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The Master; a Novel

by Israel Zangwill · English · Gutenberg #49795 · 1,111,668 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Master; a Novel

Author: Israel Zangwill


        
Release date: August 27, 2015 [eBook #49795]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASTER; A NOVEL ***

  [Illustration: “‘THERE!’ SAID OLIVE, PUFFING OUT A THIN CLOUD” Page
                                 379]




                              THE MASTER

                                A Novel

                                  BY

                              I. ZANGWILL

                  AUTHOR OF “THE KING OF SCHNORRERS”
                     “CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO” ETC.

                              ILLUSTRATED

                       [Illustration: colophon]

                          NEW YORK AND LONDON
                     HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

                Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

                        _All rights reserved._




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

PROEM                                                                  1


Book I

CHAP.

I. SOLITUDE                                                            5

II. THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE                  23

III. THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH                                            33

IV. “MAN PROPOSES”                                                    45

V. PEGGY THE WATER-DRINKER                                            58

VI. DISILLUSIONS                                                      69

VII. THE APPRENTICE                                                   83

VIII. A WANDER-YEAR                                                   99

IX. ARTIST AND PURITAN                                               113

X. EXODUS                                                            123


Book II

I. IN LONDON                                                         132

II. GRAINGER’S                                                       145

III. THE ELDER BRANCH                                                161

IV. THE PICTURE-MAKERS                                               181

V. A SYMPOSIUM                                                       202

VI. THE OUTCAST                                                      218

VII. TOWARDS THE DEEPS                                               229

VIII. “GOLD MEDAL NIGHT”                                             245

IX. DEFEAT                                                           259

X. MATT RECEIVES SUNDRY HOSPITALITIES                                273

XI. A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE                                             290


Book III

I. CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED?                                           308

II. “SUCCESS”                                                        325

III. “VAIN-LONGING”                                                  342

IV. FERMENT                                                          364

V. A CELEBRITY AT HOME                                               384

VI. A DEVONSHIRE IDYL                                                408

VII. THE IDYL CONCLUDES                                              438

VIII. ELEANOR WYNDWOOD                                               460

IX. RUTH HAILEY                                                      487

X. THE MASTER                                                        499




ILLUSTRATIONS


“‘THERE!’ SAID OLIVE, PUFFING OUT A THIN CLOUD”                  _Frontispiece_

“HE PLACED HIMSELF WITH HIS BACK TO THE DOOR”                   _Facing p._ 12

“‘I AM AFIRE WITH THIRST,’ SHE CRIED”                                    “  64

“‘LOR’ BLESS YOU, SIR,’ SAID SHE, ‘I’M NOT WORRYIN’ ABOUT THE RENT’”     “ 226

“‘GOOD-NIGHT,’ SHE SAID, SOFTLY”                                         “ 290

“MATT DINED WITH HERBERT AT A LITTLE TABLE”                              “ 338

“ALL WAS VERY STILL, SAVE FOR THE ETERNAL MONOTONE OF THE SEA”           “ 424

“SOMETHING IN THE SCENE THRILLED HIM WITH A SENSE OF RESTFUL KINSHIP”    “ 516




THE MASTER




PROEM


Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in
no incompatible union, ’twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of
good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a
population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of
green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of
little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of
overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace,
did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land
over which France and England might well bicker when first they met
oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the
States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over
New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian
settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its
willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.

At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew,
lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the
world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and
picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats;
listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church
procession passed through the drowsy streets. They had escaped the Great
Expulsion, nor had joined in the exodus of “Evangeline,” and, sprinkled
about the country, were compatriots of theirs who had drifted back when
the times grew more sedate; but for the most part it was the Saxon that
profited by the labors of the pioneer Gaul, repairing the tumble-down
farms and the dilapidated dykes, possessing himself of embanked marsh
lands, and replanting the plum-trees and the quinces his predecessor had
naturalized. For the revolt of the States against Britain sent thousands
of American loyalists flocking into this “New Scotland,” which thus
became a colony of “New England.” Scots themselves flowed in from auld
Scotland, and the German came to sink himself in the Briton, and a band
of Irish adventurers, under the swashbuckling Colonel McNutt, arrived
with a grant of a million acres that they were not destined to occupy.
The Acadian repose had fled forever. The sparse Indian hastened to make
himself scarcer, conscious there was no place for him in the new order,
and disappearing deliciously in hogsheads of rum. The virgin greenwood
rang with axes, startling the bear and the moose. Crash! Down went pine
and beech, hemlock and maple, their stumps alone left to rot and enrich
the fields. Crash!--thud! The weasel grew warier, the astonished
musquash vanished in eddying circles. Bridges began to span the rivers
where the beaver built its dams in happy unconsciousness of the tall
cylinder that was about to crown civilization. The caribou and the
silver fox pressed inland to save their skins. The snare was set in the
wild-wood, and the crack of the musket followed the ring of the axe. The
mackerel and the herring sought destruction in shoals, and the seines
brimmed over with salmon and alewives and gaspereux. The wild land that
had bloomed with golden-rod and violets was tamed with crops, and plump
sheep and fat oxen pastured where the wild strawberry vine had trailed
or the bull-frog had croaked under the alders. A sturdy, ingenious race
the fathers of the new settlement, loving work almost as much as they
feared God; turning their hand to anything, and opening it wide to the
stranger. They raised their own houses, and fashioned their own tools,
and shod their own horses, and later built their own vessels, and even
sailed them to the great markets laden with the produce of their own
fields and the timber from their own saw-mills. There were women in
this workaday paradise--shapely, gentle creatures, whose hands alone
were rough with field and house-work; women who span and sang when the
winter night-winds whistled round the settlement. The dramas of love and
grief began to play themselves out where the raccoon and the chickadee
had fleeted the golden hours in careless living. Children came to make
the rafters habitable, and Death to sanctify them with memories. The air
grew human with the smoke of hearths, the forest with legends and
histories. And as houses grew into homes and villages into townships,
Church and State arose where only Faith and Freedom had been.

The sons and heirs of the fathers did not always cling to the tradition
of piety and perseverance. The “Bluenose” grew apathetic, content with
the fatness of the day; or, if he exerted himself, it was too often to
best a neighbor. The great magnets of New York and Boston drew off or
drew back all that was iron in the race.

And amid these homely emotions of yeomen, amid the crude pieties or
impieties of homespun souls, amid this sane hearty intercourse with
realities or this torpor of sluggish spirits, was born ever and anon a
gleam of fantasy, of imagination: bizarre, transfiguring, touching
things with the glamour of dream. Blind instincts--blinder still in
their loneliness--yearned towards light; beautiful emotions stirred in
dumb souls, emotions that mayhap turned to morbid passion in the silence
and solitude of the woods, where character may grow crabbed and gnarled,
as well as sound and straight. For whereas to most of these human
creatures, begirt by the glory of sea and forest, the miracles of
sunrise and sunset were only the familiar indications of a celestial
timepiece, and the starry heaven was but a leaky ceiling in their
earthly habitation, there was here and there an eye keen to note the
play of light and shade and color, the glint of wave and the sparkle of
hoar-frost and the spume of tossing seas; the gracious fairness of cloud
and bird and blossom, the magic of sunlit sails in the offing, the
witchery of white winters, and all the changing wonder of the woods; a
soul with scanty self-consciousness at best, yet haply absorbing Nature,
to give it back one day as Art.

Ah, but to see the world with other eyes than one’s fellows, yet express
the vision of one’s race, its subconscious sense of beauty, is not all a
covetable dower.

The islands of Acadia are riddled with pits, where men have burrowed for
Captain Kidd’s Treasure and found nothing but holes. The deeper they
delved the deeper holes they found. Whoso with blood and tears would dig
Art out of his soul may lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness,
or, striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when his eye is
purged of the spell of morning, he sees his hand is full of withered
leaves.




Book I--CHAPTER I

SOLITUDE


“Matt, Matt, what’s thet thar noise?”

Matt opened his eyes vaguely, shaking off his younger brother’s frantic
clutch.

“It’s on’y the frost,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. “Go to
sleep, Billy.”

Since the sled accident that had crippled him for life, Billy was full
of nervous terrors, and the night had been charged with mysterious
noises. Within the lonely wooden house weather-boards and beams cracked;
without, twigs snapped and branches crashed; at times Billy heard
reports as loud as pistol-shots. One of these shots meant the bursting
of the wash-basin on the bedroom bench, Matt having forgotten to empty
its contents, which had expanded into ice.

Matt curled himself up more comfortably and almost covered his face with
the blanket, for the cold in the stoveless attic was acute. In the gray
half-light the rough beams and the quilts glistened with frozen breaths.
The little square window-panes were thickly frosted, and below the
crumbling rime was a thin layer of ice left from the day before, solid
up to the sashes, and leaving no infinitesimal dot of clear glass, for
there was nothing to thaw it except such heat as might radiate through
the bricks of the square chimney that came all the way from the cellar
through the centre of the flooring to pop its head through the shingled
roof.

“Matt!” Billy was nudging his brother in the ribs again.

“Hullo!” grumbled the boy.

“Thet thar ain’t the frost. Hark!”

“‘Tis, I tell ye. Don’t you hear the pop, pop, pop?”

“Not thet; t’other down-stairs.”

“Oh, thet’s the wind, I reckon.”

“No; it’s some ’un screamin’!”

Matt raised himself on his elbow, and listened.

“Why, you gooney, it’s on’y mother rowin’ Harriet,” he said,
reassuringly, and snuggled up again between the blankets.

The winter, though yet young, had already achieved a reputation.
Blustrous north winds had driven inland, felling the trees like
lumbermen. In the Annapolis Basin myriads of herrings, surprised by Jack
Frost before their migratory instinct awoke, had been found frozen in
the weirs, and the great salt tides overflowing the high dykes had been
congealed into a chocolate sea that, when the liquid water beneath ran
back through the sluices, lay solid on the marshes. By the shores of the
Basin of Minas sea-birds flapped ghostlike over amber ice-cakes, whose
mud-streaks under the kiss of the sun blushed like dragon’s blood.

Snow had fallen heavily, whitening the “evergreen” hemlocks, and through
the shapeless landscape half-buried oxen had toiled to clear the blurred
roads bordered by snow-drifts, till the three familiar tracks of hoofs
and sleigh-runners came in sight again. The stage to Truro ploughed its
way along, with only dead freight on its roof and a furred animal or
two, vaguely human, shivering inside. Sometimes the mail had to travel
by horse, and sometimes it altogether disappointed Billy and his
brothers and sisters of the excitement of its passage; for the stage
road ran by the small clearing, in the centre of which their house and
barn had been built--a primitive gabled house, like a Noah’s ark,
ugliness unadorned, and a cheap log barn of the “lean-to” type, with its
cracks corked with moss, and a roof of slabs.

Jack Frost might stop the mail, but he could not stop the gayeties of
the season. “Wooden frolics” and quilting-parties and candy-pullings and
infares and Baptist revival-meetings had been as frequent as ever; and
part of Matt’s enjoyment of his couch was a delicious sense of
oversleeping himself legitimately, for even his mother could hardly
expect him to build the fire at five when he had only returned from
Deacon Hailey’s “muddin’ frolic” at two. He saw himself coasting down
the white slopes in his hand-sled, watching the wavering radiance of the
northern lights that paled the moon and the stars, and wishing his
mother would not spoil the after-glow of the night’s pleasure and the
poetic silence of the woods by grumbling about his grown-up sister
Harriet, who had deserted them for an earlier escort home. He felt
himself well rewarded for his afternoon’s labor in loading marsh mud for
the top-dressing of Deacon Hailey’s fields; and a sudden remembrance of
how his mother had been rewarded for helping Mrs. Hailey to prepare the
feast made him nudge Billy in his turn.

“Cheer up, Billy. We’ve brought back a basket o’ goodies: there’s
plum-cake, doughnuts--”

“It’s gettin’ worst,” said Billy. “Hark!”

Matt mumbled impatiently and redirected his thoughts to the “muddin’
frolic.” The images of the night swept before him with almost the
vividness of actuality; he lost himself in memories as though they were
realities, and every now and then a dash of sleep streaked these waking
visions with the fantasy of dream.

“My, how the fiddle shrieks!” runs the boy’s reminiscence. “Why don’t
ole Jupe do his tunin’ to home, the pesky nigger? We’re all waitin’ for
the reel--the ‘fours’ are all made up; Ruth Hailey and me hev took the
floor. Ruth looks jest great with thet white frock an’ the pink sash,
thet’s a fact. Hooray!--‘The Devil among the Tailors!’--La, lalla,
lalla, lalla, lalla, flip-flop!” He hears the big winter top-boots
thwack the threshing-floor. Keep it up! Whoop! Faster! Ever faster! Oh,
the joy of life!

Now he is swinging Ruth in his arms. Oh, the merry-go-round! The long
rows of candles pinned by forks to the barn walls are guttering in the
wind of the movement; the horses tied to their mangers neigh in
excitement; from between their stanchions the mild-eyed cows gaze at the
dancers, perking their naïve noses and tranquilly chewing the cud. A
bat, thawed out of his winter nap by the heat of the temporary stove,
flutters drowsily about the candles; and the odors of the stable and of
the packed hay mingle with the scents of the ball-room. Matt’s
exhaustive eye, though never long off pretty Ruth’s face, takes in even
the grains of wheat that gild many a tousled head of swain or lass as
the shaking of the beams dislodges the unthreshed kernels in the mow
under the eaves, and, keener even than the eye of his collie, Sprat,
notes the mice that dart from their holes to seize the fallen drops of
tallow. But perhaps Sprat is only lazy, for he will not vacate his
uncomfortable snuggery under the stove, though he has to shift his
carcass incessantly to escape the jets of tobacco-juice constantly
squirted in his direction. It serves him right, thinks his young master,
for persisting in coming, though, for the matter of that, the creature,
having superintended the mud-hauling, has more right to be present than
Bully Preep. “Wonder why sister Harriet lets him dance with her so
of’n!” the panorama of his thought proceeds. “What kin she see in the
skunk, fur lan’ sakes? I told her ’bout the way he bully-ragged me when
he was boss o’ the school and I was a teeny shaver. But she don’t seem
to care a snap. Girls are queer critters, thet’s a fact. He used to put
a chip on my shoulder, an’ egg the fellers on to flick it off. But,
gosh! didn’t I hit him a lick when he pulled little Ruth’s hair? He’d a
black eye, thet’s a fact, though he giv’ me two, an’ mother an’ teacher
’ud a giv’ me one more apiece, but there warn’t no more left. I took it
out in picters though, I guess. My! didn’t ole McTavit’s face jest look
reedic’lous when he discovered Bully Preep in the fly-leaf of every
readin’-book. Thet’s jest how mother is glarin’ at Harriet this moment.
Pop! pop! pop! What a lot o’ ginger-beer an’ spruce-beer Deacon Hailey
is openin’! Pop! pop! pop! He don’t seem to notice them thar black
bottles o’ rum. He’s ’tarnal cute, is ole Hey. Seems like he’s talkin’
to mother. Wonder how she kin understand him. He allus talks as if his
mouth was full o’ words--but it’s on’y tobacco, I reckon. Pop! pop! pop!
Thet’s what I allus hear him say, windin’ up with a ‘Hey’--an’ it does
rile me some to refuse pumpkin-pie, not knowin’ he’s invitin’ me to
anythin’ but hay. I ’spect mother’s heerd him talk considerable, just es
I’ve heerd the jays an’ the woodpeckers; though she kin’t tell one from
t’other, I vow, through bein’ raised at Halifax. Thunderation! thet’s
never her dancin’ with ole Hey! My stars, what’ll her elders say? Well,
I wow! She is backslidin’. Ah, she recollecks! She pulls up, her face is
like a beet. Ole Hey is argufyin’, but she hangs back in her traces. I
reckon she kinder thinks she’s kicked over the dashboard this time. Ah,
he’s gone and taken Harriet for a pardner instead; he’ll like sister
better, I guess. By gum! He’s kickin’ up his heels like a colt when it
fust feels the crupper. I do declare Marm Hailey is lookin’ pesky ugly
’bout it. She’s a mighty handsome critter, anyways. Pity she kin’t wear
her hat with the black feather indoors--she does look jest spliffin’
when she drives her horses through the snow. Whoop! Keep it up! Sling it
out, ole Jupe! More rosin. Yankee doodle, keep it up, Yankee doodle
dandy! Go it, you cripples; I’ll hold your crutches! Why, there’s Billy
dancin’ with the crutch I made him!” he tells himself as his vision
merges in dream. “Pop! pop! pop! How his crutch thumps the floor! Poor
Billy! Fancy hevin’ to hop through life on thet thar crutch, like a
robin on one leg! Or shall I hev to make him a longer one when he’s
growed up? Mebbe he won’t grow up--mebbe he’ll allus be the identical
same size; and when he’s an ole man he’ll be the right size again, an’
the crutch’ll on’y be a sorter stick. I wish I hed a stick to make this
durned cow keep quiet--I kin’t milk her! So! so! Daisy! Ole Jupe’s music
ain’t for four-legged critters to dance to! My! what’s thet nonsense
’bout a cow? Why, I’m dreamin’. Whoa, there! Give her a tickler in the
ribs, Billy. Hullo! look out! here’s father come back from sea! Quick,
Billy, chuck your crutch in the hay-mow. Kin’t you stand straighter nor
that? Unkink your leg, or father’ll never take you out to be a pirate.
Fancy a pirate on a crutch! It was my fault, father, for fixin’ up thet
thar fandango, but mother’s lambasted me a’ready, an’ she wanted to
shoot herself. But it don’t matter to you, father--you’re allus away
a’most, an’ Billy’s crutch kin’t get into your eye like it does into
mother’s. She was afeared to write to you ’bout it. Thet’s on’y Billy in
a fit--you see, Daisy kicked him, and they couldn’t fix his leg back
proper; it don’t fit, so he hes fits now an’ then. He’ll never be a
pirate now. Drive the crutch deeper into the ice, Charley; steady there
with the long pole. The iron pin goes into the crutch, Billy; don’t get
off the ashes, you’ll slide under the sled. Now, then, is the rope
right? Jump on the sled, you girls and fellers! Round with the pole!
Whoop! Hooray! Ain’t she scootin’ jest! Let her rip! Pop! Snap!
Geewiglets! The rope’s give! Don’t jump off, Billy, I tell you; you’ll
kill yourself! Stick in your toes an’ don’t yowl; we’ll slacken at the
dykes. Look at Ruth--_she_ don’t scream. Thunderation! We’re goin’ over
into the river! Hold tight, you uns! Bang! Smash! We’re on the
ice-cakes! Is thet you thet’s screamin’, Billy? You ain’t hurt, I tell
you--don’t yowl--you gooney--don’t--”

But it was not Billy’s voice that he heard screaming when the films of
sleep really cleared away. The little cripple was nestling close up to
him with the same panic-stricken air as when they rode that flying sled
together. This time it was impossible to mistake their mother’s voice
for the wind--it rose clearly in hysterical vituperation.

“An’ you orter be ’shamed o’ yourself, I do declare, goin’ home all
alone in a sleigh with a young man--in the dead o’ night, too!”

“There were more nor ourn on the road; and since Abner Preep was perlite
enough--”

“Yes, an’ you didn’t think o’ _me_ on the road oncet, I bet! If young
Preep wanted to do the perlite, he’d’ a’ took me in his father’s sleigh,
not a wholesome young gal.”

“But I was tar’d out with dancin’ e’en a’most, and you on’y--”

“Don’t you talk about _my_ dancin’, you blabbin’ young slummix! Jest
keep your eye on your Preeps with their bow-legs an’ their pigeon-toes.”

“His legs is es straight es yourn, anyhow.”

“P’raps you’ll say thet I’ve got Injun blood next. Look at his round
shoulders and his lanky hair--he’s a Micmac, thet’s what he is. He on’y
wants a few baskets and butter-tubs to make him look nateral. Ugh! I kin
smell spruce every time I think on him.”

“It’s you that hev hed too much spruce-beer, _hey_?”

“You sassy minx! Folks hev no right to bring eyesores into the world.
I’d rather stab you than see you livin’ with Abner Preep. It’s a squaw
he wants, thet’s a fact, not a wife!”

“I’d rather stab myself than go on livin’ with _you_.”

For a moment or two Matt listened in silent torture. The frequency of
these episodes had made him resigned, but not callous. Now Harriet’s
sobs were added to the horror of the altercation, and Matt fancied he
heard a sound of scuffling. He jumped out of bed in an agony of alarm.
He pulled on his trousers, caught up his coat, and slipped it on as he
flew barefoot down the rough wooden stairs, with his woollen braces
dangling behind him.

In the narrow icy passage at the foot of the stairs, in the bleak light
from the row of little crusted panes on either side of the door, he
found his mother and sister, their rubber-cased shoes half-buried in
snow that had drifted in under the door. Mrs. Strang was fully dressed
in her “frolickin’” costume, which at that period included a crinoline;
she wore an astrakhan sacque, reaching to the knees, and a small
poke-bonnet, plentifully beribboned, blooming with artificial flowers
within and without, and tied under the chin by broad, black, watered
bands. Round her neck was a fringed afghan, or home-knit muffler. She
was a tall, dark, voluptuously-built woman, with blazing black eyes and
handsome features of a somewhat Gallic cast, for she came of old
Huguenot stock. She stood now drawing on her mittens in terrible
silence, her bosom heaving, her nostrils quivering. Harriet was nearer
the door, flushed and panting and sobbing, a well-developed auburn
blonde of sixteen, her hair dishevelled, her bodice unhooked, a strange
contrast to the other’s primness.

“Where you goin’?” she said, tremulously, as she barred her mother’s way
with her body.

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” answered her mother, carefully smoothing
out her right mitten.

“Nonsense, mother,” broke in Matt. “You kin’t go out--it’s snowin’.”

He brushed past the pair and placed himself with his back to the door,
his heart beating painfully. His mother’s mad threats were familiar
enough, yet they never ceased to terrify. Some day she might really do
something desperate. Who knew?

