A Christmas Mystery: The Story of Three Wise Men | Page 7

round spectacles, and Biggleswade turned and met the
eyes of Doyne. A pulsation like the beating of wings stirred the air.

The three wise men shivered with a queer exaltation. Something
strange, mystical, dynamic had happened. It was as if scales had fallen
from their eyes and they saw with a new vision. They stood together
humbly, divested of all their greatness, touching one another in the
instinctive fashion of children, as if seeking mutual protection, and they
looked, with one accord, irresistibly compelled, at the child.
At last McCurdie unbent his black brows and said hoarsely:
"It was not the Angel of Death, Doyne, but another Messenger that
drew us here."
The tiredness seemed to pass away from the great administrator's face,
and he nodded his head with the calm of a man who has come to the
quiet heart of a perplexing mystery.
"It's true," he murmured. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
Unto the three of us."
Biggleswade took off his great round spectacles and wiped them.
"Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar. But where are the gold, frankincense and
myrrh?"
"In our hearts, man," said McCurdie.
The babe cried and stretched its tiny limbs.
[Illustration: INSTINCTIVELY THEY ALL KNELT DOWN.]
Instinctively they all knelt down together to discover, if possible, and
administer ignorantly to, its wants. The scene had the appearance of an
adoration.
* * * * *
Then these three wise, lonely, childless men who, in furtherance of
their own greatness, had cut themselves adrift from the sweet and
simple things of life and from the kindly ways of their brethren, and

had grown old in unhappy and profitless wisdom, knew that an
inscrutable Providence had led them, as it had led three Wise Men of
old, on a Christmas morning long ago, to a nativity which should give
them a new wisdom, a new link with humanity, a new spiritual outlook,
a new hope.
And, when their watch was ended, they wrapped up the babe with
precious care, and carried him with them, an inalienable joy and
possession, into the great world.
[Illustration: CARRIED WITH THEM AN INALIENABLE JOY AND
POSSESSION INTO THE GREAT WORLD.]

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