“Oh,” she said, after a lengthy silence during which neither of them seemed able to find quite the right words to say, “was there ever such a Christmas, Allan?”
“What I am wondering,” he said in a voice that sounded surprisingly normal considering the emotion that had held them speechless, “is where we are to find another finger to put it on.”
“I see how it is,” she said, clasping ring and rag in one hand and lifting both arms up about his neck. She made no attempt to suggest a solution to the problem he had posed. “The Wise Men lost the star too for a while, but when they found it again, it was over Bethlehem, and they found also everything they had ever been looking for. Oh, Allan, that has happened to us too. It has, hasn’t it? What would we have ever done if Nicky had not come into our lives?”
He did not answer her. He kissed her instead.
She giggled suddenly after he had lifted his head. “I have just had a thought,” she said. “A thoroughly silly thought. Nicky came down a chimney and brought us a Christmas happier than any our dreams could have devised.”
He laughed with her. “But I don’t think even our wildest dreams could convey sainthood on Nicky,” he said. “I don’t think he can possibly be the real Saint Nicholas, Estelle. Would a real saint steal both a diamond and a ring, as Nicky of the sharp eyes obviously did, be smitten by a pretty lady who smells pretty, and have the ring mended by some devious means? I think it will be entirely better for my digestion if I don’t investigate that last point too closely, though doubtless I will feel obliged to do just that tomorrow. The little imp. Perhaps he is Saint Nicholas after all. Now, do you suppose we should go back upstairs to our guests?”
She hesitated and brushed at an imaginary speck of lint on his shoulder and passed a nervous tongue over her lips.
“What is it?” he asked.
She flushed and kept her eyes on his shoulder. “I have another gift for you,” she said. “At least, I am not sure about it, though I am almost sure. And I suppose I should not offer it as a gift until I am certain.
But by that time Christmas will be over. And it is such a very special Christmas that I have become greedy and want to make it even more so.”
He laughed softly. “Suppose you give it to me,” he said, “and let me decide if it a worthy offering or not.”
She raised her eyes to his and flushed a deeper shade. “I can’t actually give it to you for a little more than seven months,” she said. “That is, if I am right about it, anyway. But I think I must be, Allan, because it has been almost a whole month now.”
“Estelle?” He was whispering.
“I think it must be right,” she said, wrapping her arms about his neck again, “because I am never late except perhaps by a day or two. And I think I have felt a little dizzy and nauseated some mornings when getting out of bed, though that could, of course, be wishful thinking. I think I am with child, Allan. I think so. After almost two years. Can it be true, do you think?”
He did not even attempt to answer her question. He caught her up in a hug that seemed designed to crush every bone in her body, and in the body of their child too. He pressed his face to her neck. Hers was hidden against his shoulder.
For the next several minutes it was doubtful that Estelle was the only one without dry eyes. It seemed that men did sometimes cry-in very exceptional circumstances.
The Best Gift
“Christmas is an unutterable bore,” Lady Enid Penn said with an affected sigh. “There is positively no one with whom to amuse oneself except parents and aunts and uncles and cousins by the score and nothing to do except feast and make merry-with one’s own family!”
There was a murmur of sympathetic agreement from several other young ladies.
“I shall simply die,” the Honorable Miss Elspeth Lynch informed her listeners, “if the Worsleys remain in town for the holiday, as they did last year, instead of returning home. Patricia Worsley is my dearest bosom friend, and Howard Worsley is… well, he is interesting.” She looked around archly at her companions, who tittered on cue.
“If one were only sixteen instead of fifteen,” the Honorable Miss Deborah Latimer said, adding her sigh to everyone else’s. “One’s parents and aunts and uncles and all their friends have a wonderful time dancing and partaking of the wassail bowl and staying up almost until dawn while one is banished to the nursery and to bed with the children.”
“And what about you, Craggs?” Lady Enid turned her head to look at the lady who had sat silently writing at her desk while they talked. “Do you find Christmas a bore, too? Or do you have wonderfully exciting plans?
You are older than sixteen, after all.”
The other young ladies tittered again, though there was an edge of cruelty to their laughter this time.
“Do you have dozens of beaux, Craggs? Do tell,” Miss Lynch said, widening her eyes.
Miss Jane Craggs looked up from the journal in which she was writing.
Although it was homework hour and school rules stated quite categorically that it was to be a silent hour, she was not enforcing the rule this evening. It was the last day of school before Christmas.
Tomorrow all the girls would be going home, most of them with their parents or with liveried servants in sumptuous carriages.
“I believe it would be something of an exaggeration, Elspeth, to count my beaux in the dozens,” she said. “Besides, a lady never does tell, you know.”
“But you are not a lady, Craggs,” one of the younger girls said.
But she won only frowns for her witticism. Everyone knew that Jane Craggs was not a lady, that she had spent most of her life at Miss Phillpotts’s school for young ladies, her board and education paid for by an unknown benefactor-undoubtedly her father-until she was seventeen, that she had stayed on afterward as a teacher, though Miss Phillpotts treated her more as a servant than as an instructor. All the girls took their cue from the headmistress. The names of all their teachers were preceded by “Miss” except for Craggs. They treated her with a condescension bordering sometimes on insolence. But there was an undefined borderline beyond which they would not go. It was unladylike to remind Craggs in words that she was no lady.
“I believe,” Jane Craggs said, closing her journal and getting to her feet, “we will make a concession to the approaching holiday and end homework hour five minutes early. Would anyone care to argue the point?”
There was relieved laughter and some enthusiastic cheering from the young ladies, who jumped to their feet and made for the door.
“Happy Christmas, Craggs,” Deborah Latimer said as she was leaving the room.
Jane Craggs smiled at her and returned the greeting.
She sat down again when she was alone and began deliberately to clean and mend the pen she had been using. And she tried to ignore the knowledge that Christmas was approaching-an impossibility, of course.
No one with whom to amuse oneself except aunts and uncles and cousins and parents.Nothing to do but feast and make merry with one’s family members. Such a Christmas was unutterably boring? Jane felt rather like crying, and ruthlessly suppressed the feeling. If only she could once-just once in her life-experience such a Christmas.
She had always hated Christmas. As a child and as a young girl she had also dreaded it. Dreaded the aloneness, with which she had always lived every day of the year but that always assaulted her most cruelly at Christmas. Dreaded the emptiness. Dreaded the excitement of the other girls as they prepared to go home and waited for family members or servants to come and fetch them. Dreaded the departure of Miss Phillpotts and the teachers until she was quite alone in the school with the few servants who were kept on for the holidays-always, it seemed, the most humorless of the servants.