the younger woman. “And this was never an open breach.”
“Was?” Miss Frothingham echoed, anxious and eager.
“Wasn’t. No,” said her employer thoughtfully. “It was just a misunderstanding—the wrong word said here, and the wrong construction put upon it there, and then resentment—and silence—our lives separated——”
She fell silent herself, but it was Merle, attentively watching her, who said now,
“Their father’s sick, and they aren’t going to hang up their stockings!”
“Oh, they’ve had a great deal of trouble,” Miss Frothingham added with a grave expression, as the older woman turned inquiring eyes upon her. “Mr. Rutledge has been ill for weeks, and the baby is quite small—six or seven months old, I suppose.”
“Why, he’s a successful man!” his sister said impatiently as the other paused.
“Oh, yes, they have a good Swedish girl, I know, and a little car, and all that! But I imagine this has been a terribly hard winter for them. They’re lovely people, Doctor Madison,” added little Miss Frothingham bravely and earnestly. “So wonderful with their children, and they have a little vegetable garden, and fruit trees, and all that! But all the children in that neighborhood had whooping cough last fall, and I know Mrs. Rutledge was pretty tired, and then he got double pneumonia before Thanksgiving, and he hasn’t been out of the house since.”
“He’s a wonderful boy!” Doctor Madison said in a silence. “We were orphans, and he was a wonderful little brother to me. My grandparents were the stern, old-fashioned sort, but Timmy could put funand life into punishment, even. Many an hour I’ve spent up here in this very attic with him—in disgrace.”
She got up, walked a few paces across the bare floor, picked an old fur buggy-robe from a chair, looked at it absently, and put it down again.
“What insanity brought me up to this attic on a snowy Christmas Eve!” she demanded abruptly, laughing, but with the tears Miss Frothingham had never seen there before in her eyes. “It all comes over me so—what life was when Timmy and George—Merle’s father—were in it! Poor little girl,” she added, sitting down on a trunk and drawing Merle toward her; “you were to have seven brothers and sisters, and a big Daddy to adore you and spoil you! And he had been two months in his grave when she was born,” she added to the other woman.
“But then couldn’t you afford to have all my brothers and sisters?” Merle demanded anxiously.
“It couldn’t be managed, dear. Life gets unmanageable, sometimes,” her mother answered, smiling a little sadly. “But a brother is a wonderful thing for a small girl to have. Everything has robbed this child,” she added, “the silence between her uncle and me—her father’s death—my profession. If I had been merely a general practitioner, as I was for three years,” she went on, “there would have been a score of what we call ‘G. P.’s’ to fill her poor little stocking! But half my grateful patients hardly know me by sight, much less that I have a greedy little girl who has a stocking to be filled!”
“Mother, I love you,” Merle said, for the first time in her life stirred by the unusual hour and mood, and by the tender, half-sorrowful, and all-loving voice she had never heard before.
“And I love you, little girl, even if I am too busy to show it!” her mother answered seriously. “But here! Do let’s get done with this before we break our hearts!” she added briskly, in a sudden change of mood. And she sank upon her knees before a trunk and began vigorously to deal with its contents. “And I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Merle,” her mother went on, briskly lifting out and inspecting garments of all sorts. “I’ll go to see Mr. Waldteufel on Wednesday——”
“Not Waldteufel of the Bazaar, mother?”
“The very same. You know your daddy and I were boarding with his mother in Potsdam when the war broke out, and two years ago your mother saved his wife and his tiny baby—after two dear little babies had died. So he thinks a great deal of the Madisons, my dear, and he’ll give me the very nicest things in that big shop for my little girl’s stocking. And suppose you hang it up New Year’s Eve this year, and next year—well, we won’t say anything about next year now, but just youwait!”
“Oh, mother—mother!” Merle sang, her slippered feet dancing. And there was no question at this minute that she would some day be beautiful.
“Don’t strangle me. There, I remember that dress—look at the puffed sleeves, Merle,” said her mother, still exploring the trunk. “I suppose the velvet isworth something—and the lace collar. That was my best dress.”
“Mother, mayn’t I keep it? And wear it some day?”
“Why, I suppose you may. I wish,” said the doctor in an undertone, whimsically to the other woman, “I wish I had more of that sort of sentiment—of tenderness—in me! I did have, once.”
“Perhaps it was the sorrow—and then your taking your profession so hard?” Miss Frothingham suggested timidly.
