Book 2 - Chapter 2

The Christmas Holidays

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his
duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts
of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and
snow.

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the
limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every
sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of
color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell
from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field
with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates
were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a
disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent
sadness"; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were
one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark
river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old
Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor
world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen
all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to
the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment
that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make
the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden
day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,--fell but
hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the
food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine
in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the
secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time,
with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in
his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom's fresh delight in home,
was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always
been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and
he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and
picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding
the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy.
There had been singing under the windows after midnight,--supernatural
singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence
that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the
church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon
her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust
away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight