The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

"Leave the windows alone, Tom," he said. "It won't hurt the night to see my fire."

He pulled his cricket close up to her, and took her hand to pet. It was cold, and her teeth chattered. However, they were all so snug and close together, and Christmas, that great warm-hearted day, was so near upon them, as full of love and hearty, warm enjoyment as the living God could send it, that its breath filled all their hearts; and presently Martha Yarrow's face was brighter than Catty's. They were noisy and busy enough. The programme for to-morrow was to make out; that put all heads to work to plan: the stockings to be opened, and dinner, and maybe a visit to the menagerie in the afternoon. That was Martha's surprise, and she was not disappointed in the applause it brought. It made the tears come to her eyes, an hour after, when she was going to bed, remembering it.

"It takes such a little thing to make them happy," she said to herself,—"or me, either," with a somewhat silly face.

She tried to thank God for giving them so much, but only sobbed. After the confusion about the show was over, and Catty had been wakened into a vague jungle of tigers and lions and Shetland ponies, and put to sleep again, they subsided enough to remember the winding-up of the day. Quiet that was to be; the children from Shag's Point were coming up, some half-dozen in all, for their share of Christmas. Poorer than the Yarrows, you understand? though but a little; in fact, there were not many steps farther down: peahens and cranberries were not for every day. Well, to-morrow evening Jem would tell them the story of the Stable and the Child, and how that the Child was with us yet, if we could only see. Jem was always his mother's spokesman, and put the meaning of Christmas into words: she never talked of such things. Yet they always watched her face, when they spoke of them,—watched it now, and looked, as she did, into the little room beyond the kitchen where they sat, their eyes growing still and brighter. There might have been a tinge of the savage or the Frenchman in Martha Yarrow's nature, she had so strong a propensity to make real, apparent to the senses, what few ideas she had, even her religion. A good skill to do it, too. The recess out of the kitchen was only a small closet, but, with the aid of a softly tinted curtain or two, and the nebulous light of a concealed lamp, she had contrived to give it an air of distance and reserve. Within were green wreaths hung over the whitewashed walls, and an altar-shaped little white table, covered with heaps of crimson leaves and bright berries, such as grow in the snow; only a few flowers, but enough to fill the air with fragrance; the children's Christmas gifts, and wax-lights burning before a picture, the child Jesus, looking down on them with a smile as glad as their own. A thoroughly real person to the boys, this Christ for childhood; for she built the little altar before this picture on all their holidays: something in the woman herself needing the story of the Stable and the Child. If she were doing a healthier work on the souls of that morbid Jem and glutton Tom than could a thousand after-sermons, she did not know it: never guessed, either, when they absorbed day by day hardly enough the force of her tough-muscled endurance and wholesome laugh, that she prepared the way of the Lord and made His paths straight. Yet what matter who knew?

But to go on with our story. There were times—once or twice to-night, for instance—when she ceased doing even her unconscious work. Assuredly, somewhere back in her life, something had gone amiss with this silly, helpful creature, and left a taint on her brain. The hearty, pretty smile would go suddenly from her face, something foreign looking out of it, instead, as if a pestilent thought had got into her soul; she would rise uneasily, going to the window, looking out, her forehead leaning on the glass, her body twitching weakly. One would think from her face she saw some work in the world which God had forgotten. What could it matter to her? Whatever hurt her, it was the one word which her garrulous lips never hinted. Once to-night she spoke more plainly than Jem had ever known her to do in all his life. It was after the children had gone to bed, which they did, shouting and singing, and playing circus-riders over the pillows, their mother leaning her elbows on the foot-board, laughing, in the mean time. Jem got up, after the others were asleep, and stole after her, in his little flannel drawers, back to the kitchen. By the window again, as he had feared, the woollen sock which she was knitting for Tom in her hand, the yarn all tangled and broken. Ready was by her knees, winking sleepily. The old dog was growing surly with his years, as we said: Jem remembered when he used to romp and tussle with him, but that was long ago: he lay in the chimney-corner always now, growling at Martha herself even, if her singing or laugh disturbed his nap. But when these strange moods came on her, Jem noticed that the yellow old beast seemed conscious of it sooner than any one beside, crept up to her, stood by her: that she clung to him, not to her children. He was licking her hand now, his red eye, drowsy though it was, watching her as if danger were nigh. A dog you would not slight. Inside of his hot-headedness and courage there was that reserved look in his eyes, which some men and brutes have, that says they have a life of their own to live separate from yours, and they know it. The boy crept up jealously, thrust his numb fingers into his mother's hand. She started, looking down.

