The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 5

Rome in winter; light, warm, shaping itself readily to breezes from any
quarter, to be doffed or donned as comfortable and negligible. It
suggested that he had been a country boy in the land, still belonged to
the land, and as a man kept to its out-of-door habits and fashions. His
shoes, one of which you saw at each side of his chair, were especially
well made for rough-going feet to tramp in during all weathers.
A sack suit of dark blue serge somehow helped to withdraw your
interpretation of him from farm life to the arts or the professions. The
scrupulous air of his shirt collar, showing against the clear-hued flesh at
the back of his neck, and the Van Dyck-like edge of the shirt cuff,
defining his powerful wrist and hand, strengthened the notion that he
belonged to the arts or to the professions. He might have been sitting
before a canvas instead of a desk and holding a brush instead of a pen:
the picture would have been true to life. Or truer yet, he might have
taken his place with the grave group of students in the Lesson in
Anatomy left by Rembrandt.
Once he put down his pen, wheeled his chair about, and began to read
the page he had just finished: then you saw him. He had a big,
masculine, solid-cut, self-respecting, normal-looking, executive
head--covered with thick yellowish hair clipped short; so that while
everything else in his appearance indicated that he was in the prime of
manhood, the clipped hair caused him to appear still more youthful;
and it invested him with a rustic atmosphere which went along very
naturally with the sentimental country hat and the all-weather shoes. He
seemed at first impression a magnificent animal frankly loved of the
sun--perhaps too warmly. The sun itself seemed to have colored for
him his beard and mustache--a characteristic hue of men's hair and
beard in this land peopled from Old English stock. The beard, like the
hair, was cut short, as though his idea might have been to get both hair

and beard out of life's daily way; but his mustache curled thickly down
over his mouth, hiding it. In the whole effect there was a suggestion of
the Continent, perhaps of a former student career in Germany,
memories of which may still have lasted with him and the marks of
which may have purposely been kept up in his appearance.
But such a fashion of beard, while covering a man's face, does much to
uncover the man. As he sat amid his papers and books, your thought
surely led again to old pictures where earnest heads bend together over
some point on the human road, at which knowledge widens and
suffering begins to be made more bearable and death more kind.
Perforce now you interpreted him and fixed his general working
category: that he was absorbed in work meant to be serviceable to
humanity. His house, the members of his family, the people of his
neighborhood, were meantime forgotten: he was not a mere dweller on
his farm; he was a discoverer on the wide commons where the race
forever camps at large with its problems, joys, and sorrows.
He read his page, his hand dropped to his knee, his mind dropped its
responsibility; one of those intervals followed when the brain rests. The
look of the student left his face; over it began to play the soft lights of
the domestic affections. He had forgotten the world for his own place in
the world; the student had become the husband and house-father. A few
moments only; then he wheeled gravely to his work again, his right
hand took up the pen, his left hand went back to the pictures.
The silence of the room seemed a guarded silence, as though he were
being watched over by a love which would not let him be disturbed.
(He had the reposeful self-assurance of a man who is conscious that he
is idolized.)
Matching the silence within was the stillness out of doors. An immense
oak tree stood just outside the windows. It was a perpetual reminder of
vanished woods; and when a windstorm tossed and twisted it, the
straining and grinding of the fibres were like struggles and outcries for
the wild life of old. This afternoon it brooded motionless, an image of
forest reflection. Once a small black-and-white sapsucker, circling the
trunk and peering into the crevices of the bark on a level with the

windows, uttered minute notes which penetrated into the room like
steel darts of sound. A snowbird alighted on the window-sill, glanced
familiarly in at the man, and shot up its crest; but disappointed perhaps
that it was not noticed, quoted its resigned gray phrase--a phrase it had
made for