The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 8

and I tell you that the work is done--quite finished--without a
word to you about it. Do I not understand?" he repeated. "Have I not
understood all along? It is true; outwardly as regards this work you
have been--the Incident."
As he paused, she made a slight gesture with one hand as though she
did not care for what he was saying and brushed away the fragile web
of his words from before her eyes--eyes fixed on larger things lying
clear before her in life's distance.
He went quickly on with deepening emphasis:
"But, comrade of all these years, battler with me for life's victories, did
you think you were never to know? Did you believe I was never to
explain? You had only one more day to wait! If patience, if faith, could
only have lasted another twenty-four hours--until Christmas Eve!"
It was the first time for nearly a year that the sound of those words had
been heard in that house. He bent earnestly over toward her; he leaned
heavily forward with his hands on his knees and searched her features
with loyal chiding.
"Has not Christmas Eve its mysteries?" he asked, "its secrets for you
and me? Think of Christmas Eve for you and me! Remember!"

Slowly as in a windless woods on a winter day a smoke from a
woodchopper's smouldering fire will wander off and wind itself about
the hidden life-buds of a young tree, muffling it while the atmosphere
near by is clear, there now floated into the room to her the tender haze
of old pledges and vows and of things unutterably sacred.
He noted the effect of his words and did not wait. He turned to his desk
and, gathering up the sprigs of holly and cedar, began softly to cover
her picture with them.
"Stay blinded and bewildered there," he said, "until the hour comes
when holly and cedar will speak: on Christmas Eve you will understand;
you will then see whether in this work you have been--the Incident."
Even while they had been talking the light of the short winter afternoon
had perceptibly waned in the room.
She glanced through the windows at the darkening lawn; her eyes were
tear-dimmed; to her it looked darker than it was. She held his hat up
between her arms, making an arch for him to come and stand under.
"It is getting late," she said in nearly the same tone of quiet warning
with which she had spoken before. "There is no time to lose."
He sprang up, without glancing behind him at his desk with its
interrupted work, and came over and placed himself under the arch of
her arms, looking at her reverently.
But his hands did not take hold, his arms hung down at his sides--the
hands that were life, the arms that were love.
She let her eyes wander over his clipped tawny hair and pass downward
over his features to the well-remembered mouth under its mustache.
Then, closing her quivering lips quickly, she dropped the cat softly on
his head and walked toward the door. When she reached it, she put out
one of her hands delicately against a panel and turned her profile over
her shoulder to him:

"Do you know what is the trouble with both of those books?" she asked,
with a struggling sweetness in her voice.
He had caught up his overcoat and as he put one arm through the sleeve
with a vigorous thrust, he laughed out with his mouth behind the collar:
"I think I know what is the trouble with the authors of the books."
"The trouble is," she replied, "the trouble is that the authors are right
and the books are right: men and women are only Incidents to each
other in life," and she passed out into the hall.
"Human life itself for that matter is only an incident in the universe," he
replied, "if we cared to look at it in that way; but we'd better not!"
He was standing near the table in the middle of the room; he suddenly
stopped buttoning his overcoat. His eyes began to wander over the
books, the prints, the pictures, embracing in a final survey everything
that he had brought together from such distances of place and time. His
work was in effect done. A sense of regret, a rush of loneliness, came
over him as it comes upon all of us who reach the happy ending of toil
that we have put our heart and strength in.
"Are you coming?" she called faintly from the hall.
"I am coming," he replied, and moved toward the door; but there he
stopped again and looked back.
Once more there came into his face the devotion of the student; he was
on the commons where