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PAGE 10

A Russian Christmas Party
by [?]

“That is quite simple. You must go to the barn–now, for instance–and listen. If you hear thrashing, it is for ill-luck; if you hear grain dropping, that is good.”

“Tell us, mother, what happened to you in the barn.”

“It is so long ago,” said the mother, with a smile, “that I have quite forgotten; besides, not one of you is brave enough to try it.”

“Yes, I will go,” said Sonia. “Let me go.”

“Go by all means if you are not afraid.”

“May I, Madame Schoss?” said Sonia to the governess.

Now, whether playing games or sitting quietly and chatting, Nicolas had not left Sonia’s side the whole evening; he felt as if he had seen her for the first time, and only just now appreciated all her merits. Bright, bewitchingly pretty in her quaint costume, and excited as she very rarely was, she had completely fascinated him.

“What a simpleton I must have been!” thought he, responding in thought to those sparkling eyes and that triumphant smile which had revealed to him a little dimple at the tip of her mustache that he had never observed before.

“I am afraid of nothing,” she declared. She rose, asked her way, precisely, to the barn, and every detail as to what she was to expect, waiting there in total silence; then she threw a fur cloak over her shoulders, glanced at Nicolas, and went on.

She went along the corridor and down the back-stairs; while Nicolas, saying that the heat of the room was too much for him, slipped out by the front entrance. It was as cold as ever, and the moon seemed to be shining even more brightly than before. The snow at her feet was strewn with stars, while their sisters overhead twinkled in the deep gloom of the sky, and she soon looked away from them, back to the gleaming earth in its radiant mantle of ermine.

Nicolas hurried across the hall, turned the corner of the house, and went past the side door where Sonia was to come out. Half-way to the barn stacks of wood, in the full moonlight, threw their shadows on the path, and beyond, an alley of lime-trees traced a tangled pattern on the snow with the fine crossed lines of their leafless twigs. The beams of the house and its snow-laden roof looked as if they had been hewn out of a block of opal, with iridescent lights where the facets caught the silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell crashing off a tree in the garden; then all was still again. Sonia’s heart beat high with gladness; as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir of eternal youth and joy.

“Straight on, if you please, miss, and on no account look behind you.”

“I am not afraid,” said Sonia, her little shoes tapping the stone steps and then crunching the carpet of snow as she ran to meet Nicolas, who was within a couple of yards of her. And yet not the Nicolas of every-day life. What had transfigured him so completely? Was it his woman’s costume with frizzed-out hair, or was it that radiant smile which he so rarely wore, and which at this moment illumined his face?

“But Sonia is quite unlike herself, and yet she is herself,” thought Nicolas on his side, looking down at the sweet little face in the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the fur cloak that wrapped her, and drew her to him, and he kissed her lips, which still tasted of the burned cork that had blackened her mustache.

“Nicolas–Sonia,” they whispered; and Sonia put her little hands round his face. Then, hand in hand, they ran to the barn and back, and each went in by the different doors they had come out of.

Natacha, who had noted everything, managed so that she, Mme. Schoss, and Dimmler should return in one sleigh, while the maids went with Nicolas and Sonia in another. Nicolas was in no hurry to get home; he could not help looking at Sonia and trying to find under her disguise the true Sonia–his Sonia, from whom nothing now could ever part him. The magical effects of moonlight, the remembrance of that kiss on her sweet lips, the dizzy flight of the snow-clad ground under the horses’ hoofs, the black sky, studded with diamonds, that bent over their heads, the icy air that seemed to give vigor to his lungs–all was enough to make him fancy that they were transported to a land of magic.