“Perhaps—Here, this was my brother Timmy’s sweater,” said the doctor, taking a bulky little garment of gray wool from the trunk. “How proud he was of it! It was his first—‘my roll-top sweater,’ he used to call it. I remember these two pockets——”
She ran her fingers—the beautifully-tempered fingers of the surgeon—into one of the pockets as she spoke, and Merle and the secretary saw an odd expression come into her face. But when she withdrew her hand and exposed to them the palm, it was filled with nothing more comprehensible than eight or ten curled and crisped old crusts of bread.
“Mother, what is it?” Merle questioned, peering.
“Bait?” Miss Frothingham asked, smiling.
“Crusts,” the older woman said in an odd voice.
“Crusts?” echoed the other two, utterly at a loss.
There was that in the doctor’s look that made the moment significant.
“Yes,” said Merle’s mother. And for a full minute there was silence in the attic, Miss Frothingham covertly and somewhat bewilderedly studying her employer’sface, Merle looking from one to the other with round eyes like those of a brunette doll, and the older woman staring into space, as if entirely unconscious of their presence.
The lights stirred, and shadows leaped and moved in answer. Snow made a delicate, tinkling sound outside, in the dark, on the roof beyond the dormers. The bell of Saint Paul’s rang nine o’clock on Christmas Eve.
“I was always a stubborn child, and I hated the crusts of my bread, but they insisted that I eat them,” said Mary Madison suddenly, in an odd, rather low voice. “I used to cry and fight about it, and—and Timmy used to eat them for me.”
“Did he like them, mother?” Merle demanded, highly interested.
“Did he—? No, I don’t know that he did. But he was a very good little brother to me, Merle. And grandmother and Aunt Lizzie used to be stern with me, always trapping me into trouble, getting me into scenes where I screamed at them and they at me.”
Her voice stopped, and for a second she was silent.
“Crusts were a great source of trouble,” she resumed after a while.
“I like them!” Merle said encouragingly, to feed the conversation.
“Yours is a very different world, baby. People used to excite and bewilder children thirty years ago. I’ve spent whole mornings sobbing and defiant. ‘You will say it!’ ‘I won’t say it’—hour after hour after hour.”
Merle was actually pale at the thought.
“Timmy was the favorite, and how generous he was to me!” his sister said, musing. And suddenly she raised the little dried crusts in both hands to her face, and laid her cheek against them. “Oh, Timmy—Timmy—Timmy!” she said, between a laugh and a sob. “To think of the grimy little hand that put these here just because Molly was so naughty andso stubborn!”
“Miss Frothingham,” said Doctor Madison quietly, looking up with one of those amazing changes of mood that were the eternal bewilderment of those who dealt with her, “I wonder if you could finish this up? Get Lizzie to help you if you like; we’re all but done anyway! Use your own judgment, but when in doubt—destroy! I believe—it’s only nine o’clock! I believe I’ll go and see my brother! Come, Merle, get your coat with the squirrel collar—it’s cold!”
So then it was all Christmas magic, and just what Christmas Eve should be. Saunders brought the little closed car to the door, to be sure, but there he vanished from the scene, and it was only mother and Merle.
The streets were snowy, and snow frosted the windshield, and lights and people and the bright windows of shops were all mixed up together, in a pink and blue and gold dazzle of color.
But all this was past before they came to the “almost country,” as Merle called it, and there were gardens and trees about the little houses, where lightsstreamed out with an infinitely heartening and pleasant effect.
They stopped. “Put your arms tight about my neck, Baby. I can’t have you walking in this!” said her mother then.
And Merle tightened her little furry arms about her mother’s furry collar, and they somehow struggled and stumbled up to Uncle Tim’s porch. There was light in one of the windows, but no light in the hall. But after a while footsteps came——
“Molly!” said the pale, tall, gentle woman who opened the door, “and your dear baby!”
“Cassie—may we come in?” Merle had never heard her mother speak in quite this tone before.
They went in to a sort of red-tinted dimness. But in the dining-room there was sudden light, and they all blinked at each other. And Merle instantly saw that over the mantel two short stockings and tiny socks were suspended.
The women were talking in short sentences.
“Molly!”
“Cassie——”
“But in all this snow——”
“We didn’t mind it.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Cassie—how thin you are, child! And you look so tired!”
