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                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE




                             [Illustration]

                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                      NEW YORK. BOSTON. CHICAGO
                        ATLANTA. SAN FRANCISCO

                        MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
                       LONDON. BOMBAY. CALCUTTA
                               MELBOURNE

                   THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
                                TORONTO




                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE


                _Secretum meum mihi_
                                       FRANCIS OF ASSISI


                                   BY
                            JAMES LANE ALLEN

           AUTHOR OF "THE BRIDE OF THE MISTLETOE," "THE CHOIR
                 INVISIBLE," "A SUMMER IN ARCADY," ETC.


                               =New York=
                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                                  1910
                         _All rights reserved_




                            COPYRIGHT, 1910,
                       BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
                               * * * * *
           Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910.


                            =Norwood Press=
                 J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
                         Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




                              TO THE SOWER




                                PREFACE


THIS work now published under the title of "The Doctor's Christmas Eve"
is the one earlier announced for publication under the title of "A Brood
of the Eagle."




    "The Doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor,
    your closest friend now in middle life--do you ever tire of the
    Doctor and wish him away?"

    "The longer I know him, the more I like him, honor him, trust
    him."

                                     --_The Bride of the Mistletoe._




                                CONTENTS

                               PART FIRST

                                   I
                                                        PAGE
            THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE                         1

                                   II
            WHEN A SON FINDS OUT ABOUT HIS FATHER         32

                                  III
            THE BOOKS OF THE YEAR                         69

                                   IV
            THE BOOK OF THE YEARS                        107

                                   V
            EVERGREEN AND THORN TREE                     195


                              PART SECOND

                                   I
            TWO OTHER WINTER SNOWBIRDS AT A WINDOW       213

                                   II
            FOUR IN A CAGE                               233

                                  III
            THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT                        258

                                   IV
            TIME-SPIRIT AND ETERNAL SPIRIT               271

                                   V
            WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON          285

                                   VI
            LIVING OUT THE YEARS                         297




                                 PART I




                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE


                                   I

                         THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE


THE morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago
opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but
bitter day--with a wind like the gales of March.

Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled
counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with
movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless
landscape. They were the children of the neighborhood physician, a man
of the highest consequence in his part of the world; and they had come
from their home, a white and lemon- eighteenth-century manor
house a mile in their rear. Through the crystalline air the chimneys of
this low structure, rising out of a green girdle of cedar trees, could
be seen emptying unusual smoke which the wind in its gambolling pounced
upon and jerked away level with the chimney-tops.

But if you had stood on the hill where the two children climbed into
view and if your eye could have swept round the horizon with adequate
radius of vision, it would everywhere have been greeted by the same
wondrous harmonious spectacle: out of the chimneys of all dwellings
scattered in comfort and permanence over that rich domestic land--a land
of Anglo-Saxon American homes--more than daily winter smoke was pouring:
one spirit of preparation, one mood of good will, warmed houses and
hearts. The whole visible heaven was receiving the incense of Kentucky
Christmas fires; the whole visible earth was a panorama of the common
peace.

The two dauntless, frost-defying wayfarers--what Emerson, meeting them
in the depths of a New England winter, might have called two scraps of
valor--were following across fields and meadows and pastures one of the
footpaths which children who are friendly neighbors naturally make in
order to get to each other, as the young of wild creatures trace for
themselves upon the earth some new map of old hereditary traits and
cravings. For the goal of their journey they were hurrying toward a
house not yet in sight but hardly more than a mile ahead, where they
were to spend Christmas Day and share in an old people's and children's
Christmas-Tree party on Christmas Night--and where also they were to put
into execution a plot of their own: about which a good deal is to be
narrated.

They were thus transferring the nation's yearly festival of the home
from their own roof-tree to that of another family as the place where it
could be enacted and enjoyed. The tragical meaning of this arrangement
was but too well understood by their parents. To them the abandonment of
their own fireside at the season when its bonds should have been
freshened and deepened scarcely seemed an unnatural occurrence. The
other house had always been to them as a secondary home. It was the
residence of their father's friend, a professor in the State University
situated some miles off across fine country. His two surviving children,
a boy and a girl of about their own ages, had always been their intimate
associates. And the woman of that household--the wife, the mother--all
their lives they had been mysteriously impelled toward this gentlewoman
by a power of which they were unconscious but by which they had been
swayed.

