All the way up the creek she was so occupied with thinking of what Jack had said, and so depressed over the depths of mental suffering which his exclamations revealed, that she plied her oar mechanically, only partly awake to the scenes about her. But the long even strokes, first on one side and then the other, sent her darting forward through the water so rapidly that she soon reached a turn in the creek which she had never pa.s.sed before, and as she rounded the curve such a beautiful sight greeted her that she cried out in pleased surprise, "How perfectly _heavenly_!"

On one side the bank towered up into a high, steep cliff, straight as a wall. It was completely covered with ferns; delicate, feathery maiden-hair ferns, as luxuriantly green as in mid-summer. In this sheltered spot they were still left untouched by the frost, although it was now December. Everywhere else vegetation was dry and sere, but the green freshness of this bank was accounted for by a number of tiny water-falls splashing down from unseen springs above, and sending a light spray in every direction, as fine as mist.

"I'm coming straight back here in the morning," she said to herself, "and dig up a lot of these ferns before the frost gets them. I can't think of anything lovelier to send to Gay for a Christmas greeting than a clump of them growing in a box--a rustic box covered with bark and dainty lichens. One would be nice for Mrs. Rochester, too. She's just the kind that would appreciate such a gift. Well, that solves two of my hardest problems of what to give." That trip up the creek in _The Swan_ was a voyage of discovery in more ways than one, for Mary came upon the fact that she had grown older in the last quarter of an hour, quite as suddenly and unexpectedly as she had come upon the fern-bank. That cry of Jack's, "Heavens! If I could only end it all!" had shocked her into a deeper understanding of pain, and human limits of endurance.

She had always prided herself on her ability to imagine herself in other people's places, and until now had believed that she fully understood and appreciated the depths of Jack's suffering. Now she saw that she had not even begun to fathom it. His bravery had deceived her.

All the while that she had been thinking that he was growing accustomed to his lot and that time was making it easier for him to bear, a fire of rebellion was smouldering fiercely within him, making each day one of new torture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY WARE in TEXAS

"She sent the boat down stream with long swift strokes."]

Because she could plaster up her own small hurts with plat.i.tudes and proverbs, and ease her disappointments by counting her blessings "as one would count the beads upon a rosary" she had vainly imagined that all this would be balm for him. How many times she had offered him such comfort, feeling with childish complacency that she was helping to ease his pain. She understood now. A sugarplum may help one to forget a bee-sting, but a death-thrust is another matter.

Absorbed in her thoughts, she sent the boat down stream with long, swift strokes, not noticing how fast it was going. Helped by the current, she came in sight of Jack and Norman before she had mentally adjusted herself to her new view-point. She was afraid that as soon as she and Jack were left alone again they would find themselves facing the same wall of blank despair, and she dreaded it. So to gain time, she began calling to them about the wonderful bank of ferns she had discovered, and made several awkward thrusts of the oar in an attempt to land, before she finally ran the boat up on the bank.

But Norman did not leave them alone. Deciding that that secluded spot would be a good place to chain the boat, and that it was time to be doing his evening ch.o.r.es, he slipped the padlock key in his pocket and handed the oar over to Mary, saying, "You carry this and I'll wheel the chair."

Jack had taken a new grip on his courage, and if Mary could have but known it, it was by the help of one of the very means she had branded as futile, a few moments before. The sight of the bloodstone on his watch-fob, as he glanced at the time, recalled the story of the poor Jester who had been born in Mars month, like himself, and for that reason had cause to claim undaunted courage as the "jewel of his soul."

The merest flicker of a smile crossed Jack's grimly-set lips as he looked down at the bloodstone and thought of all it stood for; and pulling himself together he whispered the Jester's vow between clenched teeth: "I'll keep my oath until the going down of one more sun."

When Mary joined them he was chaffing Norman quite as usual, and immediately began to joke about the awkward landing she had made. On the way home Norman laughed often, thinking that Jack was in one of his jolliest moods; but Mary walked beside them, the oar over her shoulder, saying to herself, "And under all this brave show, _he's feeling every minute that he'd be glad to die_!"

When she reached the house Mrs. Ware met them at the door, and Mary, pa.s.sing in quietly as Norman began telling about the boat, suddenly remembered that that was not the natural way for her to come home.

Whenever she had any news she fairly tumbled into the house in her haste to tell it. The boys knew that she had discovered the bank of ferns, and that it was as exciting as Norman's discovery of a boat, because it would provide some of her Christmas presents without cost. Yet here she was walking in as calmly as if she were fifty years old and had outgrown her girlish enthusiasms. It certainly was not natural.

So she turned back and interrupted Norman, because that was what she always did when she was in a hurry to tell things, and she tried to make her description as full of life and color as she usually did; but all the time she had a feeling that she was acting.