"It grows into a clear winter's night, Jemmy," trying to speak carelessly.

So they stood looking out together. The fire had burned down into a great bed of flameless coals, the kitchen glowed warm and red, throwing out even a patch of ruddy light on the snow-covered yard without. A cold, but comfortable home-look out there: the bit of garden, fences, cow-house, pump, heaped with the snow; old Dolly asleep in her stable: Jem wrapped himself in his mother's skirt with a sudden relish of warm snugness. What made her pull at Ready's neck with such nervous jerks? She saw nothing beyond? Jem stood on tiptoe, peering out. There was no hint of the hailstorm they had prophesied, in the night: the moon stood lower now in the sky, filling the air with a yellow, frosty brilliance. Yet something strangely cold, dead, unfamiliar, in the night yonder, chilled him. Neither sound nor motion there; hills, river, and fields, distinct, sharply cut in pallor, but ghost-like: it made him afraid. There seemed to be no end of them; the hills to the north ran low, and beyond them he could see more blue and cold and distance, going on—who could tell where? to the eternal ice and snow, it might be. She felt it, he knew. The boy was frightened, tried to pull her back to the fire, when something he saw outside made him stop suddenly. Shag's Hill, the nearest of the ledge to the house, is a low, narrow cone, with a sharp rim against the sky; the moon had sunk half behind it, lighting the surface of drifted snow which faced them. Across this there suddenly fell a long, uncertain shadow, which belonged neither to bush nor tree: it might be the flicker of a cloud; or a man, passing across the top of the hill, would make it. It was nothing; some of the coal-diggers from the Point going home; he pulled at her petticoat again.

"Come to the fire, dear," he said, looking up.

Her whole face and neck were hot; she laughed and trembled as if some spasm were upon her.

"Do you see?" she cried, trying to force the window open. "Oh, Jemmy, it might be! it might!"

Jem was used to his mother's unaccountable whims of mood. Ready, however, startled him. The dog pricked up his ears, sniffed the air once or twice, then, after a grave pause of a minute, with a sharp howl, such as Jem had not heard him give for years, dashed through the kitchen into the wash-shed and out across the fields. Martha Yarrow turned away from the window, and leaned her head against the dresser-shelves: standing quite still, only that she clutched Jem's hand. The clock ticked noisily as a half-hour went by; the fire burned lower and dark. The dog came back at last, dragging his feet heavily, came up close to her, and crouched down with a half human moan. After a long time he got up, went out into the wash-kitchen in a spiritless way, and did not return again that night. She did not move. It seemed a long time to the child before she turned, her face wet with tears, and took him up in her arms, chafing his cold feet.

"It could not be! I knew that, Jemmy. I wasn't a fool. But I thought—Oh, Pet, I've waited such a long while!"

He patted her cheeks, soothing her,—the more effectually, perhaps, that he did not know what troubled her.

"Why, it's Christmas, mother," he said.

"I know that. You see, I thought," her eyes fastened on his in an appealing sort of way, "that, being Christmas, if there should be any lost body wandering out on the fields that God had forgotten—What then?" all the blood gone from her face. "Why, what then, Jem? No home, no one to say to him, 'Here's home, here's wife and children a-waiting to love you,—oh, sick with waiting to love you!' No one to say that, Jem. And him wandering out in the cold, going quick back to the mouth of hell, not knowing how God loved him."

"If there is such a one," Jem said, steadily, though his lip trembled, "God will let him know."

"There is no such one," sharply. "There is no one yonder but knows his home, and is nearer to his God than you or I, James Yarrow."

The boy made no reply,—sat on her knees looking earnestly into the fire. He had more nearly guessed her secret than she knew,—near enough to know how to comfort her. After a while, when she was quiet, he turned, and put his thin arms about her neck, smiling.

"Take me into your bed, mother, I'm so cold! Let me into old Catty's place this once."

She nodded, pleased, and, putting him to bed, soon followed him. When she held him snugly in her arms, the replenished fire making hot, flickering shadows from the next room, he whispered,—

"Next Christmas, mother! Only one year more!"

Again the quick shiver of her body; but this time her breath was gentle, a soft light in her eyes.

"Well, and then, my son?"

"Why, some one else then will call me son. How long he has been gone, dear! so long that I never saw him since I was a bit of a baby."

"Five years. Yes. Well, dear?" anxiously.

