Part 3

For a tense instant Aunt Cheerful stared, stared at the smiling face of her big and gallant son with eyes so wild and startled that she seemed but a pitiful little crippled ghost swaying weakly upon her crutch, then the ever-busy crutch fell unheeded to the floor and Aunt Cheerful Loring fell sobbing to her knees, one trembling out-stretched hand clutching desperately at the ragged fur on Kris Kringle's coat as if to keep the dear apparition from fading away again before her very eyes.

"Oh, Robert, oh, my dear boy!" she cried incoherently. "It--it was the Christmas pines as the gipsy said--" then in the hush that spread electrically over the little chapel, she began to shake and sob and laugh so queerly that Lord Chesterfield leaped to her side. But Robert Loring, with misty eyes, bent and gently raised his mother to her feet.

"Brave, brave little mother!" he said huskily. "I did not know."

Somewhere in the tear-dimmed host of friends within the chapel, a kindly voice in a wave of quick consideration for the tearful little cripple clinging so pitifully to her son, struck up the Christmas hymn and once more, that eventful Christmas Eve, the strains of "Holy Night" went sweeping out from the hill chapel over the moonlit snow.

VII

"Lady Ariel"

VII

MEANWHILE in the Pine Bough Bedroom, Jean was writing a letter.

"My maid, Celeste, has forwarded to me your letter," she wrote, "and now when I know that I must write you where I am and why I have come here, that at last I must answer your insistent question, oh, Robert!--it is very hard indeed.

"How mockingly to-night your words are ringing in my ears!

"'And so,' you said that memorable night, 'it is but right for me to tell you now, Jean, that with marriage, if you grant me that happiness, my brave and lonely little mother comes back into my home-life for all time!'

"Very handsome and very resolute you looked, but Robert, I wonder if you guessed what a queer resentful chill crept into my selfish heart at your words. Like a grim leper stalking at my side rose the thought that once more Life was ironically robbing me of its finest and sweetest. Oh, Robert, how can I write you now that I did not want your mother in my home and life, intruding upon the first happiness of my lonely life--that I wanted only you!

"I asked you to wait without seeing me again until I should write you and with Celeste's connivance I slipped away in the night, bent upon the maddest, crudest whim that ever selfish heart devised. For I came to the little village you had so often described--to Westowe--and I came--yes, I must write it all crude and narrow as it is--to appraise, to coldly analyze and dissect--your mother, to see if I deemed her _worthy_ a place in my home and my new life with you! And out of the rain and dark, Fate's twinkling light lured me to her very door!

"For, Robert, I am here in the dear peace and quiet of this pine-scented lane, unknown, unquestioned, trusted as I surely do not deserve, lingering on day by day with this dear, brave little mother of yours, and now I know that it is I who am not worthy, that my very quest was a profanation that makes my cheeks burn with the utter shame of it. And something has stirred in my lonely heart at the sight of her that has been hushed since early childhood. So often these days I find myself repeating those wonderful words of Lowell's:

"'The leper no longer crouched at his side, But stood before him glorified, Shining and tall and fair and straight As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate.

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And the Voice that was calmer than silence said "Lo, it is I, be not afraid! In many climes, without avail, Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail Behold it is here."'"

"So the leper of selfish resentment no longer crouches at my side. Instead there is something so shining and beautiful that I grow afraid. 'In many climes without avail!' And even that is I, Egypt and India and Syria and the uttermost parts of the world, so in a mad search for life I have gone and gone again and here in the heart of the pines I have found life and peace and love, the Holy Grail.

"After all, Robert, how much of life's heart-glow I have been denied until now. Those black and bitter childhood days, the under-current of resentment because the only heir to the Varian millions was not a boy, the tearless agony of the nights when first divorce and later death took my father and mother out of my life and I cried for sisters, for brothers, for cousins, for anything in God's world to give some touch of humanness to my barren life--such is my cycle of memory. I wonder if you can guess the utter desolation that comes with the knowledge that you are quite alone with never a single blood-tie to warm the ice about your heart.

"But, now, I have worked with my hands. I have scrubbed and ironed and baked, I have lived for another besides myself, I have watched the lives of two whose brave and cheerful compassion for each other bears in it the touch of holiness and I have come to know a wee soldier whose sturdiness on life's firing line, like that of your mother, has shamed me again and again. Such a wonderfully courteous little lad he is, Robert, with his hermit hut and his buried savings and his dreams of becoming a very great doctor. And some day when I can devise a way of breaking through the wall of his pride, I am going to make him what he dreams. Robert, I think the ice is melting around my heart at last. I am gaining a broader vision.