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” repeated Mrs. Strang, carefully winding
the muffler round her head.

She made a step towards the door, sweeping the limp Harriet roughly
behind her.

“You kin’t get out,” Matt said, firmly. “Why, you hevn’t hed breakfast
yet.”

“What do I want o’ breakfus? Your sister is breakfus ’nough for me.
Clear out o’ the way.”

“Don’t you let her go, Matt!” cried Harriet. “I’ll quit instead.”

“You!” exclaimed her mother, turning fiercely upon her, while her eyes
spat fire. “You are young and wholesome--the world is afore you. You
were not brought from a great town to be buried in a wilderness. Marry
your Preeps an’ your Micmacs, and nurse your pappooses. God has cursed
me with froward children an’ a cripple, an’ a husband that goes
gallivantin’ onchristianly about the world with never a thought for his
’mortal soul, an’ the Lord has doomed me to worship Him in the wrong
church. Mother yourselves; I throw up the position.”

“Is it my fault if father hesn’t wrote you lately?” cried Harriet. “Is
it my fault if there’s no Baptist church to Cobequid village?”

“Shut your mouth, you brazen hussy! You’ve drove your mother to her
death! Stand out o’ my way, Matthew; don’t you disobey my dyin’
reques’.”

“I sha’n’t,” said the boy, squaring his shoulders firmly against the
door. “Where kin you drownd yourself? The pond’s froze an’ the tide’s
out.”

He could think of no other argument for the moment, and he had an
incongruous vision of her sliding down to the river on her stomach, as
the boys often did, down the steep, reddish-brown slopes of greasy mud,
or sinking into a squash-hole like an errant horse.

[Illustration: “HE PLACED HIMSELF WITH HIS BACK TO THE DOOR”]

“Why, there’s on’y mud-flats,” he added.

“I’ll wait on the mud-flats fur the merciful tide.” She fastened her
bonnet-strings firmly.

“The river is full of ice,” he urged.

“There will be room fur me,” she answered. Then, with a sudden
exclamation of dismay, “My God! you’ve got no shoes and socks on! You’ll
ketch your death. Go up-stairs d’reckly.”

“No,” replied Matt, becoming conscious for the first time of a cold wave
creeping up his spinal marrow. “I’ll ketch my death, then,” and he
sneezed vehemently.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks d’reckly, you wretched boy. You know what a
bother I hed with you last time.”

He shook his head, conscious of a trump card.

“D’ye hear me! Put on your shoes and socks!”

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque,” retorted Matt, clinching his fists.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks!” repeated his mother.

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque, an’ I’ll put on my shoes an’ socks.”

They stood glaring defiance at each other, like a pair of duellists,
their breaths rising in the frosty air like the smoke of pistols--these
two grotesque figures in the gray light of the bleak passage, the tall,
fierce brunette, in her flowery bonnet and astrakhan sacque, and the
small, shivering, sneezing boy, in his patched homespun coat, with his
trailing braces and bare feet. They heard Harriet’s teeth chatter in the
silence.

“Go back to bed, you young varmint,” said Matt, suddenly catching sight
of Billy’s white face and gray night-gown on the landing above. “You’ll
ketch your death.”

There was a scurrying sound from above, a fleeting glimpse of other
little night-gowned figures. Matt and his mother still confronted each
other warily. And then the situation was broken up by the near approach
of sleigh-bells. They stopped slowly, mingling their jangling with the
creak of runners sliding over frosty snow, then the scrunch of heavy
boots travelled across the clearing. Harriet flushed in modest alarm and
fled up-stairs. Mrs. Strang hastily retreated into the kitchen, and for
one brief moment Matt breathed freely, till, hearing the click of the
door-latch, he scented gunpowder. He dashed towards the door and pressed
the thumb-latch, but it was fastened from within.

“Harriet!” he gasped, “the gun! the gun!”

He beat at the door, his imagination seeing through it. His loaded gun
was resting on the wooden hooks fastened to the beam in the ceiling. He
heard his mother mount a chair; he tried to break open the door, but
could not. The chances of getting round by the back way flashed into his
mind, only to be dismissed as quickly. There was no time--in breathless
agony he waited the report of the gun. Crash! A strange, unexpected
sound smote his ears--he heard the thud of his mother’s body striking
the floor. She had stabbed herself, then, instead. Half mad with
excitement and terror, he backed to the end of the passage, took a
running leap, and dashed with his mightiest momentum against the frail
battened door. Off flew the catch, open flew the door with Matt in
pursuit, and it was all the boy could do to avoid tumbling over his
mother, who sat on the floor among the ruins of a chair, rubbing her
shins, her bonnet slightly disarranged, and the gun, still loaded,
demurely on its perch. What had happened was obvious; some of the little
Strang mice, taking advantage of the cat’s absence at the “muddin’
frolic,” had had a frolic on their own account, turning the chair into a
sled, and binding up its speedily-broken leg to deceive the maternal
eye. It might have supported a sitter; under Mrs. Strang’s feet it had
collapsed ere her hand could grasp the gun.

“The pesky young varmints!” she exclaimed, full of this new grievance.
“They might hev crippled me fur life. Always a-tearin’ an’ a-rampagin’
an’ a-ruinatin’. I kin’t keep two sticks together. It’s ’nough to make a
body throw up the position.”

The sound of the butt-end of a whip battering the front-door brought her
to her feet with a bound. She began dusting herself hastily with her
hand.

“Well, what’re you gawkin’ at?” she inquired. “Kin’t you go an’ unbar
the door, ’stead o’ standin’ there like a stuck pig?”

Matt knew the symptoms of volcanic extinction; without further parley he
ran to the door and took down the beechen bar. The visitor was “ole
Hey,” who drove the mail. The deacon came in, powdered as from his own
grist-mill, and added the snow of his top-boots to the drift in the
hall. There were leather-faced mittens on his hands, ear-laps on his
cap, tied under the chin, a black muffler, hoary with frost from his
breath, round his neck and mouth, and an outer coat of buffalo-skin
swathing his body down to his ankles, so that all that was visible of
him was a little inner circle of red face with frosted eyebrows.

Mrs. Strang stood ready in the hall with a genial smile, and Matt, his
heart grown lighter, returned to the kitchen, extracted the family
foot-gear from under the stove, where it had been placed to thaw, and
putting on his own still-sodden top-boots, he set about shaving
whittlings and collecting kindlings to build the fire.

“Here we are again, hey!” cried the deacon, as heartily as his
perpetual, colossal quid would permit.

“Do tell! is it really you?” replied Mrs. Strang, with her pleasant
smile.

“Yes--dooty is dooty, I allus thinks,” he said, spitting into the
snow-drift and flicking the snow over the tobacco-juice with his whip.
“Whatever Deacon Hailey’s hand finds to do he does fust-rate--thet’s a
fact. It don’t seem so long a while since you and me were shakin’ our
heels in the Sir Roger. Nay, don’t look so peaked--there’s nuthin’ to
make such a touse about. You air a _partic’ler_ Baptist, hey? An’ I
guess you kinder allowed Deacon Hailey would be late with the mail, hey?
But he’s es spry es if he’d gone to bed with the fowls. You won’t find
the beat of _him_ among the young fellers nowadays--thet’s so. They’re a
lazy, slinky lot; and es for doin’ their dooty to their country or their
neighbor--”

“Hev you brought me a letter?” interrupted Mrs. Strang, anxiously.

“I guess--but you’re goin’ out airly?”

“I allowed I’d walk over to the village to see if it hed come.”

“Oh, but it ain’t the one you expec’.”

“No?” she faltered.

“I guess not. Thet’s why I brought it myself. I kinder scented it was
suthin’ special, and so I reckoned I’d save you the trouble of trudgin’
to the post-office. Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to spare himself trouble
to obleege a fellow-critter. Do es you’d be done by, hey?” The deacon
never lost an opportunity of pointing the moral of a position. Perhaps
his sermonizing tendency was due to his habit of expounding the Sunday
texts at a weekly meeting, or perhaps his weekly exposition was due to
his sermonizing tendency.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Strang extended her hand for the letter. He produced
it slowly, apparently from up the sleeve of his top-most coat, a wet,
forlorn-looking epistle, addressed in a sprawling hand. Mrs. Strang
turned it about, puzzled.

“P’raps it’s from Uncle Matt,” ejaculated Matt, appearing suddenly at
the kitchen door.

“You’ve got Uncle Matt on the brain,” said Mrs. Strang. “It’s a Halifax
stamp.” She could not understand it; her own family rarely wrote to her,
and there was no hand of theirs in the address. Deacon Hailey lingered
on, apparently prepared, in his consideration for others, to listen to
the contents of his “fellow-critter’s” letter.

“Ah, sonny,” he said to Matt, “only jest turned out, and not slicked up
yet. When I was your age I hed done my day’s chores afore the day hed
begun. No wonder the Province is so ’tarnally behindhand, hey?”

“Thet’s so,” Matt murmured. Pop! pop! pop! was all that he heard, so
that ole Hey’s moral exhortations left him neither a better nor a wiser
boy.

Mrs. Strang still held the letter in her hand, apparently having become
indifferent to it. Ole Hey did not know she was waiting for him to go,
so that she might put on her spectacles and read it. She never wore her
spectacles in public, any more than she wore her nightcap. Both seemed
to her to belong to the privacies of the inner life, and glasses in
particular made an old woman of one before one’s time. If she had worn
out her eyes with needle-work and tears, that was not her neighbors’
business.

The deacon, with no sign of impatience, elaborately unbuttoned his outer
buffalo-skin, then the overcoat beneath that, and the coat under that,
and then, pulling up the edge of his cardigan that fitted tightly over
his waistcoats, he toilsomely thrust his horny paw into his
breeches-pocket and hauled out a fig of “black-jack.” Then he slowly
produced from the other pocket a small tool-chest in the guise of a
pocket-knife, and proceeded to cut the tobacco with one of the
instruments.

“Come here, sonny!” he cried.

“The deacon wants you,” said Mrs. Strang.

Matt moved forward into the passage, wondering. Ole Hey solemnly held up
the wedge of black-jack he had cut, and when Matt’s eye was well fixed
on it he dislodged the old “chaw” from his cheek with contortions of the
mouth, and blew it out with portentous gravity. Lastly, he replaced it
by the wedge of “black-jack,” mouthed and moulded the new quid
conscientiously between tongue and teeth, and passed the ball into his
right cheek.

“Thet’s the way to succeed in life, sonny. Never throw away dirty afore
you got clean, hey?”

Poor Matt, unconscious of the lesson, waited inquiringly and
deferentially, but the deacon was finished, and turned again to his
mother.

“I ’spect it ’ll be from some of the folks to home, mebbe.”

“Mebbe,” replied Mrs. Strang, longing for solitude and spectacles.

“When did you last hear from the boss?”

“He was in the South Seas, the capt’n, sellin’ beads to the savages.
He’d a done better to preach ’em the Word, I do allow.”

“Ah, you kin’t expect godliness from sailors,” said the deacon. “It’s in
the sea es the devil spreads his nets, thet’s a fact.”

“The Apostles were fishermen,” Mrs. Strang reminded him.

“Yes; but fishers ain’t sailors, Mrs. Strang. It’s in furrin parts that
the devil lurks, and the further a man goes from his family the nearer
he goes to the devil, hey?”

Mrs. Strang winced. “But he’s gittin’ our way now,” she protested,
unguardedly. “He’s comin’ South with a freight.”

“Ah, joined the blockade-runners, hey?”

Mrs. Strang bit her lip and flushed. “I don’t kear,” the deacon said,
reassuringly. “I don’t see why Nova Scotia should go solid for the
North. What’s the North done for Nova Scotia ’cept ruin us with their
protection dooties, gol durn ’em. They won’t have slaves, hey? Ain’t we
their slaves? Don’t they skin us es clean es a bear does a sheep? Ain’t
they allus on the lookout to snap up the Province? But I never talk
politics. If the North and South want to cut each other’s throats,
that’s not our consarn. Mind your own business, I allus thinks, hey? And
if your boss kin make a good spec by provisionin’ the Southerners,
you’ll be a plaguy sight better off, I vow. And so will I--for, you
know, I shall hev to call in the mortgage unless you fork out thet thar
interest purty slick. There’s no underhandedness about Deacon Hailey. He
gives you fair warnin’.”

“D’rectly the letter comes you shall have it--I’ve often told you so.”

“Mebbe thet’ll be his letter, after all--put his thumb out, I guess, and
borrowed another feller’s, hey?”

“No--he’d be nowhere near Halifax,” said Mrs. Strang, her feverish
curiosity mounting momently. “Don’t them thar sleigh-bells play a tune!
I guess your horses air gettin’ kinder restless.”

“Well--there’s nuthin’ I kin do for you to Cobequid Village?” he said,
lingeringly.

Mrs. Strang shook her head. “Thank you, I guess not.”

“You wouldn’t kear to write an answer now--I’d be tolerable pleased to
post it for you down thar. Allus study your fellow-critters, I allus
thinks.”

“No, thank you.”

Deacon Hailey spat deliberately on the floor.

“Er--you got to home safe this mornin’?”

“Yes, thank you. We all come together, me and Harriet and Matt. ’Twere a
lovely walk in the moonlight, with the Aurora Borealis a-quiverin’ and
a-flushin’ on the northern horizon.”

“A-h-h,” said the deacon slowly, and rather puzzled. “A roarer! Hey?”

At this moment a sudden stampede of hoofs and a mad jangling of bells
were heard without. With a “Durn them beasts!” the deacon breathlessly
turned tail and fled in pursuit of the mail-sleigh, mounting it over the
luggage-rack. When he had turned the corner, Matt’s grinning face
emerged from behind the snow-capped stump of a juniper.

“I reckon I fetched him thet time,” he said, throwing away the remaining
snowball, as he hastened gleefully inside to partake of the contents of
the letter.

He found his mother sitting on the old settle in the kitchen, her
spectacled face gray as the sand on the floor, her head bowed on her
bosom. One limp hand held the crumpled letter. She reminded him of a
drooping foxglove. The room had a heart of fire now, the stove in the
centre glowed rosily with rock-maple brands, but somehow it struck a
colder chill to Matt’s blood than before.

“Father’s drownded,” his mother breathed.

“He’ll never know ’bout Billy now,” he thought, with a gleam of relief.

Mrs. Strang began to wring her mittened hands silently, and the letter
fluttered from between her fingers. Matt made a dart at it, and read as
follows:

     DEAR MARM,--Don’t take on but ime sorrie to tell you that the Cap
     is a gone goose we run the block kade oust slick but the 2 time we
     was took by them allfird Yanks we reckkend to bluff ’em in the fog
     but about six bells a skwad of friggets bore down on us sudden like
     ole nick the cap he sees he was hemd in on a lee shoar and he
     swears them lubberly northers shan’t have his ship not if he goes
     to Davy Jones his loker he lufs her sharp up into the wind and
     sings out lower the longbote boys and while the shot was tearin and
     crashin through the riggin he springs to the hall-yards and hauls
     down the cullers then jumps through the lazzaret into the store
     room kicks the head of a carsk of ile in clinches a bit of oakem
     dips it in the ile and touches a match to it and drops it on the
     deck into the runin ile and then runs for it hisself jumps into the
     bote safe with the cullers and we sheer off into the fog mufflin
     our oars with our caps and afore that tarnation flame bust out to
     show where we were we warnt there but we heard the everlastin fools
     poundin away at the poor old innocent _Sally Bell_ till your poor
     boss dear marm he larfs and ses he shipmets ses he look at good old
     _Sally_ she’s stickin out her yellow tongue at em and grinnin at
     the dam goonies beg pardon marm but that was his way he never
     larfed no more for wed disremembered the cumpess and drifted outer
     the fog into a skwall and the night was comin on and we drov blind
     on a reef and capsized but we all struck out for shore and allowed
     the cap was setting sale the same way as the rest on us but when we
     reached the harbor the cap he warnt at the helm and a shipmet ses
     ses he as how he would swim with that air bundle of cullers that
     was still under his arm and they tangelled round his legs and
     sorter dragged him under and kep him down like sea-weed and now
     dear marm he lays in the Gulf of Mexiker kinder rapped in a shroud
     and gone aloft I was the fust mate and a better officer I never
     wish to sine with for tho he did sware till all was blue his hart
     was like an unborn babbys and wishing you a merry Christmas and God
     keep you and the young orfuns and giv you a happy new year dear
     marm you deserve it.

ime yours to command,

HOSKA CUDDY (Mate).

     p s.--i would have writ erlier, but i couldn’t get your address
     till i worked my way to Halifax and saw the owners scuse me not
     puttin this in a black onwellop i calclated to brake it eesy.

Matt hastily took in the gist of the letter, then stood folding it
carefully, at a loss what to say to the image of grief rocking on the
settle. From the barn behind came the lowing of Daisy--half
protestation, half astonishment at the unpunctuality of her breakfast.
Matt found a momentary relief in pitying the cow. Then his mother’s
voice burst out afresh.

“My poor Davie,” she moaned. “Cut off afore you could repent, too deep
down fur me to kiss your dead lips. I hevn’t even got a likeness o’ you;
you never would be took. I shall never see your face again on airth, and
I misdoubt if I’ll meet you in heaven.”

“Of course you will--he saved his flag,” said Matt, with shining eyes.

His mother shook her head, and set the roses on her bonnet nodding gayly
to the leaping flame. “Your father was born a Sandemanian,” she sighed.

“What is thet?” said Matt.

“Don’t ask me; there air things boys mustn’t know. And you’ve seen in
the letter ’bout his profane langwidge. I never would’ve run off with
him; all my folks were agen it, and a sore time I’ve hed in the
wilderness ’way back from my beautiful city. But it was God’s finger. I
pricked the Bible fur a verse, an’ it came: ‘An’ they said unto her,
Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed it was even so. Then said
they, It is his angel.’”

She nodded and muttered, “An’ I was his angel,” and the roses trembled
in the firelight. “If you were a good boy, Matt,” she broke off, “you’d
know where thet thar varse come from.”

“Hedn’t I better tell Harriet?” he asked.

“Acts, chapter eleven, verse fifteen,” muttered his mother. “It was the
finger of God. What’s thet you say ’bout Harriet? Ain’t she finished
tittivatin’ herself yet--with her father layin’ dead, too?” She got up
and walked to the foot of the stairs. “Harriet!” she shrieked.

Harriet dashed down the stairs, neat and pretty.

“You onchristian darter!” cried Mrs. Strang, revolted by her
sprightliness. “Don’t you know father’s drownded?”

Harriet fell half-fainting against the banister. Mrs. Strang caught her
and pulled her towards the kitchen.

“There, there,” she said, “don’t freeze out here, my poor child. The
Lord’s will be done.”

Harriet mutely dropped into the chair her mother drew for her before the
stove. Daisy’s bellowing became more insistent.

“An’ he never lived to take me back to Halifax, arter all!” moaned Mrs.
Strang.

“Never mind, mother,” said Harriet, gently. “God will send you back some
day. You hev suffered enough.”

Mrs. Strang burst into tears for the first time. “Ah, you don’t know
what my life hes been!” she cried, in a passion of self-pity.

Harriet took her mother’s mittened hand tenderly in hers. “Yes we do,
mother--yes we do. We know how you hev slaved and struggled.”

As she spoke a panorama of the slow years was fleeting through the minds
of all three--the long blank weeks uncolored by a letter, the fight with
poverty, the outbursts of temper; all the long-drawn pathos of lonely
lives. Tears gathered in the children’s eyes--more for themselves than
for their dead father, who for the moment seemed but gone on a longer
voyage.

“Harriet,” said Mrs. Strang, choking back her sobs, “bring down my poor
little orphans, and wrap them up well. We’ll say a prayer.”

Harriet gathered herself together and went weeping up the stairs. Matt
followed her with a sudden thought. He ran up to his room and returned,
carrying a square sheet of rough paper.

His mother had sunk into Harriet’s chair. He lifted up her head and
showed her the paper.

“Davie!” she shrieked, and showered passionate kisses on the
crudely-colored sketch of a sailor--a figure that had a strange touch of
vitality, a vivid suggestion of brine and breeze. She arrested herself
suddenly. “You pesky varmint!” she cried. “So this is what become o’ the
fly-leaf of the big Bible!”

Matt hung his head. “It was empty,” he murmured.

“Yes, but there’s another page thet ain’t--thet tells you to obey your
parents. This is how you waste your time ’stead o’ wood-choppin’.”

“Uncle Matt earns his livin’ at it,” he urged.

“Uncle Matt’s a villain. Don’t you go by your Uncle Matt, fur lan’s
sake.” She rolled up the drawing fiercely, and Matt placed himself
apprehensively between it and the stove.

“You said he wouldn’t be took,” he remonstrated.

Mrs. Strang sullenly placed the paper in her bosom, and the action
reminded her to remove her bonnet and sacque. Harriet, drooping and
listless, descended the stairs, carrying the two-year-old and
marshalling the other little ones--a blinking, bewildered group of
cherubs, with tousled hair and tumbled clothes. Sprat came down last,
stretching himself sleepily. He had kept the same late hours as Matt,
and, returning with him from the “muddin’ frolic,” had crept under his
bed.

The sight of the children moved Mrs. Strang to fresh weeping. She almost
tore the baby from Harriet’s arms.

“He never saw you!” she cried, hysterically, closing the wee yawning
mouth with kisses. Her eyes fell on Billy limping towards the red-hot
stove where the others were already clustered.

“An’ he never saw _you_,” she cried to him, as she adjusted the awed
infant on the settle. “Or it would hev broke his heart. Kneel down and
say a prayer for him, you mischeevious little imp.”

Billy, thus suddenly apostrophized, paled with nervous fright. His big
gray eyes grew moist, a lump rose in his throat. But he knelt down with
the rest and began bravely:

“Our Father, which art in heaven--”

“Well, what are you stoppin’ about?” jerked his mother, for the boy had
paused suddenly with a strange light in his eyes.

“I never knowed what it meant afore,” he said, simply.

His mother’s eye caught the mystic gleam from his.

“A sign! a sign!” she cried, ecstatically, as she sprang up and clasped
the little cripple passionately to her heaving bosom.




