John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones
wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the
perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the
circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a
dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly
he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to
be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been
superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at
the wrong time.
Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me
what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The
evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to
defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things
at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain
individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed;
and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: “I do not like that
man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that
we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John
Claverhouse.
What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was
always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse
him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other
men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh
myself—before I met John Claverhouse.
But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the
sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and
would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping
it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like
an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to
spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when
the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the
forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! ha!” and “Ho! ho!” rose
up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the
lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came
his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe
and clench my nails into my palms.
I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his
fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out
again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor, dumb beasties are not to be
blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”
He had a dog he called “Mars,” a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound
and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to
him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day,
when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him
with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John
Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face
as much like the full moon as it always had been.
Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning,
being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.
“Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.
“Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on
trout.”
Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in
his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face
of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess
of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested,
no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown
long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile
but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for
existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.