The little girl wore a crimson hood and a brown cloak and the boy a
crimson skull cap and a brown overcoat; and both wore crimson mittens;
and both were red-legged and red-footed; for stockings had been drawn
over their boots to insure warmth and to provide safeguard against
slipping when they should cross the frozen Elkhorn or venture too
friskily on silvery pools in the valley bottoms.

The chestnut braids of the girl falling heavily from under her hood met
in a loop in the middle of her broad fat back and were tied there with a
snip of ribbon that looked like a feather out of the wing of a bluejay.
Her bulging hips overreached the borders of the narrow path, so that the
boy was crowded out upon the rough ground as he struggled forward close
beside her. She would not allow him to walk in front of her and he
disdained to walk behind.

"Then walk beside me or go back!" she had said to him, laughing
carelessly.

She looked so tight inside her wrappings, so like a jolly ambulatory
small barrel well hooped and mischievously daubed here and there with
vermilion, that you might have had misgivings as to the fate of the
barrel, were it to receive a violent jolt and be rolled over. No thought
of such mishap troubled her as she trotted forward, balancing herself as
lightly on her cushioned feet as though she were wind-carried
thistledown. Nor was she disturbed by her selfishness in monopolizing
the path and forcing her brother to encounter whatsoever the winter
earth obtruded--stumps of forest trees, brambles of blackberry, sprouts
of cane, or stalks of burdock and of Spanish needle. His footing was
especially troublesome when he tried to straddle wide corn-rows with his
short legs; or when they crossed a hemp-field where the butt-ends of the
stalks serried the frost-gray soil like bayonet points. Altogether his
exertions put him out of breath somewhat, for his companion was fleet
and she made no allowance for his delays and difficulties.

Her hands, deep in the fleece-lined mittens, were comfortably warm; but
she moreover kept them thrust into a muff of white fur, which also
looked overfed and seemed of a gay harmony with its owner. This muff she
now and then struck against her flexed knees in a vixenish playfulness
as one beats a tambourine on a bent elbow; and at a certain point of the
journey, having glanced sidewise at him and remarked his breath on the
icy air, she lifted it to her mouth and spoke guardedly from behind
it:--

"Remember the last thing Papa told us at the window, Herbert: we were to
keep our mouths closed and to breathe through our noses. And remember
also, my child, that we were to rely upon--_especially_ to rely
upon--the ribs and the diaphragm! I wonder why he thought it necessary
to tell us that! Did he suppose that as soon as we got by ourselves or
arrived at the Ousleys', we'd begin to rely upon something else, and
perhaps try to breathe with our spines and elbows?"

Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and her laughter had the audacity of a
child's satire, often more terrible in its small world than a sage's in
his larger one. The instant she spoke, you recognized the pertness and
precocity of an American child--which, when seen at its best or at its
worst, is without precedent or parallel among the world's children. She
was the image of a hard bold crisp newness. Her speech was new, her
ideas were new, her impertinence was new--except in this country. She
appeared to have gathered newness during her short life, to be newer
than the day she was born. The air was full of frost spangles that
zigzagged about her as she danced along; they rather seemed like
particles of salt especially provided to escort her character. If it had
been granted Lot's wife with tears of repentance to dissolve away the
crystals of her curiosity and resume the duties of motherhood,--though
possibly permeated by a mild saline solution as a warning,--that
salt-cured matron might admirably have adapted herself to the decrees of
Providence by producing Elsie.

The boy as she administered her caution stopped; and shutting his own
red mouth, which was like hers though more generous, he drew a long
breath through his nostrils; then, throwing back his head, he blew this
out with an open-mouthed puff, and a column of white steam shot up into
the blue ether and was whirled away by the wind. He stood studying it
awhile as it disappeared, for he was a close observer always--a
perpetual watcher of the thing that is--sometimes an observer fearful to
confront. Then he sprang forward to catch up with his sharp-tongued
monitress, who had hurried on. As he came alongside, he turned his face
toward her and made his reply, which was certainly deliberate enough in
arriving:--

"We have to be _taught_ the best way to breathe, Elsie; as anything
else!"

The defence only brought on a fresh attack:--

"I wonder who teaches the young of other animals how to breathe! I
should like to know who teaches kittens and puppies and calves and
lambs how to breathe! How _do_ they ever manage to get along without
country doctors among them! Imagine a middle-aged sheep--old Dr.
Buck--assembling a flock of lambs and trying to show them how to
breathe!" Judging from Elsie's expression, the lambs in the case could
not have thought very highly of this queer and genial Dr. Buck.

"But _they_ are all four-legged creatures, Elsie; and _they_ breathe
backward and forward; if you are a two-legged animal and stand up
straight, you breathe up and down: it's quite different! It's easier!"