CHAPTER II

THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE


The death of his father--of whom he had seen so little--gave Matt a
haunting sense of the unsubstantiality of things. What! that strong,
wiry man, with the shrewd, weather-beaten face and the great tanned
hands and tattooed arms, was only a log swirling in the currents of
unknown waters! In vain he strove to figure him as a nebulous
spirit--the conception would not stay. Nay, the incongruity seemed to
him to touch blasphemy. His father belonged to the earth and the seas;
had no kinship with clouds. How well he remembered the day, nearly three
years ago, when they had parted forever, and, indeed, it had been
sufficiently stamped upon his memory without this final blow.

It is a day of burning August--so torrid that they have left their coats
on the beach. They are out on the sand flats, wading for salmon among
the giant saucers of salt water, the miniature lakes left by the tide,
for this is one of the rare spots in the Province where the fish may be
taken thus. What fun it is spearing them in a joyous rivalry that makes
the fishers wellnigh jab each other’s toes with their pitchforks, and
completely tear each other’s shirt-sleeves away in the friendly tussle
for a darting monster, so that the heat blisters their arms with great
white blobs that stand out against the brown of the boy’s skin and the
ornamental coloring of the man’s. Now and then in their early course,
when tiny threads of water spurt from holes in the sand, they pause to
dig up the delicate clam, with savory anticipations of chowder. Farther
and farther they wander till their backs are bowed with the spoil, the
shell-fish in a little basket, the scaly fish strung together by a small
rope passing through their gills. The boy carries the shad and the man
the heavier salmon. At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the
afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene,
the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds,
the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms
embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless
circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a
palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with
rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty.

“Come along, sonny,” says his father, looking back.

But the boy lingers still till the man rejoins him, puzzled.

“What’s in the wind?” he asks. “Is Farmer Wade’s barn on fire?”

“Everythin’s on faar,” says the boy, waving his pitchfork
comprehensively. His dialect differs a whit from his more-travelled
father’s. In his little God-forsaken corner of Acadia the
variously-proportioned mixture of English and American which, with local
variations of Lowland and Highland Scotch, North of Ireland brogue and
French patois, loosely constitutes a Nova-Scotian idiom, is further
tinged with the specific peculiarities that spring from illiteracy and
rusticity.

David Strang smiles. “Why, you are like brother Matt,” he says, in
amused astonishment. All day his son’s prattle has amused the stranger,
but this is a revelation.

“Like your wicked brother Matt?” queries the boy in amaze. David’s smile
gleams droller.

“Avast there, you mustn’t hearken to the mother. She knows naught o’
Matt ’cept what I told her. She is Halifax bred, and we lived ’way up
country. I ran away to sea, and left him anchored on dad’s farm. When I
made port again dad was gone to glory, and Matt to England with a
petticoat in tow.”

“But mother said he sold the farm, an’ your share, too.”

“And if he didn’t it’s a pity. He had improved the land, hadn’t he? and
I might have been sarved up at fish dinners for all he knew. I don’t
hold with this Frenchy law that says all the bairns must share and share
alike. The good old Scotch fashion is good ’nough for me--Matt’s the
heir, and God bless him.”

“Then why didn’t you marry a Scotchwoman?” asked Matt, with childish
irrelevance.

“‘Twas your mother’s fault,” answers David, with a half-whimsical,
half-pathetic expression.

“And why didn’t you take her to sea with you?”

“Nay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I either. And then
there was Harriet--a little body in long clothes. And the land was
pretty nigh cleared,” he adds, with a suspicion of apology in his
accent, “and we couldn’t grow ’nough to pay the mortgage if I hadn’t
shipped again.”

“And why am I like uncle?”

“Oh, he used to be allus lookin’ at the sky--not to find out whether to
git the hay in, mind you, but to make little picturs on the sly in the
hay-mow on Sundays, and at last he sold the farm and went to London to
make ’em.”

Matt’s heart begins to throb--a strange new sense of kinship stirs
within him.

“Hev you got any of them thar picturs?” he inquires, eagerly.

“Not one,” says David, shaking his head contemptuously. “His clouds were
all right, because clouds may be anything; but when he came to cows,
their own dams wouldn’t know ’em; and as for his ships--why, he used to
hoist every inch o’ canvas in a hur’cane. I wouldn’t trust him to tattoo
a galley-boy. But he had a power of industry, dear old Matt; and I guess
he’s larnt better now, for when I writ to him tellin’ him I was alive
and goin’ to get spliced, he writ back he was settled in London in the
pictur line, and makin’ money at it, and good-luck to him.”

Matt’s heart swells. That one can actually make money by making pictures
is a new idea. He has never imagined that money can be made so easily.
Why, he might help to pay off the mortgage! He does not see the need of
going to London to make them--he can make them quite well here in his
odd moments, and one day he will send them all to this wonderful kinsman
of his and ask him to sell them. Five hundred at sixpence each--why, it
sounds like one of those faëry calculations with which McTavit sometimes
dazzles the school-room. He wonders vaguely whether pictures are equally
vendible at that other mighty city whence his mother came, and, if so,
whether he may not perhaps help her to accomplish the dream of her
married life--the dream of going back there.

“An’ uncle’s got the same name as me!” he cries, in ecstasy.

“I should put it t’other way, sonny,” says his father, dryly; “though
when I give it you in his honor I didn’t calc’late it ’ud make you take
arter him. But don’t you git it into your figurehead that you’re goin’
to London--you’ve jest got to stay right here and look arter the farm
for mother. See? The picturs that God’s made are good ’nough for
me--that’s so.”

“Oh yes, dad, I shall allus stay on here,” answers Matt, readily. “It’s
Billy who allus wants to be a pirate. Silly Billy! He says--”

His father silences him with a sudden “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?” he asks, startled.

“I guess you’re the silly Billy, standin’ jabberin’ when the tide’s
a-rushin’ in. We’ll have to run for it.”

Matt gives a hasty glance to the left, then takes to his heels straight
across the sands in pace with his father. The famous “bore” of the Bay
of Fundy, in a northerly inlet of which they have been fishing, is
racing towards them from the left, and to get to shore they must shoot
straight across the galloping current. They are at the head of the bay,
where the tide reaches a maximum speed of ten miles an hour, and the
sailor, so rarely at home, has forgotten its idiosyncrasy.

“You might ha’ kep’ your weather-eye open,” he growls. “I wonder you’ve
never been drownded afore.”

“We shall never do it, father,” pants Matt, taking no notice of the
reproach, for the waves are already lapping the rim of the little sand
island (cut out by fresh-water rivulets) on which they find themselves,
and the pools in which they had waded are filling up rapidly.

“Throw ’em away,” jerks the father; and Matt, with a sigh of regret,
unstrings his piscine treasures, and, economically putting the string
into his pocket, speeds on with renewed strength. But the sun flares
mercilessly through the fulgent haze; and when they reach the end of
their island they step into three feet of water, with the safe shore a
quarter of a mile off. David Strang, a human revolver in oaths, goes off
in a favorite sequence of shots, but hangs fire in the middle, as if
damped.

“Strikes me the mother ’ll quote Scripture,” he says, grimly, instead.

“I suppose you can’t swim, sonny?” he adds.

“Not so fur nor thet,” says Matt, meekly.

David grunts in triumphant anger, and, shifting his pitchfork to his
left hand, he grasps Matt with his right, and lifts him back on to the
burning sand, already soddened by a thin frothy wash.

“Now then, han’ us your fork,” he says, crossly. He knocks out the iron
prongs of both the pitchforks, ties the wooden handles securely together
by the string from Matt’s discarded fish, and fixes the apparatus across
the boy’s breast and under his arms. To finish the job easily he has to
climb back on the sand island; for, though he stands in a little eddy,
it is impossible to keep his feet against the fierce swirl of the
waters; and even on the island, where there are as yet only a few inches
of sea, the less sturdy Matt is almost swept away to the right by the
mad cavalry charge of the tide on his left flank.

“Now then,” cries David, “it’s about time we were home to supper. I’ll
swim ye for your flapjacks.”

“But, father,” says Matt, “you’re not going to carry the fish on your
back?”

“They won’t carry me on theirs,” David laughs, regaining his good-humor
as the critical moment arrives. “What would the mother think if we came
home without a prize in tow! Avast there! I’ll larn you how I’ll get out
of carryin’ ’em on my back.”

And with a chuckle he launches himself into the eddy, and shoots forward
with a vigorous side-stroke. “This side up with care,” he cries
cheerily. “Jump, sonny, straight for’ards.” And in a moment the man and
the boy are swimming hard for the strip of shore directly opposite the
sand island, the spot where they had left their coats hours before; but
neither has the slightest expectation of reaching it, for the tide is
sweeping them with fearful velocity to the right of it, so that their
course is diagonal; and if they make land at all, it will be very far
from their original starting-point. David keeps the boy to port, and
adjusts his stroke to his. After a while, feeling himself well buoyed up
by the handles, Matt breathes more easily, and gradually becomes quite
happy, for the water is calm on the surface, and of the warmth and color
of tepid _café au lait_, quite a refreshing coolness after the tropical
air, and he watches with pleasure the rosy haze deepening into purple
without losing its transparency. They pass sea-gulls fighting over the
dead fish which Matt left behind, and which have been carried ahead of
him in their unresisting course.

“We’re drifting powerful from them thar coats,” grumbles David. “’Twill
be a tiresome walk back. If it warn’t for them we could cut across
country when we make port.”

Matt strains his vision to the left, but sees only the purple outline of
Five Islands, and in the far background the faint peaks of the Cobequid
Hills.

“Waal, I’m darned!” exclaims his father, suddenly. “If them thar coats
ain’t comin’ to meet us, it’s a pity.”

And presently, sure enough, Matt catches sight of the coats hastening
along near the shore.

“We must cut ’em off afore they pass by,” cries his father, hilariously.
“Spurt, sonny, spurt. ’Tis a race ’twixt them and us.”

Sea-birds begin to circle low over their heads, scenting David’s fish;
but he pushes steadily on, animating his son with playful racing cries.

“We oughter back the coats,” he observes. “They’ve backed us many a
time. Just a leetle quicker,” he says, at last, “or they’ll git past
yonder p’int, and then they’re off to Truro.”

Matt kicks out more lustily, then his heart almost stops as he suddenly
sees Death beneath the lovely purple haze. It is the human swimmers who
are in danger of being carried off to Truro if they do not make the
shore earlier than “yonder p’int,” for Matt remembers all at once that
it is the last point for miles, the shore curving deeply inward. Even if
they reach the point in time, they will be thrown back by the
centrifugal swirl; they must touch the shore earlier to get in safely.
He perceives his father has been aware of the danger from the start, and
has been disguising his anxiety under the pretext of racing the coats.
He feels proud of this strong, brave man, the cold terror passes from
his limbs, and he spurts bravely.

“That’s a little man,” says David; “we’ll catch ’em yet. Lucky it’s
sandstone yonder ’stead o’ sand--no fear o’ gettin’ sucked in.”

Now it is the shore that seems racing to meet them--the red reef sticks
out a friendly finger, and in another five minutes they are perched upon
it, like Gulliver on the Brobdingnagian’s thumb; and what is more, they
tie with their coats, meeting them just at the landing-place.

David laughs a long Homeric laugh at the queerness of the incident,
quivering like a dog that shakes himself after a swim, and Matt smiles
too.

“Them thar sea-birds air a bit off their feed, that’s a fact,” chuckles
David, as he surveys his fish; and then the two cut across the forest,
drying and steaming in the sun, the elder exhorting the younger to
silence, and hiding the prongless pitchforks in the hay-mow before they
enter the house, all smiles and salmon.

At the early tea-supper they sit in dual isolation at one end of the
table, their chairs close. But lo! Mrs. Strang, passing the hot
flapjacks, or “corn-dodgers,” with the superfluous perambulations of an
excitable temperament, brushes the back of her hand against Matt’s
shoulder, starts, pauses, and brushes it with her palm.

“Why, the boy’s wringin’ wet!” she cries.

“We went wadin’,” David reminds her, meekly.

“Yes, but you don’t wade on your heads,” she retorts.

“I sorter tumbled,” Matt puts in, anxious to exonerate his father.

Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husband’s jacket.

“An’ father kinder stooped to pick me up,” adds Matt.

“You’re a nice Moloch to trust with one’s children!” she exclaims in
terrible accents.

David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat
drying under it.

“An’ when you kin’t manage to drownd ’em you try to kill ’em with
rheumatics, and then _I_ hev all the responsibility. It’s ’nough to make
a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both o’ you.”

Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of
stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to
compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces--their
shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way
up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strang’s voice brings up the rear,
and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut
the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their
naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the
while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his
oath-repeater--for he never swears before mother and the children except
when he is not angry--suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship
at St. John’s by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island
to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or
three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and
amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown
open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of
her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes
down to the sea in a ship, and does more business--of a mysterious
sort--in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he
kisses his bairns and his wife--all amorousness and amiability
again--and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under
the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so--into the great
Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas,
all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely
farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from
envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings;
passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own
bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny,
sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt--no
vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green,
sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of
the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in
the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo
petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his mother’s face
furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep;
he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly
drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they
make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of
Harriet’s face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with
his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billy’s case Death
were no such grisly mystery.

Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness
of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy
last year’s accident had taken the zest out of Matt’s enjoyment of the
ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on
the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a
barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece--a machine of his
own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But
this year the glow of the skater’s blood became the heat of remorse when
he saw or remembered Billy’s wistful eyes; he gave up skating and
contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school
at Cobequid Village.

In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the
forelock) his father’s death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial
nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round
the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping
their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up
vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows
of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent
(with an emphasis on the “r”) of the “pear’ls of the watter,” and
calling for their night’s letters held converse with the postmistress on
“the watter and its pear’ls,” and expectorated copiously, presumably in
lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively
jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts
outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden
meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were
regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in
their buffalo robes and “boots”; and it lent an added solemnity to the
appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the
indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in
the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the
drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old
grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the
winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and
grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged
nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing,
balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and
expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strang’s from
popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal
sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it
involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses
recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed
her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow.
She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave
feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village
to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with
the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of
the “pear’ls of the land,” and walking home from the singing-class the
sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where
the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much
shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of
drink, and commiseration for “Ole Hey,” and all the adjacent villages
went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the
minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum)
remarked in his nasal address, “universally respected.” And everybody,
including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome
graveyard--some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the
coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh--a far-stretching,
black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning
landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences,
past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes
of the pines.




CHAPTER III

THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH


Other rumors, too, came by coach to the village--rumors of blizzard and
shipwreck--each with its opportunities of exhortation and expectoration.
But in the lonely forest home, past which the dazzling mail-coach
rattled with only a blast on the horn, the tragic end of David Strang
stood out in equal loneliness. For Death, when he smites the poor, often
cuts off not only the beloved, but the bread-winner; and though, in a
literal sense, the Strangs made their own bread, yet it was David who
kept the roof over their head and the ground under their feet. But for
his remittances the interest on the mortgage, under which they held the
farm and the house, could not have been paid, for the produce of the
clearing, the bit of buckwheat and barley, barely maintained the
cultivators, both Harriet and Matt eking out the resources of the family
by earning a little in kind, sometimes even in money. Matt was a skilful
soapmaker, decorating his bars with fanciful devices; and he delighted
in “sugaring”--a poetic process involving a temporary residence in a
log-hut or a lumberman’s cabin in the heart of the forest.

Now that the overdue mortgage money had gone to the bottom of the sea,
more money must be raised immediately. That the dead man had any claim
upon the consideration of his employers did not occur to the bereaved
family; rather, it seemed, he owed the owners compensation for the lost
_Sally Bell_. A family council was held on the evening of the day so
blackly begun. Not even the baby was excluded--it sat before the
open-doored stove on its mother’s lap and crowed at the great burning
logs that silhouetted the walls with leaping shadows. Sprat, too, was
present, crouched on “Matt’s mat” (as the children called the rag mat
their brother had braided), thrusting forward his black muzzle when the
door rattled with special violence, and by his side lay the boy staring
into the tumbling flames, yet taking the lead in the council with a new
authoritative ring in his voice.

Wherever the realities of life beleaguer the soul, there children are
born serious, and experience soon puts an old head on young shoulders.
The beady-eyed pappoose that the Indian squaw carries sandwichwise
’twixt back and board does not cry. Dump it down, and it stands stolid
like a pawn on a chessboard. Hang it on a projecting knot in the props
of a wig-wam, and it sways like a snared rabbit. Matt Strang, strenuous
little soul, had always a gravity beyond his years: his father’s removal
seemed to equal his years to his gravity. He knew himself the head of
the house. Harriet, despite her superior summers, was of the wrong sex,
and his mother, though she had physical force to back her, was not a
reasoning being. For a time, no doubt, she would be quieted by the peace
of the grave which all but the crowing infant felt solemnizing the
household, but Matt had no hope of more than a truce.

It was the boy’s brain and the boy’s voice that prevailed at the
council-fire. Daisy was to be killed and salted down and
sold--fortunately she was getting on in years, and, besides, they could
never have had the heart to eat their poor old friend themselves, with
her affectionate old nose and her faithful udders. The calves were to
become veal, and all this meat, together with the fodder thus set free,
Deacon Hailey was to be besought to take at a valuation, in lieu of the
mortgage money, for money itself could not be hoped for from Cobequid
Village. Though the “almighty dollar” ruled here as elsewhere, it was an
unseen monarch, whose imperial court was at Halifax. There Matt might
have got current coin, here barter was all the vogue. Accounts were kept
in English money; it was not till a few years later that the dollar
became the standard coin. For their own eating Matt calculated that he
would catch more rabbits and shoot more partridges than in years of
yore, and in the summer he would work on neighboring farms. Harriet
would have to extend her sewing practice, and collaborate with Matt in
making shad-nets for the fishermen, and Mrs. Strang would get spinning
jobs from the farmers’ wives. Which being settled with a definiteness
that left even a balance of savings, the widow handed the infant in her
arms to Harriet, and, replacing it by the big Bible, she slipped on her
spectacles with a nervous, involuntary glance round the kitchen, and
asked the six-year-old Teddy to stick a finger into the book. Opening
the holy tome at that place, she began to read from the head to the end
of the chapter in a solemn, prophetic voice that suited with her black
cap pinched up at the edges. She had no choice of texts; pricking was
her invariable procedure when she felt a call to prelection, and the
issue was an uncertainty dubiously delightful; for one day there would
be a story or a miracle to stir the children’s blood, and another day a
bald genealogy, and a third day a chapter of Revelation, all read with
equal reverence as equally inspiring parts of an equally inspired whole.

Matt breathed freely when his mother announced Ezra, chap. x., not
because he had any interest in Ezra, but because he knew it was a
pictureless portion. When the text was liable to be interrupted by
illustrations, the reading was liable to be interrupted by
remonstrances, for scarce a picture but bore the marks of his
illuminating brush, and his rude palette of ground charcoal, chalk, and
berry-juice. He had been prompted to color before his hand itched to
imitate, and in later years these episodes of the far East had found
their way to planed boards of Western pine, with the figures often in
new experimental combinations, and these scenes were in their turn
planed away to make room for others equally unsatisfactory to the
critical artist. But his mother had never been able to forgive the
iniquities of his prime, not even after she had executed vengeance on
the sinner. She had brought the sacred volume from her home at Halifax,
and a colored Bible she had never seen; color made religion cheerful,
destroyed its essential austerity--it could no more be conceived apart
from black and white than a minister of the Gospel. An especial
grievance hovered about the early chapters of Exodus, for Matt had
stained the Red Sea with the reddish hue of the Bay of Fundy--a
sacrilege to his mother, to whose fervid imagination the Sea of Miracles
loomed lurid with sacred sanguineousness to which no profane water
offered any parallel.

But Ezra is far from Exodus, and to-night the reminder was not likely. A
gleam of exaltation illumined the reader’s eyes when she read the first
verse; at the second her face seemed to flush as if the firelight had
shot up suddenly.

“‘Now when Ezra hed prayed an’ when he hed confessed, weepin’ an’
castin’ himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him
out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children:
fur the people wept very sore.

“‘An’ Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam, answered
an’ said unto Ezra, We hev trespassed against our God, an’ hev taken
strange wives of the people of the land....’”

She read on, pausing only at the ends of the verses. Harriet knitted
stockings over baby’s head; the smaller children listened in awe. Matt’s
thoughts soon passed from Shechaniah, the son of Jehiel, uninterested
even by his relationship to Elam. Usually when the subject-matter was
dull, and when he was tired of watching the wavering shadows on the
gray-plastered walls, he got up a factitious interest by noting the
initial letter of each verse and timing its length, in view of his
Sunday-school task of memorizing for each week a verse beginning with
some specified letter. His verbal memory being indifferent, he would
spend hours in searching for the tiniest verse, wasting thereby an
amount of time in which he could have overcome the longest; though, as
he indirectly scanned great tracts of the Bible, it may be this A B C
business was but the device of a crafty deacon skilled in the young
idea. However this be, Matt’s mind was deeplier moved to-night. The
shriek of the blind wind without contrasted with the cheerful crackle of
the logs within, and the woful contrast brought up that weird image
destined to haunt him for so long.

He shuddered to think of it--down there in the cold, excluded forever
from the warm hearth of life. Was not that its voice in the
wind--wailing, crying to be let in, shaking the door? His eyes filled
with tears. Vaguely he heard his mother’s voice intoning solemnly.

“‘An’ of the sons of Immer; Hanani, and Zebadiah. An’ of the sons of
Harim; Maaseiah, an’ Elijah, an’ Shemaiah, an’ Jehiel, an’ Uzziah. An’
of the sons of Pashur....’”

The baby was still smiling, and tangling Harriet’s knitting, but Billy
had fallen asleep, and presently Matt found himself studying the flicker
of the firelight upon the little cripple’s pinched face.

“‘An’ of the sons of Zattu; Elioenai, Eliashib, Mattaniah, an’ Jeremoth,
an’ Zabad, an’ Aziza. Of the sons also of Bebai....’”

