“They were compensation, not retribution, David. I ought to have told you how clever and beautiful they were, but you never asked and my pride was up in arms. A man should stand by his own flesh and blood, even if it isn’t attractive; that’s what I believe.”
“I know, I know! But I’ve had no feeling for three years. I’ve been like a frozen man, just drifting, trying to make both ends meet, my heart dead and my body full of pain. I’m just out of a hospital—two months in all.”
“David! Why didn’t you let me know, or send for me?”
“Oh, it was way out in Missouri. I was taken ill very suddenly at the hotel in St. Joseph and they moved me at once. There were two operations first and last, and I didn’t know enough to feed myself most of the time.”
“Poor, poor Buddy! Did you have good care?”
“The best. I had more than care. Ruth Bentley, the nurse that brought me back to life, made me see what a useless creature I was.”
Some woman’s instinct stirred in Letty at a new note in her brother’s voice and a new look in his face. She braced herself for his next words, sure that they would open a fresh chapter. The door and the window were closed now, the shades pulled down, the fire low; the hour was ripe for confidences.
“You see, Letty”—and David cleared his throat nervously, and looked at the coals gleaming behind the Hessian soldiers—“it’s a time for a thorough housecleaning, body, mind, and soul, a long illness is; and Miss Bentley knew well enough that all was wrong with me. I mentioned my unhappy marriage and told her all about you, but I said nothing about the children.”
“Why should you?” asked Letty, although her mind had leaped to the reason already.
“Well, I was a poor patient in one of the cheapest rooms; broken in health, without any present means of support. I wanted to stand well with her, she had been so good to me, and I thought if she knew about the twins she wouldn’t believe I could ever make a living for three.”
“Still less for four!” put in Letty, with an irrepressible note of teasing in her tone.
She had broken the ice. Like a torrent set free, David dashed into the story of the last two months and Ruth Bentley’s wonderful influence. How she had recreated him within as well as without. How she was the best and noblest of women, willing to take a pauper by the hand and brace him up for a new battle with life.
“Strength appeals to me,” confessed David. “Perhaps it’s because I am weak; for I’m afraid I am, a little!”
“Be careful, Davy! Eva was strong!”
David shuddered. He remembered a strength that lashed and buffeted and struck and overpowered.
“Ruth is different,” he said. “‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’ used to be one of Parson Larrabee’s texts. That’s Ruth’s kind of strength.—Can I—will you let me bring her here to see you, Letty—say for New Year’s? It’s all so different from the last time I asked you. Then I knew I was bringing you nothing but sorrow and pain, but Ruth carries her welcome in her face.”
The prop inside of Letty wavered unsteadily for a moment and then stood in its accustomed upright position.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s the right thing to do; but you must tell her about the children first.”
“Oh! I did that long ago, after I found out that she cared. It was only at first that I didn’t dare. I haven’t told you, but she went out for her daily walk and brought me home a Christmas card, the prettiest one she could find, she said. I was propped up on pillows, as weak as a kitten. I looked at it and looked at it, and when I saw that it was this room, the old fireplace and mother’s picture, and the Hessian soldier andirons, when I realized there was a face at the window and that the door was ajar—everything just swam before me and I fainted dead away. I had a relapse, and when I was better again I told her everything. She’s fond of children. It didn’t make any difference, except for her to say that the more she had to do for me, the more she wanted to do it.”
“Well,” said Letty with a break in her voice, “that’s love, so far as I can see, and if you’ve been lucky enough to win it, take it and be thankful, and above all, nurse and keep it.—So one of Reba’s cards, the one the publisher thought would never sell, found you and brought you back! How wonderful! We little thought of that, Reba and I!”
“Reba’s work didn’t stop there, Letty! There was so much that had to be said between you and me, just now, that I couldn’t let another subject creep in till it was finished and we were friends—but Dick Larrabee saw Reba’s card about ‘the folks back home’ in Chicago and he bought a ticket for Beulah just as I did. We met in the train and compared notes.”
“Dick Larrabee home?”
The blood started in Letty’s heart and sped hither and thither, warming her from head to foot.
