CHAPTER II

[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 nice gold frame might redeem your

pictures, but gold frames are dear. No, my dear Matthew, you must

not be a little fool. How could you, a poor orphan, think of coming

to London? Why, you would die in the streets. No; remain where you

are, and thank God that you are earning your clothes and your keep

with an honest sawyer in a land of peace and plenty, and are not a

burden on your poor mother. I hope you will listen to your uncle

like a good boy, and grow up to be grateful to him for saving you

from starvation. Believe me,

Your affectionate uncle,

MATTHEW STRANG.

Matt’s tears blistered the final sheet of this discouraging document.

His roseate visions of the future faded to cold gray, his heart ached

with a sudden sense of the emptiness of existence. But when he had come

to the last word his hand clinched the letter fiercely. A great glow of

resolution pervaded his being, like the heat that returns after a cold

douche. “I will be a painter. I will, I will, I will!” he hissed. And he

tore up the embryo of the dime novel and wrote again to his uncle:

MY DEAR UNCLE,--How good you are to write to me and tell me

everything I want to know. Don’t be afraid that I will starve in

London, dear uncle. I could always earn my living there in the

fields and paint late at night, but I won’t come till I have enough

money for lessons and models and a studio, though I think I could

draw horses without hiring them. I have always been very good at

animals. Besides, what do they do when they want bears, as the

geography book says there aren’t any bears in England? I could live

in the attic, and knock a hole in the roof. My mother doesn’t need

anything from me, thank God, as she is married again and bears the

blow well, and my sister Harriet is married too, so you see it will

be easy for me to save up money. As soon as my apprenticeship is

over I shall go on to the States, where the greatest fools make

heaps of money, and so in a few years, please God, I shall be able

to come over like you did, and be a great artist like you.

Good-bye, dear uncle, God bless you.

From your loving nephew,

MATTHEW STRANG.

P.S.--When I come over I will change my name if you like, so as not

to clash with yours. I know you would not like it if people thought

you had done my pictures.

P.P.S.--Besides, my real name now might be Matthew Hailey, as

mother has changed hers to that.

This letter evoked no answer.

When Matt’s apprenticeship was at an end, the first item of his

programme broke down, for he lacked the money to carry him to the

States, so he had to stay on at Cattermole’s farm at a petty wage,

though a larger than Mrs. Cattermole was aware of, till he had scraped a

little together. And then an accident occurred that bade fair to dispose

of all the other items. He was at work in the saw-mill, when his leg got

jammed between the log he was operating upon and the carriage that was

bearing it towards the gang of up-and-down saws. There would not be room

for his body to pass between the gang of saws and the framework that

held them. It was an awful instant. He cried out, but his voice was lost

in the roar of the water and the clatter of the machinery. Round went

the water-wheel, the carriage glided along, offering inch after inch of

the log to the cruel teeth, and Matt was drawn steadily with it towards

the fatal point. With an inspiration he drew out the stout string he

always carried in his pocket, and, making a noose, threw it towards a

lever. It caught, and Matt was saved, for he had only to pull this lever

to close the gate in the flume and shut out the water. When the

machinery stopped the racket ceased, too, and Matt’s voice could be

heard, and Cattermole rushed in from the adjoining furniture

manufactory, and, knocking away the dogs at the end of the log, lifted

it and released the prisoner, and then made him kneel down and offer a

prayer for his salvation. Matt’s awakening sense of logic dimly

insinuated that this was thanking Providence for having failed to

mutilate him, but the atmosphere of Puritan acceptance in which he moved

and had his being asphyxiated the nascent scepticism.

Shortly after, Matt bade farewell to Cattermole farm, with its complex

appurtenances--a proceeding which Mrs. Cattermole christened

“onchristian ingratitood.” She declared that he ought to strip off the

clothes she had made him, and depart naked as he had come. From a dim

corner of the kitchen Cattermole’s face signalled, “Don’t mind her. God

bless you.”

Softened by the saw-mill accident, Matt tramped to Cobequid to see his

mother before departing for Boston, and thence ultimately for England.

He felt guilty, a sort of Prodigal Son, and kept assuring himself of

his innocence and economy. The third Mrs. Hailey received him with a

rapture that almost surpassed Billy’s. She hugged him to her bosom with

sobs and told him her grievances. These were manifold, but seemed

analyzable into four categories: one, the remissness of Harriet, whose

visits were rare, and whose baby had bow-legs; two, the naughtiness of

the children, of whom Matt had always been the only satisfactory

specimen; three, the cruelty of their step-father in chastising them for

the same; four, the deacon’s breach of contract in refusing to migrate

to Halifax, or to permit her to hold Baptist prayer-meetings. Her black

eyes flashed with strange fire when she spoke of her new husband’s

crimes and derelictions. And there was the old dreaded hysteria in her

threats to throw up the position. Evidently remarriage had not made her

happy, he thought with added tenderness. Perhaps nothing could. He

shuddered at his own deeper perception of unhappiness implanted in

temperament and finding nutriment in any conditions.

