1 files changed, 707 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/10707-0.txt b/10707-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ea3e212
--- /dev/null
+++ b/10707-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,707 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10707 ***
+
+"_I cannot tell how the truth may be:
+I say the tale as 'twas said to me._"
+
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+
+IDOLS
+SEPTIMUS
+THE USURPER
+THE WHITE DOVE
+THE BELOVED VAGABOND
+THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE
+THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
+AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
+A STUDY IN SHADOWS
+SIMON THE JESTER
+WHERE LOVE IS
+DERELICTS
+
+
+
+[Illustration: "I HEARD IT. I FELT IT. It WAS LIKE THE BEATING OF
+WINGS."]
+
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
+THE STORY OF THREE WISE MEN
+
+BY WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+ILLUSTRATED BY BLENDON CAMPBELL
+
+
+1910
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"I heard it. I felt it. It was like the beating of wings." Frontispiece
+
+"I told you the place was uncanny."
+
+Instinctively they all knelt down.
+
+Carried with them an inalienable joy and possession into the great
+world.
+
+
+
+
+
+A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
+
+
+
+Three men who had gained great fame and honour throughout the world met
+unexpectedly in front of the bookstall at Paddington Station. Like most
+of the great ones of the earth they were personally acquainted, and they
+exchanged surprised greetings.
+
+Sir Angus McCurdie, the eminent physicist, scowled at the two others
+beneath his heavy black eyebrows.
+
+"I'm going to a God-forsaken place in Cornwall called Trehenna," said
+he.
+
+"That's odd; so am I," croaked Professor Biggleswade. He was a little,
+untidy man with round spectacles, a fringe of greyish beard and a weak,
+rasping voice, and he knew more of Assyriology than any man, living or
+dead. A flippant pupil once remarked that the Professor's face was
+furnished with a Babylonic cuneiform in lieu of features.
+
+"People called Deverill, at Foulis Castle?" asked Sir Angus.
+
+"Yes," replied Professor Biggleswade.
+
+"How curious! I am going to the Deverills, too," said the third man.
+
+This man was the Right Honourable Viscount Doyne, the renowned Empire
+Builder and Administrator, around whose solitary and remote life popular
+imagination had woven many legends. He looked at the world through tired
+grey eyes, and the heavy, drooping, blonde moustache seemed tired, too,
+and had dragged down the tired face into deep furrows. He was smoking a
+long black cigar.
+
+"I suppose we may as well travel down together," said Sir Angus, not
+very cordially.
+
+Lord Doyne said courteously: "I have a reserved carriage. The railway
+company is always good enough to place one at my disposal. It would give
+me great pleasure if you would share it."
+
+The invitation was accepted, and the three men crossed the busy, crowded
+platform to take their seats in the great express train. A porter, laden
+with an incredible load of paraphernalia, trying to make his way through
+the press, happened to jostle Sir Angus McCurdie. He rubbed his shoulder
+fretfully.
+
+"Why the whole land should be turned into a bear garden on account of
+this exploded superstition of Christmas is one of the anomalies of
+modern civilization. Look at this insensate welter of fools travelling
+in wild herds to disgusting places merely because it's Christmas!"
+
+"You seem to be travelling yourself, McCurdie," said Lord Doyne.
+
+"Yes--and why the devil I'm doing it, I've not the faintest notion,"
+replied Sir Angus.
+
+"It's going to be a beast of a journey," he remarked some moments later,
+as the train carried them slowly out of the station. "The whole country
+is under snow--and as far as I can understand we have to change twice
+and wind up with a twenty-mile motor drive."
+
+He was an iron-faced, beetle-browed, stern man, and this morning he did
+not seem to be in the best of tempers. Finding his companions inclined
+to be sympathetic, he continued his lamentation.
+
+"And merely because it's Christmas I've had to shut up my laboratory and
+give my young fools a holiday--just when I was in the midst of a most
+important series of experiments."