The prophetic voice rose and fell unwaveringly, unwearyingly.

“Don’t you think I ought to write and tell Uncle Matt?” came suddenly
from the brooding boy’s lips.

“Silence, you son of Belial!” cried his mother indignantly. “How dare
you interrupt the chapter, so near the end, too! Uncle Matt, indeed!
What’s the mortal use of writin’ to him, I should like to know? Do you
think he’s likely to repent any, to disgorge our land? Why, he don’t
deserve to know his brother’s dead, the everlastin’ Barabbas. If he’d
hed to do o’ me he wouldn’t hev found it so easy to make away with our
inheritance, I do allow, and my poor David would hev been alive, and to
home here with us to-night, thet’s a fact. Christ hev mercy on us all.”
She burst into tears, blistering the precious page. Harriet ceased to
ply her needles; they seemed to be going through her bosom. The baby
enjoyed a free hand with the wool. Billy slept on. Presently Mrs.
Strang choked back her sobs, wiped her eyes, and resumed in a steady,
reverential voice:

“‘Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, Azareel, an’ Shelemiah, Shemariah,
Shallum, Amariah, an’ Joseph. Of the sons of Nebo; Jeiel, Mattithiah,
Zabad, Zebina, Jadau, an’ Joel, Benaiah.

“‘All these hed taken strange wives, an’ some of them hed wives by whom
they hed children.’”

Her voice fell with the well-known droop that marked the close.
“Anyways,” she added, “I don’t know your uncle’s address. London is a
big place--considerable bigger nor Halifax; an’ he’ll allow we want to
beg of him. Never!” She shut the book with an emphatic bang, and Matt
rose from Sprat’s side and put it away.

“Of course, I sha’n’t go back to school any more,” he said, lightly,
remembering the point had not come up.

“Oh yes, you will.” His mother’s first instinct was always of
contradiction.

“I may get a job an’ raise a little money towards the mortgage.”

“What job kin you get in the winter?”

“Why, I kin winnow wheat some,” he reminded her, “an’ chop the
neighbors’ wood, an’ sort the vegetables in their cellars.”

“An’ whatever you make by thet,” she reminded him, “you’ll overbalance
by what you’d be givin’ away to the school-master. You’ve paid Alic
McTavit to the end o’ the season.”

“I guess you’re off the track this load o’ poles, mother,” said Matt,
amused by her muddled finance.

Yet it was the less logical if even more specious argument of completing
the snow months (for only young and useless children went to school in
the summer) that appealed to him. The human mind is strangely under the
sway of times and seasons, and the calendar is the stanchest ally of
sloth and procrastination, and so Mrs. Strang settled in temporary
triumph to her task of making new black mourning dresses for the girls
out of her old merino, and a few days afterwards, when Matt had carried
out his financial programme satisfactorily (except that Deacon Hailey’s
valuation did not afford the estimated surplus), he joined the other
children in their pilgrimage schoolward. The young Strangs amounted to a
procession. At its head came Matt, drawing Billy on a little hand-sled
by a breast-rope that came through the auger-holes in the peaks of the
runners, and the end of Sprat, who sneaked after the children, formed a
literal tail to it, till, arriving too far to be driven back, the animal
ran to the front in fearless gambollings. This morning the air was keen
and bright, the absence of wind preventing the real temperature from
being felt, and the sun lit up the white woods with cold sparkle. Ere
the children had covered the two miles most of them conceived such a new
appetite that their fingers itched to undo their lunch packets. A halt
was called, the bread-and-molasses was unwrapped, and while the future
was being recklessly sacrificed to the present by the younger savages,
Matt edified them by drawing on the snow with the point of Billy’s
crutch. They followed the development of these designs with vociferous
anticipation, one shouting, “A cow,” and another “Ole Hey” before more
than a curve was outlined. Matt always amused himself by commencing at
the most unlikely part of the figure, and working round gradually in
unexpected ways, so as to keep the secret to the last possible moment.
Sometimes, when it had been guessed too early, he would contrive to
convert a fox into a moose, his enjoyment of his dexterity
countervailing the twinge of his conscience. To-day all the animals were
tamer than usual. The boy drew listlessly, abstractedly, unresentful
when his secret was guessed in the first stages. And at last, half of
itself, the crutch began to shape a Face--a Face with shut eyes and
dripping hair, indefinably uncanny.

“Father!” cried Ted, in thick, triumphant tones, exultation tempered by
mastication. But the older children held their breath, and Teddy’s
exclamation was succeeded by an awesome silence. Suddenly a sagging
bough snapped and fell, the collie howled, and Matt, roused from his
reverie, saw that Billy’s face had grown white as the dead snow. The
child was palsied with terror; Matt feared one of his fits was coming
on. In a frenzy of remorse he blurred out the face with the crutch, and
hustled the sled forward, singing cheerily:

    “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
     Look upon a little child,
     Pity my simplicity,
     And suffer me to come to Thee.”

The children took up the burden, sifting themselves instinctively into
trebles and seconds in a harmony loud enough to rouse the hibernating
bear. Billy’s face returned to its normal pallor, and Matt’s to its
abstraction.

In the school-room--a bare, plastered room, cold and uninviting, with a
crowd of boys and girls at its notched pine desks--he continued pensive.
There was nothing to distract his abstraction, for even Ruth Hailey was
away. The geography lesson roused him to a temporary attention. London
flitted across his dreams--the Halifax of England, that mighty city in
which pictures were saleable for actual coin, and a mighty
picture-maker, the Matt Strang of England, was paid for play as if for
work. But the reading-book, with its _menu_ of solid stories and essays,
peppered with religious texts, restored him to his reveries. McTavit,
who was shaping quills with his knife, called upon him to commence the
chapter; but he stared at the little pedagogue blankly, unaware of the
call. He was noting dreamily how his jagged teeth showed beneath the
thin, snuffy upper lip, and the trick the mouth had of remaining wide
open after it had ceased talking. He tried to analyze why McTavit was
not smiling. Months ago, seeking to make his figures smile, the boy had
discovered the rident effect of a wide mouth, and now he essayed to
analyze the subtle muscular movements that separate the sublime from the
ridiculous. Suddenly the haunting thought recurred to him with a new
application. Even McTavit’s freckled face would one day be frozen--those
twitching eyelids still, the thin wide lips shut forever. How long more
would he stride about his motley school-room, scattering blows and
information? Would he come to a stop in the school-room as the clock
sometimes did, grown suddenly silent, its oil congealed by the intense
cold? Or would Death find him in bed, ready stretched? And the restless
boys and girls around him--good God!--they, too, would one day be very
peaceful--mere blocks--Carroty Kitty, who was pinching Amy Warren’s arm,
and Peter Besant, who was throwing those pellets of bread, and even
Simon the Sneak’s wagging tongue would be still as a plummet. They would
all grow rigid alike, not all at once, nor in one way, but some very
soon, perhaps, and others when they were grown tall, and yet others when
they were bent and grizzled; some on sea and some on land, some in this
part of the map and some in that, some peacefully, some in pain;
petrified one by one, ruthlessly, remorselessly, impartially; till at
last all the busy hubbub was hushed, and of all that lively crew of
youngsters not one was left to feel the sun and the rain. The pity of it
thrilled him; even McTavit’s freckled face grew softer through the veil
of mist. Then, as his vision cleared, he saw the face was really darker:
strange emotions seemed to agitate it.

“So ye’re obstinate, are ye?” it screamed, with startling suddenness. At
the same instant something shining flew through the air, and, whizzing
past Matt’s ear, sent back a little thud from behind. Matt turned his
head in astonishment, and saw a penknife quivering in the wall. He
turned back in fresh surprise, and saw that McTavit’s face had changed,
lobster-like, from black to red, as its owner realized how near had been
Matt’s (and his own) escape.

“Eh, awake at last, sleepy-head,” he blustered. “There’s na gettin’ your
attention. Well, what are ye starin’ at? Are ye na goin’ to fetch me my
knife?”

“I’m not a dog,” answered Matt, sullenly.

“Then dinna bark! Ye think because ye’ve lost your father ye’re
preevileged--to lose your manners,” he added, with an epigrammatic
afterthought that mollified him more than an apology. “I’m verra
obleeged to you,” he concluded, with elaborate emphasis, as Simon the
Sneak handed him the knife.

“Now, then, sleepy-head,” he said again, “p’r’aps ye’ll read your
paragraph--that’s richt, Simon; show him the place.”

McTavit hailed from Cape Breton Isle, and was popularly supposed to
soliloquize in Gaelic. This hurt him when he proposed to the
postmistress, who had been to boarding-school in Truro. She declared she
would not have a man who did not speak good English.

“I do speak guid English,” he protested, passionately. “Mebbe not in the
school-room, when I’m talkin’ only to my pupils, and it dinna matter,
but in private and in society I’m most parteecular.”

McTavit was still a bachelor, and still spoke guid English. When the
reading-lesson had come to an end, Matt was left again to his own
thoughts, for while poor McTavit gave the juniors an exercise in grammar
which they alleviated by gum-chewing, Matt and a few other pupils were
allotted the tranquillizing task of multiplying in copy-books £3949
17_s._ 11¾_d._ by 7958. The sums were so colossal that Matt wondered
whether they existed in the world; and if so, how many pictures it would
be necessary to make to obtain them. An awful silence brooded over the
room, for when written exercises were on, the pupils took care to do
their talking silently, lest they should be suspected of copying, this
being what they were doing. There was a little museum case behind
McTavit’s desk, containing stuffed skunks and other animals and local
minerals lovingly collected by him--stilbite and heulandite and quartz
and amethyst and spar and bits of jasper and curiously clouded agate,
picked up near Cape Blomidon amid the débris of crumbling cliffs. At
such times McTavit would stand absorbed in the contemplation of his
treasures, his rod carelessly tucked under his arm, as one “the world
forgetting, by the world forgot.” Then the tension of silence became
positively painful, for the school-room had long since discovered that
the museum case was a reflector, and McTavit, though he prided himself
on the secret of his Argus eye, never caught any but novices not yet
initiated into the traditions. Imagine, therefore, the shock both to him
and the room, when to-day the acute stillness was broken by a loud cry
of “Bang! bang! bang!” An irresistible guffaw swept over the school, and
under cover of the laughter the cute and ready collogued as to
“answers.”

“Silence!” thundered McTavit. “Who was that?”

In the even more poignant silence of reaction a small still voice was
heard.

“Please, sir, it was me,” said Matt, remorsefully.

“Oh, it was you, was it? Then here’s bang! bang! bang! for ye.” And as
he spoke the angry little man accentuated each “bang” with a vicious
thwack. Then his eye caught sight of Matt’s copy-book. In lieu of ranged
columns of figures was a rough pen-and-ink sketch of a line of great
war-ships overhung by smoke-clouds, and apparently converging all their
batteries against one little ship, on whose deck a stalwart man stood
solitary, wrapped in a flag.

McTavit choked with added rage.

“D-defacin’ your books agen. What--what d’ye call that?” he spluttered.

“Blockade,” said Matt, sulkily.

“Blockhead!” echoed McTavit, and was so pleased with the universal
guffaw (whereof the cute and ready took advantage to compare notes as
before) that he contented himself with the one slash that was necessary
to drive the jest home. But it was one slash too much. Matt’s vocal
cannonade had been purely involuntary, but he was willing to suffer for
his over-vivid imagination. The last insult, however--subtly felt as an
injury to his dead father, too--set his blood on fire. He suddenly
remembered that this blockhead was, at any rate, the “head” of a family;
that he could no longer afford to be degraded before the little ones,
who were looking on with pain and awe. He rose and walked towards the
door.

“Where are ye goin’?” cried McTavit.

“To find Captain Kidd’s treasure. I’ve learned all I want to know,” said
Matt.

“Ye’d better come back.”

Matt turned, walked back to his seat, possessed himself of his
half-empty copy-book, and walked to the door.

“Good-bye, you fellers,” he said, cheerfully, as he passed out. The
girls he ignored.

McTavit gave chase with raised rod, regardless of the pandemonium that
rose up in his wake. Matt was walking slowly across the field, with
Sprat leaping up to lick his face. The dog had rejoined him. McTavit
went back, his rod hanging down behind.

Matt walked on sadly, his blood cooled by the sharp air. Another link
with the past was broken forever. He looked back at the simple wooden
school-house, with the ensign of smoke fluttering above its pitched
roof; kinder memories of McTavit surged at his heart--his little jests
at the expense of the boys, his occasional reminiscences of his native
Cape Breton and of St. John, New Brunswick, with its mighty cathedral,
the _Life of Napoleon_ he had lent him last year, his prowess with line
and hook the summer he boarded with the Strangs in lieu of school-fees,
and then--with a sudden flash--came the crowning recollection of his
talent for cutting turreted castles, and tigers, and anything you
pleased, out of the close-grained biscuits and the chunks of
buckwheat-cake the children brought for lunch. Matt’s thoughts went back
to the beginnings of his school career, when McTavit had spurred him on
to master the alphabet by transforming his buckwheat-cake into any
animal from ass to zebra. He remembered the joy with which he had
ordered and eaten his first elephant. Pausing a moment to cut a stick
and drive Sprat off with it, he walked back into the wondering
school-room.

“Please, sir, I’m sorry I went away so rudely,” he said, “and I’ve cut
you a new birch rod.”

McTavit was touched.

“Thank you,” he said, simply, as he took it. “What’s the matter?” he
roared, seeing Simon the Sneak’s hand go up.

“Please, sir, hedn’t you better try if he hesn’t split it and put a hair
in?”

“Grand idea!” yelled McTavit, grimly. “How’s that?”

And the new birch rod made its trial slash at the raised hand.




CHAPTER IV

“MAN PROPOSES”


Mrs. Strang was busy in Deacon Hailey’s kitchen. The providential death
of Mrs. Hailey had given her chores to do at the homestead; for female
servants--or even male--were scarce in the colony, and Ruth had been
brought up by her mother to play on the harpsichord.

When Mrs. Strang got home after a three mile walk, sometimes through
sleet and slush, she would walk up and down till the small hours,
spinning carded wool into yarn at her great uncouth wheel, and weeping
automatically at her loneliness, reft even of the occasional husband for
whom she had forsaken the great naval city of her girlhood, the
beautiful century-old capital. “It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the
position,” she would cry hysterically to the deaf rafters when the
children were asleep and only the wind was awake. But the droning wheel
went round just the same, steady as the wheel of time (Mrs. Strang
moving to and fro like a shuttle), till the task was completed, and
morning often found her ill-rested and fractious and lachrymose. Matt
would have pitied her more if she had pitied herself less. In the
outside world, however, she had no airs of martyrdom, bearing herself
genially and independently. At the “revivals” held in private houses she
was an important sinful figure, though neither Harriet nor Matt had yet
found grace or membership. She smiled a pleasant response to-night when
Deacon Hailey came in from the tannery and said “Good-evenin’.” It was a
large, low kitchen, heated by an American stove, with a gleaming dresser
and black wooden beams, from which hams hung. The deacon felt more
comfortable there than in the room in which Ruth was at that moment
engaged in tinkling the harpsichord, a room that contained other
archaic heirlooms: old china, a tapestry screen, scriptural mottoes
worked in ancestral hair, and a large colored lithograph of the Ark on
Mount Ararat, for refusing to come away from which Matt had once been
clouted by his mother before all the neighbors. The house was, indeed,
uncommonly luxurious, sheltered by double doors and windows, and warmly
wrapped in its winter cincture of tan-bark.

“An’ how’s Billy?” asked the deacon. “Some folks ’ud say how’s Billy’s
mother, but thet I can see fur myself--rael bonny and han’sum, thet’s a
fact. It’s sick folk es a Christian should inquire arter, hey?”

“Billy’s jest the same,” replied Mrs. Strang, her handsome face
clouding.

“No more fits, hey?”

“No; not for a long time, thank God. But he’ll never be straight again.”

“Ah, Mrs. Strang, we’re all crooked somehow. ’Tis the Lord’s will, you
may depend. Since my poor Susan was took, my heart’s all torn and
mangled; my heartstrings kinder twisted ’bout her grave. Ah! never kin I
forgit her. Love is love, I allus thinks. My time was spent so happy,
plannin’ how to make her happy--for ’tis only in makin’ others happy
that we git happy ourselves, hey? Now I hev no wife to devote myself to
my han’s are empty. I go ’bout lookin’ everyways fur Sunday.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you’ve never got a minute to spare.”

“You may depend,” said the deacon, proudly. “If I ain’t ’tarnally busy
what with the tannery an’ the grist-mill an’ the farm an’ the local
mail, it’s a pity. I don’t believe in neglectin’ dooty because your
heart’s bustin’ within.” He spat sorrowfully under the stove. “My motto
is, ‘Take kear o’ the minutes, and the holidays ’ll take kear o’
themselves.’ A man hes no time to waste in this oncivilized Province,
where stinkin’ Indians, that never cleared an acre in their lazy lives,
hev the right to encamp on a man’s land, an’ cut down his best firs an’
ashes fur their butter-butts and baskets, and then hev the imperence to
want to swop the identical same for your terbacco. It’s thievin’, I
allus thinks; right-down breakin’ o’ the Commandments, hey?”

“Well, what kin you expec’ from Papists?” replied Mrs. Strang. “Why, fur
sixpence the holy fathers forgive ’em all their sins.”

“‘Tain’t often they’ve got sixpence, hey? When ’lection-day comes round
agen I won’t vote fur no candidate that don’t promise to coop all them
greasy Micmacs up in a reservation, same es they do to Newfoundland.
They’re not fit to mix with hard-workin’ Christian folk. Them thar kids
o’ yourn, now, I hope they’re proper industrious. A child kin’t begin
too airly to larn field-work, hey?”

“Ah, they’re the best children in the world,” said Mrs. Strang. “They’ll
do anythin’ an’ eat anythin’ e’en a’most, an’ never a crost word; thet’s
a fact.”

The deacon suppressed a smile of self-gratulation. Labor was scarcer
than ever that year, and in his idea of marrying Harriet Strang, which
he was now cautiously about to broach, the possibility of securing the
gratuitous services of the elder children counted not a little,
enhancing the beauty of his prospective bride. He replied, feelingly:

“I’m everlastin’ glad to hear it, Mrs. Strang, for I know you kin’t
afford t’ employ outside labor. They’re goin’ to arx three shillin’s a
day this summer, the blood-suckers.”

“The laborer is worthy of his hire,” quoted Mrs. Strang.

“Yes; but he allus wants to be _highered_, hey? A seasonable joke ain’t
bad in its right place, I allus thinks. You needn’t allus be pullin’ a
long face. Thet Matt of yourn, now, I’ve seen him with a face like ole
Jupe’s fiddle, and walkin’ along es slow es a bark-mill turns a’most.”

Mrs. Strang sighed.

“Ah, you’re a good woman, Mrs. Strang. There’s no call to blush, fur
it’s true. D’ye think Deacon Hailey hesn’t got eyes for what’s under his
nose? The way you’re bringing up them thar kids is a credit to the
Province. I only hopes they’ll be proper thankful fur it when they’re
growed up. It makes my heart bleed a’most, I do declare. Many a time
I’ve said to myself, ‘Deacon Hailey, ’tis your dooty to do somethin’ fur
them thar orphans.’ Many a time I’ve thought I’d take the elder ones
off your han’s. There’s plenty o’ room in the ole farm--’twere built for
children, but there’s on’y Ruth left. An’ _she_ isn’t my own, though
when you see a gal around from infancy you forgits you ain’t the father,
hey? What a pity poor Sophia’s two boys were as delicate as herself.”

“Sophia?” murmured Mrs. Strang, interrogatively.

“Thet was my fust wife afore you came to these parts. She died young,
poor critter. Never shall I forgit her. Ah, there’s nothin’ like fust
love, I allus thinks. If I hedn’t wanted to hev children to work fur, I
should never ha’ married agen. But it’s a selfish business, workin’ for
one’s own han’, I allus thinks, knowin’ thet when you die all you’ve
sweated fur ’ll go to strangers. An’ now thet I’ve on’y got one soul
dependent on me, I feels teetotally onswoggled. What do you say? s’pose
I relieve you of Matt--dooty don’t end with passin’ the bag round in
church, hey?--it’s on this airth that we’re called upon to sacrifice
ourselves--or better still--s’pose I take Harriet off your han’s?”

Mrs. Strang answered, hesitatingly: “It is rael kind o’ you, deacon.
But, of course, Harriet couldn’t live here with you.”

“Hey? Why not?”

“She’s too ole.”

“An’ how ole might she be?”

“Gittin’ on for seventeen.”

“I guess thet’s not too ole for me,” he said, with a guffaw.

Mrs. Strang paused, startled. The idea took away her breath. The deacon
smiled on. In the embarrassing silence the tinkle of Ruth’s harpsichord
sounded like an orchestra.

“You--would--raelly--like my Harriet?” Mrs. Strang said, at last.

“You may depend--I’ve thought a good deal of her, a brisk an’ handy
young critter with no boardin’-school nonsense ’bout her.” He worked his
quid carefully into the other cheek, complacently enjoying Mrs. Strang’s
overwhelmed condition, presumably due to his condescension. “Of course
there’s heaps of han’sum gals every ways, but booty is only skin-deep, I
allus thinks. She’s very young, too, but thet’s rather in her favor.
You can eddicate ’em if you take ’em young. Train up a _child_, hey?”

“But I’m afeared Harriet wouldn’t give up Abner Preep,” said Mrs.
Strang, slowly. “She’s the most obstinate gal, thet’s a fact.”

“Hey? She walks out with Abner Preep?”

“No--not thet! I’ve sot my face agin thet. But I know she wouldn’t give
him up, thet’s sartin.”

Ruth’s harpsichord again possessed the silence, trilling forth
“Doxology” with an unwarranted presto movement. Mrs. Strang went on:
“The time o’ your last muddin’ frolic she danced with him all night e’en
a’most and druv off home in his sleigh, an’ there ain’t a quiltin’ party
or a candy-pullin’ or an infare but she contrives to meet him.”