In conclusion, she besought her boy--the only person in the world who

loved her, the only person to whom she could tell her troubles--to go to

Halifax instead of the States. It was far nearer, and money could be

made just as easily. Her folks lived at Halifax, and though he must not

dream of seeking their assistance, for they had been very bad to her,

mewing her up strictly so that she had been forced to elope with her

poor Davie, still it would be a consolation to know that he was near her

own people, likewise not far from herself, in case of anything happening

to either of them. Perhaps she would persuade her husband to move there,

after all--who knew? Or she might come there herself and stay with him,

for a week or two at any rate, and meantime he should write to her about

the dear old town. Moved by her lack of reproaches and by her misery,

and impressed into his olden subjugation to the handsome, masterful

woman, Matt acquiesced. Perhaps his main motives were the comparative

cheapness of the journey and the reinflammation of his childish

curiosity concerning the gay city.

It was Saturday, but Matt suffered such tortures under the moral but

mumbled exordiums of “Ole Hey,” of which his unaccustomed ear took in

less than ever, that he determined to depart on the Monday. The deacon

seemed to have aged considerably, his beard was matted and thick, and

his dicky was stained with tobacco-juice. For the rest, Matt discovered

that most of the children were employed about the farm or the works, and

that they had ceased to go to school, the deacon having converted Ruth

into a school-mistress when she could be spared from keeping the books

of his tannery and grist-mill. Ruth herself he met with indifference

that the stateliness of her unexpectedly tall presence did nothing to

thaw. He was surprised to hear from Billy, whose bed he shared that

night, and who was more greedy to hear Matt’s adventures than to talk,

that they were all very fond of her, and that she could still romp

heartily. But Ruth had gradually grown shadowy to his imagination beside

his burning dreams of Art, and the sight of her seemed to add the last

touch of insubstantiality to her image. And yet, in the boredom of the

Sunday services, with his eye roving restlessly about the severe,

unlovely meeting-house in search of distractions, he could not but be

conscious that she was the sweetest and sedatest figure in the village

choir that sang and flirted in the rising tiers of the gallery over the

vestibule; and when Deacon Hailey, tapping his tuning-fork on the rails,

imitated its note with a rasping croak, Matt had a flash of sympathy

with the divined inner life of the girl in this discordant environment.

He told her briefly of his plans--to save up enough money to get to his

uncle in London, who would doubtless put him in the way of studying Art

seriously. She said she wished she had something as fine to live and

work for; still she was busy enough, what with book-keeping and teaching

school, as she put it smilingly. Their parting, like their meeting, was

awkward. Self-consciousness and shyness had come into their simple

relation. Neither dared take the initiative of a kiss, which for the

rest was a rare caress in Cobequid save between children and lovers.

Relatives shook hands; even women were not free of one another’s lips.

And for the lad’s part, timidity was all he felt in the presence of this

sweet graceful stranger. Only at the last moment, when she handed him a

keepsake in the shape of a prize copy of the _Arabian Nights_ her

music-mistress had given her, did their looks meet as of yore, and then

it was more the young painter than the old playmate who was touched by

the earnest radiance of her eyes and the flicker of rose across the

delicate fairness of her cheek. He made a little sketch of her in

return, and sent it her from Halifax.

When he was on his way he opened the gilt-bound volume and read on the

fly-leaf:

TO MATT

From Ruth.

God make you a great artist.

CHAPTER VIII

A WANDER-YEAR

Halifax exceeded Matt’s expectations, and gave him a higher opinion of

his mother. For the first time his soul received the shock of a great

town, or what was a great town to him. The picturesque bustle enchanted

him. The harbor, with its immense basin and fiords, swarming with ships

and boats, was an inexhaustible pageant, and sometimes across the green

water came softened music from a giant iron-clad. High in the background

of the steep city that sat throned between its waters rose forests of

spruce and fir. From the citadel on the hill black cannon saluted the

sunrise, and Sambro Head and Sherbrooke Tower shot rays of warning

across the night. The streets throbbed with traffic, and were vivid with

the blues and reds of artillery and infantry; and the nigger and the

sailor contributed exotic romance. On the wharves of Water Street, which

were lined with old shanties and dancing-houses, the black men sawed

cord-wood, huge piles of which mounted skyward, surrounded by boxes of

smoked herrings. On one of the wharves endless quintals of codfish lay

a-drying in the sun. And when the great tide, receding, exposed the tall

wooden posts, like the long legs of some many-legged marine monster,

covered with black and white barnacles and slime of a beautiful arsenic

green, the embryonic artist found fresh enchantment in this briny,

fishy, muddy water-side. Then, too, the Government House was the biggest

and most wonderful building Matt had ever seen, and the fish, fruit, and

meat markets were a confusion of pleasant noises.

