The Doctor's Christmas Eve

LIVING OUT THE YEARS

An afternoon of early summer, at the edge of a quiet Kentucky town, on the slope of a grassy hillside within one of those dreamy enclosures where our earthly dreams are ended, the sunlight began to descend slantingly for the first time—as on white silvery wings—upon a newly placed memorial for a child. Across the top of the memorial was carved a single legend hoary with the guilt and shame of men and women of centuries long since gone. Beside the memorial stood a young evergreen as the living forest substitute of him sleeping below: it was of about his age and height. The ancient stone with its legend of atonement and the young tree thus brought together stood there as if the offending and the innocent had come to one of their meeting-places—and in life they meet so often.

Tree and mound and marble stood within an open enclosure of turf encircled at a score of yards by old evergreens touching one another.

Early in the afternoon two of these evergreens had some of their lower interlapping boughs softly pushed apart, and into the open space there stepped excitedly a frail little figure in a frock of forget-me-not blue. Just inside the boughs which folded behind her like living doors so that she was screened from view, she hesitated for a moment and looked about her for the dreaded spot which she knew she was doomed to find. Having located it, she advanced with uncertain footsteps as though there could be no straight path for her to the scene of such a loss.

When she reached it, she sat hurriedly down, dropped her bouquet on the grass beside herself, jerked off her spectacles and pressing her hands to her eyes, burst into an agony of weeping. Long she sat there, helpless in her anguish. Once holding her hand before her eyes, she drew from her pocket a fresh handkerchief; she had brought two: she knew her tears would be many.

At last she dried her red swollen eyes and brushed back from her temples the long sunny strands of wind-woven hair; she put on her glasses and picked up her little round brilliant country picnic bouquet; and with quivering lips and quivering nostrils looked where she must place it. With tear-wet forefinger and thumb she forced the flowers apart on one side and peeped at the card pushed deep within within—"From Elizabeth."

She got up then and went slowly away, fading out behind the pines like a little wandering strip of heaven's remembering blue.

Later in the afternoon the sound of slowly approaching wheels sounded on the gravel of the drive that wound near: then a carriage stopped. A minute afterwards there appeared within the open enclosure a woman in black, thickly veiled, bringing an armful of flowers. Some yards behind her a man followed in deep mourning also, bareheaded, his hat in his hand at his side—the soldierly figure of a man squaring himself against adversity, but stricken and bowed at his post. They did not advance side by side as those who walk most in unison when they are most bereaved and draw closer together as fate draws nearer.

When she reached the mound, she turned toward him and waited; and when he came up, without a word she held the flowers out to him. She held them out to him with silence and with what a face under her veil—with what a look out of the wife's and mother's eyes—there was none to see. He gently pushed the flowers back toward her, mutely asking of her some charity for the sake of all; so that, consenting, she turned to arrange them. As she did so, she became conscious at last of what hitherto she had perceived with her eyes only: the happy little bouquet of a child left on the sod. And suddenly there fell upon her veil and hung enmeshed in it some heavy tears, of which, however, she took no notice. But she disposed the flowers so that they would not interfere with—not quite reach to—that token of a child's love which had never known and now would never know time's disillusion or earth's disenchantment.

When she had finished, she remained standing looking at it all. He moved around to her side; and they both with final impulse let their eyes meet upon the ancient line chiselled across the marble:—

"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."

He broke the silence:—

"I chose that for him: it is the truth: he has been sent away, bearing more than was his."

She looked at it a long time, and then bowed as if to set the seal of her judgment upon the seal of his judgment. And, moved by some pitiless instinct to look at things as they are,—the discipline of her years,—with a quiet resolute hand she lifted her veil away from her face. It was a face of that proud and self-ennobled beauty that anywhere in the world gives to the beholder of it a lesson in the sublimer elements of human character. There was no feature of reproach nor line nor shadow of bitterness, but the chastened peace of a nature that has learned to live upon itself, after having first cast itself passionately upon others; and that indestructible strength which rests not upon what life can give, but upon what life cannot take away: she stood revealed there as what in truth she was—heroic daughter of the greater vanished people.

She dropped her veil and turned away toward the carriage. He drew to her side and once—hesitatingly, desolately—he put his arm around her. She did not yield, she did not decline; she walked with him as though she walked alone. During all the barren bitter years she had not been upheld by his arm: her staff and her support had been her ideal of herself and of her people—after she had faced the ruined ideal of their lives together and her lost ideal of him. It was yet too soon for his arm—or it was too late altogether.

He withdrew it; and he continued to walk beside her as a man who has lost among women both her whom he had most wished to have and her whom he might most have had. And so they passed from the scene.

But throughout that long obscurity amid which we are appointed to pass our allotted years, it is not the order of nature that all stars within us should rise at once. There are some that are seen early, that move rapidly across our sky, and are beheld no more—youth's flaming planets, the influence of which upon us often leaves us doubting whether they were baneful or benign. There are other lights which come out to shine upon our paths and guide us later; and, thanks be to nature, until the very last new stars appear. Those who early have left them they love can never know what late radiance may illumine the end of their road. And only those who remain together to the end can greet the last splendid beacons that sometimes rise above the horizon before the dawn—the true morning stars of many a dark and troubled life.

