It was not until Kate Dayton reached her father’s gate that the spell wrought by the flickering firelight and the dim glow of the ghostly candle wore off. The crisp air of the winter night—for it was now quite dark—had helped, but the sight of Mark’s waiting figure striding along the snow-covered path to her home and his manly outspoken apology, “Please forgive me, Kate, I made an awful fool of myself,” followed by her joyous refrain, “Oh, Mark! I’ve been so wretched!” had done more. It had all come just as Cousin Annie had said; there had been neither pride nor anger. Only the Little Gray Lady’s timely word.
But if the spell was broken the pathetic figure of the dear woman, her eyes fixed on the dying embers, still lingered in Kate’s mind.
“Oh, Mark, it is so pitiful to see her!—and I got so frightened; the whole room seemed filled with ghosts. Christmas seems her loneliest time. She won’t have but one candle lighted, and she sits and mopes in the dark. Oh, it’s dreadful! I tried to cheer her up, but she says she likes to sit in the dark, because then all the dead people she loves can come to her. Can’t we do something to make her happy? She is so lovely, and she is so little, and she is so dear!”
They had entered the house, now a blaze of light. Kate’s father was standing on the hearth rug, his back to a great fireplace filled with roaring logs.
“Where have you two gadabouts been?” he laughed merrily. “What do you mean by staying out this late? Don’t you know it’s Christmas Eve?”
“We’ve been to see Cousin Annie, daddy; and it would make your heart ache to look at her! She’s there all alone. Can’t you go down and bring her up here?”
“Yes, I could, but she wouldn’t come, not on Christmas Eve. Did she have her candle burning?”
“Yes, just one poor little miserable candle that hardly gave any light at all.”
“And it was in the corner on a little table?”
“Yes, all by itself.”
“Poor dear, she always lights it. She’s lighted it for almost twenty years.”
“Is it for somebody she loved who died?”
“No—it’s for somebody she loved who is alive, but who never came back and won’t.”
He studied them both for a moment, as if in doubt, then he added in a determined voice, motioning them to a seat beside him:
“It is about time you two children heard the story straight, for it concerns you both, so I’ll tell you. Your Uncle Harry, Mark, is the man who never came back and won’t. He was just your age at the time. He and Annie were to be married in a few months, then everything went to smash. And it was your mother, Kate, who was the innocent cause of his exile. Harry, who was the best friend I had in the world, tried to put in a good word for me—this was before I and your mother were engaged—and Annie, coming in and finding them, got it all crooked. Instead of waiting until Harry could explain, she flared up, and off he went. Her hair turned white in a week when she found out how she had misjudged him, but it was too late then—Harry wouldn’t come back, and he never will. When he told you, Mark, last year in Rio that he was coming home Christmas I knew he’d change his mind just as soon as you left him, and he did. Queer boy, Harry. Once he gets an idea in his head it sticks there. He was that way when he was a boy. He’ll never come back as long as Annie lives, and that means never.”
He stopped a moment, spread his fingers to the blazing logs, and then, with a smile on his face, said: “If ever I catch you two young turtledoves making such fools of yourselves, I’ll turn you both outdoors,” and again his hearty laugh rang through the cheery room.
The girl instinctively leaned closer to her lover. She had heard some part of the story before—in fact, both of them had, but never in its entirety. Her heart went out to the Little Gray Lady all the more.
Mark now spoke up. He, too, had had an hour of his own with the Little Gray Lady, and the obligation still remained unsettled.
“Well, if she won’t come up here and have Christmas with us,” he cried, “why can’t we go down there and have Christmas with her? Let’s surprise her, Kate; let’s clean out all those dead people. I know she sits in the dark and imagines they all come back, for I’ve seen her that way many a time when I drop in on her in the late afternoon. Let’s show her they’re alive.”
Kate started up and caught Mark’s arm. “Oh, Mark! I have it!” she whispered, “and we will—yes—that will be the very thing,” and so with more mumblings and mutterings, not one word of which could her father hear, the two raced up-stairs to the top of the house and the garret.