"Lady Ariel--it is so Aunt Cheerful calls me. Oh, Robert, how can I go to her and tell her why I came, how I linger here day by day hoping for courage to ask her pardon. And it has grown even harder now that I know that she would have the kind and beautiful wife of her son like Lady Ariel, that she has whimsically chosen to see in me her fanciful Lady of the Fireglow garbed wondrously in flame-colored satin! For how can I let her glimpse the cruel canker that lay in the heart of the daughter of her dreams. On the bed as I write lies a gown of 'flame-colored satin' and the Varian jewels, and this moonlit Christmas Eve when she comes from the chapel, I shall go to her as she has dreamed of me and on my knees I shall beg her forgiveness and a place in the beautiful shrine of her brave and cheerful heart.

"Oh, Robert, pray for me that I may not hurt her!"

Very thoughtfully Jean sealed the letter and directed it to Robert Loring, then she began a brisk pilgrimage about the quiet house. Holly and mistletoe and Christmas wreaths came mysteriously to light from a box beneath the Lady Ariel's bed, and soon the cottage among the pines smiled cheerfully through a Christmas flare of pine and holly. For Aunt Cheerful's Christmas interest had somehow waned after Robert's letter, and at the hermit's diffident suggestion, Lady Ariel had taken the pleasant task upon herself.

And when the deft and busy decorator had finished her work, she slipped into her cloak and went hurrying through the village toward the covered bridge. Very lonely and small the hermit's hut in the moonlight and with a catch in her throat, Jean took the rusty key from the nail and entered. Only Aunt Cheerful and Lady Ariel knew the secret of the buried savings. So to-night Jean hurriedly searched the hermit's floor for a certain creaking board, and when at last she drew forth the pitiful little canvas bag, she stuffed it full of greenbacks.

The chill silver of the winter moonlight flooded brightly through the open door, haloing the figure of the girl upon her knees in the desolate shanty and flashing full upon the ragged photograph above the table. So as Jean turned, her startled eyes rested directly upon the features of the hermit's father, and the girl stared aghast, her face white in the moonlight. For the face was the face of her nomad Uncle whose life had been irrevocably marred by the cruelty of her father. And as Jean stared, somewhere within her the ice melted for all time. Starved and eager strands of kinsmanship went flying out to twine hungrily about the gallant heart of Lord Chesterfield, and there upon her knees in the river shack, the heiress to the Varian millions fell to sobbing and praying incoherently for the love of her little cousin. And even as she prayed, faintly over the village came the echo of the Christmas hymn.

VIII

The Lady of the Fire-Glow

VIII

INTENT in the kitchen upon the preparation of a little surprise supper for Aunt Cheerful and the hermit, Jean had not heard the opening of the cottage door and therefore when a man's pleasant voice broke in upon her thoughts, she started so violently that the spoon in her hand went clattering to the floor.

"I beg your pardon," said Robert Loring, "but my mother bade me tell the Lady Ariel that she has gone with Hiram Scudder to carry the chapel's Christmas gifts to the poor of Westowe."

But oddly enough there was no answer at all from the white-aproned worker in his mother's kitchen, moreover she did not even turn her head and a little puzzled, Robert Loring raised his voice.

"I beg your pardon," he began again and halted--for Lady Ariel had turned as he spoke with a wistful smile of apology about her lips.

Unutterable astonishment flamed up in Robert Loring's eyes, but he did not speak, for there was something in Jean's face that somehow made the power of words depart. In a queer silence they faced each other, Robert Loring's memory flashing back to the night at the opera when he had first seen this girl before him in the white and silver of trailing satin, when the beautiful chill and bitterness of her eyes had left their imprint upon his soul for eternity. There were no shadows in her eyes to-night; and smoothing away the lines of soul-rebellion, a new strength and sweetness lay wistfully about her mouth. Ruffled hair and toil-marked hands! With a sudden bound, Robert Loring caught the girl's hands within his own.

"Oh, Jean, Jean!" he cried wonderingly, "what does it all mean? Celeste would not tell me where you had gone." But Jean slipped from his arms with a laugh that was half a sob.

"Oh, no! no! Robert," she said bravely, "you must read your letter first and know me for what I am."

So by the kitchen window, Robert Loring read his letter and when he finished his eyes were very thoughtful.

"Jean, dear," he said gently, "there is much for which you and I must one day beg my little mother's pardon but surely you have not erred so much as I."

