XLII A Christmas Reunion — A Midnight Warning — How a Good Man Came to “The Happiest Day of His Life”
“Skies bright, and brightening!” was the clan watchword, in passing along the summons for a rally in the old home at Christmas-time, 1866, that should include three generations of the name and blood.
On Sunday, December 23d, we attended church in a body, in morning and afternoon. Not one was missing from the band except my brother Herbert, whose professional duties detained him over Sunday. He was pledged to be with us early on Monday morning.
That evening, we grouped about the fire in the parlor, a wide circle that left room for the babyest of the party to disport themselves upon the rug, in the glow of the grate piled with cannel coal. My father, entering last of all, stooped to pick up a granddaughter and kiss her, in remarking:
“I had intended to go down to hear Doctor Moore to-night. I am very fond of him as man and preacher. But”—a comprehensive glance around the room, pointing the demurrer—“you look so comfortable here that I am tempted to change my mind.”
A chorus of entreaties broke forth. It had been so long since we had had—“all of us together—a Sunday evening at home; there was so much to talk of; Christmas was so near; the night was damp and raw; there would be snow by ten o’clock,” etc.—all in a breath, until the dear man put his hands to his ears, ready to promise anything and everything, for the sake of peace.
This was before supper, a jolly meal, over which we lingered until the mothers of the company had to hustle the younglings off to bed by the time we left the table.
Returning to the drawing-room after hearing my girls’ prayers, and assuaging their impatience at the lagging flight of time, by telling them that, in twenty-two hours more, they would be hanging up their stockings, I found my father alone. He stood on the rug, looking down into the scarlet depths of the coals, his hands behind him and his head bent—in thought, not in sadness, for he turned a bright face to me as my voice awoke him from his revery:
“‘A penny for your thoughts!’”
I said it gayly, laying my hand on his shoulder. He turned his cheek to meet it.
“My thoughts were running upon what has kept them busy all day. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess it, but I lost one ’head’ of Doctor Hoge’s sermon this afternoon. I was thinking of—my children!”
His voice sank into a tender cadence it seldom took. He was reckoned an undemonstrative man, and he had a full strain of the New England Puritan in his blood.
I waited to steady my own voice before asking, softly, “And what of them, father?”
The query was never answered. The opening door let in a stream of happy humanity—mother, brothers, and sisters—Mea and her husband, Horace and Percy, Myrtle and her fiancé, “Will” Robertson, who would, ere long, be one of us in fact, as he was now in heart. They were full of Christmas plans and talk. Among other items one was fixed in my memory by subsequent events. In consequence of the intervention of Sunday, the business of decorating the house had to be postponed until Monday. The evergreens were to be sent in from the country early on the morrow. Percy reported that the snow had begun to fall. If the roads were heavy by morning, would the countryman who had promised a liberal store of running cedar, pine, and juniper, in addition to the Christmas-tree, keep his word?
“I will see that the evergreens are provided,” my father laid the disquiet by saying. “There will be no harm in engaging a double supply.”
Then Mea went to the piano, and we had the olden-time Sunday-evening concert, all the dear old hymns we could recall, among them two called for by our father:
“God moves in a mysterious way,”
and,
“There is an hour of peaceful rest,
To weary wanderers given;
There is a joy for souls distressed,
A balm for every wounded breast,—
’Tis found alone in Heaven!”
We sang, last of all, The Shining Shore, and talked of the time when the composer set the MS. upon the piano-rack, with the ink hardly dried upon the score, and trial was made of the music in that very room—could it be just eleven years ago?
My father left us as the clock struck ten. My mother lingered half an hour later. We all knew, although none of us spoke of it, that he liked to have a little time for devotional reading on Sunday evening, before he went to bed. He had not demitted the habit in fifty-odd years, yet I doubt if he had ever mentioned, even to his wife, why he kept it up and what it meant to him.
Our mother told me afterward that when she joined him in their chamber, the Bible was still open on the stand before him. He closed it at her entrance and glanced around, a smile of serene happiness lighting up his face.
“We have had a delightful Sunday!” he observed. “It is like renewing my youth to have all the children about us once more.”
He had had his breakfast and gone down-town, when we came into the dining-room next morning. At my exclamation of regretful surprise, our mother told us how he had hurried the meal for himself, pleading that he had much to attend to that forenoon. The snow was not deep, but it was sodden by the fine rain that had succeeded it toward the dawn of the gray December day, and he feared the evergreens might not be forthcoming.
“I shall send a couple of carts into the country at once,” were his parting words. “I would not have the children disappointed for ten times the worth of the evergreens.”
It was to be a busy morning with us all. As soon as breakfast was dispatched, the long table—pulled out to its utmost limit to accommodate the tribe—was cleared of dishes, plates, and cloth, and we fell to tying up parcels for the tree, sorting bonbons, and other light tasks. Mince-pies, concocted according to the incomparable recipe handed down from mother to daughter, in the Montrose and Olney families, for a century-and-a-half, had been baked last week, and loaded the pantry-shelves. My mother’s unsurpassable crullers, superintended by herself at Christmas, and at no other season, were packed away in stone jars; and, that no distinctive feature of Yule-tide might be missing from the morrow’s dinner, the whitest, plumpest, tenderest sucking pig the market could offer, lay at length in a platter in the store-room. Before he could go into the oven, he would be buttered from nose to toes, and coated with bread-crumbs. When he appeared on the table, he would be adorned with a necklace of sausages, cranberries would fill out the sunken eyes, and a lemon be thrust into his mouth. A mammoth gobbler, fattened for the occasion, would support him at the other end of the board.
I had offered last Friday to make pumpkin-pies—the genuine New England brand, such as my father had eaten at Thanksgiving in the Dorchester homestead.
