



Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and Distributed Proofreaders







THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE

By James Lane Allen



Author Of "Flute And Violin," "A Kentucky Cardinal," "Aftermath," Etc.



TO ONE WHO KNOWS


Je crois que pour produire il ne faut pas trop raissoner.  Mais il
faut regarder beaucoup et songer a ce qu'on a vu.  Voir: tout est la,
et voir juste. J'entends, par voir juste, voir avec ses propres yeux
et non avec ceux des maitres.  L'originalite d'un artiste s'indique
d'abord dans les petites choses et non dans les grandes.

Il faut trouver aux choses une signification qui n'a pas encore
decouverte et tacher de l'exprimer d'une facon personelle.

--GUY DE MAUPASSANT.




PREFACE


Any one about to read this work of fiction might properly be apprised
beforehand that it is not a novel: it has neither the structure nor
the purpose of The Novel.

It is a story. There are two characters--a middle-aged married couple
living in a plain farmhouse; one point on the field of human nature is
located; at that point one subject is treated; in the treatment one
movement is directed toward one climax; no external event whatsoever
is introduced; and the time is about forty hours.

A second story of equal length, laid in the same house, is expected to
appear within a twelvemonth. The same father and mother are
characters, and the family friend the country doctor; but
subordinately all. The main story concerns itself with the four
children of the two households.

It is an American children's story:

"A Brood of The Eagle."

During the year a third work, not fiction, will be published,
entitled:

"The Christmas Tree: An Interpretation."

The three works will serve to complete each other, and they complete a
cycle of the theme.



CONTENTS

       EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL

    I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET

   II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET

  III. THE LIGHTING OF THE CANDLES

   IV. THE WANDERING TALE

    V. THE ROOM OF THE SILENCES

   VI. THE WHITE DAWN




EARTH SHIELD AND EARTH FESTIVAL


A mighty table-land lies southward in a hardy region of our country.
It has the form of a colossal Shield, lacking and broken in some of
its outlines and rough and rude of make. Nature forged it for some
crisis in her long warfare of time and change, made use of it, and so
left it lying as one of her ancient battle-pieces--Kentucky.

The great Shield is raised high out of the earth at one end and sunk
deep into it at the other. It is tilted away from the dawn toward the
sunset.  Where the western dip of it reposes on the planet, Nature,
cunning artificer, set the stream of ocean flowing past with restless
foam--the Father of Waters. Along the edge for a space she bound a
bright river to the rim of silver. And where the eastern part rises
loftiest on the horizon, turned away from the reddening daybreak, she
piled shaggy mountains wooded with trees that loose their leaves ere
snowflakes fly and with steadfast evergreens which hold to theirs
through the gladdening and the saddening year. Then crosswise over the
middle of the Shield, northward and southward upon the breadth of it,
covering the life-born rock of many thicknesses, she drew a tough skin
of verdure--a broad strip of hide of the ever growing grass. She
embossed noble forests on this greensward and under the forests drew
clear waters.

This she did in a time of which we know nothing--uncharted ages before
man had emerged from the deeps of ocean with eyes to wonder, thoughts
to wander, heart to love, and spirit to pray. Many a scene the same
power has wrought out upon the surface of the Shield since she brought
him forth and set him there: many an old one, many a new. She has made
it sometimes a Shield of war, sometimes a Shield of peace.  Nor has
she yet finished with its destinies as she has not yet finished with
anything in the universe.  While therefore she continues her will and
pleasure elsewhere throughout creation, she does not forget the
Shield.

She likes sometimes to set upon it scenes which admonish man how
little his lot has changed since Hephaistos wrought like scenes upon
the shield of Achilles, and Thetis of the silver feet sprang like a
falcon from snowy Olympus bearing the glittering piece of armor to her
angered son.

These are some of the scenes that were wrought on the shield of
Achilles and that to-day are spread over the Earth Shield Kentucky:

Espousals and marriage feasts and the blaze of lights as they lead the
bride from her chamber, flutes and violins sounding merrily. An
assembly-place where the people are gathered, a strife having arisen
about the blood-price of a man slain; the old lawyers stand up one
after another and make their tangled arguments in turn. Soft, freshly
ploughed fields where ploughmen drive their teams to and fro, the
earth growing dark behind the share. The estate of a landowner where
laborers are reaping; some armfuls the binders are binding with
twisted bands of straw: among them the farmer is standing in silence,
leaning on his staff, rejoicing in his heart. Vineyards with purpling
clusters and happy folk gathering these in plaited baskets on sunny
afternoons.  A herd of cattle with incurved horns hurrying from the
stable to the woods where there is running water and where
purple-topped weeds bend above the sleek grass. A fair glen with white
sheep. A dancing-place under the trees; girls and young men dancing,
their fingers on one another's wrists: a great company stands watching
the lovely dance of joy.

Such pageants appeared on the shield of Achilles as art; as pageants
of life they appear on the Earth Shield Kentucky. The metal-worker of
old wrought them upon the armor of the Greek warrior in tin and
silver, bronze and gold. The world-designer sets them to-day on the
throbbing land in nerve and blood, toil and delight and passion. But
there with the old things she mingles new things, with the never
changing the ever changing; for the old that remains always the new
and the new that perpetually becomes old--these Nature allots to man
as his two portions wherewith he must abide steadfast in what he is
and go upward or go downward through all that he is to become.

But of the many scenes which she in our time sets forth upon the
stately grassy Shield there is a single spectacle that she spreads
over the length and breadth of it once every year now as best liked by
the entire people; and this is both old and new.

It is old because it contains man's faith in his immortality, which
was venerable with age before the shield of Achilles ever grew
effulgent before the sightless orbs of Homer. It is new because it
contains those latest hopes and reasons for this faith, which briefly
blossom out upon the primitive stock with the altering years and soon
are blown away upon the winds of change. Since this spectacle, this
festival, is thus old and is thus new and thus enwraps the deepest
thing in the human spirit, it is never forgotten.

When in vernal days any one turns a furrow or sows in the teeth of the
wind and glances at the fickle sky; when under the summer shade of a
flowering tree any one looks out upon his fatted herds and fattening
grain; whether there is autumnal plenty in his barn or autumnal
emptiness, autumnal peace in his breast or autumnal strife,--all days
of the year, in the assembly-place, in the dancing-place, whatsoever
of good or ill befall in mind or hand, never does one forget.

When nights are darkest and days most dark; when the sun seems
farthest from the planet and cheers it with lowest heat; when the
fields lie shorn between harvest-time and seed-time and man turns
wistful eyes back and forth between the mystery of his origin and the
mystery of his end,--then comes the great pageant of the winter
solstice, then comes Christmas.

So what is Christmas? And what for centuries has it been to differing
but always identical mortals?

It was once the old pagan festival of dead Nature. It was once the old
pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when
the hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was
the pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of
an upper world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and
the production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now
the festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal
children. It is now the new festival of man's remembrance of his
errors and his charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly become
the widening festival of universal brotherhood with succor for all
need and nighness to all suffering; of good will warring against ill
will and of peace warring upon war.

And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it
is on the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an
age to many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen;
setting forth man's pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that will
not stay with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its
ancient way upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.

This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.




I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET


A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a
few years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.

One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the desk
near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing and
turned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his
mental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through the
evergreens.

Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and
customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper,
as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large
one.  It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the
class of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which
possess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds.

Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwriting
lay thickly on the desk.  A table in the centre of the room was strewn
with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the
tops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing
scenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints
hanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the times
and places where they had been gathered, brought together in this room
of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:
the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens.

While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be
submerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other of
three picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.

Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy and
a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly
and disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them
looked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness
and good humor