“Timmy’s been so ill!”
“But he’s better?”
“Oh, yes—but so weak still!”
“You’ve had a nurse?”
“Not these last two weeks. We couldn’t—we didn’t—really need her. I have my wonderful Sigma in the kitchen, you know.”
“But, my dear, with a tiny baby!”
The worn face brightened. “Ah, he’s such a dear! I don’t know what we would have done without him!”
A silence. Then Mrs. Rutledge said: “The worst is over, we hope. And the boys have been such a comfort!”
“They hung up their stockings,” Merle commented in her deep, serious little voice.
“Yes, dear,” their mother said eagerly, as if she were glad to have the little pause bridged. “But I’m afraid Santa Claus is going to be too busy to remember them this year! I’ve just been telling them that perhaps he wouldn’t have time to put anything but some candy and some fruit in, this year!”
“Theybelieve in Santa Claus,” Merle remarked, faintly reproachful, to her mother. “But I’m younger than Tommy, and I don’t!”
“But you may if you want to, dear!” Doctor Madison said, shaken, yet laughing, and kneeling down to put her arms about the little girl. “Cassie, what can I do for Tim?” she pleaded. “We’re neither of us children. I don’t have to say that I’m sorry—that it’s all been a bad dream of coldness and stupidity.”
“Oh, Molly—Molly!” the other woman faltered. And tears came into the eyes that had not known them for hard and weary weeks. “He was to blame more than you—I always said so. He knew it! Andhe did try to write you! He’s grieved over it so. But when he met you in the street that day——”
“I know it! I know it! He was wrong—I was wrong—you were the only sensible one, the peacemaker, between us!” the doctor said eagerly and quickly. “It’s over. It’s for us now to see that the children are wiser in their day and generation!”
“Ah, Molly, but you were always so wonderful!” faltered Cassie Rutledge. And suddenly the two women were in each other’s arms. “Molly, we’ve missed—justyou—so!” she sobbed.
Two small shabby boys in pajamas had come solemnly in from the direction of the kitchen, whence also proceeded the fretting of a baby. Merle was introduced to Tommy and Rawley and was shy. But she immediately took full charge of the baby.
“Santa Claus may not give us anything but apples and stuff,” Rawley, who was six, confided. “Because Dad was sick, and there are lots of poor children this year!”
“And we aren’t going to have any turkey because Dad and John couldn’t have any, anyway!” Tommy added philosophically.
John was the baby, who now looked dewily and sleepily at the company from above the teething biscuit with which he was smearing his entire countenance.
“He’s getting a great, big, hard back tooth, Molly, at eight months,” said his mother, casting aside the biscuit and wiping the exquisite, little velvet face. “Isn’t that early?”
“It seems so to me. I forget! Any fever?”
“Oh, no, but his blessed little mouth is so hot! Timmy’s asleep,” said Cassie anxiously. “But Molly, if you could stay to see him just a minute when he wakes! Could Merle—we have an extra bed in the little room right off the boys’ room, where the nurse slept. She couldn’t spend Christmas with the boys? That would be better than any present to us!”
She spoke as one hardly hoping, and Merle felt no hope whatever. But to the amazement of both, the handsome, resolute face softened, and the doctor merely said:
“Trot along to bed then, Merle, with your cousins. But mind you don’t make any noise. Remember Uncle Timmy is ill!”
Merle strangled her with a kiss. There was a murmur of children’s happy voices on the stairs; a messenger came back to ask if Tom’s nine-year-old pajamas or Rawley’s seven-year-old size would best suit the guest. Another messenger came discreetly down and hung a fourth stocking at the dining-room mantel, with the air of one both invisible and inaudible.
“He’s terrified,” said Cassie in an aside, with her good motherly smile; “he knows he has no business downstairs at this hour!”
Then Cassie’s baby fretted himself off in her arms, and the two women sat in the dim light, and talked and talked and talked.
“Cassie, we’ve an enormous turkey—I’ll send it over the first thing in the morning.”
“But, Molly, when Tim knows you’ve been here, he’ll not care about any turkey!”
“Their stockings—” mused the doctor, unhearing.
With a suddenly lighting face, after deep thought, she went to the telephone in the dining-room, and three minutes later a good husband and father, a mile away across the city, left his own child and the tree he was trimming and went to answer her summons.
“Mr. Waldteufel? This is Doctor Madison.”