They had half their lives before them: they were growing, unfolding characters; perhaps they were yet to find happiness together. She had loved him with a love too single and complete, and she loved him yet too well, to accept anything from him a second time less than everything. Happiness was in store for them perhaps—and more children.

The working out of this lay with them and their remaining days.

But for the doctor one thing had been worked out to the end: that year by year he was to drive along turnpikes and lanes—alone. That every spring he was to see the sower go forth in the fields; that with his whitening hair he was to watch beside the beds of sick children; and often at night under his lamp to fall asleep with his eyes fixed upon The World's Path of Lessening Pain.

When the two were gone, it was a still spot that afternoon with the sunlight on the grass. As the sun began to descend, its rays gradually left the earth and passed upward toward the pinnacles of the pines; and lingering on those summits awhile, it finally took its flight back to the infinite. Twilight fell gray; darkness began to brood; objects lost their outlines. The trees of the enclosure became shadows; these shadows in time became as other realities. The sturdy young evergreen planted beside the boy as his forest counterpart, having his shape and size, now stood there as the lad himself wrapped in his overcoat—the crimson-tipped madcap little fellow who had gambolled across the frozen fields that windy morning toward his Christmas Festival.

In this valley of earth he stood there holding upright for all to see the slab on which was to be read his brief ended tale:—

"Unto a Land Not Inhabited."

THE END

Mr. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S

The Bride of the Mistletoe

To which The Doctor's Christmas Eve is a sequel, was described at the time of its publication as "so exquisite that not a few of his admirers will hold it the best work he has accomplished."
"It stands out in the midst of the year's fiction, and perhaps the fiction of many years, as a thing by itself. There is the spirit of Maeterlinck in these pages blended with the spirit of Hawthorne."—Current Literature.
The English press was enthusiastic, the London Academy declaring it "worth very many ordinary novels"; "conceived in a fine vision and developed with beauty"; "exercising over us a strong and at times a weird fascination."
The Literary World sums up: "We may assure the author's innumerable readers and friends that in his latest book he has lost none of the charm that first won them."
"Exquisite in form, full of color, finely finished." —Record-Herald, Chicago.

PUBLISHED BY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York

Mr. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S Novels

The Choir Invisible

This can also be had in a special edition
illustrated by Orson Lowell $2.50

"One reads the story for the story's sake, and then re-reads the book out of pure delight in its beauty. The story is American to the very core.... Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. The Choir Invisible will solidify a reputation already established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand."—Hamilton W. Mabie in The Outlook. Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

The Reign of Law A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields

"Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly finished as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness for spiritual suggestion that makes all his stories rich in the qualities that are lacking in so many novels of the period.... If read in the right way, it cannot fail to add to one's spiritual possessions."—San Francisco Chronicle.
Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

The Mettle of the Pasture

"It may be that The Mettle of the Pasture will live and become a part of our literature; it certainly will live far beyond the allotted term of present-day fiction. Our principal concern is that it is a notable novel, that it ranks high in the range of American and English fiction, and that it is worth the reading, the re-reading, and the continuous appreciation of those who care for modern literature at its best."—E.F.E. in the Boston Transcript. Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

Summer in Arcady A Tale of Nature

"This story by James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the season. It is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to nature and life in its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, in its incidents; indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must become classic. It is difficult to give an outline of the story; it is one of the stories which do not outline; it must be read."—Boston Daily Advertiser. Cloth, $1.25

PUBLISHED BY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York

Mr. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S
SHORTER STORIES

The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky

"'The simple, rural key-note of life is still the sweetest,' he had written in the opening pages of The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky; and it is this note which, played on the pipes of Pan in ever-recurring and fresh variations, yields the sweetest music, and, touched with the breath of his passion for nature, is transmuted into those 'invisible flowers of sound' which lie pressed between his pages."—The Bookman.
Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.50

Flute and Violin
and other Kentucky Tales and Romances

"He takes us into a green and fragrant world in that Kentucky home of his which he has shared with us so genially and delightfully before now. No one has made more of a native region than he—more beauty and more attractiveness. He has done for the blue grass country what Miss Wilkins has done for New England, what Hamlin Garland has done for some parts of the West."—Boston Transcript.
Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.50

A Kentucky Cardinal

"A narrative, told with naive simplicity in the first person, of how a man who was devoted to his fruits and flowers and birds came to fall in love with a fair neighbor who treated him at first with whimsical raillery and coquetry, and who finally put his love to the supreme test."—New York Tribune. Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.00

Aftermath A Sequel to "A Kentucky Cardinal"

"The perfect simplicity of all the episodes, the gentleness of spirit, and the old-time courtesy, the poetry of it all, with a gleam of humor on almost every page."—Life. Cloth, 12mo, illustrated, $1.00

A Kentucky Cardinal and Aftermath In one volume. Illustrated by Hugh Thomson. $2.50

Two Gentlemen of Kentucky Fifty cents

PUBLISHED BY

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Sixty-four and Sixty-six Fifth Avenue, New York

Clyx.com