+
+Professor Biggleswade, who had heard vaguely of and rather looked down
+upon such new-fangled toys as radium and thorium and helium and
+argon--for the latest astonishing developments in the theory of
+radio-activity had brought Sir Angus McCurdie his world-wide fame--said
+somewhat ironically:
+
+"If the experiments were so important, why didn't you lock yourself up
+with your test tubes and electric batteries and finish them alone?"
+
+"Man!" said McCurdie, bending across the carriage, and speaking with a
+curious intensity of voice, "d'ye know I'd give a hundred pounds to be
+able to answer that question?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked the Professor, startled.
+
+"I should like to know why I'm sitting in this damned train and going to
+visit a couple of addle-headed society people whom I'm scarcely
+acquainted with, when I might be at home in my own good company
+furthering the progress of science."
+
+"I myself," said the Professor, "am not acquainted with them at all."
+
+It was Sir Angus McCurdie's turn to look surprised.
+
+"Then why are you spending Christmas with them?"
+
+"I reviewed a ridiculous blank-verse tragedy written by Deverill on the
+Death of Sennacherib. Historically it was puerile. I said so in no
+measured terms. He wrote a letter claiming to be a poet and not an
+archæologist. I replied that the day had passed when poets could with
+impunity commit the abominable crime of distorting history. He retorted
+with some futile argument, and we went on exchanging letters, until his
+invitation and my acceptance concluded the correspondence."
+
+McCurdie, still bending his black brows on him, asked him why he had not
+declined. The Professor screwed up his face till it looked more like a
+cuneiform than ever. He, too, found the question difficult to answer,
+but he showed a bold front.
+
+"I felt it my duty," said he, "to teach that preposterous ignoramus
+something worth knowing about Sennacherib. Besides I am a bachelor and
+would sooner spend Christmas, as to whose irritating and meaningless
+annoyance I cordially agree with you, among strangers than among my
+married sisters' numerous and nerve-racking families."
+
+Sir Angus McCurdie, the hard, metallic apostle of radio-activity,
+glanced for a moment out of the window at the grey, frost-bitten fields.
+Then he said:
+
+"I'm a widower. My wife died many years ago and, thank God, we had no
+children. I generally spend Christmas alone."
+
+He looked out of the window again. Professor Biggleswade suddenly
+remembered the popular story of the great scientist's antecedents, and
+reflected that as McCurdie had once run, a barefoot urchin, through the
+Glasgow mud, he was likely to have little kith or kin. He himself envied
+McCurdie. He was always praying to be delivered from his sisters and
+nephews and nieces, whose embarrassing demands no calculated coldness
+could repress.
+
+"Children are the root of all evil," said he. "Happy the man who has his
+quiver empty."
+
+Sir Angus McCurdie did not reply at once; when he spoke again it was
+with reference to their prospective host.
+
+"I met Deverill," said he, "at the Royal Society's Soirée this year. One
+of my assistants was demonstrating a peculiar property of thorium and
+Deverill seemed interested. I asked him to come to my laboratory the
+next day, and found he didn't know a damned thing about anything. That's
+all the acquaintance I have with him."
+
+Lord Doyne, the great administrator, who had been wearily turning over
+the pages of an illustrated weekly chiefly filled with flamboyant
+photographs of obscure actresses, took his gold glasses from his nose
+and the black cigar from his lips, and addressed his companions.
+
+"I've been considerably interested in your conversation," said he, "and
+as you've been frank, I'll be frank too. I knew Mrs. Deverill's mother,
+Lady Carstairs, very well years ago, and of course Mrs. Deverill when
+she was a child. Deverill I came across once in Egypt--he had been sent
+on a diplomatic mission to Teheran. As for our being invited on such
+slight acquaintance, little Mrs. Deverill has the reputation of being
+the only really successful celebrity hunter in England. She inherited
+the faculty from her mother, who entertained the whole world. We're sure
+to find archbishops, and eminent actors, and illustrious divorcées asked
+to meet us. That's one thing. But why I, who loathe country house
+parties and children and Christmas as much as Biggleswade, am going down
+there to-day, I can no more explain than you can. It's a devilish odd
+coincidence."