“Oh, Doctor!” came rushing the rich European voice. “Merry Christmas to you! I wish could you but zee your bapey—so fat we don’t weigh him Sundays no more! His lecks is like——”
The surgeon’s voice interrupted. There was excited interchange of words. Then the toy-king said:
“I meet you at my store in ten minutes! It is one more kindness that you ask me to do it! My employees go home at five—the boss he works late, isn’t it? I should to work hard for this boy of mine—an egg he eats to-day, the big rough-neck feller!”
“Oh, Molly, you can’t!” Cassie protested. But there was color in her face.
“Oh, Cassie, I can! Have we a tree?”
“I couldn’t. It wasn’t the money, Molly—don’t think that. But it was just being so tired ... the trimmings are all there from last year ... oh, Molly, into this darkness and cold again! You shouldn’t!”
She was gone. But the hour that Cassie waited, dreaming, with the baby in her lap, was a restfulhour, and when it was ended, and Molly was back again, the baby had to be carried upstairs, up to his crib, for there was heavy work to do below stairs.
Molly had a coaster and an enormous rocking-horse. She had the car loaded and strapped and covered with packages. She had a tree, which she said she had stolen from the grocer; he would be duly enlightened and paid to-morrow.
She flung off her heavy coat, pinned back her heavy hair, tied on an apron. She snapped strings, scribbled cards. And she personally stuffed the three larger stockings.
Cassie assisted. Neither woman heard the clock strike ten, strike eleven.
“You’ll be a wreck to-morrow, my dear!”
“Oh, Molly, no! This is just doing me a world of good. I had been feeling so depressed and so worried. But I believe—I do believe—that the worst of it is over now!”
“Which one gets this modeling clay? It’s frightfully smelly stuff, but they all adore it! My dear, does Timmy usually sleep this way? I’ve looked in at him twice, he seems troubled—restless——”
“Yes—the scissors are there, right under your foot. Yes, he is like that, Molly, no real rest, and he doesn’t seem to have any particular life in him. He seems so languid. Nothing tastes exactly right to him and of course the children are noisy, and the house is small. I want him——”
Mrs. Rutledge, working away busily in the litter, and fastening a large tinsel ball to a fragrant boughwith thin, work-worn hands, stepped back, squinted critically, and turned to the next task. The homely little room was fire-warmed. Mary Madison remembered some of the books, and the big lamp, and the arm-chair that had belonged to her father. Cassie had a sort of gift for home-making, even in a perfectly commonplace eight-room suburban house, she mused.
“I want him,” Cassie resumed presently, “to take us all down south somewhere—or to go by himself, for that matter!—and get a good rest. But he feels it isn’t fair to Jim Prescott—his partner, you know. Only—” reasoned the wife, threading glassy little colored balls with wire, “only Tim is the real brains of the business, and Jim Prescott knows it. Timmy does all the designing, and this year they’ve seemed to get their first real start—more orders than they can fill, really. And it worries Timmy to fall down just now! He wants to get back. But I feel that if he had a real rest——”
“I don’t know,” the physician answered, setting John’s big brown bear in an attitude of attack above the absurd little sock. “It’s a very common attitude, and nine times out of ten a man is happier in his work than idling. I’d let him go back, if I were you, I think.”
“Oh, would you, Molly?” Cassie demanded in relief and surprise.
“I think so. And then perhaps you could all get away early to Beachaways——”
“Molly!”
“Don’t use that tone, my dear. The place wasn’teven opened last year. I went to Canada for some hospital work, and took Merle with me and left her at the Lakes with my secretary. I wanted then to suggest that you and Timmy use Beachaways. It’s in a bad condition, I know——”
“Bad condition! Right there on the beach, and all to ourselves! And he can get away every Friday night!”
“Perhaps you’ll have my monkey down with her cousins, now and then. She doesn’t seem to have made strangers of them, exactly.”
“Not exactly,” agreed Cassie with her quiet smile. “They were all crowded into the boys’ big bed when I went up. I carried Rawley into the next room. Tom and Merle had their hands clasped, even in their sleep. Molly,” she added suddenly, in an odd tone, “what—I have to ask you!—what made you come?”
“Christmas, perhaps,” the doctor answered gravely, after a moment. “I’ve always wanted to. But, I’m queer. I couldn’t.”