By the fireglow with the Emperor humming a festive prediction of tea for the Christmas supper, Robert Loring heard the story of Lady Ariel's whimsical journey and its climax in the hermit's hut, but when the jingle of sleigh-bells outside announced the halting of Hiram Scudder's sleigh Jean went flying happily from the room and up the stairs. With a tap! tap! tapping! of the crutch--never so brisk and cheerful as to-night, Aunt Cheerful presently entered upon the arm of the gallant hermit.

"Oh, Robert, my dear boy!" she exclaimed happily. "How very like my dear Lady Ariel to surprise me with all this glow of holly and the Christmas wreaths. You can not imagine how cheerily they smiled at me through the pines! And dear me, bless the child's heart, the table is set for a little supper and the Emperor singing a Christmas hymn. Never, never was there such another Christmas since the world began."

But Robert Loring drew his mother to a seat by the fire and gently began to tell her something of the wife who was to come at last into his mother's life and his own, and somehow as he talked Aunt Cheerful grew very quiet and a little sad and presently she turned quite around that she might not look into the fireglow for since Lady Ariel's coming she had made wistful plans of her own about Son Robert's wife and the fireglow mocked her with the impotency of them all. And when a quick step on the stairway betokened the return of Lady Ariel, a great tear rolled slowly down Aunt Cheerful's face and turning she fell back in her chair with a cry of awe.

For surely so radiant a Christmas vision never stood framed in a holly-crowned doorway before. Flame-colored satin trailed about the Lady Ariel's slender figure; diamonds flashed about her throat and hair. And as she gasped and stared, first at the eloquent eyes of her son and then at the Christmas vision in the doorway, Aunt Cheerful Loring knew the truth. With a wild tapping of her crutch she went flying swiftly across the quiet room.

"Oh, my beautiful Lady of the Fireglow!" she cried, sobbing for the very joy of it all. "My dear, dear Lady Ariel!"

And Lord Chesterfield, kindly little courtier that he was, began briskly to poke the fire that he might not be an outside witness to this Christmas scene of joy and reunion, but a great loneliness swept over him and all the while he was stirring up the sleepy swashbuckler in the fire he was swallowing manfully. So in his tearful abstraction the hermit did not know that Jean's eyes were full upon him or that with a soft rustle of the flame-colored satin she had crossed the room and seated herself beside him.

"Lord Chesterfield," said Jean gently, "all these wonderful days you have not once told me your Lordship's name."

"Why, why, no, Lady Ariel," stammered the boy in quick apology, "I haven't. I do beg your Ladyship's pardon. It is Norman Varian."

"Norman Varian!" repeated Jean. "It is a very familiar name, your Lordship."

Smiling Lady Ariel slipped a paper into the hermit's hand. And these were the very astonishing words the paper bore:

"I hereby pledge myself by the memory of my dead uncle, Norman Varian, to make of my brave little cousin a gentleman and a scholar and a very great Doctor.

"Christmas eve. JEAN VARIAN."

And when Lord Chesterfield reached the familiar surname at the end, he knew why Lady Ariel's beautiful face had haunted his dreams--it was a face very like the face of his dead father; moreover he knew why the look in the girl's gray eyes had so hurt his throat for, unlike his own, they were Varian eyes. And as the brave little hermit slowly came to realize that in this lonely world he was not quite alone, that here were kindly eyes that had the right of kinsmanship to watch over his sturdy climb to manhood, his pride and independence ruthlessly deserted him and he dropped on his knees and buried his face in Jean's lap, a forlorn little lad unnerved at the end of a gallant fight.

"Oh, Cousin Jean," he blurted with a great sob, "I been so awful lonely 'specially when the wind blew nights and I missed daddy so and--and the canvas bag's been fillin' so awful slow and mos' every rain there was a new leak--"

Jean stroked her cousin's hair with a hand that trembled a little.

Now in the silence that fell over the room, the wrathful Emperor burst suddenly into a perfect bubble of ferocity. He steamed and he hissed and he bubbled and grumbled, he fumed at the mouth and rattled his helmet and tossed his plume of steam about in an imperial rage, for when had royalty been so persistently ignored as on this Christmas Eve! And presently as the four sat down to the Christmas supper, through the moonlit pines came the sound of the chapel bell ringing in a Christmas morning.

THE END

VAIL-BALLOU CO., BINGHAMPTON AND NEW YORK

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Transcriber's Note: Varied hyphenation was retained most notably in that Fire-glow or Fire-Glow retains a hyphen in some titles but not in the text.