"Then I suppose the fewer legs a thing has, the harder it is to get its
breath. And I suppose if we ventured to stand on _one_ leg, we'd all
soon suffocate! Dear me! why _don't_ all one-legged people die at once!"

The lad looked over the field of war on which it would seem that he was
being mowed down by small-gun fire before he could get his father's
heavy artillery into action. He decided to terminate the wordy
engagement, a prudential manoeuvre of the wiser head but slower tongue.

"Father is right," he declared. His manner of speaking was sturdy and
decisive: it was meant to remind her first that he had enough gallantry
as a male to permit her to crowd him out of the path; but that the
moment a struggle for mental footing arose between them, he reserved the
whole road: the female could take to the weeds! He notified her also
that he stood with his father not only in this puzzling question of legs
and parlous types of respiration, but that the men in the family were
regularly combined against the women--like good organized against evil!

But now something further had transpired. Had there been present on the
winter fields that morning an ear trained to separate our complex human
tones into simple ones--to disengage one from another the different
fibres of meaning which always make up even the slenderest tendril of
sound (as there is a cluster of grapes to a solitary stem), it might, as
it noted one thing, have discovered another. While the boy asserted his
father to be right in the matter they were debating, there escaped from
him an accent of admission that his father was wrong--wrong in some far
graver affair which was his discovery and his present trouble.

Therefore his voice, which should have been buoyant, for the instant was
depressed; and his face, which should have been a healthy boy's happy
face, was overcast as by a foreign interference. You might have likened
it to a small luminary upon the shining disk of which a larger body,
traversing its darkened orbit, has just begun to project a wavering
shadow. And thus some patient astronomer of our inter-orbited lives,
sweeping the spiritual heavens for signs of its pendent mysteries, here
might have arrested his telescope to watch the portent of a celestial
event: was there to take place the eclipse of a son by a father?

Certainly at least this weight of responsibility on the voice must have
caused it to strike only the more winningly upon any hearer. It was such
a devoted, loyal voice when he thus spoke of his father, with a curious
quavering huskiness of its own, as though the bass note of his distant
manhood were already beginning to clamor to be heard.

The voice of the little girl contrariwise was a shrill treble. Had you
first become aware of it at your back, you must instantly have wheeled
to investigate the small creature it came from, as a wild animal quickly
turns to face any sound that startles its instincts. Voltaire might have
had such a voice if he had been a little girl. Yet to look at her, you
would never have imagined that anything but the honey of speech could
have dripped from so perfect a little rose. (Many surprises await
mankind behind round amiable female faces: shrews are not _all_ thin.)

Instead of being silenced by her brother's ultimatum, she did not deign
to notice it, but continued to direct her voluble satire at her
father--quite with the air of saying that a girl who can satirize a
parent is not to be silenced by a son.

"... forever telling us that American children must have the newest and
best way of doing everything.... My, my, my! The working of our jaws!
And the drinking and the breathing; and the stretching and the bending:
developing everything we have--and everything we haven't! I am even
trying now to find an original American way to go to sleep at night and
to wake up in the morning! Dear me, but old people can be silly without
knowing it!" She laughed with much self-approval.

For Elsie had already entered into one of mankind's most dependable
recreations--the joy of listening to our own words: into that economic
arrangement of nature whereby whatsoever a human being might lose
through the vocal cords is returned to the owner along the auditory
nerve! So that a woman can eat her colloquial cake times over: and each
time, having devoured it, can return it to the storeroom and have it
brought out as whole and fresh as ever--sometimes actually increased in
size. And a man can send his vocal Niagara through his whirlpool rapids
and catch it again above the falls! The more gold the delver unearths,
the more he can empty back into the thinking mine. One can sit in his
own cranial theatre and produce his own play: he can be stage and
orchestra, audience and critic; and he can see that the claque does not
get drowsy and slack: it never does--in _this_ case!

The child now threw back her round winter-rose of a face and started
along the path with a fresh outburst of speed and pride. Access of
impertinence seemed to have released in her access of vitality. Perhaps
it had. Perhaps it always does. Perhaps life itself at the full is sheer
audacity.

The lad scrambled roughly along, and merely repeated the words that
sufficed for him:--

"Father knows."

Suddenly he gave a laughing outcry, and stood still.

"Look!" he called out, with amusement at his plight.

He had run into some burdock, and the nettles had stuck to his yarn
stockings like stinging bees--a cluster of them about his knees and
calves. He drew off his gloves, showing the strong, overgrown hands of
boyhood: they, like his voice, seemed impatiently reaching out for
maturity.

