VIIISHOWERS 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 avividness 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 forbiddenline 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 reckoningof 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 asprotector, 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 Christmaswhich 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 drawingthe 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 sheemerged 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. Shedid 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 entirelyfitting 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.
That evening, as she journeyed along the cool, fragrant roads, Mary Christmas sang, not now the songs of Vartan or of the Virgin’sfestival, but one of wedded love. How clearly the unfamiliar, musical words rose and fell in the still air, accompanied by the monotonous undertone of the pushcart:—
“It rained showers of gold when Artasches became a bridegroom;It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride.”
“It rained showers of gold when Artasches became a bridegroom;It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride.”
“It rained showers of gold when Artasches became a bridegroom;It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride.”
“It rained showers of gold when Artasches became a bridegroom;
It rained pearls when Satenik became a bride.”