Nobody had told Stella that Sol was going to die, yet she knew it and was sad. When she was sewing her sampler, preparing her lessons, or stoning raisins for cakes or puddings, she would bring her stool to the chimney corner and sit beside Sol while she worked. And sometimes she would talk to him and tell him stories. She doubted if he paid much attention to what she said, but she knew that he liked to have her there; she would look up and see him with his old face softened with tenderness for her, and his eyes bright with amusement. She was dimly aware that it was her distress which amused him. He regarded it much as he had regarded the rare tantrums of her childhood, it was just an expression of extreme youth that she would presently outgrow. Yet she could not imagine herself ever becoming philosophic about the things that happened to other people. Her own small buffetings she accepted willingly enough, subconsciously aware of her deep reserves of strength that would always be equal to the demands made upon her endurance, but other people’s buffetings sent her into a humbling rage at her own powerlessness. Here was old Sol becoming daily more knotted up by his rheumatism, and there was nothing at all she could do to unknot him. And presently he would die, and go right I away from them all, and if he did not like it there, she would not be able to sit beside him and make it nicer for him.
Having Sol away would in some ways be worse than having Zachary away, because she knew that Zachary would come back one day, but Sol would never come back. It was his own pain that flayed Zachary; it was the pain of others that did it to Stella, but both of them now had felt on the raw the burning touch of things as they are, and were growing up fast. "Things be as they be," said Sol suddenly and cheerfully. Every now and then he made these cryptic remarks, gazing into the fire or at Stella with his bright amused eyes. She did not understand him, and he had no words to explain what he knew. It was only by the tranquility with which he carried the burden of things as they are that he could reveal his innate knowledge that the hands that had put it upon him were the hands of love. "And it be Christmas Eve, see." She understood the last remark. She had been rebellious all day because of old Sol, and because Zachary had not come home. But that was wrong. Christmas was no time for moods. Christmas was like a star fallen down upon the earth, a miraculous thing. If you were paying proper attention to it, you were so astonished that you couldn’t pay attention to anything else. She looked up and laughed, and then looked ’round the room at the Christmas preparations. Sol looked too, chuckling as he noticed the old familiar setting for the miracle. It struck him now, as he looked upon it for perhaps the last time, as extremely comic. Its comicality had not occurred to him in other years, so much a part of it had he been. Now, withdrawn from it all as he turned to leave it, he saw how funny it was that a falling star should be welcomed with all this food and greenery.
The great cavelike kitchen looked magnificent, Stella thought, and well it might, for she and Mother Sprigg had been laboring at it for days. Fir and holly decorated the dresser and all the odd crannies and shelves, and the grand-father clock had a branch of yew from the tree on Bowerly Hill. Mistletoe that had been cut from the Duke of Marlborough hung from the central beam. The great table, pulled back against the dresser, was loaded with food. Arranged in rows at the back were rabbit pies, mutton pies, pigs’ trotters in brawn, a round of cold beef, and a huge frilled ham sprinkled with brown sugar. In front were apple pies, mince pies, syllabubs, Devonshire splits, saffron cake, and mounded dishes of Devonshire cream and candied fruits. The great wassailing bowl stood ready with its ladle, and the holly-trimmed platter was waiting for the Christmas bread. There was ale and cider, and Mother Sprigg’s homemade damson wine, elderberry wine, and sloe gin. Throughout Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day the front door of Weekaborough would stand wide in welcome to any who might come, be he angel, prince, or peasant. Father Sprigg’s dislike of vagabonds evaporated at Christmas. The dirtiest scoundrel was welcomed, warmed, and fed.