“Scendalous!” exclaimed the deacon.

“I don’t see nothin’ scendalous!” replied Mrs. Strang, indignantly. “The
young man wants to marry her genu_ine_. ’Pears to me _your_ darter is
more scendalous a’most, playin’ hymns as if they were hornpipes. I
didn’t arx my folks if I might meet my poor Davie; we went to dances and
shows together, and me a Baptist, God forgive me! And Harriet’s jest
like that--the hussy--she takes arter her mother.”

“But if you were to talk to her!” urged the deacon.

Mrs. Strang shook her head.

“She’d stab herself sooner.”

“Stab herself sooner’n give up Abner Preep!”

“Sooner’n marry any one else.”

The deacon paused to cut himself a wedge of tobacco imperturbably. There
was no trace of his disappointment visible; with characteristic
promptitude he was ready for the next best thing.

“Well, who wants her to marry anybody else?” he asked, raising his
eyebrows. “_You_ don’t, do you?”

“N-n-o,” gasped Mrs. Strang, purpling.

“Thet’s right. Give her her head a bit. It don’t do to tie a grown-up
gal to her mammy’s apron-strings. You may take a horse to the water, but
you kin’t make her drink, hey? No, no, don’t you worry Harriet with
forcin’ husbands on her.”

“I--I--kinder--thought--” gasped Mrs. Strang, looking handsomer than
ever in the rosy glow of confusion.

“You kinder thought--” echoed Old Hey, spitting accurately under the
stove.

“Thet you wanted Harriet--”

“Thet’s so. I guessed she could live here more comfortable than to home.
I don’t ask no reward; ‘the widder and the orphan,’ as Scripter
says--hey?”

“You didn’t mean marriage?”

“Hey?” shouted the deacon. “Marriage? Me? Well, I swow! Me, whose Susan
hes only been dead five months! A proper thing to suspec’ me of! Why,
all the neighbors ’ud be sayin’, ‘Susan is hardly cold in her grave
afore he’s thinkin’ of another.’”

“I beg your pardin,” said the abashed woman.

“An’ well you may, I do declare! Five months arter the funeral, indeed!
Why, ten months at least must elapse! But you teetotally mistook my
meanin’, Mrs. Strang; it’s a woman _I_’d be wantin’--a woman with a
heart an’ a soul, not an unbroken filly. All I was a-thinkin’ of was,
Could thet thar Abner Preep clothe and feed your darter? But I ain’t the
man to bear malice; and till you kin feel you kin trust her to him or
some other man, my house is open to her. I don’t draw back my offer, and
when I made it I was quite aware you would hev to be on the spot, too,
to look arter her--hey?”

“Me?”

“Well, you’re not too ole, anyways.” And the deacon smiled again.
“A’ready you’re here all day e’en a’most.” Here he half knelt down to
attend to the stove, which was smoking very slightly. “It wouldn’t be
much of a change to sleep here, hey?”

“Oh, but you’re forgittin’ the other children, deacon.”

“Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to forgit anythin’, I guess,” he said, over
his shoulder. “Afore he talks he thinks. He puts everythin’ in the
tan-pit an’ lets it soak, hey? Is it likely I’d take you over here an’
leave the little uns motherless? I never _did_ like this kind of stove.”
He fidgeted impatiently with the mechanism at the back, making the iron
rattle.

“I--I--don’t--understand,” faltered Mrs. Strang, her heart beginning to
beat painfully.

“How you do go on ter-day, Mrs. Strang! When I ain’t talkin’ o’ marriage
you jump at it, and when I am you hang back like a mare afore a six-foot
dyke. Ah! thet’s better,” and he adjusted the damper noisily, with a
great sigh of satisfaction.

“You want to marry _me_?” gasped Mrs. Strang. The dark, handsome
features flushed yet deeper; her bosom heaved.

“You’ve struck it! I do want ter, thet’s plain!” He rose to his feet,
and threw his head back and his chest forward. “You’ll allus find me
straightforward, Mrs. Strang. I don’t beat about the bush, hey? But I
shouldn’t hev spoke so prematoor if you hedn’t druv me to it by your
mistake ’bout Harriet. Es if I could marry a giddy young gal with her
head full o’ worldly thoughts! Surely you must hev seen how happy I’ve
been to hev you here, arnin’ money to pay off your mortgage. Not that
I’d a-called it in anyways! What’s thet thar little sum to me? But I was
thinkin’ o’ _your_ feelin’s; how onhappy you would be to owe me the
money. And then thinkin’ how to do somethin’ for your children, I saw it
couldn’t be done without takin’ you into account. A mother clings to her
children. Nater is nater, I allus thinks. And the more I took you into
account, the more you figured up. There’s a great mother, I thinks;
there’s a God-fearin’ woman. An’ a God-fearin’ woman is a crown to her
husban’, hey? If ever I do bring myself to marry agen, thet’s the woman
for my money, I vow! When I say money, it’s on’y speakin’ in parables
like, ’cause I’m not thet sort o’ man. There _air_ men as ’ud come to
you an’ say, ‘See here, Mrs. Strang, I’ve got fifty acres of fust-class
interval-land, an’ a thousand acres of upland and forest-land, an’
thirty head o’ cattle, an’ a hundred sheep a’most, an’ a tannery thet,
with the shoemaker’s shop attached, brings me in two hundred pound a
year, an’ a grist-mill, an’ I carry the local mail, an’ I’ve shares and
mortgages thet would make you open your eyes, I tell you, an’ I’m free
from encumbrances e’en a’most, whereas you’ve got half a dozen.’ But
what does Deacon Hailey say? He says, jest put all thet outer your mind,
Mrs. Strang, an’ think on’y o’ the man--think o’ the man, with no one
to devote himself to.”

He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it. Emotion made her
breathing difficult. In the new light in which he appeared to her she
saw that he was still a proper man--straight and tall and sturdy and
bright of eye, despite his grizzled beard and hair.

“An’ if you kin’t give him devotion in return, jest you say so plump;
take a lesson from his straightforwardness, hey? Don’t you think o’ your
mortgage, or his money-bags, ’cause money ain’t happiness, hey? An’
don’t you go sacrificin’ yourself for your children, thinkin’ o’ poor
little Billy’s future, ’cause I don’t hold with folks sacrificin’
themselves wholesale; self-preservation is the fust law of nater, hey?
an’ it wouldn’t be fair to _me_. All ye hev to arx yourself is jest
this: Kin you make Deacon Hailey happy in his declinin’ years?” He drew
himself up to his full height without letting go her hand, and his eyes
looked into hers. “Yes, I say declinin’ years--there’s no deception, the
’taters air all up to sample. How ole might you think me?”

“Fifty,” she said, politely.

“Nearer sixty!” he replied, triumphantly. “But I hev my cold bath every
mornin’--I’m none o’ your shaky boards that fly into etarnal bits at the
fust clout, hey?”

“But you hev been married twice,” she faltered.

“So will _you_ be--when you marry me, hey?” And the deacon lifted her
chin playfully. “We’re neither on us rough timber--we’ve both hed our
wainy edges knocked off, hey? My father hed three wives--and he’s still
hale and hearty--a widower o’ ninety. Like father like son, hey? He’s a
deacon, too, down to Digby.”

As Deacon Hailey spoke of his father he grew middle-aged to Mrs.
Strang’s vision. But she found nothing to reply, and her thoughts
drifted off inconsequently on the rivulet of sacred music.

“But Ruth won’t like it,” she murmured at last.

“Hey? What’s Ruth got to say in the matter? I guess Ruth knows her fifth
commandment, an’ so do I. My father is the on’y person whose blessin’ I
shall arx on my ’spousals. I allus make a pint o’ thet, you may depend.”

The pathetic picture of Deacon Hailey beseeching his father’s blessing
knocked off ten years more from his age, and it was a young and ardent
wooer whose grasp tightened momently on Mrs. Strang’s hand.

“We might go to see him together,” he said. “It’s an everlastin’ purty
place, Digby.”

“I’d rayther see Halifax,” said Mrs. Strang, weakly. In the whirl of her
thoughts Ruth’s tinkling tune seemed the only steady thing in the
universe. Oh, if Ruth would only play something bearing on the
situation, so that Heaven might guide her in this sudden and fateful
crisis!

“Halifax, too, some day,” said the deacon, encouragingly, laying his
disengaged hand caressingly on her hair. “We’ll go to the circus
together.”

She withdrew herself spasmodically from his touch.

“Don’t ask me!” she cried; “you’re Presbyterian!”

“Well, and what was your last husban’?”

“Don’t ask me. Harriet and Matt air ongodly ’nough as it is; they’ve
neither on ’em found salvation.”

“Well, I won’t interfere with your doctrines, you bet. Freedom o’
conscience, I allus thinks. We all sarve the same Maker, hey? I guess
you’re purty reg’lar at our church, though.”

“Thet’s God’s punishment on me for runnin’ away from Halifax, where I
hed a church of my own to go to, but he never cared nuthin’ ’bout the
’sential rite, my poor Davie. I ought to ha’ been expelled from
membership there and then, thet’s a fact, but the elders were merciful.
Sometimes I think ’tis the old French nater that makes me backslide; my
grandfather came from Paris in 1783, at the end o’ the Amur’can war, and
settled to St. Margaret’s Bay; but then he married into a god-fearin’
German family that emigrated there the same time a’most, and that ought
to ha’ made things straight agen.”

Mrs. Strang talked on, glad to find herself floating away from the
issue. But the deacon caught her by the hand again and hauled her back.

“There won’t be no backslidin’ in Deacon Hailey’s household, you may
depend,” he said. “When a woman hes a godly stay-to-home husband, Satan
takes to his heels. It’s widders and grass-widders es he flirts with,
hey?”

Mrs. Strang colored up again, and prayed silently for help from the
harpsichord.

“I kin’t give you an answer yet,” she said, feebly.

Old Hey slowly squirted a stream of tobacco-juice into the air as
imperturbably as a stone fountain figure.

“I don’t want your answer yet. Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t dream of
marryin’ agen for ages? It don’t matter your bein’ in a hurry ’cause
your pardner left you three years back, but I hev the morals o’ the
township to consider; it’s our dooty in life to set a good example to
the weaker brethren, I allus thinks. Eight months at least must elapse!
I on’y spoke out now ’cause o’ your onfortunate mistake ’bout Harriet,
and all I want is to be sure thet when I do come to ask you in proper
form and in doo course, you won’t say ‘no.’”

Mrs. Strang remained silent. And the harpsichord was silent too. Even
that had deserted her; its sound might have been tortured into some
applicability, but its silence could be construed into nothing, unless
it was taken to give consent. And then all at once Ruth struck a new
chord. Mrs. Strang strained her ears to catch the first bar. The deacon
could not understand the sudden gleam that lit up her face when the
instrument broke into the favorite Nova Scotian song, “The Vacant
Chair!” At last Heaven had sent her a sign; there was a vacant chair,
and it was her mission to fill it.

“Well, is thet a bargen?” asked the deacon, losing patience.

“If you’re sure you want me,” breathed Mrs. Strang.

In a flash the deacon’s arms were round her and his lips on hers. She
extricated herself almost as quickly by main force.

“‘Twarn’t to be yet,” she cried, indignantly.

“Of course not, Mrs. Strang,” retorted the deacon, severely. “On’y you
asked if I was sure, and I allowed I’d show you Deacon Hailey was
genu_ine_. It’s sorter sealin’ the bargen, hey? I couldn’t let you
depart in onsartinty.”

“Well, behave yourself in future,” she said, only half mollified, as she
readjusted her hair, “or I’ll throw up the position. I guess I’ll be
off now,” and she took bonnet and mantle from a peg.

“Not in anger, Mrs. Strang, I hope. ‘Let all bitterness be put away from
you,’ hey? Thet thar han’sum face o’ yourn warn’t meant for
thunder-clouds.”

He hastened to help her on with her things, and in the process effected
a reconciliation by speaking of new ones--”store clothes”--that would
set off her beauty better. Mrs. Strang walked airily through the slushy
forest road as on a primrose path. She was excited and radiant--her
troubles were rolled away, and her own and her children’s future
assured, and Heaven itself had nodded assent. Her lonely heart was to
know a lover’s tenderness again; it was swelling now with gratitude that
might well blossom into affection. How gay her home should be with
festive companies, to be balanced by mammoth revivalist meetings! She
would be the centre of hospitality and piety for the country-side.

But as she neared the house--which seemed to have run half-way to meet
her--the primroses changed back to slush, and her face to its habitual
gloom.

Matt and Harriet were alone in the kitchen. The girl was crocheting, the
boy daubing flowers on a board, which he slid under the table as he
heard his mother stamping off the wet snow in the passage. Mrs. Strang
detected the board, but she contented herself by ordering him to go to
bed. Then she warmed her frozen hands at the stove and relapsed into
silence. Twenty times she opened her lips to address Harriet, but the
words held back. She grew angry with her daughter at last.

“You’re plaguy onsociable to-night, Harriet,” she said, sharply.

“Me, mother?”

“Yes, you. You might tell a body the news.”

“There’s no news to Cobequid. Ole Jupe’s come back from fiddlin’ at a
colored ball way down Hants County. He says two darkies hed a fight over
the belle.”

Harriet ceased, and her needles clicked on irritatingly. Mrs. Strang
burst forth:

“You might ask a body the news.”

“What news can there be down to Ole Hey’s?” Harriet snapped.

“Deacon Hailey,” began Mrs. Strang, curiously stung by the familiar
nickname, and pricked by resentment into courage; then her voice failed,
and she concluded, almost in a murmur, “is a-thinkin’ of marryin’ agen.”

“The ole wretch!” ejaculated Harriet, calmly continuing her crocheting.

“He’s not so ole!” expostulated Mrs. Strang, meekly.

“He’s sixty! Why, _you_ might as well think o’ marryin’! The idea!”

“Oh, but I’m on’y thirty-five, Harriet!”

“Well, it’s jest es ole. Love-makin’ is on’y for the young.”

“Thet’s jest where you’re wrong, Harriet. Youth is enjoyment enough of
itself. It is the ole folks that hev nothin’ else to look fur thet want
to be loved. It’s the on’y thing thet keeps ’em from throwin’ up the
position, an’ _they_ marry sensibly. Young folks oughter wait till
they’ve got sense.”

“The longer they wait the less sense they’ve got! If two people love
each other they ought to marry at once, thet’s a fact.”

“Yes; if they’re two ole sensible people.”

“I’m tar’d o’ this talk o’ waitin’,” said Harriet, petulantly. “How ole
were you when you ran away with father?”

“You ondecent minx!” ejaculated Mrs. Strang.

“You weren’t no older nor me,” persisted Harriet, unabashed.

“Yes, but I lived in a great city. I saw young men of all shapes and
sizes. I picked from the tree--I didn’t take the fust thet fell at my
feet; an’ how you can look at an onsightly critter like Abner Preep! I’d
rayther see you matched with Roger Besant, for though his left shoulder
_is_ half an inch higher than the right a’most, from carrying heavy
timbers in the ship-yard, he don’t bend his legs like a couple o’ broken
candles.”

“Don’t talk to me o’ Roger Besant--he’s a toad. It’s Abner I love. I
don’t kear ’bout his legs; his heart’s in the right place!”

“You mean he’s give it to you!”

“I reckon so!”

“An’ you will fly in my face?”

“I must,” said Harriet, sullenly, “if you don’t take your face out o’
the way.”

“You imperent slummix! An’ you will leave your mother alone?”

“Es soon es Abner kin build a house.”

“Then if you marry Abner Preep,” said Mrs. Strang, rising in all the
majesty of righteous menace, “I’ll marry Deacon Hailey.”

“What!” Harriet also rose, white and scared.

“You may depend! I’m desprit! You kin try me too far. You know the wust,
now. I _will_ take my face out o’ the way, you onnatural darter! I will
take it to one thet ’preciates it.”

There was a painful silence. Mrs. Strang eyed her daughter nervously.
Harriet seemed dazed.

“You’d marry Ole Hey?” she breathed at last.

“You’d marry young Preep!” retorted the mother

“I’m a young gal!”

“An’ I’m an ole woman! Two ole folks is es good a match es two young
uns.”

“Ah, but you don’t allow Abner and me _is_ a good match!” said Harriet,
eagerly.

“If you allow the deacon and me is.”

Their eyes met.

“You see, there’s the young uns to think on,” said Mrs. Strang. “If you
were to go away, how could I get along with the mortgage?”

“Thet’s true,” said Harriet, relenting a little.

“An’ if we were all to go to the farm, there’d be the house for you and
Abner.”

Harriet flushed rosily.

“An’ mebbe the deacon wouldn’t be hard with the mortgage!”

“Mebbe,” murmured Harriet. Her heart went pit-a-pat. But suddenly her
face clouded.

“But what will Matt say?” she half whispered, as if afraid he might be
within hearing. “I guess he’ll be riled some.”

“Oh, he’ll be all right if you kinder break the news to him an’ explain
the thing proper. I reckon he won’t take to the deacon at first.”

“The deacon! It’s Abner I’m thinkin’ on!”

“Abner! What does it matter what he thinks of Abner? ’Tain’t es if Matt
was older nor you. He’s got nothin’ to say in the matter, I do allow.”

“But he calls him Bully Preep, and says he used to wallop him at
McTavit’s.”

“And didn’t he desarve it?” asked Mrs. Strang, indignantly.

“He says he won’t hev him foolin’ aroun’. He calls him a mean skunk.”

“And who’s Matt, I should like to know, to pass his opinions on his
elders an’ betters? You jest take no notice of his ’tarnation imperence
and he’ll dry up. It’s hevin’ a new father he’ll be peaked about. Thet’s
why you’d better do the talkin’ to Matt!”

“Then _you’ll_ hev to tell him ’bout Abner,” bargained Harriet.

But neither had the courage.




CHAPTER V

PEGGY THE WATER-DRINKER


The old year had rolled off into the shadows, and the new had spun round
as far as April. Spring came to earth for a few hours a day, and behind
her Winter, whistling, clanged his iron gates, refreezing the morass to
which she had reduced the roads. Even at noon there was no genial
current in the air, unless you took the sheltered side of hills and
trees, and found Spring nestling shyly in windless coverts, though many
a se’n-night had still to pass ere, upon some more shaded hummock, the
harbinger Mayflower would timidly put forth a white bud laden with
delicate odor. Everywhere, down the hills and along the tracks, in every
rut and hollow, the sun saw a thousand dancing rivulets gleam and run,
and great freshets stir up the sullen, ice-laden rivers to sweep away
dams and mills, but the moon looked down on a white country demurely
asleep.

Early in the month, Matt having previously said farewell in earnest to
McTavit’s school-room, left home for the spring sugaring. Billy, alas!
could not accompany him as of yore, so Sprat was left behind, too, by
way of compensation to Billy. For company and co-operation, Matt took
with him an Indian boy whose Christian name (for he was a Roman
Catholic) was Tommy.

Matt had picked up Tommy in the proximate woods, where the noble savage
ran wild in cast-off Christian clothes. Tommy belonged to a tribe that
had recently pitched its wigwams in the backlands, a mile from Cobequid
Village. To Mrs. Strang, who despatched the sugaring expedition and
provisioned it, he was merely “a filthy brat who grinned like a Chessy
cat,” but to Matt he incarnated the poetry of the primitive, and even
spoke it. Not that Matt had more than a few words of Algonquinese, but
Tommy broke English quite unhesitatingly; and his remarks, if terse and
infrequent, were flowery and sometimes intelligible. They generally ran
backward, after the manner of Micmac, which is as highly inflected as
Greek or Hebrew. For the admiring Matt there was an atmosphere of
romance about the red man which extended even to the red boy, and he had
set himself to win Tommy’s heart in exchange for tobacco, which was
itself obtained by another piece of barter. Tommy smoked a clay pipe,
being early indurated to hardship, after the Spartan custom of his
tribe. There were sketches of Tommy, colored like the Red Sea or the Bay
of Fundy, in Matt’s secret gallery. Tommy was easy to do, owing to his
other tribal habit of sitting silent for hours without moving a muscle.
It was only rarely that Matt could extract from him native legends about
Glooscap, the national hero, and Mundu, the devil.

The two boys set out together for a rock-maple district five miles off,
drawing their impedimenta heaped high on a large sled. They were
fortified for a three weeks’ stay. Mrs. Strang had baked them several
batches of bread, and with unwonted enthusiasm supplied them with
corn-meal for porridge, and tea and sugar, and butter and molasses, and
salt pork and beef, all stowed into the barrel that would come home
full of sugar. Their kitchen paraphernalia embraced a teapot and a
teakettle, a frying-pan and a pot, while their manufacturing apparatus
comprised tin pails, Yankee buckets, dippers, and axes. Guns,
ammunition, and blankets completed their equipment. Matt’s painting
materials were stowed away on his person unobtrusively.

They took possession of a disused log-cabin, formerly the property of a
woodsman, as the advertising agent would have put it, had he penetrated
to the backwoods. Possibly under his roseate vision it might have
expanded into a detached villa without basement, or a bungalow standing
in its own grounds, but a non-professional eye would have seen nothing
but four walls and a pitched roof with a great square hole in it to let
the light in and the smoke out. These walls were built of unhewn logs in
their rough, natural bark. The floor was even more primitive, being
simply the soil. It was necessary to thaw it by lighting the fire on it
before the stakes could be driven in to support the cross-pieces from
which the sugar-pot depended.

