The Seeker | Page 3

especially because a text often quoted in the story said "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." He had often wondered why Ben Holt should be considered an especially good name; and why Ben Holt came to choose it instead of the goldpiece he found and returned to the schoolmaster, before he fell sick and was sent away to the country where the merry haymakers were. Of course, there were worse names than Ben Holt. It was surely better than Eygji Watts, whose sanguine parents were said to have named him with the first five letters they drew from a hat containing the alphabet; Ben Holt was assuredly better than Eygji, even had this not been rendered into "Hedge-hog" by careless companions. His last confusion of ideas was a wondering if Bernal Linford was as good a name as Ben Holt, and why he could not remember having chosen it in preference to a goldpiece. Back of this, in his fading consciousness was the high-coloured image of a candy cane, too splendid for earth.
Then, far in the night, as it might have seemed to the little boy, came the step of slippered feet. This time Clytie, satisfying herself that both boys slept, set down her candle and went softly out, leaving the door open. There came back with her one bearing gifts--a tall, dark old man, with a face of many deep lines and severe set, who yet somehow shed kindness, as if he held a spirit of light prisoned within his darkness, so that, while only now and then could a visible ray of it escape through the sombre eye or through a sudden winning quality in the harsh voice, it nevertheless radiated from him sensibly at all times, to belie his sternness and puzzle those who feared him.
Uneasy enough he looked now as Clytie unloaded him of the bundles and bulky toys. In a silence broken only by their breathing they quickly bestowed the gifts--some in the hanging stockings at the fire-place, others beside each bed, in chairs or on the mantel.
Then they were in the hall again, the door closed so that they could speak. The old man took up his own candle from a stand against the wall.
"The little one is like her," he said.
"He's awful cunning and bright, but Allan is the handsomest. Never in my born days did I see so beautiful a boy."
"But he's like the father, line for line." There was a sudden savage roughness in the voice, a sterner set to the shaven upper lip and straight mouth, though he still spoke low. "Like the huckstering, godless fiddle-player that took her away from me. What a mercy of God's he'll never see her again--she with the saved and he--what a reckoning for him when he goes!"
"But he was not bad to let you take them."
"He boasted to me that he'd not have done it, except that she begged him with her last breath to promise it. He said the words with great maudlin tears raining down his face, when my own eyes were dry!"
"How good if you can leave them both in the church, preaching the word where you preached it so many years!"
"I misdoubt the father's blood in them--at least, in the older. But it's late. Good night, Clytie--a good Christmas to you."
"More to you, Mr. Delcher! Good night!"
CHAPTER II
AN OLD MAN FACES TWO WAYS
His candle up, he went softly along the white hallway over the heavy red carpet, to where a door at the end, half-open, let him into his study. Here a wood fire at the stage of glowing coals made a searching warmth. Blowing out his candle, he seated himself at the table where a shaded lamp cast its glare upon a litter of books and papers. A big, white-breasted gray cat yawned and stretched itself from the hearthrug and leaped lightly upon him with great rumbling purrs, nosing its head under one of his hands suggestively, and, when he stroked it, looking up at him with lazily falling eye-lids.
He crossed his knees to make a better lap for the cat, and fell to musing backward into his own boyhood, when the Christmas Saint was a real presence. Then he came forward to his youth, when he had obeyed the call of the Lord against his father's express command that he follow the family way and become a prosperous manufacturer. Truly there had been revolt in him. Perhaps he had never enough considered this in excuse for his own daughter's revolt.
Again he dwelt in the days when he had preached with a hot passion such truth as was his. For a long time, while the old clock ticked on the mantel before him and the big cat purred or slept under his absent