But the happy traffic had not started yet, and Stella and Sol and Hodge were alone in the kitchen. The fire burned low, waiting for the new yule-log to replenish it. The apples for the wassailing bowl were roasting in the ashes, the Christmas bread was baking in the bread oven in the wall, and delicious warm smells were creeping out. It was so still and quiet that the ticking of the grandfather clock sounded very loud. One could hear the rustling of the settling ashes, the scamper of a mouse in the corner, and the click of Stella’s needle against her dented little brass thimble. She was getting on faster with her sampler now, because she was turning it into a gift for Zachary. She had done quite a lot of the border of stiff little apple trees and strange birds that went all around the edge, and in the middle, she was going to embroider a frigate in full sail, with dolphins and seagulls sporting ’round it. When it was done, she would frame it, and Zachary should have it for a picture to hang on the wall. But she was aware that she had set herself a very difficult task. She would get on better, she thought, if she had a really nice workbox, with skeins of bright colors in it, and a real silver thimble.
3
"Stella! Stella! Tom Pearse has just driven into the yard, ‘ and the doctor and some friend of his are coming down the hill."
It was Mother Sprigg, calling down the stairs. The quiet hour was over, and Christmas was beginning. Stella and Sol looked at each other and their eyes were bright. Then Stella rolled up her work, put it away in the cupboard under the window seat, and shook out the folds of the new frock that Mother Sprigg had made for her for Christmas. It was soft gray wool, patterned with small red roses, and she had a new white apron to wear with it. Then Mother Sprigg bustled in, rosy and smiling, and smelling faintly of the lavender that she always kept between the folds of her best winter dress of dark crimson wool, followed by Father Sprigg creaking loudly in his Sunday suit. Then Madge came in from the yard, followed by Tom Pearse, and the doctor’s loud rat-tat sounded at the open front door.
"I’ll go," cried Stella, and with Hodge at her heels ran out to the hall to bid him welcome. “God bless you, Sirs," she said, as Mother Sprigg had taught her to say to all who came at Christmas, "and send you a happy Yuletide and a prosperous New Year." Then holding out her flowered skirts on either side, she curtsied, not the usual quick bob of a country child, but the full-blown curtsey of a great lady. Where in the world had she learned to curtsey like that, the doctor wondered.
"You remember Monsieur de Colbert, Stella?" he asked her.
But she had evidently not forgotten. Her thin brown face was alight with pleasure as she rose from her curtsey, and she looked up at the Abbé as though looking to see if he was just as she remembered him. Apparently he was, for she smiled and held out her hand. "Welcome to Weekaborough, mon Pere. Mind the step."
He took her hand and held it, looking down at her, but he did not say a word. The doctor, divesting himself of his greatcoat, looked at the couple curiously. Why should the child’s smile have made the man look for one moment as though mortally stricken, and then in the next moment, as he smiled back, almost as radiant as the child herself? There was a curious likeness in the steadiness with which each looked at the other. The rosy evening light shining through the open kitchen door softened the hard outlines of the Abbé’s face, and took the angularity from his tall figure. He had been visited by one of those strange moments of metamorphosis from which none of us are safe, when for an instant-brief as a Hash of lightning-some strong emotion, helped perhaps by a trick of the light, clothes us with an outward semblance that was ours twenty years ago, or will be ours in twenty years time. And the startled beholder knows what we looked like when we were young, or what we will look like when we come to die.
He had great beauty once, thought the startled doctor. Beauty, elegance and fire.
Stella, too. It was not a child who stood there, it was a woman in a gray dress, moving through the shadows with head bent, carrying some precious gift very carefully in her two hands.
"Stella!" he cried almost sharply, and she looked up and laugh
ed, a merry girl who had just been given a Christmas present, a brown paper parcel that contained she knew not what. Yet even when met by the glow and warmth of the kitchen, and Father and Mother Sprigg’s greetings, the doctor remained shaken. That young man had had so striking a beauty, and the attitude of the woman had been one of sorrow, and he was powerless to halt either the passing of the one or the coming of the other.
With the arrival of fresh neighbors, he was abruptly himself again. Stella and the Abbé, he saw, were sitting in one of the window seats, happy in each other’s company. He put the shock they had given him out of his mind, and let the country festival he loved take possession of him.
The two on the window seat were oblivious of the laughter and talk around the fireplace. Stella was unpacking her parcel very slowly, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted, finding the moments of anticipation so delightful that she must linger over them.