+
+The three men looked at one another. Suddenly McCurdie shivered and drew
+his fur coat around him.
+
+"I'll thank you," said he, "to shut that window."
+
+"It is shut," said Doyne.
+
+"It's just uncanny," said McCurdie, looking from one to the other.
+
+"What?" asked Doyne.
+
+"Nothing, if you didn't feel it."
+
+"There did seem to be a sudden draught," said Professor Biggleswade.
+"But as both window and door are shut, it could only be imaginary."
+
+"It wasn't imaginary," muttered McCurdie.
+
+Then he laughed harshly. "My father and mother came from Cromarty," he
+said with apparent irrelevance.
+
+"That's the Highlands," said the Professor.
+
+"Ay," said McCurdie.
+
+Lord Doyne said nothing, but tugged at his moustache and looked out of
+the window as the frozen meadows and bits of river and willows raced
+past. A dead silence fell on them. McCurdie broke it with another laugh
+and took a whiskey flask from his hand-bag.
+
+"Have a nip?"
+
+"Thanks, no," said the Professor. "I have to keep to a strict dietary,
+and I only drink hot milk and water--and of that sparingly. I have some
+in a thermos bottle."
+
+Lord Doyne also declining the whiskey, McCurdie swallowed a dram and
+declared himself to be better. The Professor took from his bag a foreign
+review in which a German sciolist had dared to question his
+interpretation of a Hittite inscription. Over the man's ineptitude he
+fell asleep and snored loudly.
+
+To escape from his immediate neighbourhood McCurdie went to the other
+end of the seat and faced Lord Doyne, who had resumed his gold glasses
+and his listless contemplation of obscure actresses. McCurdie lit a
+pipe, Doyne another black cigar. The train thundered on.
+
+Presently they all lunched together in the restaurant car. The windows
+steamed, but here and there through a wiped patch of pane a white world
+was revealed. The snow was falling. As they passed through Westbury,
+McCurdie looked mechanically for the famous white horse carved into the
+chalk of the down; but it was not visible beneath the thick covering of
+snow.
+
+"It'll be just like this all the way to Gehenna--Trehenna, I mean," said
+McCurdie.
+
+Doyne nodded. He had done his life's work amid all extreme fiercenesses
+of heat and cold, in burning droughts, in simoons and in icy
+wildernesses, and a ray or two more of the pale sun or a flake or two
+more of the gentle snow of England mattered to him but little. But
+Biggleswade rubbed the pane with his table-napkin and gazed
+apprehensively at the prospect.
+
+"If only this wretched train would stop," said he, "I would go back
+again."
+
+And he thought how comfortable it would be to sneak home again to his
+books and thus elude not only the Deverills, but the Christmas jollities
+of his sisters' families, who would think him miles away. But the train
+was timed not to stop till Plymouth, two hundred and thirty-five miles
+from London, and thither was he being relentlessly carried. Then he
+quarrelled with his food, which brought a certain consolation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The train did stop, however, before Plymouth--indeed, before Exeter. An
+accident on the line had dislocated the traffic. The express was held up
+for an hour, and when it was permitted to proceed, instead of thundering
+on, it went cautiously, subject to continual stoppings. It arrived at
+Plymouth two hours late. The travellers learned that they had missed the
+connection on which they had counted and that they could not reach
+Trehenna till nearly ten o'clock. After weary waiting at Plymouth they
+took their seats in the little, cold local train that was to carry them
+another stage on their journey. Hot-water cans put in at Plymouth
+mitigated to some extent the iciness of the compartment. But that only
+lasted a comparatively short time, for soon they were set down at a
+desolate, shelterless wayside junction, dumped in the midst of a hilly
+snow-covered waste, where they went through another weary wait for
+another dismal local train that was to carry them to Trehenna. And in
+this train there were no hot-water cans, so that the compartment was as
+cold as death. McCurdie fretted and shook his fist in the direction of
+Trehenna.
+
+"And when we get there we have still a twenty miles' motor drive to
+Foullis Castle. It's a fool name and we're fools to be going there."
