VIA 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 fromAugusta 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 broughther 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, echoingnames 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 inestimableadvantages 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 thelittle 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 firsttold 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 thatJohn, 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, asshehad 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 shamefacedover 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.’”
“‘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!
Oldwas, perhaps, her first love and kept its place in spite of many contending rivals. Mary Christmas lovedold. 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!”