“The wisdom of the Spirit seeth the grain of mustard-seed, that is the least of all seeds, how it shall become a great tree, and the fowls of heaven shall lodge in its branches. Let us, then, lift up the hands that hang down and the feeble knees, and let us hope that, like as great salvation to all people came out of small beginnings of Bethlehem, so the work which we shall begin tomorrow shall be for the good of many nations.
“It is a custom on this Christmas Day to give love-presents. What love-gift giveth our Lord Jesus on this day? Brethren, it is a great one and a precious; as St. Paul said to the Philippians: ‘For unto you it is given for Christ, not only that ye should believe on Him, but also that ye should suffer for His sake;’ and St. Peter also saith, ‘Behold, we count them blessed which endure.’ And the holy Apostles rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer rebuke for the name of Jesus.
“Our Lord Christ giveth us of His cup and His baptism; He giveth of the manger and the straw; He giveth of persecutions and afflictions; He giveth of the crown of thorns, and right dear unto us be these gifts.
“And now will I tell these children a story, which a cunning playwright, whom I once knew in our Queen’s court, hath made concerning gifts:
“A great king would marry his daughter worthily, and so he caused three caskets to be made, in one of which he hid her picture. The one casket was of gold set with diamonds, the second of silver set with pearls, and the third a poor casket of lead.
“Now it was given out that each comer should have but one choice, and if he chose the one with the picture he should have the lady to wife.
“Divers kings, knights, and gentlemen came from far, but they never won, because they always snatched at the gold and the silver caskets, with the pearls and diamonds. So, when they opened these, they found only a grinning death’s-head or a fool’s cap.
“But anon cometh a true, brave knight and gentleman, who chooseth for love alone the old leaden casket; and, behold, within is the picture of her he loveth! and they were married with great feasting and content.
“So our Lord Jesus doth not offer himself to us in silver and gold and jewels, but in poverty and hardness and want; but whoso chooseth them for His love’s sake shall find Him therein whom his soul loveth, and shall enter with joy to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
“And when the Lord shall come again in his glory, then he shall bring worthy gifts with him, for he saith: ‘Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life; to him that overcometh I will give to eat of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone with a new name that no man knoweth save he that receiveth it. He that overcometh and keepeth my words, I will give power over the nations and I will give him the morning star.’
“Let us then take joyfully Christ’s Christmas gifts of labors and adversities and crosses today, that when he shall appear we may have these great and wonderful gifts at his coming; for if we suffer with him we shall also reign; but if we deny him, he also will deny us.”
And so it happens that the only record of Christmas Day in the pilgrims’ journal is this:
“Monday, the 25th, being Christmas Day, we went ashore, some to fell timber, some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry; and so no man rested all that day. But towards night some, as they were at work, heard a noise of Indians, which caused us all to go to our muskets; but we heard no further, so we came aboard again, leaving some to keep guard. That night we had a sore storm of wind and rain. But at night the ship-master caused us to have some beer aboard.”
So worthily kept they the first Christmas, from which comes all the Christmas cheer of New England today. There is no record how Mary Winslow and Rose Standish and others, with women and children, came ashore and walked about encouraging the builders; and how little Love gathered stores of bright checker-berries and partridge plums, and was made merry in seeing squirrels and wild rabbits; nor how old Margery roasted certain wild geese to a turn at a woodland fire, and conserved wild cranberries with honey for sauce. In their journals the good pilgrims say they found bushels of strawberries in the meadows in December. But we, knowing the nature of things, know that these must have been cranberries, which grow still abundantly around Plymouth harbor.
And at the very time that all this was doing in the wilderness, and the men were working yeomanly to build a new nation, in King James’s court the ambassadors of the French King were being entertained with maskings and mummerings, wherein the staple subject of merriment was the Puritans!
So goes the wisdom of the world and its ways—and so goes the wisdom of God!
THE LADY ERMETTA; or, The Sleeping Secret:
A SENSATIONAL NOVELETTE IN THREE PARTS, WITH AN ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS INTRODUCTION, BY ERNEST FAVENC
INTRODUCTION
It was Christmas Day, and I, the wearied super of a cattle station far out in the back country, was swinging idly in a hammock, in an iron-roofed verandah, where the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten; and imagining that I was keeping a merry Christmas. Not a sound, save the indistinct hum of insect life, was to be heard; all hands on the station, having succumbed to the influence of colonial rum and pudding, were asleep; and I lay and perspired, and smoked, and thought—of what? That is a question that will be answered directly. With my hands clasped under the back of my head, one foot projecting over the side of the hammock, and occasionally touching the verandah post in order to keep myself swinging, I began gradually to lose full consciousness of surrounding objects. I knew that it seemed to be getting hotter and hotter, that the iron roof overhead appeared to be assuming a molten appearance; that I was getting too lazy to keep myself rocking, that my eyelids were growing heavy, and that I should soon give it up and fall asleep, when I heard a deep, deep sigh close to me. I turned—
Saw throned on a flowery rise,
One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled.
Well, not exactly.