“Tim’s always wanted to,” his wife said. “He’s always said: ‘There’s no real reason for it! But life has just separated us, and we’ll have to wait until it all comes straight naturally again.’”
“I don’t think those things ever come straight, naturally,” said Mary Madison thoughtfully. “One thinks, ‘Well, what’s the difference? People aren’t necessarily closer, or more congenial, just because they happen to be related!’ But at Christmas time you find it’s all true; that families do belong together; that blood is thicker than water!”
“Or when you’re in trouble, Molly, or in joy,” the other woman said, musing. “Over and over again I’ve thought that I must go to you—must try to clear up the whole silly business! But you are away so much, and so busy—and so famous now—that somehow I always hesitated! And just lately, when it seemed—” her voice thickened, “when it seemed as if Timmy really might die,” she went on with a little difficulty, “I’ve felt so much to blame! He’s always loved you so, admired you—his big sister! He is always quoting you, what Molly says and does. And just to have the stupid years go on and on, and this silence between us, seemed so—so wasted!”
“Die!” Molly echoed scornfully. “Why should he? With these lovely boys and you to live for!”
“Yes, I know. But don’t you remember saying years ago, when you were just beginning to study medicine to have an intelligent interest in George’s work—don’t you remember saying then that dying is a point of view? That you had seen a sudden sort of meekness come over persons who really weren’t very sick, just as if they thought to themselves: ‘What now? Oh, yes, I’m to die?’ I remember our all shouting when you said it, but many a time since I’ve thought it was true. And somehow it’s been almost that way with Timmy, lately. Just—dying, because he was through—living!”
“Cassie, what utter foolishness to talk that way, and get yourself crying when you are tired out, anyway!”
“Ah, well, I believe just the sight of you when hewakes up is going to cure him, Molly!” his wife smiled through her tears.
But only a little later, the invalid fell, as it chanced, into the most restful sleep he had known for weeks, and Mary, creeping away to her car, under the cold, high moon, and hearing the Christmas bells ring midnight as she went over the muffling snow toward her own room and her own bed, could only promise that when she had had a bath, and some sleep, she would come back and perhaps be beside him when he awakened.
And so it happened that in the late dawn, when three little wrappered forms were stirring in the Rutledge nursery, and when thrilled whispers were sounding in the halls, Merle Madison was amazed to see her mother coming quietly up from the kitchen and could give her an ecstatic Christmas kiss.
“We know it’s only oranges and candy,” breathed Merle, “but we’re going down to get our stockings now!”
“Is the tree lighted?” Mary Madison, who was carrying a steaming bowl, asked in French.
“It is simply a vision!” the other mother, whose pale face was radiant, answered, with her lips close to the curly head of the excited baby she was carrying. “Timmy’s waking,” she added, with a nod toward the bedroom door.
“I’ll go in.”
The other woman carried her burden across the threshold—in the quiet orderly sick room her eyesand her brother’s eyes met for the first time in years.
He was very white and thin, unshorn, and somehow he reminded her of the unkempt little motherless boy of years ago.
“Molly!” he whispered, his lips trembling.
And her own mouth shook as she put the bowl on the bedside table, and sat down beside him, and clasped her fine, strong, warm hand over his thin one.
“Hello, Timmy,” she said gently, blinking, and with a little thickness of speech.
“Molly,” he whispered again in infinite content. And she felt his fingers tighten, and saw two tears slip through the closed eyelids as his head was laid back against the pillow.
“Weak—” he murmured, without stirring.
“You’ve been so sick, dear.”
A silence. Then he said, “Molly, were you here in the night?”
“Just to peep at you, Timmy!”
“I thought you were. It was so delicious even to dream it. I didn’t dare ask Cassie, for fear it was only a dream. Cassie’s been an angel, Molly!”
“She always was, Tim. You and I were the demon liars.”
“‘Demon liars!’ Oh, do you remember the whipping we got for yelling that at each other?”
“Do you remember that we agreed that ‘yellow cats’ would mean all the very worst and naughtiest things that ever were, and the grown-ups would never know what it meant?”
He submitted childishly to her ministrations. She washed his face, brushed his hair, settled herself beside him with the steaming bowl.
“Come now, Timmy, Christmas breakfast!”
“Do you remember crying for mother, that first Christmas in this house?”
“Ah, my dear! Fancy what she must have felt, to leave us!”
