The Doctor's Christmas Eve

At last she dried her red swollen eyes and brushed back from her temples the long sunny strands of wind-woven hair; she put on her glasses and picked up her little round brilliant country picnic bouquet; and with quivering lips and quivering nostrils looked where she must place it. With tear-wet forefinger and thumb she forced the flowers apart on one side and peeped at the card pushed deep within within – "From Elizabeth."

She got up then and went slowly away, fading out behind the pines like a little wandering strip of heaven's remembering blue.

Later in the afternoon the sound of slowly approaching wheels sounded on the gravel of the drive that wound near: then a carriage stopped. A minute afterwards there appeared within the open enclosure a woman in black, thickly veiled, bringing an armful of flowers. Some yards behind her a man followed in deep mourning also, bareheaded, his hat in his hand at his side – the soldierly figure of a man squaring himself against adversity, but stricken and bowed at his post. They did not advance side by side as those who walk most in unison when they are most bereaved and draw closer together as fate draws nearer.

When she reached the mound, she turned toward him and waited; and when he came up, without a word she held the flowers out to him. She held them out to him with silence and with what a face under her veil – with what a look out of the wife's and mother's eyes – there was none to see. He gently pushed the flowers back toward her, mutely asking of her some charity for the sake of all; so that, consenting, she turned to arrange them. As she did so, she became conscious at last of what hitherto she had perceived with her eyes only: the happy little bouquet of a child left on the sod. And suddenly there fell upon her veil and hung enmeshed in it some heavy tears, of which, however, she took no notice. But she disposed the flowers so that they would not interfere with – not quite reach to – that token of a child's love which had never known and now would never know time's disillusion or earth's disenchantment.

When she had finished, she remained standing looking at it all. He moved around to her side; and they both with final impulse let their eyes meet upon the ancient line chiselled across the marble: —

"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."

He broke the silence: —

"I chose that for him: it is the truth: he has been sent away, bearing more than was his."

She looked at it a long time, and then bowed as if to set the seal of her judgment upon the seal of his judgment. And, moved by some pitiless instinct to look at things as they are, – the discipline of her years, – with a quiet resolute hand she lifted her veil away from her face. It was a face of that proud and self-ennobled beauty that anywhere in the world gives to the beholder of it a lesson in the sublimer elements of human character. There was no feature of reproach nor line nor shadow of bitterness, but the chastened peace of a nature that has learned to live upon itself, after having first cast itself passionately upon others; and that indestructible strength which rests not upon what life can give, but upon what life cannot take away: she stood revealed there as what in truth she was – heroic daughter of the greater vanished people.

She dropped her veil and turned away toward the carriage. He drew to her side and once – hesitatingly, desolately – he put his arm around her. She did not yield, she did not decline; she walked with him as though she walked alone. During all the barren bitter years she had not been upheld by his arm: her staff and her support had been her ideal of herself and of her people – after she had faced the ruined ideal of their lives together and her lost ideal of him. It was yet too soon for his arm – or it was too late altogether.

He withdrew it; and he continued to walk beside her as a man who has lost among women both her whom he had most wished to have and her whom he might most have had. And so they passed from the scene.

But throughout that long obscurity amid which we are appointed to pass our allotted years, it is not the order of nature that all stars within us should rise at once. There are some that are seen early, that move rapidly across our sky, and are beheld no more – youth's flaming planets, the influence of which upon us often leaves us doubting whether they were baneful or benign. There are other lights which come out to shine upon our paths and guide us later; and, thanks be to nature, until the very last new stars appear. Those who early have left them they love can never know what late radiance may illumine the end of their road. And only those who remain together to the end can greet the last splendid beacons that sometimes rise above the horizon before the dawn – the true morning stars of many a dark and troubled life.

They had half their lives before them: they were growing, unfolding characters; perhaps they were yet to find happiness together. She had loved him with a love too single and complete, and she loved him yet too well, to accept anything from him a second time less than everything. Happiness was in store for them perhaps – and more children.

The working out of this lay with them and their remaining days.

But for the doctor one thing had been worked out to the end: that year by year he was to drive along turnpikes and lanes – alone. That every spring he was to see the sower go forth in the fields; that with his whitening hair he was to watch beside the beds of sick children; and often at night under his lamp to fall asleep with his eyes fixed upon The World's Path of Lessening Pain.

When the two were gone, it was a still spot that afternoon with the sunlight on the grass. As the sun began to descend, its rays gradually left the earth and passed upward toward the pinnacles of the pines; and lingering on those summits awhile, it finally took its flight back to the infinite. Twilight fell gray; darkness began to brood; objects lost their outlines. The trees of the enclosure became shadows; these shadows in time became as other realities. The sturdy young evergreen planted beside the boy as his forest counterpart, having his shape and size, now stood there as the lad himself wrapped in his overcoat – the crimson-tipped madcap little fellow who had gambolled across the frozen fields that windy morning toward his Christmas Festival.

In this valley of earth he stood there holding upright for all to see the slab on which was to be read his brief ended tale: —

"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."THE END