“Yes, looking as fit as a fiddle; the way a man looks when things are coming his way.”
“But what did the card mean to him? Did he seem to like Reba’s verses?”
“Yes, but I guess the card just spelled home to him; and he recognized this house in a minute, of course. I showed him my card and he said: ‘That’s Letty fast enough: I know the cape.’ He recognized you in a minute, he said.”
He knew the cape! Yes, the old cape had been close to his shoulder many a time. He liked it and said it matched her hair.
“He was awfully funny about your ear, too! I told him I never noticed women’s ears, and he said he did, when they were pretty, and their eyelashes, too.—Anything remarkable about your eyelashes, Letty?”
“Nothing that I’m aware of!” said Letty laughingly, although she was fibbing and she knew it.
“And he said he’d call and say ‘Merry Christmas’ to you the first thing tomorrow; that he would have been here tonight but you’d know his father had to come first. You don’t mind being second to the parson, do you?”
No, Letty didn’t mind. Her heart was unaccountably light and glad, like a girl’s heart. It was the Eve of Mary when all women are blest because of one. The Wise Men brought gifts to the Child; Letty had often brought hers timidly, devoutly, trustfully, and perhaps tonight they were coming back to her!
VIII.
“Put the things down on the front steps,” said Dick to the driver as he neared the parsonage. “If there’s nobody at home I’ll go on up to the church after I’ve got this stuff inside.”
“Got a key?”
“No, don’t need one. I’ve picked all the locks with a penknife many a time. Besides, the key is sure to be under the doormat. Yes, here it is! Of all the unaccountable customs I ever knew, that’s the most laughable!”
“Works all right for you!”
“Yes, and for all the other tramps”—and Dick opened the door and lifted in his belongings. “Good-night,” he called to the driver; “I’ll walk up to the church after I’ve found out whether mother keeps the mince pie and cider apple sauce in the same old place.”
A few minutes later, his hunger partially stayed, Dick Larrabee locked the parsonage door and took the well-trodden path across the church common. It was his father’s feet, he knew, that had worn the shoveled path so smooth; his kind, faithful feet that had sped to and fro on errands of mercy, never faltering in all the years.
It was nearly eight o’clock. The sound of the melodeon, with children’s voices, floated out from the white-painted meeting-house, all ablaze with light; or as much ablaze as a kerosene chandelier and six side lamps could make it. The horse sheds were crowded with teams of various sorts, the horses well blanketed and standing comfortably in straw; and the last straggler was entering the right-hand door of the church as Dick neared the steps. Simultaneously the left-hand door opened, and on the background of the light inside appeared the figure of Mrs. Todd, the wife of his ancient enemy, the senior deacon. Dick could see that a sort of dressing-room had been curtained off in the little entry, as it had often been in former times of tableaux and concerts and what not. Valor, not discretion, was the better policy, and walking
boldly up to the steps Dick took off his fur cap and said, “Good-evening, Mrs. Todd!”
“Good gracious me! Where under the canopy did you hail from, Dick Larrabee? Was your folks lookin’ for you? They ain’t breathed a word to none of us.”
“No, I’m a surprise, Mrs. Todd.”
“Well, I know you’ve given me one! Will you wait a spell till the recitations is over? You’d scare the children so, if you go in now, that they’d forget their pieces more’n they gen’ally do.”
“I can endure the loss of the ‘pieces,’” said Dick with a twinkle in his eye.
At which Mrs. Todd laughed comprehendingly, and said: “Isaac’ll get a stool or a box or something; there ain’t a vacant seat in the church. I wish we could say the same o’ Sundays!—Isaac! Isaac! Come out and see who’s here,” she called under her breath. “He won’t be long. He’s tendin’ John Trimble in the dressin’-room. He was the only one in the village that was willin’ to be Santa Claus an’ he wa’n’t over-willin’. Now he’s et something for supper that disagrees with him awfully and he’s all doubled up with colic. We can’t have the tree till the exercises is over, but that won’t be mor’n fifteen minutes, so I sent Isaac home to make a mustard plaster. He’s puttin’ it on John now. John’s dreadful solemn and unamusin’ when he’s well, and I can’t think how he’ll act when he’s all crumpled up with stomach-ache, an’ the mustard plaster drawin’ like fire.”