“I’ve thought of that so often, since the boys have grown big enough to love us, and want to be with us!”
“My girl is with them downstairs—I’ll have to tell you what a Christmas we’ve made for them! The place looks like a toy-shop! Timmy, I hope they’ll always like her, be to her like the own brothers that she never had!” So much Mary said aloud. But to herself she was saying: “He doesn’t seem to know it, but that’s fully two ounces—three ounces—of good hot bread and milk he’s taken. Well, was it a riot?” she added to Cassie, who came quietly in to sit on the foot of the bed and study the invalid with loving and anxious smiling eyes.
“Mary, you should have seen it! It was too wonderful,” said Cassie, who had been crying. “I never saw anything like the expression on their little faces when I opened the door. Merle was absolutely white—Tom gave one yell! It was a sight—the candles all lighted, the floor heaped, the mantel loaded—I suppose there never was such a Christmas!”
“Cassie, you wouldn’t taste this? It is the mostdelicious milk-toast I ever tasted in my life!” Tim said.
“If it tastes good to you, dearest!”
“I don’t know how Molly makes it. Molly, do you suppose you would show Sigma how you do it?”
“I think so, Tim.” The women exchanged level quick glances of perfect comprehension, and there was heaven in their eyes.
“There isn’t any more downstairs?”
“I don’t know that I would now, Timmy,” dictatorial and imperious DoctorMadison said mildly.“You can have more when I get back from the hospital, say at about one. Now you have to sleep—lots, all the time, for days! I’m going to take all the children to my house for dinner and over night. You’re not to hear a sound. Look at the bowl, Cassie!”
She triumphantly inverted it. It was clean.
“Do you remember,” Mary Madison asked, holding her brother’s hands again, “do you remember years ago, when you used to eat my crusts for me, Timmy?”
“And is this bread upon the water, Molly?” he asked, infinitely satisfied to lie smiling at the two women who loved him. “I ate your crusts, and now you come and turn other crusts into milk-toast for me!”
“But don’t you remember?”
He faintly shook his head. It was long ago forgotten, the little-boy kindness and loyalty, in the days of warts and freckles, cinnamon sticks andskate-keys, tears that were smeared into dirty faces, long incomprehensibly boring days in chalk and ink-scentedschoolrooms, long blissful vacation forenoons dreaming under bridges, idling in the sweet dimness of old barns. There had been a little passionate Molly, alternately satisfactory and naughty, tearing aprons and planning Indian encampments, generous with cookies and taffies, exacting and jealous, marvellous, maddening, and always to be protected and admired. But she was a dim, hazy long-ago memory, merged now into the handsome, brilliant woman whose fine hand held his.
“He used to fill his little pockets with them, Cassie. I can remember passing them to him, under the table.”
“Our Tom is like that,” Cassie nodded.
“Think of your remembering—” Tim murmured contentedly.
He did not, but then it did not matter. It was Christmas morning, the restless dark night was over. Sun was shining outdoors on the new snow. His adored boys were happy, and the baby was asleep, and Cassie, instead of showing the long strain and anxiety, looked absolutely blooming as she smiled at him. Best of all, here was Molly, back in his life again, and talking of teaching the boys swimming, down at beloved old Beachaways. He had always thought, when he was a little boy, that no felicity in heaven or earth equalled a supper on the shore at Beachaways. The grown-ups of those days must have been hard, indeed, thought Tim mildly, drifting off to sleep, for he could remember begging for the joy of taking sandwiches down there, and being coldly and,unreasonably—he could see now—refused. Well, it would be different with his kids. They could be pirates, smugglers, beachcombers, whale fishers, anything they pleased. They could build driftwood fires and cook potatoes and toast bread——
“Crusts, hey?” he said drowsily. “Bread upon the waters.”
“Bread is oddly symbolical anyway, isn’t it, Molly?” Cassie said, in her quiet, restful voice. “Bread upon the waters, and the breaking of bread, and giving the children stones when they ask for bread! Even the solemnest words of all—‘Do this in commemoration’—are of bread.”
“Perhaps there is something we don’t understand about it,” Molly answered very softly. “The real sacrament of love—the essence of all religion and all sacraments.”
She thought of the little crusts still in the pocket of the roll-top sweater, she looked at the empty bowl, and she held Tim’s thin hand warmly, steadily.
“Christmas bread,” she said, as if to herself.