This was a man, and he was sitting in one of the squatter chairs leaning against the slabs, and a curious-looking figure he was to see in such a situation. I knew him at once; he was the Genius of Christmas. There he was, holly wreath, white beard, laughing countenance, and all the attributes complete.
I said, “Good day, old man—how are you?” for I felt astonishingly bold somehow. He was reading in a large book, the print of which seemed possessed with life, and to be constantly moving and changing; but when I made this remark he raised his head, and gazed at me with “a countenance more in sorrow than in anger,” but did not speak.
“I know who you are,” I went on; “you’re the Genius of Christmas.”
“I am,” he said.
“And you’re going to show me all manner of pictures and scenes of human life, and I shall awake by-and-by and find that it has all been a dream; and I shall be very good and charitable all the rest of my life.”
“Not you,” said the Spirit; “you couldn’t be charitable if you tried.”
“Spirit,” I said, “that’s very hard, why could I not be charitable if I tried?”
“When you couldn’t show mercy to a poor old ghost who’s been harped upon, and written about, and carolled over—there, I’ll say no more; but man’s inhumanity to me makes a Christmas Spirit mourn.”
“Spirit,” I said, “you mistake, surely, I who esteem and venerate the Christmas season.”
“You do, do you? Now, answer me truly, were you not trying to compose a Christmas tale as you lay in that hammock?”
“I confess it, I was.”
“And you say you venerate me; pretty veneration I call that, but I’ll be revenged. I’ll stand it no longer. I’ll read Christmas poetry to you for the next three hundred and sixty-five days.”
“Spirit, do not judge me unheard; be calm.”
“Be calm! Who could be calm under such provocation? Listen! We are seven—that’s Wordsworth isn’t it—never mind, as I said before, we are seven; seven spirits, one for each day in the week. I’m Saturday. When Christmas Day falls on a Saturday,
as it does this year, I have to attend to it. Now every leap year one of us has to do double duty, and as next year is a leap year I am told off for the extra day’s work; but there is a chance for any of us to get out of this extra work, thus”—he went on as though quoting from some rule or regulation—“If a Spirit when in the execution of its duty, can find a place upon earth inhabited by Christian, or supposedly Christian people, where no Christmas Literature is to be found upon Christmas Day, he shall be able to claim exemption from extra duty on leap-year, and the Spirit following him shall do his work.”
“Spend your Christmas here,” I cried, starting from the hammock. “Search the house from garret to basement (it was only a two-roomed hut), and see if you can find a Christmas magazine or paper.”
“That Christmas story,” the Spirit sternly replied, “That Christmas story, which shall never see the light, by its mere presence in your idiotic skull has spoilt my chance of a holiday, and I wanted to put Sunday into it”—the long faced sanctimonious hypocrite. “But I will be revenged, revenged!”
“Spirit,” I cried, casting myself at its feet and clutching its robe, “have mercy; I am not strong-nerved. I could not bear to be transported to regions of ice and snow, and see poor people kind and generous to one another, and pretty girls playing at blindman’s-buff, and all the many signs you would show me—have mercy!”
“Can you ask it knowing that during the whole of the past year I have wandered to and fro seeking for a place wherein to rest on this twenty-fifth day of December? I marked this spot, noted the dense stolidity, not to say stupidity, visible in your face, and I said here is a place where I shall be safe; nicely situated in a warm comfortable climate, mails always a month late; here I am secure for my holiday. This morning I took a turn through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, just to see that everything was going on all right, come here to finish my day quietly and peace fully, in the virtuous frame of mind that a Spirit feels in who has done his duty, and I find, what! That you—a being than whom a generation of apes could not produce a greater fool—have dared to compose a Christmas Story; that you have committed two pages of it to paper, and it is even now lying there in your bedroom. Can you deny it?”
I could only bow my head in guilty assent.
“But vengeance can still be mine—yes, Vengeance! Vengeance!! Vengeance!!!” Here his voice rose to such a shriek that I expected to see the stockman and cook come rushing in to see what was up; but no help came to me, and he raged on.
“I will read to you, commencing with your own wretched two pages, all the Christmas literature that has been published in the world this season!” Uttering this awful sentence he leaned back in the chair, and glared furiously at me.”
“Mercy, mercy,” I said faintly.
“No mercy, I know it not; I reckon it will just comfortably occupy us until the end of next year to get through it all.”
“Spirit!” I cried, “I have sinned, but I repent; I will be a new man, Christmas shall be to me a season of mourning and desolation; spare me.”
Its only answer was to open its book and commence reading.
As though its first word was a blow, I fell back spell-bound and motionless, and there I lay whilst the Genius began to read my now detested production of two pages. First he read it in an ordinary colloquial tone, then he gabbled it over, next he sung it, then he tried to chant it. Then he read it in a facetious manner, stopping to laugh every now and then; then he read it in a dismal manner, pretending to cry; then he tried to make blank verse of it, and I tried to stop my ears, but all in vain; over and over again he read the horrid sentences I knew so well, until at last he seemed out of breath, and stopped.
“How do you like it,” he said, “will you ever do it again?”