Mrs. Ware expressed her interest with many pleased exclamations as she always did when Mary came to her with any new-found cause for rejoicing, but Mary, suddenly grown keen of vision, saw the look of anxiety and weariness that seemed to lie in the back of her eyes behind the smile.

"I wonder," she mused, "if mamma is acting, too, if her gladness is only on the surface, and she smiles to keep up her courage and ours, as they say little boys whistle in the dark. Oh, it's dreadful to grow up if one has to lose faith in this being a good old world. It used to seem so happy all the time, and now it's all so sorrowful and out of joint."

She went into her room to wash her hands and get an ap.r.o.n before going out into the kitchen to help prepare supper. As she stood tying the ap.r.o.n-strings, she looked up at Lloyd Sherman's picture which hung over her bed, as it used to hang in Warwick Hall and at Lone Rock, when she pretended that it was Lloyd's _shadow-self_, the chum to whom she could carry all her troubles, sure of silent sympathy. But somehow, while the beautiful eyes smiled down into hers as kindly as they had always done, they did not bring the sense of her presence. They did not speak to her as they had done those other times when she turned to them for the imagined communion that always brightened her spirits.

"It's never seemed the same since I knew she was engaged," Mary thought with a sigh. "Of course I know she's just as fond of me as she was before, but I can't help feeling that she's so taken up with other things now, her life so heavenly full since she has found her prince, that she _can't_ take the same interest in my affairs."

As she pa.s.sed the mirror she turned back for a second glance. The first had shown her the fresh unlined face of a girl of seventeen, but judging by the way she felt she was sure there should be wrinkles. The weight of world-weariness and disillusionment and foreboding which depressed her, certainly could not belong to youth. They must be the property of an old woman, in her sixties at least.

CHAPTER VII

CHRISTMAS

TEN days before Christmas Mary opened the bottom drawer of her bureau, in which she had placed each gift as soon as it was finished, and sitting down on the floor beside it, proceeded to take an inventory of the packages within. They were all wrapped, stamped and addressed, but she had made them ready without a single Christmas thrill. There was nothing in the climate or surroundings to suggest the holiday season, and she compared this year's preparations with the year before at Warwick Hall, when the very air seemed charged with a spirit of delightful expectancy; when everybody had secrets and went around smiling and humming s.n.a.t.c.hes of carols which the choir-girls were practising for the service in the chapel.

Mechanically she counted the bundles and checked them off her list: the ones for Holland, for Joyce, for Eugenia, the bunny doll with the chamois skin head which she had made for little Patricia. She was very well satisfied with them all, as well as with the fancy trifles she had made for Lloyd and Betty and the girls at school, with whom she still kept up a correspondence. They were inexpensive, but they were original and appropriate.

Allowing for the crowded condition of the mails, she decided that the packages which had the longest distance to go should be started that very day. These she took from the drawer and piled on her bed, and then got out her pen to begin the writing of her Christmas letters.

Now one may make all sorts of dainty gifts, and tie them with holly ribbon, and send them away in Christmasy looking packages which will bring a glow to the heart of the one who opens them, and yet do it all without one spark of festal feeling herself. But it is impossible to write a Christmas letter and put the proper zest into its greetings, unless one is a-tingle with it. When Mary discovered that fact, she tore up the sheets on which she had made various beginnings, and put the cork in her ink-bottle.

"I can't do it any more than I could keep Thanksgiving on the Fourth of July or New Year's on April Fool's day," she thought. "Luckily the letters travel faster than second-cla.s.s mail, so I'll take my packages to the post-office now, and then go out in the boat awhile, and think about snow and sleigh-bells and holly berries till I work myself up to the proper mood."

As she started out of the door her mother called to her to remind her that they needed eggs. That meant that Mary was to go around by the Metz place to get them on her way home, which would take so much longer that there wouldn't be much time for meditation in the boat. But it was in going for the eggs that she came across the very inspiration of which she was in quest.

Mr. Metz and his wife were sitting on a bench in the sunny garden near the kitchen door, when Mary opened the gate. Looking up the path between the stiff rows of c.o.xcombs and prince's feather, she could see that the old lady was knitting, as usual. He sat with a newspaper across his knees, and his spectacles folded in one hand. The other grasped the end of his long white beard which flowed almost to his lap.

They were both singing; singing with the quavering voices of age, a song which they had brought with them from their far away youth in the beloved Fatherland. It was a song of Christmas joy which they had carolled many a time around a candle-lighted tree. Their voices were thin and tremulous, and broke now and then on the high notes, but it was a gay little tune, very sweet and full of cheer; and Mary, who stopped to listen just inside the gate, was thankful that they had not heard the latch click. When it came to an end she waited a moment, hoping there would be another verse, but they began to talk, and she started on up the path. But halfway to the house she paused again, for they had begun another song.

