The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 4

of autumn
thistles--thistles that look out from the shadow of a rock. They had a
veritable thistle quality and suggestiveness: gray and of the fields, sure
of their experience in nature, freighted with silence.
Despite grayness and thorniness, however, you saw that they were in
the summer of their life-bloom; and singularly above even their beauty
of blooming they held what is rare in the eyes of either men or
women--they held a look of being just.
The whole face was an oval, long, regular, high-bred. If the lower part
had been hidden behind a white veil of the Orient (by that little bank of
snow which is guardedly built in front of the overflowing desires of the
mouth), the upper part would have given the impression of reserve,
coldness, possibly of severity; yet ruled by that one look--the garnered
wisdom, the tempering justice, of the eyes. The whole face being seen,
the lower features altered the impression made by the upper ones;
reserve became bettered into strength, coldness bettered into dignity,
severity of intellect transfused into glowing nobleness of character. The
look of virgin justice in her was perhaps what had survived from that
white light of life which falls upon young children as from a receding
sun and touches lingeringly their smiles and glances; but her mouth had
gathered its shadowy tenderness as she walked the furrows of the years,
watching their changeful harvests, eating their passing bread.
A handful of some of the green things of winter lay before her picture:
holly boughs with their bold, upright red berries; a spray of the cedar of
the Kentucky yards with its rosary of piteous blue. When he had come
in from out of doors to go on with his work, he had put them
there--perhaps as some tribute. After all his years with her, many and
strong, he must have acquired various tributes and interpretations; but

to-day, during his walk in the woods, it had befallen him to think of her
as holly which ripens amid snows and retains its brave freshness on a
landscape of departed things. As cedar also which everywhere on the
Shield is the best loved of forest-growths to be the companion of
household walls; so that even the poorest of the people, if it does not
grow near the spot they build in, hunt for it and bring it home:
everywhere wife and cedar, wife and cedar, wife and cedar.
The photographs of the children grouped on each side of hers with
heads a little lower down called up memories of Old World pictures in
which cherubs smile about the cloud-borne feet of the heavenly
Hebrew maid. Glowing young American mother with four healthy
children as her gifts to the nation--this was the practical thought of her
that riveted and held.
As has been said, they were in two groups, the children; a boy and girl
in each. The four were of nearly the same age; but the faces of two
were on a dimmer card in an older frame. You glanced at her again and
persuaded yourself that the expression of motherhood which
characterized her separated into two expressions (as behind a thin white
cloud it is possible to watch another cloud of darker hue). Nearer in
time was the countenance of a mother happy with happy offspring;
further away the same countenance withdrawn a little into shadow--the
face of the mother bereaved--mute and changeless.
The man, the worker, whom this little flock of wife and two surviving
children now followed through the world as their leader, sat with his
face toward his desk In a corner of the room; solidly squared before his
undertaking, liking it, mastering it; seldom changing his position as the
minutes passed, never nervously; with a quietude in him that was
oftener in Southern gentlemen in quieter, more gentlemanly times. A
low powerful figure with a pair of thick shoulders and tremendous
limbs; filling the room with his vitality as a heavy passionate animal
lying in a corner of a cage fills the space of the cage, so that you wait
for it to roll over or get up on its feet and walk about that you may
study its markings and get an inkling of its conquering nature.
Meantime there were hints of him. When he had come in, he had

thrown his overcoat on a chair that stood near the table in the centre of
the room and had dropped his hat upon his coat. It had slipped to the
floor and now lay there--a low, soft black hat of a kind formerly much
worn by young Southerners of the countryside,--especially on
occasions when there was a spur of heat in their mood and
going,--much the same kind that one sees on the heads of students in