“Shall I cut the string?" asked the Abbé, producing his pocket knife.
"No, Sir!" ejaculated Stella in horror, for she had been trained not to be wasteful. "It’s a very good piece of string."
Her nimble fingers managed the knots and folded the string and brown paper carefully, and then she gave a sigh of delight at the sight of the silver paper and the scarlet ribbon. She took off the ribbon and smoothed it lovingly. "Is it mine too?" she asked.
"Of course! Of course!" said the impatient Abbé.
She tied it around her waist, and then she began taking off the silver paper. She knew that excitement was making her much too slow, but she could not help it. She did not get many presents, and she was almost too happy to breathe. The paper fell away and the box of carved cedarwood and inlaid ivory lay on her lap. She had not known that such beautiful things existed. It was a box for a princess. It was the sort of box in which the Lady Hester would have kept her jewels when she lived at llsham Castle. No, it was even lovelier than that. She remembered how she had thought once that words could be made into caskets to hold visions. This was as unearthly as one of those caskets. She looked up at the Abbé, her face transfigured. "Has it got dreams inside it?"
"Look and see," he said.
She lifted the lid a little way and looked inside. She gave a small cry of ecstasy and lifted it right up. "A workbox!" She forgot the Abbé, She forgot everybody and everything. She lifted the enchanting little covers and saw the reels of colored silks inside. She took out the emery cushion like a strawberry, held it cupped in her hands and said that Curly locks had strawberries and cream when she sewed. She took out the silver thimble and found it fitted exactly, and murmured something about Lady Hester having one just like that. She lifted the scissors and said at once, "It is a white swan flying over the water." She unearthed treasures that the Abbé had not known were there-a velvet pincushion like a scarlet toadstool, a needlebook made of a scrap of gold brocade, lace bobbins with beads hanging on the ends, some faded scraps. of silk and satin, a child’s necklace of blue glass beads, and a tiny pair of paste buckles. She lifted each treasure and held it, murmuring to herself before she put it back again, and the Abbé gathered from her murmuring that each was the starting point of a fresh dream in her mind.
As the child was now oblivious of everything in the world except her box, so he was oblivious of everything except the child. He found himself learning every detail of her by heart. The shape of her head with its short boyish curls, the curve of her neck, the outline of her thin brown cheek with the long dark lashes lying on it as she looked down at her box, the short upper lip, and the determined chin. Her eyes he knew already, star-bright, and of an unusually dark gray, and her smile that had such power to shake him. And yet it did not seem so much that he was learning the child as remembering her. She seemed so much a part of him that he longed to establish some physical contact with her, to touch the twisting curl in the nape of her neck, to put his arm ’round her and feel her heart beat against his hand. It was entirely ridiculous. It was like falling in love all over again.
"Well, my dear heart, did you ever see anything so lovely!” Mother Sprigg was standing in front of them, staring dumbfounded at the box. Stella looked up at her. "Monsieur de Colbert has given it to me."
“Given you that lovely workbox? A little poppet like you? Well, I never! It’s a box for a fine lady. Well!" Mother Sprigg hardly knew which of her emotions was uppermost, delight that her precious child should have such a lovely gift or sadness that she herself had not been the giver of it. And who was this fine gentleman, anyway, that he should give her child such a gift? He had risen and was standing politely before her.
"I hope the child has thanked you nicely, Sir," she said, and there was a tiny edge of sharpness to her voice. "Stella, have you thanked the gentleman for his gift?" Stella had been putting the box away in the window seat cupboard, where she kept her special treasures. Now she turned around, her face suddenly scarlet with distress. "No, Mother, I-didn’t."
"Well, of all the ungrateful girls!"
And now her voice was so sharp that the tears came suddenly to Stella’s eyes. Not knowing what she did, she slipped her hand into the Abbé’s, half for protection, half to show him how sorry she was that she had not said thank you. He gripped her hand tightly; bone of his bone she seemed.