"_Am Weinachtsbaum die Lichter brennen!_"

Their voices came to a sudden stop at the end of that line, however, as they became aware of an approaching visitor. Mary hurried forward saying, "Oh, I understood one word of it. You were singing about a Christmas tree, weren't you? The children in the blue cottages across from us have been talking about a 'Weinachtsbaum' all week. Please don't stop. It sounded so sweet as I came in at the gate."

At some other time the old couple might have been hard to persuade, but the holiday season was their high-tide of the year, and its return always swept them along with a rush of happy memories, to a state of enjoyment that was almost childish in its outward manifestation. Finding that Mary was really interested in hearing them talk of the customs of their youth, they began a series of reminiscences so interesting that she could have listened all day.

Seventy Christmases they could remember distinctly, besides the dim impressions of several earlier ones. In the course of describing them it came about quite naturally that they should sing her the interrupted song.

The old man, because he spoke better English than his wife, interpreted the verses first. But even his speech was halting and broken, and he pulled his white beard desperately, and used many despairing gestures when he could not find the right word. She, clicking her needles, kept up a constant nodding while he explained.

"On the Christmas tree the lights are burning. The children gaze at the what you call it--picture--scene--till the eye laughs and the heart laughs and the old look Himmelwartz, heavenwards that means, with blessed rapture."

"Yah, yah!" nodded the old wife, prompting him as he paused. "Zwei Engel"--

"Two angels appear," he repeated, going haltingly on with the next verse. Mary could not understand all that he tried to convey, but she caught the meaning of the last part, that the day brings G.o.d's blessing to young and old alike, to the white as well as the brown hair.

"It is the same all over the world," he said, clearing his throat preparatory to singing the lines he had just translated.

"We will be alone this year. We cannot go to our children and they cannot come to us. But we shall not feel alone. We will make ready one little tree, and in our hearts we will join hands with all the happy ones who greet the _Weinachtsbaum_. We will be part of that circle which reaches around the whole wide world."

The quavering old voices took up the tune, and although Mary recognized only three words, Christmas-tree, angels and heavenward, there was something in the zest with which they sung it, something in the expression of the wrinkled old faces, which gave her the inspiration she was in search of. It was as if she had brought to them a little unlighted candle, and they had kindled it at the flame of their own glowing ones.

When Mary went home she was more like her accustomed self than she had been for days. She went dancing into the house with the eggs, and immediately set about the writing of her Christmas letters in her usual resourceful way. Mrs. Ware looked up, much amused, to see her piling some fresh orange peel and bits of broken cedar on the table beside her ink-bottle.

"There's nothing like that combination of smells to make you think that Santa Claus is coming straight down the chimney," exclaimed Mary gravely, catching her mother's amused glance. "You may think it is foolish, but really it makes all the Christmases I have ever known stand right up in a row in front of me, whenever I smell that smell."

She rubbed a bit of the fresh peel and then a piece of the cedar between her palms to bring out the pungent fragrance, and afterwards, from time to time, bent over it for another whiff to bring her new inspiration.

By the twentieth of December the last letter and the last out-of-town package but one was started on its way. Gay's box of ferns, a ma.s.s of luxuriant, feathery greenness, sat on a window-sill, waiting for its time to go. The crate in which it was to be shipped stood ready in the wood-shed, even to the address on the express-tag. Then time began to drag. The next two days, although the shortest in the year, seemed many times longer than usual.

"It's like trying to keep things hot when somebody is late and keeps dinner waiting," complained Mary. "If you can't eat when it's all ready, some of the things are sure to dry up and some to get cold. I was worked up to quite a festive state of mind day before yesterday, but my enthusiasm is all drying up and cooling off now."

"Here's something to warm it over again," announced Norman, coming in from the express office with a box on his shoulder. "Here's the first gift to arrive. Let's open up right now, and open each thing that comes after this _when_ it comes instead of waiting for one grand surprise on Christmas morning. You never will try my way, and it would spread the pleasure out and make it last lots longer if you only would. You're bound to get more enjoyment out of each thing if you give your undivided attention to it."

For once Norman's suggestion, made yearly, was not opposed, and as he pried the lid off the box Mary flopped down on the floor beside it, Jack wheeled his chair closer, and Mrs. Ware came in from the next room in answer to their eager calls that it was from Joyce.

Each one of the studio family had contributed to the filling of the box.

The holly-wreaths on top, tied with great bows of wide red ribbon, were from Miss Henrietta Robbins.