A Christmas Mystery - William J. Locke
Suddenly McCurdie cried in a high pitched voice, "My God! Don't you feel
it?" and clutched Doyne by the arm. An expression of terror appeared on
his iron features.
"There! It's here with us."
Little Professor Biggleswade sat on a corner of the table and wiped his
forehead.
"I heard it. I felt it. It was like the beating of wings."
"It's the fourth time," said McCurdie. "The first time was just before I
accepted the Deverills' invitation. The second in the railway carriage
this afternoon. The third on the way here. This is the fourth."
Biggleswade plucked nervously at the fringe of whisker under his jaws
and said faintly, "It's the fourth time up to now. I thought it was
fancy."
"I have felt it, too," said Doyne. "It is the Angel of Death." And he
pointed to the room where the dead man and woman lay.
"For God's sake let us get away from this," cried Biggleswade.
"And leave the child to die, like the others?" said Doyne.
"We must see it through," said McCurdie.
* * * * *
A silence fell upon them as they sat round in the blaze with the
new-born babe wrapped in its odd swaddling clothes asleep on the pile of
fur coats, and it lasted until Sir Angus McCurdie looked at his watch.
"Good Lord," said he, "it's twelve o'clock."
"Christmas morning," said Biggleswade.
"A strange Christmas," mused Doyne.
McCurdie put up his hand. "There it is again! The beating of wings." And
they listened like men spellbound. McCurdie kept his hand uplifted, and
gazed over their heads at the wall, and his gaze was that of a man in a
trance, and he spoke:
"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given--"
Doyne sprang from his chair, which fell behind him with a crash.
"Man--what the devil are you saying?"
Then McCurdie rose and met Biggleswade's eyes staring at him through the
great round spectacles, and Biggleswade turned and met the eyes of
Doyne. A pulsation like the beating of wings stirred the air.
The three wise men shivered with a queer exaltation. Something strange,
mystical, dynamic had happened. It was as if scales had fallen from
their eyes and they saw with a new vision. They stood together humbly,
divested of all their greatness, touching one another in the instinctive
fashion of children, as if seeking mutual protection, and they looked,
with one accord, irresistibly compelled, at the child.
At last McCurdie unbent his black brows and said hoarsely:
"It was not the Angel of Death, Doyne, but another Messenger that drew
us here."
The tiredness seemed to pass away from the great administrator's face,
and he nodded his head with the calm of a man who has come to the quiet
heart of a perplexing mystery.
"It's true," he murmured. "Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given. Unto the three of us."
Biggleswade took off his great round spectacles and wiped them.
"Gaspar, Melchior, Balthazar. But where are the gold, frankincense and
myrrh?"
"In our hearts, man," said McCurdie.
The babe cried and stretched its tiny limbs.
[Illustration: INSTINCTIVELY THEY ALL KNELT DOWN.]
Instinctively they all knelt down together to discover, if possible, and
administer ignorantly to, its wants. The scene had the appearance of an
adoration.
* * * * *
Then these three wise, lonely, childless men who, in furtherance of
their own greatness, had cut themselves adrift from the sweet and simple
things of life and from the kindly ways of their brethren, and had grown
old in unhappy and profitless wisdom, knew that an inscrutable
Providence had led them, as it had led three Wise Men of old, on a
Christmas morning long ago, to a nativity which should give them a new
wisdom, a new link with humanity, a new spiritual outlook, a new hope.
And, when their watch was ended, they wrapped up the babe with precious
care, and carried him with them, an inalienable joy and possession, into
the great world.
[Illustration: CARRIED WITH THEM AN INALIENABLE JOY AND POSSESSION INTO
THE GREAT WORLD.]