“Never, never,” I groaned. He chuckled, and turning again to his book, the pages of which produced anything he liked without his having to turn over the leaves, he inflicted the following story upon me:
THE LADY ERMETTA; OR, THE SLEEPING SECRET—PROLOGUE
Calm in the serene solemnity of their solitude; grand in the outstretched vastness of their extent, and golden in the Pactolean wealth of their beauty, lie the sands of Plimlivon. But what huge, gloomy object is that, the rugged outlines of which mar the tranquil beauty of their level expanse? Like the fossilised form of some gigantic inhabitant of a world long forgotten, or like a Brobdignagian bandbox labelled, “This side up, with care,” stands a mighty isolated rock, and casts upon the otherwise unflecked extent of stainless sand around it, a shadow, weird, gloomy, and mysterious. Why does that rock—that grim, portentous sentinel, challenging the gladsome sunlight, with its ominous “Qui vive,” stand there and throw its gruesome shade over sand-grain and pebble that would else be revelling in the glorious radiance of day? Say, why does the shadow of some awful secret crime fall across the otherwise unblotted course of a fair, fresh life, and turn the rich colors of the flowers of life into the sombre hues and tints of death? I know not, gentle reader, but that rock stands there because I intend to use it in the third and last chapter.
Chapter I. THE SECRET
“My daughter,” said the Marquis of Marborough.
“Yes, my father,” replied the Lady Ermetta, who was of a most dutiful disposition, and when she did not say “No” said “Yes” with undeviating regularity.
“The hour has now arrived when I feel it incumbent on me to reveal to you the secret—the secret upon which hinges your future welfare and happiness, and is also the central point of interest in this story in which we are two of the principal characters. Therefore, arm yourself with fortitude, and prepare to hear it as becomes a heroine.”
“Very well, my father,” returned the dutiful girl, but will you kindly tell me exactly what to do.”
“Clasp your hands convulsively, lean forwards attentively, and with an expression of anxious horror on your beautiful features, exclaim, ‘Speak, speak, my father; I can bear the worst’”
The Lady Ermetta followed his directions to the eighth part of an affygraffy.
“You know, my child, that in the third and last chapter you are to be married, as becomes a heroine; and you also know that Baron Gadzooks is the bridegroom elect. But you do not know that a dark secret hangs over his birth, a secret which I am now about to reveal, therefore listen attentively.”
“I am all ears,” said the lovely girl.
“My dearest, that is a most irrational remark; now, really, how can you be all ears?”
The Lady Ermetta blushed to the tips of the articles in question, and muttered something that sounded like a request for her father to go and put his boots on.
“Silence, Ermetta!” said her father sternly, “such conduct is unbecoming in the heroine of a novel. Now, listen to me— The Baron was changed at birth.”
“Then Baron Gadzooks—”
“Is somebody else.”
“And somebody else?”
“Is the Baron. You now comprehend the situation.”
“Not altogether, my father, you have neglected to inform me who somebody else is.”
“That, my dear child, is a question that even the author could not answer.”
“Then supposing that I marry the Baron, I in fact marry ‘somebody else,’ and as you say that ‘somebody else’ is the Baron, why of course my husband will be the Baron.”
“How the deuce is that?” said the Marquis; “let’s see. If you marry the Baron—, but you can’t marry the Baron, because he’s not the Baron—he was changed at birth,”
“He’s somebody else.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Then, as he is not the Baron, somebody else is the Baron.”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
“Then, again, if I marry Gadzooks, I marry ‘somebody else,’ and somebody else, you say, papa, is the Baron,” said the Lady Ermetta, triumphantly. “Come now,” she added rather maliciously, “I think you are a little irrational now.”
“Really Ermetta, you wi
ll look at the matter from only one point of view; don’t you see that he’s not the right somebody else. There are any amount of somebodies else; but let me tell you all about it. This important secret came out in a conversation that was overheard to pass between two servants. One was the nurse of the then infant Gadzooks, the other was a fellow servant. The nurse was heard to make the following remark about her youthful charge: ‘The blessed dear was a layin in my arms as quiet as a lamb, and smiling like a cherrup, when he changed all of a sudden, and has been that cross and frakshus ever since that I ain’t had a minnit’s peace with him.’ The person who overheard this startling disclosure was a devoted friend of the family; he acted with decision and promptitude. The servants were first got rid of—one was strangled, the other hung. He then took the secret, hushed it into a sound sleep, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, and put it into a box.”
“Then where is the danger to come from?”
“Here lies the danger. When that devoted friend put the secret into the box he made a fatal mistake—he put it into the wrong box, and the secret might awake and find itself.”
“In the wrong box! How truly awful.”
“It is indeed; it might awake at the very moment of your marriage, and forbid the ceremony to proceed. There’s no knowing to what lengths a secret that’s been kept asleep, in the wrong box for many years might proceed when once awakened.”
The Lady Ermetta sobbed deeply. “I can never give up Gadzooks,” she said, “I have never seen him, for he has not been introduced personally into this story yet, but I feel that he has my poor heart.”
“Restrain your feelings, my child; picture to yourself what would be the result if the secret should awake after your marriage, and announce to an astonished world that you had married somebody else; why you might almost be tried for bigamy.”
The Second Christmas Megapack: 29 Modern and Classic Yuletide Stories Page 20