+
+"I shall die of bronchitis," wailed Professor Biggleswade.
+
+"A man dies when it is appointed for him to die," said Lord Doyne, in
+his tired way; and he went on smoking long black cigars.
+
+"It's not the dying that worries me," said McCurdie. "That's a mere
+mechanical process which every organic being from a king to a
+cauliflower has to pass through. It's the being forced against my will
+and my reason to come on this accursed journey, which something tells me
+will become more and more accursed as we go on, that is driving me to
+distraction."
+
+"What will be, will be," said Doyne.
+
+"I can't see where the comfort of that reflection comes in," said
+Biggleswade.
+
+"And yet you've travelled in the East," said Doyne. "I suppose you know
+the Valley of the Tigris as well as any man living."
+
+"Yes," said the Professor. "I can say I dug my way from Tekrit to Bagdad
+and left not a stone unexamined."
+
+"Perhaps, after all," Doyne remarked, "that's not quite the way to know
+the East."
+
+"I never wanted to know the modern East," returned the Professor. "What
+is there in it of interest compared with the mighty civilizations that
+have gone before?"
+
+McCurdie took a pull from his flask.
+
+"I'm glad I thought of having a refill at Plymouth," said he.
+
+At last, after many stops at little lonely stations they arrived at
+Trehenna. The guard opened the door and they stepped out on to the
+snow-covered platform. An oil lamp hung from the tiny pent-house roof
+that, structurally, was Trehenna Station. They looked around at the
+silent gloom of white undulating moorland, and it seemed a place where
+no man lived and only ghosts could have a bleak and unsheltered being. A
+porter came up and helped the guard with the luggage. Then they realized
+that the station was built on a small embankment, for, looking over the
+railing, they saw below the two great lamps of a motor car. A fur-clad
+chauffeur met them at the bottom of the stairs. He clapped his hands
+together and informed them cheerily that he had been waiting for four
+hours. It was the bitterest winter in these parts within the memory of
+man, said he, and he himself had not seen snow there for five years.
+Then he settled the three travellers in the great roomy touring car
+covered with a Cape-cart hood, wrapped them up in many rugs and started.
+
+After a few moments, the huddling together of their bodies--for, the
+Professor being a spare man, there was room for them all on the back
+seat--the pile of rugs, the serviceable and all but air-tight hood,
+induced a pleasant warmth and a pleasant drowsiness. Where they were
+being driven they knew not. The perfectly upholstered seat eased their
+limbs, the easy swinging motion of the car soothed their spirits. They
+felt that already they had reached the luxuriously appointed home which,
+after all, they knew awaited them. McCurdie no longer railed, Professor
+Biggleswade forgot the dangers of bronchitis, and Lord Doyne twisted the
+stump of a black cigar between his lips without any desire to relight
+it. A tiny electric lamp inside the hood made the darkness of the world
+to right and left and in front of the talc windows still darker.
+McCurdie and Biggleswade fell into a doze. Lord Doyne chewed the end of
+his cigar. The car sped on through an unseen wilderness.
+
+Suddenly there was a horrid jolt and a lurch and a leap and a rebound,
+and then the car stood still, quivering like a ship that has been struck
+by a heavy sea. The three men were pitched and tossed and thrown
+sprawling over one another onto the bottom of the car. Biggleswade
+screamed. McCurdie cursed. Doyne scrambled from the confusion of rugs
+and limbs and, tearing open the side of the Cape-cart hood, jumped out.
+The chauffeur had also just leaped from his seat. It was pitch dark save
+for the great shaft of light down the snowy road cast by the acetylene
+lamps. The snow had ceased falling.
+
+"What's gone wrong?"
+
+"It sounds like the axle," said the chauffeur ruefully.
+
+He unshipped a lamp and examined the car, which had wedged itself
+against a great drift of snow on the off side. Meanwhile McCurdie and
+Biggleswade had alighted.
+
+"Yes, it's the axle," said the chauffeur.