The colored cooks could not compass the delicacy. He had sent home four bouncing pumpkins on Saturday, and two had been pared, eviscerated, and stewed. I sat at the far end of the table, beating, seasoning, and tasting. My mother was filling candy-bags at the other, when Myrtle rallied her upon not tasting the confectionery, of which she was extravagantly fond.
“Mother is saving up her appetite for the Christmas pig!” she asserted.
“I never eat sweets when I have a headache,” was the answer. “I did not sleep well last night.”
This led to her account of a “queer fright” she had had at midnight, or thereabouts. Awakened from her first sound sleep by the unaccountable thrill of alarm each of us has felt, in the impression that some one or something that has no right to be there, is in the darkened chamber, she lay still with beating heart and listened for further proof of the intrusion. In a few minutes she heard a faint rustle that ran from the farthest window toward her bed, and passed to the door leading into the hall. Thoroughly startled, she shook my father’s shoulder and whispered to him that there was some one in the room. He sprang up, lighted the gas, and made a thorough search of the chamber and the dressing-room. The door was locked, and, besides themselves, there was no occupant of the apartment. He had fallen asleep again, when she heard the same rustling noise, louder and more definite than before. There was no mistaking the direction of the movement. It began at the window, swept by the bed, and was lost at the door. The terrified wife again awoke her husband, and he made the round a second time, with the same result as before.
When the mysterious movement seemed to brush her at the third coming, she aroused her companion in an agony of nervousness:
“I am terribly ashamed of my foolishness,” she told him, shivering with nameless fears; “but there really is something here, now!” He was, as I have said in a former part of my true story, usually so intolerant of nervous whimsies that we forbore to express them in his hearing. He had mellowed and sweetened marvellously within the last few years, as rare vintages are sure to ripen. Arising now, with a good-humored laugh, he made a third exploration of the premises, and with no better result. When he lay down again, he put his hand affectionately upon my mother’s arm with a soothing word:
“I will hold you fast! You are the most precious thing in the house. Neither burglar nor bogie shall get you.”
“What was it?” we asked.
“Oh, probably the wind blowing the shade, or making free with something else that was loose. It was a stormy night. We agreed, this morning, that it must have been that.”
She spoke carelessly, and we took the incident as little to heart. Passing through the hall, awhile later, I espied my maid Ellen, who had lived with me for five years, whispering with a mulatto woman in a corner. They fell apart at seeing me, and Ellen followed me to the sitting-room.
“Rhoda was saying that the colored people think what happened last night was a warnin’,” she observed, with affected lightness. “They are awful superstitious, ma’am, ain’t they?”
“Very superstitious and very ignorant!” I returned, severely.
The trifling episode was gone, like a vapor passing from a mirror, before my brother Herbert appeared. He had arisen at daybreak, driven to Petersburg, and taken there the train to Richmond, arriving by nine o’clock.
At the same hour our father reached his office. I have heard the story of his walk down-town so minutely described that I can trace each step. It was more than a mile from his house to the office. There were no street-cars or omnibuses in the city, at that time. Sometimes he drove to his place of business; sometimes he rode on horseback. Generally, he chose to walk. He was a fine horseman and a fearless driver, from his youth up. At sixty-eight he carried himself as erect as at thirty, and made less of tramping miles in all weathers than men of half his age thought of pacing a dozen squares on a sunny day. As he had reminded his wife, in excusing his hurried breakfast, there were errands, many and important, to be looked after. He stopped at Pizzini’s, the noted confectioner of the town, to interview that dignitary in person, anent a cake of noble proportions and brave with ornate icing—Christmas fruit-cake—of Pizzini’s own composition, for which the order was given a week ago. To the man of sweets he said that nothing must hinder the delivery of the cake beyond that evening.
“We are planning a royal, old-fashioned family Christmas,” he subjoined, “and there must be no disappointments.”
The evergreens were ordered as stringently. Two cart-loads, as he had said, and two more Christmas-trees, in case one was not satisfactory. “There must be no disappointments.”
Not far from Pizzini’s he met Doctor Haxall, also “Christmasing.” The two silver-haired men shook hands, standing in the damp snow on the corner, and exchanged the compliments of the season.
“What has come to you?” queried the doctor, eying his friend curiously. “You are renewing your youth. You have the color, the step, and the eyes of a boy!”
“Doctor!” letting his hand drop upon the other’s shoulder, “to-morrow will be the happiest day of my life! After four terrible years of war and separation, I am to have in the old home all my children and grandchildren—a united and loving family. It will be the first time in eight years! My cup runneth over!”
He strode into his office with the springing step that had brought him all the long mile and a half; spoke cheerily to two or three employees who were on hand; remarked upon the weather, and his confidence that we would have a fine day to-morrow, and laid aside his overcoat and hat. Then he stepped to the outer door to issue an order to two colored men standing there, began to speak, put his hand to his head, and fell forward. The men caught him, saved him from falling, and supported him to a chair. He pointed to the door, and spoke one word:
“Horace!”
My brother was his partner in business, and he could not be far away. The messenger met him within a short distance of the door. The dulling eyes brightened at sight of him; with an inarticulate murmur, the stricken man raised his hand to his head, to indicate the seat of pain, leaned back upon the strong young arms that held him, and closed his eyes.
He was still breathing when they brought him home. Doctor Haxall had galloped on ahead of the carriage containing him and the attendants, to prepare us measurably for what was coming. The unconscious master of the home was brought through the hall between banks of evergreens, delivered in obedience to his order issued but three hours earlier. Two tall Christmas-trees and three wagon-loads of running cedar, pine, and spruce heaped the floor, and were pushed aside hastily by the servants to make way for the mournful procession.
He did not speak or move after they laid him upon his own bed.
One more hour of anguished waiting, and we knew that he had entered upon the “happiest day of his life.”