Dick threw back his head and laughed. He had forgotten just how unexpected Beulah’s point of view always was.
Deacon Todd now came out cautiously.
“I’ve got it on him, mother, tho’ he’s terrible unresigned to it; an’ I’ve given him a stiff dose o’ Jamaica Ginger. We can tell pretty soon whether he can take his part.”
“Here’s Dick Larrabee come back, Isaac, just when we thought he had given up Beulah for good an’ all!” said Mrs. Todd.
The Deacon stood on the top step, his gaunt, grizzled face peering above the collar of his great coat; not a man to eat his words very often, Deacon Isaac Todd.
“Well, young man,” he said, “you’ve found your way home, have you? It’s about time, if you want to see your father alive!”
“If it hadn’t been for you and others like you, men who had forgotten what it was to be young, I should never have gone away,” said Dick hotly. “What had I done worse than a dozen others, only that I happened to be the minister’s son?”
“That’s just it; you were bringin’ trouble on the parish, makin’ talk that reflected on your father. Folks said if he couldn’t control his own son, he wa’n’t fit to manage a church. You played cards, you danced, you drove a fast horse.”
“I never did a thing I’m ashamed of but one”—and Dick’s voice was firm. “My misdeeds were nothing but boyish nonsense, but the village never gave me credit for a single virtue. I ought to have remembered father’s position, but whatever I was or whatever I did, you had no right to pray for me openly for full five minutes at a public meeting. That galled me worse than anything!”
“Now, Isaac,” interrupted Mrs. Todd. “I hope you’ll believe me! I’ve told you once a week, on an average, these last three years, that you might have chastened Dick some other way besides prayin’ for him in meetin’!”
The Deacon smiled grimly. “You both talk as if prayin’ was one of the seven deadly sins,” he said.
“I’m not objecting to your prayers,” agreed Dick, “but there were plenty of closets in your house where you might have gone and told the Lord your opinion of me; only that wasn’t good enough for you; you must needs tell the whole village!”
“There, father, that’s what I always said,” agreed Mrs. Todd.
“Well, I ain’t one that can’t yield when the majority’s against me,” said the Deacon, “particularly when I’m treatin’ John Trimble for the colic. If you’ll stop actin’ so you threaten to split the church, Dick Larrabee, I’ll stop prayin’ for you. The Lord knows how I feel about it now, so I needn’t keep on remindin’ Him.”
IX.
“That’s a bargain and here’s my hand on it,” cried Dick. “Now, what do you say to letting me be Santa Claus? Come on in and let’s look at John Trimble. He’d make a splendid Job or Jeremiah, but I wouldn’t let him spoil a Christmas festival!”
“Do let Dick take the part, father”—and Mrs. Todd’s tone was most ingratiating. “John’s terrible dull and bashful anyway, an’ mebbe he’d have a pain he couldn’t stan’ jest when he’s givin’ out the presents. An’ Dick is always so amusin’.”
Deacon Todd led the way into the improvised dressing-room. He had removed John’s gala costume in order to apply the mustard faithfully and he lay in a crumpled heap in the corner. The plaster itself adorned a stool near by.
“Now, John! John! That plaster won’t do you no good on the stool. It ain’t the stool that needs drawin’; it’s your stomach,” argued Mrs. Todd.
“I’m drawed pretty nigh to death a’ready,” moaned John. “I’m rore, that’s what I am—rore! An’ I won’t be Santa Claus neither. I want to go home.”
“Wrop him up and get him into your sleigh, father, and take him home; then come right back. Bed’s the place for him. Keep that hot flat-iron on his stomach, if he’d rather have it than the mustard. Men-folks are such cowards. I’ll dress Dick while you’re gone. Mebbe it’s a Providence!”