+
+"Then we're done," remarked Doyne.
+
+"I'm afraid so, my lord."
+
+"What's the matter? Can't we get on?" asked Biggleswade in his querulous
+voice.
+
+McCurdie laughed. "How can we get on with a broken axle? The thing's as
+useless as a man with a broken back. Gad, I was right. I said it was
+going to be an infernal journey."
+
+The little Professor wrung his hands. "But what's to be done?" he cried.
+
+"Tramp it," said Lord Doyne, lighting a fresh cigar.
+
+"It's ten miles," said the chauffeur.
+
+"It would be the death of me," the Professor wailed.
+
+"I utterly refuse to walk ten miles through a Polar waste with a gouty
+foot," McCurdie declared wrathfully.
+
+The chauffeur offered a solution of the difficulty. He would set out
+alone for Foullis Castle--five miles farther on was an inn where he
+could obtain a horse and trap--and would return for the three gentlemen
+with another car. In the meanwhile they could take shelter in a little
+house which they had just passed, some half mile up the road. This was
+agreed to. The chauffeur went on cheerily enough with a lamp, and the
+three travellers with another lamp started off in the opposite
+direction. As far as they could see they were in a long, desolate
+valley, a sort of No Man's Land, deathly silent. The eastern sky had
+cleared somewhat, and they faced a loose rack through which one pale
+star was dimly visible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I'm a man of science," said McCurdie as they trudged through the snow,
+"and I dismiss the supernatural as contrary to reason; but I have
+Highland blood in my veins that plays me exasperating tricks. My reason
+tells me that this place is only a commonplace moor, yet it seems like a
+Valley of Bones haunted by malignant spirits who have lured us here to
+our destruction. There's something guiding us now. It's just uncanny."
+
+"Why on earth did we ever come?" croaked Biggleswade.
+
+Lord Doyne answered: "The Koran says, 'Nothing can befall us but what
+God hath destined for us.' So why worry?"
+
+"Because I'm not a Mohammedan," retorted Biggleswade.
+
+"You might be worse," said Doyne.
+
+Presently the dim outline of the little house grew perceptible. A faint
+light shone from the window. It stood unfenced by any kind of hedge or
+railing a few feet away from the road in a little hollow beneath some
+rising ground. As far as they could discern in the darkness when they
+drew near, the house was a mean, dilapidated hovel. A guttering candle
+stood on the inner sill of the small window and afforded a vague view
+into a mean interior. Doyne held up the lamp so that its rays fell full
+on the door. As he did so, an exclamation broke from his lips and he
+hurried forward, followed by the others. A man's body lay huddled
+together on the snow by the threshold. He was dressed like a peasant, in
+old corduroy trousers and rough coat, and a handkerchief was knotted
+round his neck. In his hand he grasped the neck of a broken bottle.
+Doyne set the lamp on the ground and the three bent down together over
+the man. Close by the neck lay the rest of the broken bottle, whose
+contents had evidently run out into the snow.
+
+"Drunk?" asked Biggleswade.
+
+Doyne felt the man and laid his hand on his heart.
+
+"No," said he, "dead."
+
+McCurdie leaped to his full height. "I told you the place was uncanny!"
+he cried. "It's fey." Then he hammered wildly at the door.
+
+There was no response. He hammered again till it rattled. This time a
+faint prolonged sound like the wailing of a strange sea-creature was
+heard from within the house. McCurdie turned round, his teeth
+chattering.
+
+"Did ye hear that, Doyne?"
+
+
+[Illustration: I TOLD YOU THE PLACE WAS UNCANNY.]
+
+
+"Perhaps it's a dog," said the Professor.
+
+Lord Doyne, the man of action, pushed them aside and tried the
+door-handle. It yielded, the door stood open, and the gust of cold wind
+entering the house extinguished the candle within. They entered and
+found themselves in a miserable stone-paved kitchen, furnished with
+poverty-stricken meagreness--a wooden chair or two, a dirty table, some
+broken crockery, old cooking utensils, a fly-blown missionary society
+almanac, and a fireless grate. Doyne set the lamp on the table.