When he overtook his companion, who had not stopped, he had transferred
a few of the burrs to his skull cap. He had done this with crude
artistry--from some faint surviving impulse of primitive man to decorate
his body with things around him in nature: especially his head (possibly
he foresaw that his head would be most struck at). The lad was pleased
with his caper; and, smiling, thrust his head across her path, expecting
her to take sympathetic notice. He had reason to expect this, because on
dull rainy days at home he often amused her with the things he did and
the things he made: for he was a natural carpenter and toy-maker. But
now she took only the contemptuous notice of disapproval. This morning
her mind was intent on playthings of positive value: she was a little
travelling ten-toed pagoda of holiday greed. Every Christmas she
prepared for its celebration with a balancing eye to what it would cost
her and what it would bring in: she always calculated to receive more
than she gave: for Elsie, the Nativity must be made _to pay_!

He resented her refusal to approve his playfulness by so much as a
smile, and he came back at her by doing worse:--

"Why didn't I think to bring all the burrs along and make a Christmas
basket for Elizabeth? Now what will I give her?"

This drew out a caustic comment quickly enough:--

"Poor Elizabeth!"

A child resents injustice with a blow or rage or tears: the old have
learned to endure without a sign--waiting for God's day of judgment (or
their first good opportunity!).

He was furious at the way she said "Poor Elizabeth"--as though
Elizabeth's hands would be empty of gifts from him.

"You _know_ I have _bought_ my presents for Elizabeth, Elsie!" he
exclaimed. "But Elizabeth thinks more of what I _make_ than of what I
_buy_," he continued hotly. "And the less it is worth, the more she
values it. But you can't understand _that_, Elsie! And you needn't try!"

The little minx laughed with triumph that she had incensed him.

"I don't expect to try!" she retorted blithely. "I don't see that I'd
gain anything, if I _did_ understand. You and Elizabeth are a great deal
too--"

He interrupted overbearingly:--

"Leave Elizabeth out! Confine your remarks to me!"

"My remarks will be wholly unconfined," said Elsie, as she trotted
forward.

He scrambled alongside in silent rage. Perhaps he was thinking of his
inability to reach protected female license. He may obscurely have felt
that life's department of justice was being balked at the moment by its
department of natural history--a not uncommon interference in this too
crowded world. At least he put himself on record about it:--

"If you were a boy, Elsie, you'd get taken down a buttonhole!"

"Don't you worry about my buttonholes!" chirped Elsie. "My buttonholes
are where they ought to be!"

It was not the first time that he had made something of this sort for
Elizabeth. One morning of the May preceding he had pulled apart the
boughs of a blooming lilac bush in the yard, and had seen a nest with
four pale-green eggs. That autumn during a ramble in the woods and
fields he had taken burrs and made a nest and deposited in it four
pale-green half-ripe horse chestnuts.

Elizabeth, who did not amount to much in this world but breath and a
soft cloud of hair and sentiment, had loyally carried it off to her
cabinet of nests. These were duly arranged on shelves, and labelled
according to species and life and love: "The Meadow Lark's"--"The
Blue-bird's"--"The Orchard Oriole's"--"The Brown Thrasher's"; on and on
along the shelves. At the end of a row she placed this treasured
curiosity, and inscribed it, "An Imitation by a Young Animal."

Elizabeth's humor was a mild beam.

Do country children in that part of the world make such playthings now?
Do they still look to wild life and not wholly to the shops of cities
for the satisfying of their instincts for toys and games and fancies?

Do alder stalks still race down dusty country lanes as thoroughbred
colts, afterwards to be tied in their stalls in fence corners with
halters of green hemp? Does any little rustic instrument-maker now
draw melodies from a homegrown corn-stalk? Across rattling
window-panes of old farm-houses--between withered sashes--during long
winter nights does there sound the aeolian harp made with a hair from a
horse-tail? Do boys still squeeze the red juice of poke-berries on the
plumage of white barnyard roosters, thus whenever they wish bringing
on a cock-fight between old far-squandered Cochins, who long
previously had entered into a treaty as to their spheres of influence
in a Manchuria of hens? Do the older boys some wet night lead the
youngest around the corner of the house in the darkness and show him,
there! rising out of the ground! the long expected Devil come at last
(as a pumpkin carved and candle-lighted) for his own particular urchin?
When in autumn the great annual ceremony of the slaughter of the swine
takes place on the farms at the approach of the winter sol