XWAYSIDE SACRAMENTS
THE five years that followed Mary Wescott’s wedding brought many changes into the lives of the persons who make this story. From the Wescott parents in partnership they exacted the unpleasant necessity of becoming accustomed to an empty house, although they did offer some compensation in the presentation of two grandsons, who, since they early favored their Grandfather Wescott in features, might very probably have inherited also his manner of looking at certain important matters. To Father Wescott himself those years were nothing short of cataclysmic. The entire West, he told Mrs. Wescott daily, was going crazy, the middle portion over that unsound principle of coöperation, and certain far States in their unprecedented stand upon the recall of judges. As though a party, dedicated from its early infancy to Progress, couldlook upon such extremists, at their best, as anything short of anarchists! The East must stand firm! Father Wescott accepted this decision as his battle-cry, and, with many misgivings, bought an automobile, a vehicle which itself demanded in those days no small amount of coöperation on the part of its owner. By means of this locomotion Father Wescott could exhort the county at least to stand firm in its loyalty to the safe and sane gentleman then in the presidential chair. This he did while Mrs. Wescott sat by his side in numberless dooryards, a patient listener to conversations which, she feared, must ultimately prove useful to her also, if someone did not stop those absurd women in Washington.
To Cynthia the years were kind, for not only did they convince her that she was doing the thing she loved most, which conviction is in itself no mean possession, but one of them took her to far places—to England, where she studied at Oxford and dreamed away long hours under the great trees at Iffley Church; to Germany, where she walked in the Harz Mountains and in Nurembergate cakes frosted with fairy tales; and to Paris, where she wandered for days through the Louvre, lived in the Latin Quarter, and in every other shop bought presents for her nephews. John and Roger, beneath the elms and in the echoing old halls of their father’s and Mr. Longfellow’s college, found life not unfriendly, though Greek was passing away and though a new and strange variety of poetry had begun to replace in the affection of students the long cadences of Mr. Algernon Swinburne. Indeed, John, who had taken to writing verses in private, composed in these new, uncertain measures some lines descriptive of an ancient church, standing within gray walls and bathed in more ancient moonlight.
Nor in the life of Mary Christmas had Time been idle, though in outward semblance she bore few marks of its changes. At fifty, after nearly twenty years of traveling on foot, heavily laden and the prey of all weathers, she was singularly little worn. Her hair was still more black than gray, and her eyes, although at times they harbored an unfathomable sadness, had not lost theirglow. Still she pushed her red cart up and down the coast roads—roads which now too often echoed with the snorts and puffs of vehicles akin to Mr. Wescott’s; still she arranged to reach the Wescott village in early June. Not once, indeed, did she deviate from that now long-established custom, even when the assurance of the later arrival of the four Wescotts, vacation-bound, might have tempted her to postpone her coming. Them she saw in midsummer or early fall, often making the journey by rail and by stage particularly for that purpose; but her first visit of every spring continued to occur, as it had begun, with the drifting of the petals and the drying of the roads.
Those who understood her best saw in this tenaciousness an almost pathetic adherence to custom, which, as she grew older, became not only the dominating motive in her life but also the source of untold strength and comfort. Shorn and stripped by the very force of circumstances of those observances which, hallowed by centuries of reverent usage, had come down to her, she clung to the places and persons that, upon her firstcoming to this new land, had been most closely identified with the old. For, kind as had been this country of her adoption with its easy peace and plenty, she felt as she grew older a disquieting sense of its incompleteness and of her own strangeness within its welcoming gates. Thus it happened that when Raphael, now a prosperous American business man in a cigar store, bought and furnished by his mother’s capital, refused to answer her when she spoke to him in his native language, and when the new Scandinavian husband of little Mary laughed stupidly at the cakes which, on the days commemorating ancient festivals, she brought into his bakeshop, she longed for the drying of the familiar roads along which she had left the thoughts and memories of so many years.
Those winding coast roads, which led around quiet coves where herons stood in the clear, still water, past stretches of gray, wind-vexed sea and over upland pastures fragrant with bayberry, mitigated in some degree the tragedy in which Mary Christmas as the years went by had found herselfan unwilling actor. It was the old, bitter tragedy of Age contending with Youth and going down before it—a tragedy older than that of Lear or of Isaac and his sons, old as life itself, and enhanced a thousandfold in its cruelty when enacted by immigrant children who willingly crush beneath their feet all that their parents have held sacred. Defeated at home, Mary Christmas took to the long familiar roads, in the courses of which during those first years she had lived over again so much of her life. Along that particularly lonely stretch of woodland she had sung of Vartan; under that great pine which afforded such a sweep of tossing blue water she had imagined that she was looking upon the Mediterranean, her homesick eyes dim with tears; in that clump of sumach, red in the September sunshine, she had fallen asleep and dreamed that avenging blood was flowing in the far city of Erzerum; in country lanes, in farmhouse kitchens, and beneath blossoming apple trees she had told to wide-eyed children her tales of saints and heroes, and of holy places.
These landmarks of the woods and coastvillages lent a consistency and coherence to her life as she grew older, which not even the complete emancipation of Raphael and little Mary could entirely disturb. Through her repeated visits to them and her eager reception of those sacramental elements of which they were the symbols, she kept close the past with all its beneficence. It was doubtless in an effort to strengthen this coherence of which she felt such need that, the year following Mary Wescott’s marriage and that of her own Mary, she discarded her suit and hat and returned to the gold-laced bodice and the red silk handkerchief. These she never again relinquished, in spite of the pressure at home and the fast changing modes of those complacent years.
She knew the coast of Maine as few natives knew it and was its best chronicler during those early years of the new century. She watched the invasion alike of the summer sojourner and the automobile, and looked upon both with displeasure, although with the advent of the former there was increased wealth for her. The latter she scorned to employ except in the worst of weathers, whenshe would occasionally allow some friendly passer-by to carry her to her next stopping-place, the red pushcart bumping along over the stones in the rear; for she hated its choking, sputtering voice along the quiet roads and its rude disturbance of her solitude. She watched children who had feared her upon her first visits grow to maturity and marry; she brought gifts to their children. And each year in graveyards above the sea she saw new white stones, stark and ugly in the wind-swept grass. Before these she would pause not infrequently, to cross herself and to say a prayer for the spirits of those who had learned to look upon her with kindliness.