+
+"We must bring him in," said he.
+
+They returned to the threshold, and as they were bending over to grip
+the dead man the same sound filled the air, but this time louder, more
+intense, a cry of great agony. The sweat dripped from McCurdie's
+forehead. They lifted the dead man and brought him into the room, and
+after laying him on a dirty strip of carpet they did their best to
+straighten the stiff limbs. Biggleswade put on the table a bundle which
+he had picked up outside. It contained some poor provisions--a loaf, a
+piece of fat bacon, and a paper of tea. As far as they could guess (and
+as they learned later they guessed rightly) the man was the master of
+the house, who, coming home blind drunk from some distant inn, had
+fallen at his own threshold and got frozen to death. As they could not
+unclasp his fingers from the broken bottleneck they had to let him
+clutch it as a dead warrior clutches the hilt of his broken sword.
+
+Then suddenly the whole place was rent with another and yet another
+long, soul-piercing moan of anguish.
+
+"There's a second room," said Doyne, pointing to a door. "The sound
+comes from there." He opened the door, peeped in, and then, returning
+for the lamp, disappeared, leaving McCurdie and Biggleswade in the pitch
+darkness, with the dead man on the floor.
+
+"For heaven's sake, give me a drop of whiskey," said the Professor, "or
+I shall faint."
+
+Presently the door opened and Lord Doyne appeared in the shaft of light.
+He beckoned to his companions.
+
+"It is a woman in childbirth," he said in his even, tired voice. "We
+must aid her. She appears unconscious. Does either of you know anything
+about such things?"
+
+They shook their heads, and the three looked at each other in dismay.
+Masters of knowledge that had won them world-wide fame and honour, they
+stood helpless, abashed before this, the commonest phenomenon of nature.
+
+"My wife had no child," said McCurdie.
+
+"I've avoided women all my life," said Biggleswade.
+
+"And I've been too busy to think of them. God forgive me," said Doyne.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The history of the next two hours was one that none of the three men
+ever cared to touch upon. They did things blindly, instinctively, as men
+do when they come face to face with the elemental. A fire was made, they
+knew not how, water drawn they knew not whence, and a kettle boiled.
+Doyne accustomed to command, directed. The others obeyed. At his
+suggestion they hastened to the wreck of the car and came staggering
+back beneath rugs and travelling bags which could supply clean linen and
+needful things, for amid the poverty of the house they could find
+nothing fit for human touch or use. Early they saw that the woman's
+strength was failing, and that she could not live. And there, in that
+nameless hovel, with death on the hearthstone and death and life
+hovering over the pitiful bed, the three great men went through the pain
+and the horror and squalor of birth, and they knew that they had never
+yet stood before so great a mystery.
+
+With the first wail of the newly born infant a last convulsive shudder
+passed through the frame of the unconscious mother. Then three or four
+short gasps for breath, and the spirit passed away. She was dead.
+Professor Biggleswade threw a corner of the sheet over her face, for he
+could not bear to see it.
+
+They washed and dried the child as any crone of a midwife would have
+done, and dipped a small sponge which had always remained unused in a
+cut-glass bottle in Doyne's dressing-bag in the hot milk and water of
+Biggleswade's thermos bottle, and put it to his lips; and then they
+wrapped him up warm in some of their own woollen undergarments, and took
+him into the kitchen and placed him on a bed made of their fur coats in
+front of the fire. As the last piece of fuel was exhausted they took one
+of the wooden chairs and broke it up and cast it into the blaze. And
+then they raised the dead man from the strip of carpet and carried him
+into the bedroom and laid him reverently by the side of his dead wife,
+after which they left the dead in darkness and returned to the living.
+And the three grave men stood over the wisp of flesh that had been born
+a male into the world. Then, their task being accomplished, reaction
+came, and even Doyne, who had seen death in many lands, turned faint.
+But the others, losing control of their nerves, shook like men stricken
+with palsy.
+
+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.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Christmas Mystery, by William J. Locke
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10707 ***