Then the boys chopped down a vast store of hardwood for fuel, and lanced
the tall maples, catching their blood in birch-bark troughs through pine
spills. They emptied the troughs into pails, and carried the sap to
their cabin, and boiled it in the big pot, and cooled it again to sugar.
A halcyon fortnight passed, full of work, yet leaving Matt leisure for
daubing boyish fancies on pieces of birch-bark to cover withal the
wooden walls of his home, which the aforesaid advertiser might not
unwarrantably have described as a studio with a novel top-light in a
quiet neighborhood. Possibly Matt’s mural decorations would have
enhanced the description. They comprised a fantastic medley of angels
with faces more or less like Ruth Hailey, and devils fashioned more or
less after the similitude of Bully Preep, and strange composite animals
more or less like nothing on earth, moving amid hills and ships and
lurid horizons. One night Matt sat by the fire in the centre of the hut
painting a more realistic picture and meditating a weeding of his
gallery. There had been no sap running that day, a sudden return of
winter had congealed it, and so this extra artistic output during the
comparatively idle hours had almost exhausted his hanging-space. While
he painted he gave an eye to the seething pot in which the sap must
change to molasses, and then thicken to maple syrup, and then to maple
wax ere it was ladled into the birch-bark dishes and set to cool outside
the hut. A piece of fat pork hanging from a hook in the cross-piece just
touched the surface of the sap and prevented it from effervescing. Tommy
was asleep on a heap of fir boughs in a corner, for the boys took it in
turn to watch the pot and replenish the fire. The soundness of Tommy’s
sleep to-night astonished Matt, for usually the young Micmac slept the
sleep of the vigilant, a-quiver at the slightest unwonted sound. Matt
did not know that his ingenious partner had just completed the
distillation of a crude rum from a portion of sap arrested at the
molasses stage, and that he had imbibed gloriously thereof.

Matt’s painting-stool was an inverted bucket. He wore a fur cap with
pendent earlaps that gave him an elderly appearance; and his feet were
cased in moccasins, made from the green shank of a cow. For some time he
painted steadily, trying to reproduce the picturesque interior of the
cabin with his rude home-made colors and brush. The air was warm and
charged with resinous odors. The camp-fire burned brightly, the hardwood
flaming without snapping or crackling, with only the soft hissing and
spurting of liberated gases; the fire purred as if enjoying the warmth.
The yellow billows curled round the bulging bottom of the three-legged
pot, and sent up delicate spirals of blue smoke, tinged below with
flame, to mingle with the white sappy steam that froze as soon as it got
outside and disentangled itself from the wood smoke by falling as
hoar-frost. At moments when all this smoke lifted Matt could see the
stars shining on him through the hole in the roof, stainless and far
away in a deep blue patch of heaven. Somehow they made him dissatisfied
with his work; they seemed like calm, sovran eyes watching his puny
efforts to reproduce, with his pitiable palette, the manifold hues and
shades of the simple scene around him--the greasy copper of the Indian
boy’s face, glistening against the yellow blanket which covered him and
the olive-green boughs on which he lay; the motley firewood, the dull
brown tones of the spruce branches, the silver of birch, the yellow of
beech; the empty birch-bark troughs, silver-white outside and dull
salmon within, touched with tints of light gold or gray. Why, there was
a whole color-scheme of subdued rich tints in the moss alone--the dead
dry moss that filled up the uneven rifts in the log-roof, and gleamed
with a mottle of green and olive and russet. He threw down his brush in
despair, longing for the rich, thick paints he vaguely imagined his
uncle in London must have--real paints that did not fade as his did,
despite the gums he mixed experimentally with them--pure reds and blues
and greens and yellows, capable of giving real skies and real grass and
real water, and of being mixed into every shade of color the heart could
desire. Then he slipped out through the door, shutting it quickly to
prevent the hut filling with smoke. The ground was white under a
brilliant moon, with here and there patches of silver that wellnigh
sparkled. Overhead mystic pallid-gold rays of northern light palpitated
across the clear star-strewn heaven. The trees showed more sombre, the
birches and maples bare of leafage, the spruces and hemlocks and all the
tangled undergrowth reduced to a common gray in the moonlight. Here and
there a brown hummock stood solemnly with bared head. And from all this
sleeping woodland rose a restless breathing, that incessant stir of a
vast alien, self-sufficient life, the rustle of creatures living and
moving and having their being in another world than the human, in that
dim, remote, teeming underworld of animal life, with its keen joys and
transient pains. And every now and then a definite sound disengaged
itself from the immense murmur: a chickadee chirped, a black-headed
snow-bird twittered, a cat-owl hooted, a rabbit ran from the underwood,
as faintly distinguishable from the snow in his white winter coat as he
had been from the dead leaves over which he pattered in autumn in his
gray homespun.

Matt stood leaning against the door, absorbed into the multifarious
night, and hardly conscious of the cold; then he went in, thrilling with
vague, sweet emotion, and vast manful resolutions that cast out despair.
But he did not take up his brush again. He sat down before the fire in
dreamy bliss; all the asperities of his existence softened by its
leaping light, and even that dead face of his father thawed into the
pleasant motions of life. The past shone through a mellow, rosy mist,
and the future was like the scarlet sunrise of the forest, flaming from
splendor to splendor--a future of artistic achievement upon which Ruth
Hailey’s face smiled applause; a future of easy, unsought riches which
banished the gloom upon his mother’s.

And then all of a sudden he caught sight of Tommy’s clay pipe, fallen
from his mouth on to the blanket; and an unforeseen desire to smoke it
and put the seal on this hour of happiness invaded the white boy’s
breast. He rose and picked it up. It was full of charred tobacco. The
craving to light it and taste its mysterious joys grew stronger. His
mother had sternly forbidden him to smoke, backing up her prohibition by
the text in Revelation--“And he opened the bottomless pit, and there
arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the
sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.” But now he
remembered he had left school; he was a man. He put the stem into his
mouth and plucked a brand from the fire, then stood for a moment
irresolute. He wondered if any instinct warned his mother of what he was
doing, and from that thought it was an easy transition to wondering what
she was doing. His fancy saw her still running backward and forward,
working that great buzzing wheel with stern, joyless face. He put down
his pipe.

There was a fresh element in his dreamy bliss as he resumed his seat
before the fire, a sense of something high and tranquillizing like the
clear stars, yet touching the spring of tears. His head drooped in the
drowsy warmth, he surrendered himself to voluptuous sadness, and the
outside world grew faint and fading.

When he looked up again his heart almost ceased to beat. At his side
loomed a strange female figure, her head covered with a drab shawl that
hid her face. She stood in great snow-shoes as on a pair of pedestals,
and the log walls repeated her form in contorted shadow.

The gentle purring of the fire, the Indian boy’s breathing, sounded
painfully in the weird stillness. From without came the manifold rustle
of the night.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Give me a glass of water,” she replied, sweetly.

“I hev’n’t any water,” he breathed.

“I am afire with thirst,” she cried. “Quench me! quench me!” Her shawl
slipped back, revealing a face of wild, uncanny beauty crowned with an
aureola of golden hair. But the awesome thrill that had permeated Matt’s
being passed into one of æsthetic pleasure mingled with astonished
recognition.

“Why, it’s Mad Peggy!” he murmured.

“Aye, it’s the Water-Drinker!” assented the beautiful visitor, in soft,
musical tones, thereupon crying out, “Water, water, for God’s sake!”

“I hev’n’t any water, I tell you. Not till I git some from the spring in
the mornin’. Hev some sap!”

And Matt, starting to his feet, plunged the dipper into the barrel of
raw sap that stood on the floor. Mad Peggy seized it greedily and
drained the great ladle to the dregs. Then she filled it again with
delicious fluid, and then again, and yet again, leaving Matt aghast at
her gigantic capacity. She was filling the dipper a fourth time, but he
pulled it out of her hand, fearing she would do herself a mischief.

“I’m so thirsty!” she whispered, plaintively, in her musical accents.

“What are you doin’ in the woods at this hour?” answered Matt, sternly.

“I’m looking for Peter. What a bonny fire!” And she bent over it,
holding out her long, white hands to the flames.

Matt divined vaguely that Peter must be the sweetheart whose desertion
had crazed the poor creature. It was reported in Cobequid Village that
the handsome German immigrant who had been betrothed to her had gone off
forever on the pretext of “sugaring” when he learned that she was one of
the Water-Drinkers--the unhappy family whose ancestor had refused a cup
of cold water to a strange old woman, who thereupon put the curse upon
him and his descendants that they

[Illustration: “‘I AM AFIRE WITH THIRST,’ SHE CRIED.”]

might drink water and drink water and never quench their thirst. Peggy
was reputed quite harmless.

“You haven’t seen Peter, have you?” she cooed, suddenly.

“No,” replied Matt, with a fresh, nervous thrill. “But this is not a
night for you to be out and about. It’s bitter cold.”

“It’s bitter cold,” she repeated, “bitter cold for an old man like you,
but not for a girl like me, loved by the handsomest young fellow in the
Province; the heart within me keeps me warm, always warm and thirsty.
Give me more water.”

“No, you’ve hed ’nough,” said Matt. “It’s a shame your folks don’t look
arter you better.”

“Look after me! They’re all up at the ball, the heartless creatures; but
I saw the weddings, both of them, in spite of them all, and I think it’s
high time Peter came back from the sugaring to _our_ wedding, and I’ve
come to tell him so. This is the spot he used to sugar at. Are you sure
you haven’t seen him? You are his partner; confess, now,” she wound up,
cajolingly, turning her lovely face towards his troubled gaze.

“Can’t you see I’m only a boy?” he replied.

“Nonsense. You’re not a boy. Boys always call after me and pull my
shawl. I know all the boys.”

Matt felt the moisture gathering afresh under his eyelids.

“What’s your name, then?” she went on, sweetly.

“Matt,” he murmured.

“Ah, mad!” she cried, in ecstasy. “We are cousins--I knew it! That’s
what they call me.”

Her wild eyes shone in the firelight. The boy shuddered.

“Not mad, but Matt!” he corrected her.

“Ah, yes, Mad Matt! Cousins! Mad Peggy--Mad Matt!”

“I’m not mad,” he protested, feebly.

“Yes, yes, you are!” she cried, passionately. “I can see it in your
face. And yet you won’t give me a cup of water.”

“You’ve drunk ’nough,” said the boy, soothingly.

“Oh, what lovely little devils,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the
wall decorations. “Do _you_ see devils, too? Didn’t I say we were
cousins? Why, there’s one of the bridegrooms--ha! ha! ha! I guess he
didn’t show the cloven hoof this morning.”

“Which is the bridegroom?” asked Matt, piqued into curiosity.

“There--there he is! There is the boy!” She pointed to the best portrait
of Bully Preep. “_He_ always called after me, the little devil.”

Matt’s heart beat excitedly, his face crimsoned. But his strange
visitor’s next words threw him back into uneasy chaos.

“Oh, but everybody is saying how scandalous it is! with his wife only
six months in her grave. Look how long Peter and I have waited. Most of
the girls in the village get engaged half a dozen times; they don’t know
what love is, they don’t know anything, they’ve got no education. But
I’ve only been engaged once, and I’m so thirsty. And you’ve got her too,
the little angel! Everybody is saying how hard it is for her! And yet
they all go to the ball. May they dance till they drop, the hypocrites!”

“What are you sayin’?” faltered Matt. “Hard for Ruth Hailey? Why, she’s
only a little girl.”

“She isn’t a little girl. Little girls run after me. I know all the
little girls. She’s a little angel! Just as you’ve pictured her. Give me
some more water.”

This time Matt surrendered the dipper to her.

“Thank you, Cousin Matt,” she said, and drank feverishly. But seeing
that she was about to dip again, he placed himself between her and the
barrel. She turned away with a marvellously dexterous movement
considering her cumbrous foot-gear, and dipped the ladle into the
seething caldron instead. But Matt seized her arm and stayed her from
extracting the dipper.

“You’ll scald yourself,” he said.

“Let go my arm,” she cried, threateningly. “How dare you touch me--you
are not Peter!”

“You mustn’t drink any more.”

“You are very cruel!” she moaned. “Who is that sleeping there? Perhaps
it is Peter. I will wake him up; he will give me water. I am so
thirsty.” She moaned and crooned over the three-legged caldron, stirring
the sap feebly with the ladle in her efforts to wrest herself free, and
the white steam curled about her face, and gave her the air of a young,
beautiful witch bent over a caldron. Matt forgot everything except that
he would like to make a picture of her as she appeared now.

“You’d best go to sleep,” he said at last, awakening to a remembrance of
the strange situation. “There’s my bed--those fir-boughs--you kin lie
down there till the mornin’, and I’ll cover you with my blanket.”

“I want water,” she crooned.

“You kin’t get it,” said Matt.

“Then may the curse light on you and yours,” she cried, stirring the sap
more fiercely in her struggle, while the vapor and the wood smoke rose
in denser volumes around her. “May you thirst and thirst, and never be
satisfied! And that is to be your fate, Cousin Matt. I read it in your
face, in your eyes. Never to quench your thirst--never, never, never! To
thirst and thirst and thirst for everything, and never to be satisfied,
never to have anything you want. Mad Matt and Mad Peggy--cousins, you
and I! Ha! ha! ha!” Her laugh of malicious glee made the boy’s blood run
cold. From without came the answering screech of a wild-cat.

“Lie down and rest!” repeated Matt, imperatively.

“What! stay here with you? No, no, no, Cousin Matt. I know what you
want. You want to paint me and put me on the wall among the devils! No,
no, I must be off to find Peter. I shall stay with him in his cabin.”

Her grip of the dipper relaxed; it reeled against the side of the pot.
She turned away, and Matt let go her arm and watched her, spellbound.
She drew the thick dun shawl over her head, again veiling the glory of
the golden hair, and almost brought the edges together over her sad
beautiful face, so that the eyes alone shone out with unearthly
radiance. Then she moved slowly towards the door and thrust it open, and
the wind came in, and filled the entire cabin with heavy, acrid smoke,
which got into Matt’s eyes and throat, and woke even the Indian boy, who
sat up choking and rubbing his black, beady eyes.

“Dam door shuttum!” he cried, with unusual vehemence.

The words broke Matt’s spell. He rushed to the door, but his smarting
eyes could detect no gray-shawled figure gliding among the gray trunks.
He closed the door, wondering if he had been dreaming.

“‘Tain’t your turn yet, Tommy,” he said, waving away the smoke with his
hand, and Tommy fell back asleep, as if mesmerized. Matt was as relieved
at not having to explain as at Tommy’s momentary wakefulness, which had
braced him against the superstitious awe that had been invading him
while the mad beauty cursed him with that sweet voice of hers that no
anger could make harsh. He thought of the apparition with pity, mingled
with a thrill of solemn adoration; she had for him the beauty and
wildness of the elemental, like the sky or the sea. And yet she had left
in him other feelings--not only the doubt of her reality, but an uneasy
stirring of apprehensions. Was there nothing but insane babble in this
talk of Ruth Hailey and Abner Preep? A fear he could not define weighed
at his heart. Even if he had been dreaming, if he had drowsed over the
fire--as he must in any case have done not to have heard the scrape and
clatter of snow-shoes entering--the dream portended something evil. But,
no! it was not a dream. Assuredly the sap in the barrel had sunk to a
lower level. With a new thought he lit a resinous bough and slipped out
quickly and examined the dry stiff snow. The double trail of departing
snow-shoes was manifest, meandering among the bark dishes and
irregularly intersecting the trail of arrival. The radiant moonlight
falling through the thin bare maple-boughs made his torch superfluous,
except in the fuscous glade of leafy evergreens, along which he followed
the giant footmarks for some little distance. He paused, leaning against
a tall hemlock. Doubt was impossible. He had really entertained a
visitor. Not seldom in former years had he entertained visitors who came
to camp out for the night, which they made uproarious. But never had his
hut sheltered so strange a guest. He was moved at the thought of her
drifting across the wastes of snow like some fallen spirit. He looked up
and abstractedly watched a crow sleeping with its head under its wing on
the top of the hemlock, then his vision wandered to the flashing
streamers of northern light, and, higher still, to those keen depths of
frosty sky where the stars stood beautiful, and they drew up his
thoughts yearningly to the infinite spaces. Something cried within him
for he knew not what--save that it was very great and very majestic and
very beautiful, mystically blending the luminousness of light and color
with the scent of flowers and the troubled sweetness of music; and at
the back of his dim, delicious craving for it was a haunting certainty
that he would never reach up to it, never, never. The prophecy of mad
Peggy recurred to the boy like a cutting blast of wind. Was it true,
then, that he would thirst and thirst, and nothing ever quench his
thirst? He held up his torch yearningly to the stars, while the night
moaned around him, and the flaring pinewood cast a grotesque shadow of
him on the pure white snow, an uncouth image that danced and leered as
in mockery.




CHAPTER VI

DISILLUSIONS


As soon as he could get away next morning Matt drew on his oversocks and
started for home, racked by indefinite fears. He had not troubled to
rouse Tommy to take his watch, for he knew he himself would not sleep a
wink, and it seemed a pity to disturb so deep and healthy a slumber; so
he bustled about to blur his thoughts, and had breakfast ready an hour
after sunrise, which his anxiety did not prevent him from observing. To
see sky and forest take fire in gradual glory was an ecstasy
transcending the apprehensions of the moment.

Tommy had asked no questions during the morning meal, and made no
complaints about Matt’s failure to rouse him; but on being apprised of
his companion’s intended journey, he had pointed to the scanty
wood-pile--a reminder that had delayed Matt by a couple of hours spent
in felling and chopping up a straddle or two. But at last he got away,
Tommy undertaking, in a minimum of monosyllables, to attend to
everything else. Matt felt afresh the strength and stability of Tommy.
Tommy was like Sprat--firm, faithful, and uninquisitive.

He had five miles of clogged walking before him, but he made fairly good
progress, for he was unencumbered by snow-shoes, having a light step and
an instinct for hollows and drifts, and his oversocks, which reached
beyond the knee, kept out the snow when he trod deep. The freshness and
buoyancy of the morning dispelled his alarm; dread was impossible under
that wonderful blue sky. But as he got deeper and deeper into the
recesses under thick boughs that shut out the living blue with dead
gray, and took the sparkle out of the snow, his gloom returned, and
lasted till he was nearly at his journey’s end, when the road caught the
sunlight again just as the thought of home flooded his soul. And soon a
bend brought the goal in sight. There it was, the dear old house,
standing back from the road, in the midst of its little clearing, the
sun shining on its bleached clapboards, the black window-sashes standing
out fantastically against the white panes, opaque with frosty designs.
The smoke curled tranquilly from the chimney towards the overarching
azure, making the home seem a living creature whose breath was thus
condensed to visibility. It seemed months since he had left it, yet it
was absolutely unchanged. And then he heard the cock crow from the rear,
and his last fears vanished like evil spirits of the night, and a wave
of pleasurable anticipation bore him to the porch.

He opened the door--no one ever fastened doors by day, for burglars came
only in the milder form of peddlers, and other visitors were accustomed
to stable their horses and take their seats at the board without
ceremony or warning. It was not far from noon, but he heard no sounds
about the house, except the crowing of the cock, which continued, and
brought up to memory a grotesque and long-obliterated image of his
mother holding on to the leg of a soaring hawk that had picked up a
chicken. He listened for the lowing of Daisy; then, remembering she was
dead and salted, he moved forward into the passage. But he found nobody
in the living-room. There was not even a fire. The clumsy spinning-wheel
stood silent. The table was bare and tidy; the chairs were neatly
ranged. He ran into the kitchen--it radiated bleaker desolation. Matt
fought against the cold chill that was gathering at his heart. Of course
there would be nobody at home. Harriet was sewing somewhere, most of
the children were at school; and his mother, instead of leaving the baby
in the kitchen with one of them, must have taken it with her to her
work. And yet it was all very depressing and very disappointing. Then he
remembered, with a fresh shock, the smoke he had seen curling from the
roof, and for an instant he was oppressed by a sense of the uncanny. An
atmosphere of horror seemed to brood over the house. But the
recollection of a proverb of Deacon Hailey’s, “There’s no smoke without
fire, hey?” uttered in a moment of unusual articulateness, brought back
common-sense. He ran up to the bedrooms, but there was not even a stove,
except in his mother’s room--a room tapestried with texts worked in
Berlin wool on perforated card-board--where the bed had not been made,
and where there were traces of extinct logs. Immeasurably puzzled, and
wondering if the smoke had been an optical illusion, he returned to the
living-room. There was only one room he had not gone into--the best
room--and when he at last recollected the existence of it he did not
immediately enter it. Only visitors had the enjoyment of this room and
the privilege of sitting gingerly on its cane chairs and surveying its
papered walls; and, in the absence of the family, there could be no
reception in progress. When, for the sake of logical exhaustiveness, he
did approach the door, it was listlessly and with a certain constraint,
amounting to awe. His nostrils already scented the magnificent mustiness
of its atmosphere. He opened the door with noiseless reverence. Then he
stood rigid, like one turned to stone by the sight of Medusa’s head. It
was indeed a head that petrified him--or, rather, two heads, one pressed
against the other. Though he had only a back view of them, he knew them
both. The lank black hair was Bully Preep’s, the long auburn-brown
tresses were Harriet Strang’s. A fire had been lighted, regardless of
the polish of the Franklin stove and the severity of its fancy
scroll-work and ornamental urn; and before this fire his sister sat on
Abner’s knee, and Abner sat on a cane chair, tilting it with a
familiarity that hovered on contempt. The treble shock was too great.
Matt was dumb and sick and cold, though red-hot thoughts hurtled in his
brain. What! The skunk had sneaked in during his mother’s absence, and
it was thus that Harriet did the honors!

He struggled to get his voice back. “Harriet!” he cried, in raucous
remonstrance.

Harriet gave a little shriek and turned her head. The color fled from
her soft cheeks as she caught sight of her outraged junior, then the
blush returned in fuller crimson. Matt fixed her with a stern, imperious
eye.

“What are you doin’ in the best room?” was the phrase that leaped to his
angry lips.

Abner turned on him a face of smiling friendship.

“The best thing,” he replied, gayly.

“How dare you kiss my sister?” thundered Matt.

“Don’t be a fool, Matt!” said Abner, amiably. “She isn’t on’y your
sister--she’s my wife.”

“Your wife!” breathed Matt.

“Yes, don’t be streaked, dear. We were married yesterday.” And Harriet
disentangled herself from Abner and ran to throw her arms round Matt.
But the boy repulsed her with a commanding gesture.

“Don’t come near me!” he cried, huskily. “Where’s mother? Does she
know?”

“Oh, Matt!” cried Harriet, reproachfully, “d’you think I’d marry without
her consent!”