On the whole, Dick agreed with Mrs. Todd as he stood ready to make his entrance. The School Committee was in the church and he had had much to do with its members in former days. The Select-men of the village were present, and he had made their acquaintance once, in an executive session. The deacons were all there and the pillars of the church and the choir and the organist—a spinster who had actively disapproved when he had put beans in the melodeon one Sunday. Yes, it was best to meet them in a body on a festive occasion like this, when the rigors of the village point of view were relaxed. It would relieve him of several dozen private visits of apology, and altogether he felt that his courage would have wavered had he not been disguised as another person altogether: a popular favorite; a fat jolly, rollicking dispenser of bounties to the general public. When he finally discarded his costume, would it not be easier, too, to meet his father first before the church full of people and have the solemn hour with him alone, later at night? Yes, as Mrs. Todd said, “Mebbe ’twas a Providence!”
* * * *
There was never such a merry Christmas festival in the Orthodox church of Beulah; everybody was of one mind as to that. There was a momentary fear that John Trimble, a pillar of prohibition, might have imbibed hard cider; so gay, so nimble, so mirth-provoking was Santa Claus. When was John Trimble ever known to unbend sufficiently to romp up the side aisle jingling his sleigh bells, and leap over a front pew stuffed with presents, to gain the vantage-ground he needed for the distribution of his pack? The wing pews on one side of the pulpit had been floored over and the Christmas Tree stood there, triumphant in beauty, while the gifts strewed the green-covered platform at its feet.
How gay, how audacious, how witty was Santa Claus! How the village had always misjudged John Trimble, and how completely had John Trimble hitherto obscured his light under a bushel. In his own proper person children avoided him, but they crowded about this Santa Claus, encircling his legs, gurgling with joy when they were lifted to his shoulder, their laughter ringing through the church at his droll antics. A sense of mystery grew when he opened a pack on the pulpit stairs, a pack unfamiliar in its outward aspect to the Committee on Entertainment. Every girl had a little doll dressed in fashionable attire, and every boy a brilliantly colored, splendidly noisy, tin trumpet; but hanging to every toy by a red ribbon was Mrs. Larrabee’s Christmas card; her despised one about the “folks back home.”
The publishers’ check to the minister’s wife had been accompanied by a dozen complimentary copies, but these had been sent to Reba’s Western friends and relations; and although the card was on many a marble-topped table in B
eulah, it had not been bought by all the inhabitants, by any means. Fifteen cents would purchase something useful, and Beulah did not contain many Croesuses. Still, here the cards were—enough of them for everybody—with a linen handkerchief for every woman and every man in the meeting-house, and a dozen more sticking out of the pack, as the people in the front pews could plainly see. Modest gifts, but plenty of them, and nobody knew from whence they came! There was a buzzing in the church, a buzzing that grew louder and more persistent when Santa Claus threw a lace scarf around Mrs. Larrabee’s shoulders and approached her husband with a fine beaver collar in his hands: hands that trembled, as everybody could see, when he buttoned the piece of fur around the old minister’s neck.
And the minister? He had been half in, and half out of, a puzzling dream for ten minutes, and when those hands of Santa Claus touched him, his flesh quivered. They reminded him of baby fingers that had crept around his neck years ago when he patiently walked the parsonage floor at night with his ailing child in his arms. Every drop of blood in his veins called out for answer. He looked above the white cotton beard and mustache to a pair of dark eyes; merry, mischievous, yet tender and soft; at a brown wavy lock escaping from the home-made wig. Then those who were near heard a weak voice say, “My son!” and those who were far away observed Santa Claus tear off his wig and beard, heard him cry, “Father!”—and, as Mrs. Todd said afterwards, saw him “fall on to the minister’s neck right there before the whole caboodle, an’ cling to him for all the world like an engaged couple, only they wouldn’t ’a’ made so free in public.”
No ice but would have thawed in such an atmosphere! Grown-up Beulah forgot how much trouble Dick Larrabee had caused in other days, and the children had found a friend for all time. The extraordinary number of dolls, trumpets, handkerchiefs, and Christmas cards circulating in the meeting-house raised the temperature considerably, and induced a general feeling that if Dick Larrabee had really ever been a bit wild and reckless, he had evidently reformed, and prospered, besides.
The Second Christmas Megapack Page 37