"Madame, she was not ungrateful," he said. "Never have thanks been more charmingly expressed."
His stilted way of speaking annoyed Mother Sprigg. She disliked him intensely. A foreigner. And it hurt her to see those two standing there as though siding against her. She looked from one face to the other and it was an added aggravation to note that both of them had dark gray eyes. "Get your cloak, Stella," she said shortly. “It’s time we went to the wassailing."
4
The merry company trooped out to the orchard, led by Father Sprigg carrying the wassailing bowl filled with cider and apples, followed by Madge carrying a tray of glasses. It was getting dark now and Amos the new shepherd and Dick the new boy, and two of the guests, carried lighted lanterns. Stella, with her usual understanding, had attached herself like a limpet to Mother Sprigg, and the Abbé stood with the doctor delighting in the beauty of the scene.
They had grouped themselves in a circle about the old Duke of Marlborough, and they stood for a moment quietly. In the sudden silence, they could hear an owl hooting, and a church clock miles away tolling the hour, and a strange long surging sigh that was full tide tugging at Paignton beach, but that in the eerie twilight sounded like the sighing of the earth itself. The rough grass was already silvered with a heavy dew and the motionless branches of the apple trees made intricate patterns in silver and ebony against the deep bottle-green sky. The lantern light sent a warm glow over the rosy weather-beaten country faces, suddenly so intent and quieted. What were they all thinking of, wondered the Abbé?
Father Sprigg’s rugged bearded face, as he stood holding the great bowl where the hot roasted apples sizzled in the cider, sending up a fragrance almost like incense, was as absorbed as a priest officiating at some sacred mystery. They were all looking at the apple tree and it was no longer a tree but an old wise pagan god of fertility who stood as the guardian of this farm, seeing to it that the crops should not fail nor the well run dry, nor the ewes cast their lambs, nor the trees fail to bear their fruit in due season. Someone began to sing and voice after voice took up the song. The words, beginning “Health to the good apple tree!" were just rhyming doggerel, but the chant to which they were set sounded to the Abbé far older than the words. Wassail was a Saxon word. As old as that? He could believe it.
The song ended, and each man and woman took a glass, dipped it into the bowl and drank a toast to the god. Then Father Sprigg carried the bowl to the apple tree and poured out all that was left as a solemn libation over the twisted roots. Then it was over, and laughter and merriment broke out again.
They trooped back to the kitchen, dim and quiet now with old Sol sitting beside the dying fire. No one spoke while Father Sprigg and Amos brought in the yule log from t
he yard and laid it on the hearth. It was a branch of quick burning ash that had been carefully dried so that it should catch alight at once. Father Sprigg piled small branches of apple wood around it, and Stella plied the bellows with all her strength, and in a moment the flames were roaring up the chimney. Mother Sprigg meanwhile had gone to the bread oven, lifted out the Christmas bread, hot and spicy with a golden top, and laid it upon the holly-decked platter on the table. From a jar on a shelf she took a mildewed gray morsel, the last crust of last year’s bread, and threw it on the flames. The hitherto quiet company cheered lustily. Fire and bread had not failed through the year that had passed, and the burning of the last crust in the flames of the new yule log had assured fire and bread for the year to come. Then Mother Sprigg and Madge lit all the candles and everyone became very merry, eating and drinking, laughing and talking with amazing heartiness, and the doctor perceived that the entertainment would soon be no longer to the Abbé’s taste. "We’ll slip away," he said. "Stella, come with us to the garden gate."
Stella was glad to slip away too. She loved the wassailing and the kindling of the yule log, but not the noisy hour that came after. It seemed to spoil those quiet moments when the libation had been poured out and the flames had leaped up. Wrapped in her cloak, she walked sedately down the garden path between the two elderly gentlemen. The moon had risen now and the stars were bright. There was no breath of wind.
"Stella," said the Abbé, "the workbox belonged to a very old lady, a friend of mine who lives at Torre. She gave it to me for you. Will you come with me one day to visit her?"
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