“I call it rael mean, anyways,” he cried, tears of vexation getting into
his eyes and his voice, “to take advantage of a feller like that, jest
because his back’s turned!”

“Waal, we won’t do it agen!” cried Abner, with unshakable good-humor.
“See here, Matt,” and he rose, too, revealing the slight tendency to
crookedness of lower limb that offended the exigent eye of his
mother-in-law, “let’s be pals. You were allus a spunky little chap, and
I liked you from the day you stood up agin me and blacked my eye, though
you had to jump up a’most to reach it. I was a beast in them thar days,
but I raelly ain’t now, thanks to Harriet--God bless her! I know you
don’t like my legs,” he added, with a flash of humor, “but there’s on’y
two of ’em, anyways.”

“An’ thet’s two too many, you crawlin’ reptile,” retorted Matt. Then,
turning to Harriet, he went on in slow, measured accents, “And is
this--chap--goin’ to--live here?”

“He is so,” retorted Harriet.

“Then,” said Matt, with ominous calm--”then you won’t hev me here,
thet’s all.”

“Of course we won’t,” said Harriet, with a pleasant laugh. “You’ll live
with mother.”

“With mother?” repeated Matt, staring.

“Yes; down to Deacon Hailey’s.”

“Hes mother gone to live to Deacon Hailey’s?” he asked, excitedly.

“You bet!” put in Abner, grinning genially.

“What--altogether?” exclaimed Matt. The world seemed going round as it
did in the geography books.

“I guess so.”

“I won’t hev it!” cried Matt, agitatedly. “I won’t hev her slavin’ like
a nigger. It was bad enough afore, when she hed to go there every day.
But now she’s naught but a servant. It’s a shame, I do declare. An’ you,
Harriet!” he said, turning fiercely on her again; “ain’t you ’shamed o’
yourself, drivin’ mother out of house and home?”

“No,” said Harriet, stoutly.

The laughter that lurked about her mouth filled him with a trembling
presentiment of the truth.

“Don’t you understand?” said Abner, kindly. “Your mother’s been and gone
and married the deacon, and a good thing for all o’ you, I do allow.”

“You’re a liar!” hissed the boy. The world spun round more fiercely.

Abner shrugged his shoulders good-temperedly.

“You see, it was all arranged in a hurry, Matt,” said Harriet,
deprecatingly. “An’ mother thought we’d best get it all over, an’ so we
were both married yesterday, an’ we thought it a pity to bother you to
come all the way. But you hevn’t finished, hev you? Where’s the sugar?”

“An’ a nice scandal, I vow!” he cried, furiously. “Everybody is talkin’
’bout it.”

“Oh come, Matt, thet’s a good un,” laughed Abner. “Why, you’ve heerd
nuthin’ ’bout it.”

“Oh, hevn’t I?” returned Matt, with sullen mysteriousness. “I don’t know
thet everybody went there an’ everybody said it was a shame. Oh no; I’m
blind and deaf, thet’s what I am.”

“Don’t make such a touse, Matt,” said Harriet, putting her hair behind
her ears with some calmness. “Don’t you see things air ever so much
better? I’ve got a man to support me,” and she put her arms lovingly
round Abner’s neck, as if supporting him, “an’ mother’ll be quite a
lady, not a servant, as you were silly ’nough to allow, an’ you won’t
hev to work so hard. An’ I’ll tell you what, Matt, you shall come here
sometimes an’ draw your picters, an’ mother won’t know.”

But Matt clinched his teeth. The bait was tempting, but unfortunately it
reminded him of his obedience to his mother the night before, when in
deference to her views he had denied himself the joy of Tommy’s pipe.
Oh, how he had been duped and bamboozled! At the very hour his inner eye
had seen her toiling, sorrowful at her spinning-wheel, she was
frolicking at her wedding-ball in gay attire. A vast self-compassion
softened his indignation and raw misery. He turned his back on the
newly-married couple, and strode from the house, lest they should
misinterpret his tears. But the tears did not come--anger rekindling
evaporated them unshed. What right had the deacon to steal his mother
without even asking him? And how ignoble of his mother to forget his
father thus! He figured Ruth Hailey replacing himself by another boy
merely because he was dead. It seemed sacrilege. And yet no doubt Ruth
was as bad as the rest of her sex. Had she not submitted tamely to the
supplanting of her dead mother--nay, was she not a necessary accomplice
in the conspiracy to keep him ignorant of the double marriage? Then he
had a vague remembrance that he had once heard she was not originally
the deacon’s daughter, but only the late Mrs. Hailey’s, which somehow
seemed to exonerate her from the full burden of his doings. Still, she
had unquestionably been sly.

His feet had turned instinctively back towards the lonely forest. No,
he would not go and live with the deacon, not even though it brought
Ruth within daily proximity. His attitude towards the deacon had never
been cordial--nay, the auditory strain upon him when “Ole Hey” spoke to
him had gone far towards making him antipathetic. It seemed monstrous
that such an old mumbler should have been deemed fit to replace the
cheery sailor who had gone down wrapped in his flag. No, Matt at least
would have none of him. Life under his roof would be a discord of
jarring memories. He would go back to his hut and live in the wood. He
would shoot enough to live upon, and there, alone and self-sufficient
and free as its denizens, he would pass his life painting and sketching.
Or, if he wanted society, he would seek that of the Indian, the simple,
noble Indian, and pitch his lot with his for a time or forever. Or
perhaps Tommy would stay with him--Tommy who was deep without being
wily, and restful without being dull. What a pity Billy was disabled;
they might have seceded together, but fate had separated them, not his
will.

The five miles were longer now, and the sky had grown a shade colder,
but he trod the gloomiest paths unchilled. His heart was hot with
revolt. As he came to the little open space round the hut a curious
phenomenon arrested his attention. There was no smoke curling above the
chimney-hole. A problem--the exact reverse of that which had greeted him
at the other terminus of his journey--clamored for solution. Surely
Tommy had not let the fire go out! He hastened his steps, and saw that
the door stood wide open on its leather hinges, projecting outwards into
the forest. Outside, too, empty birch-bark troughs were scattered about
in lieu of being piled up neatly. The air of desolation sobered him like
a cold douche. He was frightened. He had not even courage to dwell on
the thought of what foreboding whispered. But perhaps Tommy had only
gone to sleep again, and forgotten about the fire. With a gleam of hope
he ran to the entrance, then leaped back with a wild thrill, and slammed
the door to and put his back to it and stood palpitating, restrained
only by excitement from breaking down in childish tears. The interior of
the hut had been transformed as by enchantment. Of barrels, axes,
ironware, provender, even of his rude paints, there was not a trace,
though the birch-bark picture exhibition was undisturbed. The
birch-boughs were littered over the floor. There was no Tommy. But in
the centre of the cabin, where the fire had been, lay a matted bear,
voluptuously curled up on the warm ashes, and licking the mellifluous
soil, which was syrup-sodden by drops that had fallen from the sap-pot.
The beautiful sunshine had lured the animal from its winter
sleeping-chamber, famished after its long fast.

It was a moment Matt never forgot; one of those moments that age and
imbitter. As he stood with squared shoulders against the rough, battened
door, that was built of stout slabs, he shook from head to foot with
mingled emotions. Numb misery alternated with burning flashes of
righteous indignation against humanity, red and white. And with it all
was a stirring of the hunter’s instinct--an itching to shoot the
creature on the other side of the door--which aggravated his vexation by
the reminder that even his gun had been stolen. It eased him a little to
let his mind dwell on the prospect of potting such glorious game; but
first of all he must run Tommy to earth. Tommy could not have gone far,
burdened as he would be with the spoil.

The broken-hearted boy moved stealthily from the door and pushed up a
small trunk that he had cut down that morning, but not yet chopped up.
With some difficulty he raised this and propped it against the door,
which, being already latched, could not easily be burst open by the
bear. The creature was, moreover, likely to resume its winter nap in the
snug, sweet quarters in which it found itself. Having thus trapped his
bear, Matt started off by a cross-cut in the direction of the Indian
encampment, to which he presumed Tommy would naturally have returned
full-handed. But he had not gone a hundred yards before he called
himself a fool, and ran back. In his agitation he had forgotten to note
the trail of the sled in which Tommy must have drawn off the things.
This he now discovered ran quite in the opposite direction, and was
complicated not only by Tommy’s footmarks, but by a man’s. Whither had
Tommy decamped? The day seemed made up of surprises and puzzles.
However, there was everything to gain, or rather regain, by following
the dusky young impostor and the accomplice who had helped him to draw
the heavy sled. Matt discovered that the trail led towards Long Village,
two and a half miles off, and instantly it flashed upon him that Tommy
had gone there to dispose of the things. He quickened his pace, and in
less than half an hour strode into a truer solution of the mystery, for
suddenly he found himself amid dogs grubbing in the sunshine and
swaddled pappooses swinging on the poles of birch-bark wigwams, and
perceived that the vagrant Micmacs had shifted their encampment during
the fortnight. Tommy’s knowledge of the migration argued secret
correspondence, unless a tribal tempter had visited him accidentally
during Matt’s absence--which seemed rather improbable.

Matt’s soul was aflame with wrath and resentment. He rushed about among
the wigwams, unceremoniously peering behind the blankets that overhung
the doorways, which were partly blocked by spruce boughs arranged to
spring back and forth. Bow-legged, round-shouldered, dumpy men, with
complexions of grayish copper, squatting cross-legged on fir boughs
before the central fire, smoked on unresentful, a few ejaculating
sullenly, “_Kogwa pawotumun?_” (“What is your wish?”) Their faces had
nothing of the American hatchet-shape; they would have been round but
for the angularity of the jaw, and Chinese but for the eyes, which did
not slant upward, but were beady and wide apart. The cheek-bones were
high, the nose was of a negro flatness, and the straight black hair was
long and matted. In attire the men had an air of shabby civilization,
which went ill with the blankets and skins overwrapping the white men’s
leavings. Near the door--in the quarter of less distinction--sitting
with feet twisted round to one side, one under the other, as befits the
inferior sex--were women good-looking but greasy, who wore shawls and
blankets over their kerchiefed heads, and necklaces of blue beads
twinkling against their olive throats, and smoked as gravely as their
lords. But Tommy was invisible. Nor could Matt see anything of the
stolen goods. But in one tent he found Tommy’s father, and,
discourteously omitting the “Kwa” of greeting, plied him with indignant
questions in a mixture of bad English and worse Indian.

Tommy’s father understood little and knew nothing. He did not invite the
visitor into the tent, but smoked on peacefully and whittled a shaving,
and Matt’s admiration of the red man’s taciturnity died a painful death.
Had Tommy’s father not even seen Tommy? No; Tommy’s father had not seen
Tommy for half a moon, and the smoke curled peacefully round Tommy’s
father’s greasy head. Never had the unspeakable uncleanliness of the
picturesque figure struck Matt as it did now. He moved away with heavy
heart and heavy footstep, and interviewed other Indians, equally dingy
and equally reticent; even the squaws kept the secret.

Matt went back in despairing anger and poured out his passion in a flood
of remonstrance upon the unwashed head of Tommy’s father; he pointed to
the trail of the sled that drew up at Tommy’s father’s tent, he
reasoned, he threatened, he clinched his fist and stamped his foot; and
Tommy’s father smoked the pipe of peace and whittled the shaving. The
Indian held the stick on his knee and drew the knife towards himself,
unlike the white man, who cuts away from himself. It was a crooked
knife, with a notch for the thumb in the handle. Matt’s spirit oozed
away before its imperturbable movement to and fro. He felt sick and
faint; he became vaguely conscious that he had eaten nothing since
breakfast. Then he remembered the bear waiting in the cabin--waiting to
be killed. With a happy thought he informed Tommy’s father that he had
trapped a bear and could conduct him to the spot, and Tommy’s father
instantly began to understand him better; and when Matt proceeded to
offer him the beast in exchange for the stolen goods, the Micmac
betrayed a complete comprehension of the offer, and with a courteous
exclamation of “_Up-chelase_,” invited him into the furthermost and most
honorable portion of the tent. He even rose and held colloquy with some
of his brethren gathered round. A bear was a valuable property--dead.
His snout alone was worth five dollars, when presented as a death
certificate to a grateful government, anxious to extinguish him. These
five dollars were a great consideration to a tribe paid mainly in kind,
and hard pushed to find coin for the annual remission of sin at the
hands of the priests. The bear’s skin would fetch four or five dollars
more; while its three or four hundred pounds of flesh would set up the
larder for the season. As a result of the native council, Tommy’s father
informed Matt that he had just learned Tommy had been seen that morning,
but that he had hauled the sled past the encampment on his way to Long
Village to sell the freight (which nobody had suspected was not his own
property, the much dam thief). He had, however, left a gun with a boy
friend, and if Matt was content to swop the bear for this, he could have
it. Matt, fuming at his own helplessness, consented. The gun was
accordingly produced; Matt recognized his old friend, but Tommy’s father
explained in easy pantomime that when bear was dead boy would get gun,
and not before; and he handed it to a blanketless by-stander, who had
evidently bartered external heat for internal fire-water. Then,
shouldering his own gun, he motioned to Matt to lead the way. The little
procession of three set forth, the second Indian prudently providing
himself with a flat, wide sledge. The afternoon was waning, the blue
overhead had lost in luminousness, leaving the coloring of the earth
more vivid. But the shifting of nature’s kaleidoscope had ceased to
interest Matt; humanity occupied him exclusively, and the evil that was
done under the sun. Man or woman, white or red, they were all alike--a
skulking, shifty breed. It was not only he that had been betrayed; it
was truth, it was honor. Were these things, then, merely lip-babble?

On their arrival at the hut Matt explained the position. He was about to
remove the log that braced up the door, but Tommy’s father pulled him
violently back, and gestured that it was much more convenient to shoot
the animal through the chimney-hole. Matt felt a qualm of disgust and
remorse. It seemed cowardly to give the poor beast that had taken refuge
in his hut no chance. He leaned sullenly against the door, feeling
almost like one who had betrayed the laws of hospitality, and conscious,
moreover, of a strange savage sympathy with the bear in its strife with
humanity. His last respect for the noble red man vanished when the two
Micmacs clambered upon the low-pitched roof. They uttered “ughs” of
satisfaction as they peeped over the great square hole and perceived
their prey asleep. After some amiable banter of the animal they began to
put their guns into position. But Tommy’s father insisted on having the
glory of the deed, since he was paying for the bear with Matt’s gun, and
his rival ungraciously yielded. In his cocksureness, however, Tommy’s
father merely hit the bear’s shoulder. The creature started up with a
fierce growl, and began biting savagely at the bleeding wound. Excited
by his failure and the brute’s leap up, Tommy’s father leaned more over
the hole for his second shot; but his companion, exclaiming that it was
his turn now, pushed him back, and strove to get his body in front.
Tommy’s father, who was now effervescing with excitement, thrust himself
more forward still, and in his zeal succeeded so well that he suddenly
found himself flying head-foremost into the hut, while the gun went off
at random. The bullet missed, but the man struck the obfuscated creature
with a thud, ricochetted off its back, and lay prostrate on the
branch-strewn floor.

The sound of the fall, the explosion, the cry of dismay from the roof,
informed Matt of what had happened. In a flash his sympathy went back to
man. He cried to the other Indian to shoot, but the latter’s arm was
shaking, and the bear, after a few seconds of bewilderment, had risen on
its hind legs and stood over the fallen man growling fiercely, so that
the Micmac was afraid of hitting his friend. Matt reached up impatiently
for his gun, which the Micmac readily handed to him in unforeseen
violation of orders, and Matt, overthrowing the door-prop with the butt
end, lifted the latch and dashed in. Tommy’s father was already in the
bear’s grip, the infuriated animal’s elastic fore-paws beginning to
press horribly upon his ribs. Matt clapped the barrel of the gun to the
bear’s ear; then he was overswept by a fearsome doubt lest the gun had
been unloaded since it had left his hands. But his suspense was short.
He pressed the trigger; there was a ringing explosion, and the creature
bounded into the air, relaxing its hold of the Indian, upon whom it fell
again in its death-agony. Matt, aided by the other Micmac, who hurried
in, grunting, disentangled Tommy’s father from the writhing heap, and
found him bruised and breathless, but practically uninjured. Tommy’s
father vowed eternal gratitude to his rescuer, and said his life was
henceforward at Matt’s disposal. The boy curtly asked for his property
instead, whereupon the Indian shook his head and shrugged his shoulders
in token of impotence. Rolling the bear over with a prod of his
contemptuous foot, he produced his knife and started scalping and
skinning the dead enemy, while his brother-in-arms lit some boughs, and
cut a juicy steak from the carcass and set it to broil. The warmth was
grateful, for the shadows were fast gathering and the hyperborean hours
returning. A covey of bob-whites whirred past, and the weird note of a
hoot-owl was borne on the bleak air.

The Indians offered the boy “a cut from the joint,” and he refused
sulkily--a deadly insult in normal circumstances. But the keen pangs of
hunger and the delicious odor of the meat weakened him, and a later
invitation to join the squatting diners found him ravenously responsive,
though he felt he had bartered away his righteous indignation for a mess
of pottage. During the meal his guests or his hosts (he knew not which
they were) betrayed considerable interest in his mural decorations,
which they evidently regarded as symptoms of a relapse from
Christianity, and they were astonished, too, at his refusal to quaff
more than a mouthful or two of their rum--the coarse concoction locally
nicknamed “rot-gut.” While Matt, who had started last, was still eating
from the birch-bark dish he had utilized for the purpose, Tommy’s father
lit his after-dinner pipe, and, having taken a few whiffs, passed it on
to his companion, who in turn held out to Matt the long, reedy stem with
its feather ornaments.

The offer sent a thrill through the boy’s whole being. All his
grievances ascended afresh from the red stone bowl and mingled with the
fragrant smoke. How good, how obedient he had been! And all for what? A
lump gathered in his throat, so that he could not swallow his bit of
bear. He nodded assent, his heart throbbing with defiant manhood, and
motioned to the Micmac to place the pipe beside his dish till he was
ready for it. The two Indians then hauled the carcass athwart the sledge
hastily, for night had come on as though shed from the starless sky, and
they called to Matt to come along, but Matt shouted back that he did not
intend to accompany them. He no longer craved to cast in his lot with
the red man. Yet he went to the door of his tent to watch his
fellow-hunters disappear among the sombre groves, and a deeper dusk
seemed to fall on the landscape when the very rustle of their passage
died away. But as he turned in again and fastened up the door, his heart
leaped up afresh with the leaping flames. The sense of absolute solitude
became exultation--a keen, bitter joy. Here was his home; he had no
other. He had parted company with humanity forever.

He reseated himself on a little pile of fir boughs in his deserted home,
that was naked but for the wall-pictures--the least comforting of all
possible salvage, since they were the only things Tommy had not thought
worth stealing. As Matt sat brooding, darker patches on the soil, and
spots upon some of those pictures, caught his eye. He saw they were of
blood. In one place there was quite a little pool which had not yet sunk
into the earth or evaporated. He touched it curiously with his finger,
and wiped away the stain against a leaf. Then with a sudden thought he
curled a piece of bark and scooped up the blood into his birchen dish,
as a possible color, murmuring, gleefully:

    “‘Who caught his blood?’
        ‘I,’ said the fish,
        ‘With my little dish,
      I caught his blood.’”

In moving the “little dish” he laid bare Tommy’s father’s calumet,
forgotten. He took it up. How the universe had changed since last he
held a pipe in his hand--only last night! Again he heard the howl of a
wild-cat, and he looked round involuntarily, as if expecting to find Mad
Peggy at his elbow. But he had no sense of awe just now--though he had
barred his door inhospitably against further bears--only the
voluptuousness of liberty and loneliness, the healthy after-glow of
satisfied appetite, and the gayety born of flaming logs and a couple of
mouthfuls of fire-water. The Water-Drinker’s prophecy seemed peculiarly
inept in view of the pipe he held in his hand. With tremulous
anticipation of more than mortal rapture he relit it. The sensation was
unexpectedly pungent, but Matt puffed away steadily in hope and trust
that this was merely the verdict of an unaccustomed palate, and he found
a vast compensatory pleasure in his ability to make the thing work, to
send the delicate wreaths into the air as ably as any Micmac or deacon
of them all.

But soon even this pleasure began to be swamped by a wave of less
agreeable sensation, and Matt, puzzled and chagrined, after a gallant
stand, threw down the calumet, and hastened into the cold air with
palpitating heart and splitting head, and there, in the maple wood,
Bruin was avenged. That night, despite his vigil of the night before,
Matt Strang vainly endeavored to close his eyes upon an unsatisfactory
world.




CHAPTER VII

THE APPRENTICE


The long, endless years, crowded with petty episodes and uniformities,
and moving like a cumbrous, creeping train that stops at every station,
flash like an express past the eye of memory. Yet it is these unrecorded
minutiæ of monotonous months that color the fabric of our future lives,
eating into our souls like a slow acid. When, in after years, Matt
Strang’s youth defiled before him, the panorama seemed more varied than
when he was living the scenes in all their daily detail of dull routine,
and when, whatever their superficial differences, they were all linked
for him by an underlying unity of toil and aspiration.

First came his apprenticeship in Cattermole’s saw-mill, at the opposite
outskirt of the forest, twenty miles from Cobequid. For, though he early
tired of savagery, as a blind-alley on the road to picture-painting, he
refused, in the dogged pride of his boyish heart, to return to his
folks, contenting himself with informing them of his whereabouts and of
his intention to apprentice himself (with or without their consent).
Labor being so scarce that year, Deacon Hailey drove over in great haste
to offer him a loving home. Matt, who happened to be in the house, which
was only parted from the mill-stream by a large vegetable-garden, saw
through a window the deacon’s buggy arrive at the garden-path, and the
deacon himself alight to open the wooden gate. The boy’s resentment
flamed afresh, and it was supplemented by dread of the deacon’s
inarticulate conversation. He fled to Mrs. Cattermole in the kitchen.