Her eyes were shut, he stroked the lids softly, thinking how moist and red her lips were: never as beautiful a face as the little mother's; for so Jem, feeling quite grown up in his heart, called her there.

"Well, then, no more trouble, but somebody to take care of us all the time. Whenever I see a preacher, now, I think of father"—stopping abruptly, with that anxious, incisive look so sad to see on a child's face.

She did not reply at first; then,—

"He preached God's word as he knew it," she said, dryly.

"And whenever I hear of a good, brave man, I think, 'That's like father!'"

Her eyes opened now.

"That's true, Jemmy! God knows that's true! So proud my boy will be of his father!"

She did not say anything more, but began playing with his hair, her month unsteady, and a bashful, dreamy smile in her eyes. She looked very young and girlish in the mellow light.

"He's not coarse like me, Jem," she said at last. "Even more like a woman in some ways. He always came nearer to you children, for instance; I mind how you always used to creep away from me close to him at night. He hates noise, Stephen does,—and mean, scraping ways, such as we're used to, being poor. My boy'll mind that? We'll keep anything shabby out of his sight, when he comes back."

"I'll mind," said Jem, dryly. "But—Well, no matter. We're to try and be like him, Tom and I? I understand."

She drew down her head suddenly into the pillow. Jem had been growing sleepy, but he started wide awake now, trying to see her face: the pretty pink color his questions had brought was gone from it.

"Did you speak, mother?"

No answer.

"I said we are to be men like him, Tom and I, if we can?"

He knew he had touched her to the quick somehow: his heart beat thick with the old childish terror, as he waited for her answer.

"Yes, you are to try, my son."

Martha Yarrow's frivolous chirruping voice was altered, with meaning in it he never had heard before, as if her answer came out of some depth where God had faced her soul, and forced it to speak truth. But when, after that, the boy, curious to know more, went on with his questions, she quieted him gravely, kissed him good-night, and turned over,—to sleep, he concluded, from her regular breathing. However, when Jem, after a while, began to snore, she got up and went to the kitchen-fire, kneeling down on the stone hearth: her head was on fire, and her body cold.

"So they shall be like him!" she whispered, with a fierce, baited look, as if by her wife's trust in him she defied the whole world. "I have kept my word. I've tried to make his sons what God made him in the beginning."

That was true: she had kept her word. Five years ago, when the great scandal came on the church in –, and their minister was tried for forgery, and sentenced to six years' imprisonment in the penitentiary, the first letter his wife wrote to him there had these words: "For the boys, my husband, they never shall know of this thing. They shall know you as God and I do, Stephen. I'll make them men like you, if I can: except in your religion; for I believe, before God, the Devil taught you that."

When the man read that in his cell, a dry, quiet smile came over his face. He had not expected such a keen opinion from his shallow, easy-going wife: he did not think there was so much insight in her.

"It's a deep sounding you give, Martha, true or not," folding up the letter. "And so the boys will never know?" going back to his solitary cobbling, for they were making a shoemaker of him.

If there were any remorse under his quiet, or impatience at fate, or gnawing homesickness, he did not show it. That was the last letter or message that came from his wife. The friends of other prisoners were admitted to visit them, but no one ever asked to see him; the five years went by; every day the same bar of sunlight struck across his bench, and glittered on the point of his awl, gray in winter, yellow in summer; but no day brought a word or a sign from the outer world but that. The man grew thin, mere skin and bone; but then he was scrofulous. He asked no questions, ceased at last to look up, when the jailer brought his meals, to see if he carried a letter. Sometimes, when he used to stand chafing his stubbly chin in the evening at the slit cut in the stones for his window, looking at the red brick chimney-pot he could see over the penitentiary-wall, it seemed like something of outer life, and he would mutter, "She said the boys would never know." Once, too, a year or two after that, when the jailer came into "quiet Stevy's" cell, (for so he nicknamed him,) Yarrow came up, and took him by the coat-buttons, looking up and gabbling something about Martha and the little chaps in a maudlin sort of way,—then, with a silly laugh, lay down on his pallet.

"I never felt sorry for the little whiffet before," said the fat jailer, when he came out. "He's so close; but it's a cursed shame in his people to give him the go-by that way,—there!"

But when he went back an hour or two after, he found he had gained no ground with Stevy; he was dry, silent as ever: he had come to himself, meanwhile, and shivered with disgust at the fear that any madness had made him commit himself to this mass of flesh.

"'Mortised with the sacred garlic,'" he muttered, with the usual dry twinkle in his eyes.