She was a shrewish, angular person, economical of everything save angry
breath. A black silk cap with prim bows and ribbons sat severely on her
head, and a thread-net confined her hair. Cattermole, a simple,
religious, hen-pecked creature, had gone to the village store to trade
off butter.

“There’s Ole Hey coming!” cried Matt, breathlessly.

“Kin’t you speak quietly?” thundered Mrs. Cattermole. “You made my heart
jump like a frog. You don’t mean Ole Hey from Cobequid, the man es you
said married your mother?”

“Yes, thet’s the skunk. I reckon he’s come to take me back.”

Mrs. Cattermole’s eyes flashed angrily. “Well, I swan! But you’ve
promised to bide with us.”

“Thet’s so. I wouldn’t go back fur Captain Kidd’s treasure! I won’t see
him.”

“I’ll tell him you’re gone away.”

“No,” said Matt, sturdily. “I wrote that I was goin’ to be ’prenticed
here, and there ain’t any call for lies. Tell him I’m in the kitchen and
I won’t come out, and I don’t want to hev anythin’ to do with him. See!”

“Well, set there and mind the cradle, and I’ll jest give him
slockdologee. You uns allow you’re considerable smart, Cobequid way, but
I reckon he’s struck the wrong track this time.”

Matt grinned joyously. “Spunk up to him, ma’am!” he cried, with stirring
reminiscences of fights at McTavit’s. “Walk into him full split!”

“You mind the baby, young man. There won’t be no touse at all. He don’t
set foot in my kitchen, and there’s an end of it.”

Mrs. Cattermole greeted the deacon politely, and informed him that the
lad he was inquiring after was sulking in the kitchen, and that he
refused to receive his visitor on any account. The deacon sighed
unctuously with an air of patient martyrdom. Matt’s obduracy heightened
his estimate of the lad’s value as a gratuitous field-worker, and
sharpened his sense of being robbed of what small dowry Mrs. Strang had
brought him.

“The boy is dreadful set agin me,” he complained. “But, es I told his
poor mother, if you let a boy run wild, wild he runs, hey? Anyways, it
ain’t fur me to fail in lovin’-kindness. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth,
ain’t the gospel _we’re_ called upon to practise. I allus thinks there’s
no sort o’ use in bein’ a Christian on Sundays and a heathen on
week-days.”

“No, thet thar ain’t,” Mrs. Cattermole assented, amiably.

“Even to beasts a man kin be a Christian, hey? I reckon I’d better wait
in your kitchen an’ give the mare a rest. If _I_’ve come on a fool’s
errand, thet ain’t a reason my ole nag should suffer, hey?”

Mrs. Cattermole, seeing the outworks taken, directed the deacon, by a
flank movement, into the parlor, as alone befitting his dignity. To Matt
this parlor, far finer than the best room at home, was a chamber of awe,
but also of attraction, for its walls were hung with sober Bible prints.
Mrs. Cattermole stood there among her splendors with her back to the
door, partly for defensive purposes, partly so as not to depreciate one
of the hair-cloth chairs by sitting down. It was enough for one day that
her guest sat solidly on the rocking-chair of honor.

“We’ve been hevin’ too much soft weather, Mrs. Cattermole, arter all
thet heavy snow.”

“Yes, I’m afeard the dam will go out,” responded Mrs. Cattermole,
gloomily.

They discussed the disastrous thaw of a few years back, with a vivid
remembrance of the vegetables and dairy produce spoiled in the flooded
cellars.

“But it’s the Lord’s will,” summed up the deacon. “It ain’t any use
heapin’ up worldly treasure, I allus thinks.”

“Thet’s a fact.” Mrs. Cattermole shook her head in sad acquiescence.

“Heaven’s the only safe place to lay up your goods, hey? So I guess I’m
just goin’ to forgive thet durned boy all the anxiety he’s giv his poor
mother an’ me, an’ take him back right along.”

“Oh, but I guess you ain’t,” said Mrs. Cattermole. “We’ve promised to
take him on here.”

“We’ll let you off thet thar promise, Mrs. Cattermole. We ain’t folks as
allus wants to hold people tight to every onthinkin’ word. An’ you won’t
be the loser hardly, for the lad ain’t worth a tin pint to mortal man.
He’s a dreamy do-nuthin’, an’ the worry he’s been to his poor mother
you’ve no idee--allus wastin’ the Lord’s hours, unbeknown to her, in
scrawlin’ picters an’ smutchin’ boards with colors.”

“I reckon he’ll come in handy in our paint-shop, then.”

The deacon shook his head, as if pitying her bubble delusions.

“He ain’t smart, an’ he ain’t good-tempered. You see for yourself how
grouty he is to the best friend a boy ever hed.”

“He ain’t smart, I know. Thet’s why we ain’t goin’ to pay him no wages.”

The deacon chawed his quid and swayed in silent discomfiture.

“Ah, it’s his poor mother I’m thinkin’ of,” he said, after a while.
“She’s thet delicate she’d kinder worry if he was to--a mother’s heart,
hey? If ’twas my boy, I’d be proper glad to see him in the han’s of sech
a hard-workin’, God-fearin’ couple.”

“You hedn’t ought to talk to me,” said Mrs. Cattermole, softening.
“Father’d be terrible ugly if I was to settle anythin’ while he was to
the store.”

“And if he wouldn’t it’s a pity. Wives, obey your husbands, hey? But
there ain’t no call for hurry. More haste less speed, I allus thinks.
But I don’t want to keep you from your occupations. There air some
visitors who forgit folks kin’t afford to keep more’n one Sunday a week,
hey? Sorter devil’s darnin’-needles flyin’ into your ear--they worry
you, and they don’t do themselves no good. So don’t you take no notice
of me. I’ll jest talk to Matt to fill up the time.”

Mrs. Cattermole straightened herself against the door. “He won’t listen;
he’s too mad.”

“I reckon I could tone him down some.”

“Guess not. He’s too sot--he won’t come in.”

“I ain’t proud. I’ll go to him. True pride is in doin’ what’s right, I
allus thinks. Some folks kin’t see the difference between true pride an’
false pride. I’ll go to the kitchen.”

“I’d rayther you didn’t, deacon. It’s all in a clutter.”

The conversation drooped. The deacon’s mouth moved in mere chawing.
Swallowing his quid in deference to the parlor, he cut himself a new
chunk.

“You’ve heerd about the doctor, Mrs. Cattermole?” he began again.

“I dunno es I hev.”

“What! Not heerd about our doctor es was said to practise the Black
Art?”

“Oh, the sorcerer es lives on the ole wood-road. My brother who drives
the stage was tellin’ me ’bout it. He sets spirits turnin’ tables,
tellin’ the future, an’ nobody’ll go past his house arter dark.”

“Ah, but the elders called on him last week,” said the deacon. “Of
course we couldn’t hev him in the vestry. An’ he explained to the
committee thet sperrits or devils ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it.”

“Lan’ sakes! An’ you believed him?”

“Waal, my motto is allus believe your fellow-critters. An evil mind sees
a lookin’-glass everyways, hey? He jest showed us how to make a table
turn and answer questions. He says it’s no more wonderful than turnin’ a
grindstone.”

“I guess he’s pulled the wool over the eyes o’ the Church,” said Mrs.
Cattermole, sceptically.

“Not hardly! He turned thet thar table in broad daylight with the Bible
open upon it, to show thet Satan didn’t hev a look in.”

“The Bible on it! ’Pears to me terrible ongodly.”

“Ongodly! Why, you an’ me kin do it--two pillars o’ the Church! I guess
the Evil One couldn’t come nigh _us_, hey?”

“I dunno es it would turn if you an’ me was to do it.”

“You bet! It told me ’bout the future world, an’ my poor Susan’s
Christian name, an’ how much to ast for my upland hay.”

“Good lan’!” cried Mrs. Cattermole. “An’ would it tell me whether my
sister is through her sickness yet?”

“You may depend!”

“My! Thet’s jest great!” And Mrs. Cattermole eagerly inquired how one
set about interrogating the oracle.

The deacon explained, adding that the parlor table would not do. It must
be a rough deal table.

“Ah, the kitchin table,” said Mrs. Cattermole, walking into the
elaborately laid trap.

“I dunno,” said the deacon, shaking his head. “Air you sure it ain’t too
large for us to span around?”

“We could let the flaps down.”

The deacon chawed reflectively.

“Waal, it might,” he said, cautiously, at last. “There ain’t no harm in
tryin’. We hedn’t ought to give up anythin’ without tryin’, I allus
thinks. One never knows, hey?”

“I kinder think we ought to try,” said Mrs. Cattermole.

The deacon rose ponderously, and followed his guide into the kitchen.

“Why, there’s Matt!” he cried, in astonished accents. “Good-day, sonny.”

Matt strained his ears, but pursed his lips and rocked the cradle in
violent impassivity. The deacon was uneasy at the boy’s sullen
resentment. He could not understand open enemies.

“How’s your health, hey?” he asked, affectionately.

“Oh, I’m hunky dory,” said Matt, in off-hand school-boy slang.

“I’m considerable glad you’ve found a good place with rael Christians,
Matt. I on’y hope you’ve made up your mind to work hard an’ turn over a
new leaf. It’s never too late to mend, I allus thinks. You’re growin’ a
young man, now; no more picter-makin’, hey? If it warn’t that you air so
moony an’ lay-abed I’d give you a chanst on my own land, with
pocket-money into the bargain, hey, an’ p’raps a pair o’ store shoes fur
a Chrismus-box.”

A flame shot from Mrs. Cattermole’s now-opened eyes. She shut the cellar
door with a vicious bang, but ere she could speak Matt cried out, “I
wouldn’t come, not fur five shillin’s a week!”

“An’ who wants you to come fur money? What is money, hey? Is it health?
Is it happiness? No, no, sonny. If money was any use, my poor Susan
would hev been alive to this day. You’ll know better when you’re my
age.”

He spat out now, directing the stream into the sink under the big wooden
pump.

“Don’t worry ’bout him,” interposed Mrs. Cattermole. “Here’s the table.”

Deacon Hailey waved a rebuking palm. “Dooty afore pleasure, Mrs.
Cattermole. See here, sonny, I’ve been talkin’ with Mrs. Cattermole
’bout you. She’s promised me to be a mother to you, Heaven bless her!
But I kin’t forget you’ve got a mother o’ your own.”

“She ain’t my mother now, she’s Ruth’s mother,” said Matt, half divining
the mumble of words.

“She’s mother to both o’ you. A large heart, thet’s what she’s got. An’
if she’s Ruth’s mother, then I’m your father, hey? An’ it ain’t right of
you to disobey your father and mother. But young folks nowadays treats
the commandments like old boots,” and the deacon sighed, as if in
sympathy with the sorrows of a neglected decalogue.

“I’ve got no father an’ no mother,” said Matt. “An’ I’m goin’ to be a
picture-painter soon es I kin. I won’t do _any_thing else, thet’s flat.
An’ when I’m bigger I’m goin’ to write to my uncle Matt and see if he
kin sell my pictures fur me. If you was to drag me back by force, I’d
escape into the woods. An’ I’d work my way to London to be handy my
uncle Matt. I reckon he takes in ’prentices same es the boss here. So
you jest tell my mother I’m done with her, see! I don’t want to hear any
more ’bout it.”

His face resumed its set expression, and his rocking foot its violence.

The deacon cast a reproachful, irate glance at Mrs. Cattermole.

“Did I tell you a lie when I said he warn’t worth thet thar?” he
vociferated, snatching the tin dipper from the water-bucket. The noise
disturbed the baby, which began to whimper feebly. Matt turned his
chair’s back on the deacon and gazed studiously towards the wood-house
in the yard. The deacon’s face grew apoplectic. He seemed about to throw
the dipper at the back of Matt’s head, but mastering himself he let it
fall with a splash, and said, quietly: “I guess you won’t hev me to
blame if he turns out all belly an’ no han’s. Some folks’d say I’m
offerin’ you a smart, likely young man, with his heart in the wood-pile.
But thet’s not Deacon Hailey’s way. He makes a pint of tellin’ the bad
pints. He’s a man you could swap a horse with, hey? I tell you, Mrs.
Cattermole, thet durned boy is all moonshine an’ viciousness, stuffed
with conceit from floor to ridge-piece. Picters, picters, picters, is
all he thinks about! Amoosin’ himself--thet’s his idee of life in this
vale of tears. I reckon he thinks he’s goin’ to strike Captain Kidd’s
treasure. But, arter all, he ain’t _your_ burden. I’ve giv his poor
mother a home, an’ I ain’t the man to grudge bite an’ sup to her boy. So
even now I don’t mind lettin’ you off. He’s my crost, and I’ve got to
bear him. ’Tain’t no use bein’ a Christian only in church, hey?”

“I guess I’m a Christian, too,” said Mrs. Cattermole. “So I must bear
with the poor lad an’ train him up some in the way he should go. An’
then there’s father. You’re a rael saint, deacon, but I sorter think
where heaven is consarned father ’ud like a look-in es well. So let’s
say no more ’bout it. Now, then, deacon, the table’s waitin’!”

He ignored the patient piece of furniture. “Waal, don’t blame me any if
the buckwheat turns out bad,” he shouted, losing his self-control again,
and spurting out his nicotian fluid at the stove like an angry
cuttle-fish.

“Thet’s so,” acquiesced Mrs. Cattermole, quietly. “Now, then, Deacon
Hailey, jest you set there.” She had taken a chair and placed her hands
on the table.

“Hush!” said the deacon. “Don’t you see thet thar young un wakin’ up?
The tarnation boy hes been shakin’ him like an earthquake. I didn’t know
es you kep’ your baby in the kitchin or I wouldn’t hev troubled to come.
When thet thar table kinder began to dance and jump, you wouldn’t thank
me fur rousin’ the innocent baby, hey? Sleep, sleep, thet’s what a baby
wants! A baby kin’t hev too much sleep an’ a grown-up person kin’t hev
too little, hey? They’re a lazy slinky lot, the young men o’ the
Province, sleepin’ with their mouths open, expectin’ johnny-cakes to
fall into ’em. I wonder this young man here don’t get into a cradle
hisself. He’d be es much use to his fellow-critters es makin’ picters, I
do allow. This life’s a battle, I allus thinks, an’ star-gazin’ ain’t
the way to sight the enemy, hey? I reckon I’ll git back now, Mrs.
Cattermole. There’s ’nough time been wasted over thet limb of Satan.
Jest you tell Cattermole what I say ’bout him, an’ if ever you git
durned sick an’ tired feedin’ an onthankful lazybones, es you’re bound
to git, sure es skunks, jest you remember Deacon Hailey is the Christian
you’re lookin’ fur. An’ don’t you forgit it!” And very solemnly he
strode without.

Mrs. Cattermole lifted her hands and brought them down again on the
table with a thump. “The tarnation ole fox!” she cried, “tryin’ to
bamboozle me with tales ’bout turnin’ tables. ’Tain’t likely es a table
is goin’ to dance of itself, an’ tell me ’bout Maria’s sickness. Jest
you come here, Matt, an’ lay your hands alongside o’ mine. What’s thet
you’re doin’?”

For Matt had begun pensively adorning the hood of the cradle by means of
a burned stick he had pulled from the stove.

“It’s on’y Ole Hey,” he said, reddening.

“Jest you leave off makin’ fun o’ your elders an’ betters,” she said,
sharply. “There’ll be plenty of work fur you in the paint-shop.”

There was plenty of work, Matt found, in numerous other directions, too.
Many more things than mechanical wood-cutting did the boy practise at
Cattermole’s saw-mill. To begin with, Mrs. Cattermole’s apprehensions
were justified and the spring freshets swept away the dam, and so Matt
was set to work hauling brushwood and gravel and logs to build up a kind
of breast-work. Cattermole was really a house-joiner and house-builder,
so Matt acquired cabinet-making, decoration, and house-building. His
farming and cattle-rearing experience was also considerably enlarged. He
milked the cows, looked after four stage-horses (driven by Mrs.
Cattermole’s brother) and thirty-six sheep, cut firewood, cleared out
barns, turned churns, hoed potatoes, mowed hay, fed fowls and pigs, and
rocked the cradle, and, in the interval of running the circular and
up-and-down saws in the mill, worked in the paint-shop at the back,
graining and scrolling the furniture and ornamenting it with roses and
other gorgeous flowers, sometimes even with landscapes. This was his
only opportunity of making pictures, for recreation hours he had none.
He rose at four in the morning and went to bed at ten at night. His
wages were his food and clothes, both left off.

Mrs. Cattermole made his garments out of her husband’s out-worn
wardrobe, itself of gray homespun.

But the hours in the paint-shop threw their aroma over all the others
and made them livable.

And Cattermole, though a hard was not a harsh taskmaster, and had gentle
flashes of jest when Mrs. Cattermole was out of ear-shot. And, though
winter was long, yet there were seasons of delicious sunshine, when the
blueberries ripened on the flats, or the apples waxed rosy in the
orchard; when the air thrilled with the song of birds, and the dawn was
golden.

In one of these seasons of hope he wrote to his uncle of his father’s
death and his own existence, and Cattermole paid the postage; an
ingenuous letter full of the pathetic, almost incredible ignorance of
obscure and sequestered youth, and inquiring what chances there would be
for him to reap fortune by painting pictures in London. He addressed the
letter--with vague recollection of something in his school
reading-book--to Mr. Matthew Strang, Painter, National Gallery, London.

It was not an ill-written letter nor an ill-spelt. Here and there the
orthography was original, but in the main McTavit had been not
ineffectual, and there were fewer traces of illiteracy about the epistle
than might have been imagined from Matt’s talk. But in Matt’s mind the
written and the spoken were kept as distinct as printed type and the
manuscript alphabet; they ran on parallel lines that never met, and that
“Amur’can” should be spelled “American” seemed no more contradictory
than that “throo” should be spelled “through.” The grammar he had used
in scholastic exercises was not for everyday wear; it was of a
ceremonious dignity that suited with the stateliness of epistolary
communication. Alas! For all the carefulness of the composition, his
uncle of the National Gallery gave no sign.

Matt’s suspense and sorrow dwindled at last into resignation, for he had
come to a renewed sense of religion. As Mrs. Strang would have put it,
he had found grace. There were a few pious books and tracts about the
Cattermole establishment, to devour in stolen snatches or by bartering
sleep for reading, and among these dusty treasures he lighted on _The
Pilgrim’s Progress_, with quaint wood-cuts. In the moral fervor with
which the dramatic allegory informed him Matt felt wickedness an
impossibility henceforward; his future life stretched before him white,
fleckless, unstainable. Meanness or falsehood or viciousness could never
touch his soul. How curiously people must be constituted who could
knowingly prefer evil, when good thrilled one with such rapture, bathed
one in such peace! Already he felt the beatitude of the New Jerusalem.
The pictures he painted should be _good_, please God. They should
exhibit the baseness of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, castigate the town of
Carnal Policy; he would uplift the eyes of the wicked to the
contemplation of the Shining Ones. Though, after all, he began to ask
himself, could any picture equal Bunyan’s book? Was not a book
immeasurably the better medium of expression? The suspicion was
strengthened by the reading of a dime novel which his mistress’s
brother, the stage-driver, had left lying about. It was the first
unadulterated novel he had read, and the sensational episodes stirred
his blood, his new-born religious enthusiasm died. He loved Mike the
Bush-ranger, who was the hero of the novel. Action, strong,
self-dependent action, a big personality--there lay the admirable in
life. The Christians and Hopefuls were pale-blooded figures after all,
and unreal at that. In actual life one only came across mimics who used
their language: the Deacon Haileys or the Abner Preeps, to whom even
thieving Tommy were preferable. No wonder Mike had been driven to
bush-ranging! What a pity he himself had not remained in his forest hut,
rebel against humanity, king of the woods! Ah! and how inadequate was
paint to express the fulness of life; the medium was too childishly
simple. At most one could fix a single scene, a single incident, and
that only in its outside aspect. Books palpitated with motion and
emotion. He set to work to write a dime novel, stealing an hour from his
scanty night. He made but slow progress, though he began with an
exciting episode about a white boy besieged in his log-hut by a party of
Indians, and saved by the sudden advent of a couple of bears. The words
he wrote down seemed a paltry rendition of his thought and inner vision,
they were tame and scant of syllable. He discovered that his literary
palette was even more pitiful than his pictorial. Still he labored on,
for the goal was grand. And, despite his mental divorce between
pronunciation and orthography, his spoken English improved imperceptibly
through all this contact with literature.

Then one wonderful day--to be marked with a white stone and yet also
with a black--he received a letter from England. All his artistic
ambition flamed up furiously again as he broke the seal:

LONDON, Limners’ Club.

     DEAR NEPHEW,--Your letter gave me mingled pain and pleasure. I was
     deeply grieved to hear of the sad death of your dear father. My
     poor brother had not written to me nor had I seen him since his
     marriage, but I knew I should somehow hear of it if anything went
     wrong with him. I am shocked to have remained ignorant for so many
     months after his death. I really think your mother should have let
     me know, as she could have discovered my address through my wife’s
     relatives, who live in Halifax. However, I hope God has given her
     strength to bear the blow. And now, my dear Matthew, let me tell
     you your letter is very childish, and not what I should have
     expected of a young man of fourteen as you describe yourself. It is
     very nice to amuse yourself by painting pictures; it keeps you out
     of mischief. But how can you fancy that your pictures are worth any
     money? Why, painting is the most difficult of all the arts; it
     requires years and years of study under great masters, and it costs
     a heap of money to pay models--that is, men or women who sit or
     stand in uncomfortable positions while you are painting them. No
     picture is any good that is done without models; if you wanted to
     paint a horse you would have to hire a horse, and that is even more
     expensive than hiring a man. Otherwise your horse would be all
     wrong. Why, a friend of mine painted a picture of a forge, and he
     had to have it all built up in his studio, and it cost a hundred
     and twenty pounds. Studio! The word reminds me that an artist must
     have a special room to work in, with windows on top, and these
     rooms are very expensive. London is crammed full of artists who
     have had all these advantages and yet they are starving. The
     pictures that you do now everybody would laugh at. And where would
     you get the money for frames? A nic

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