In the newly opened park on the “Point” the wives of the English

officials and officers--grand dames, who set the tone of the

city--strolled and rode in beautiful costumes. Matt thought that the

detached villas in which they lived, with imposing knockers and

circumscribing hedges instead of fences, were the characteristic

features of great American cities. He loved to watch the young ladies

riding into the cricket-ground on their well-groomed horses; beautiful,

far-away princesses, whose exquisite figures, revealed by their

riding-habits, fascinated rather than shocked his eye, accustomed though

it was to the Puritan modesty of ill-fitting dresses, the bulky

wrappings of a village where to go out “in your shape” was to betray

impure instincts. He would peer into the enclosure with a strange,

wistful longing, eager to catch stray music of their speech, silver

ripples of their laughter. He wondered if he would ever talk to such

celestial creatures, for whom life went so smooth and so fair. What

charming pictures they made in the lovely summer days, when the officers

played against the club, and they sat on the sward drinking tea under

the shady trees, in white dresses, with white lace parasols held over

their softly glinting hair to shield the shining purity of their

complexions--a refreshing contrast of cool color with the scarlet of the

officers’ uniforms. Sometimes the wistful eyes of the boy grew dim with

sad, delicious tears. How inaccessible was all this beautiful life whose

gracious harmonies, whose sweet refinements, some subtle instinct

divined and responded to! At moments he felt he could almost barter his

dreams of Art to move in these heavenly spheres, among these dainty

creatures whose every gesture was grace, whose every tone was

ravishment. There was one girl, the most bewitching of all, whom he only

saw in the saddle, so that in his image of her, as in his sketches of

her, she was always on a beautiful chestnut horse, which she sat with

matchless ease and decision; a tall, slender girl, with yellow-brown

hair that lay soft and fluffy about the forehead of her lovely English

face. Her favorite canter was along the beach-road; and here, before he

had found work, he would loiter in the hope of seeing her. How he

longed--yet dreaded--that she might some day perceive his presence;

sometimes so high flew his secret audacious dream that in imagination he

patted her horse’s glossy neck.

In such an exhilarating atmosphere the boy felt great impulses surge

within him. But, alas! the seamy side of great cities was borne in on

him also. He had a vile lodging in the central slums, near the roof of a

tall tenement-house that tottered between two groggeries, and here

drunken wharfingers and sailors and negro wenches and Irishmen reeled

and swore. To a lad brought up in godly Cobequid, where drunkenness was

spoken of with bated breath, this unquestionable supremacy of Satan was

both shocking and unsettling. Nevertheless, Matt spent the first days in

a trance of delight, for--apart from and above all other wonders--there

were picture-shops in the town; and the works of O’Donovan, the local

celebrity, were marked at twenty, or thirty, and even fifty dollars

apiece. They were sea-paintings of considerable merit, that excited

Matt’s admiration without quite overwhelming him. On the strength of

O’Donovan’s colossal prices, Matt invested some of his scanty stock of

dollars in a kit of paint at a fairy shop, where shone collapsible tubes

of oil-color, such as he had never seen before, and delightful brushes

and undreamed-of easels and canvases. He also bought two yellow-covered

books, one entitled _Artistic Anatomy_, and the other _Practical House

Decoration_, which combined to oppress him with his ignorance of the

human form divine and the house beautiful, and became his bed-fellows,

serving to raise his pillow. His conceit fell to zero when he saw a

portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds among the collection in the Session

Hall.

After a depressing delay, mitigated only by the sight of his fair

horsewoman, he found work in a furniture shop at the top of an old

rambling warehouse that was congested with broken litter and old pianos.

The proprietor not only dealt in débris, but bought new furniture and

had it painted in the loft. Matt received six dollars a week, half of

which he saved for his English campaign. At first he had the atelier to

himself, but as the proprietor’s business increased he was given a

subordinate--a full-grown Frenchman, rather shorter than himself, who

swore incomprehensibly and was restive under Matt’s surveyorship. By

this time Matt had learned something of the wisdom of the serpent, so he

treated his man to liquor. After the Frenchman had got drunk several

times at the expense of his sober superior, he discovered that Matt was

his long-lost brother, and peace reigned in the paint-shop.

But Matt did not remain long in Halifax. The Frenchman’s jabber of the

mushroom millionaires of the States (though he failed to explain his own

distance from these golden regions) fired Matt’s imagination, and he

resolved to go to Boston in accordance with his original programme. He

considered he had sufficiently studied his mother’s wishes, and her

letters had become too incoherent for attention. It was a pain, not a

pleasure, to receive them. He was not surprised to learn from Billy’s

letters that domestic broils were frequent, and that the deacon’s

proverbial wisdom did not avail to cope with Mrs. Strang’s threats of

suicide. It was only poor Ruth’s girlish sweetness that could bring calm

into these household cyclones.

And so one fine evening Matt set sail for the city of culture and

“Crœsuses.” Everything seemed of good augury. Though the expense of

the trip had wellnigh eaten up his savings, his heart was as light as

his pocket. He was going only to the States, but he felt that, in

quitting his native soil, the voyage to London, the temple of Art, and

to his uncle, its high-priest, had begun. The moon shone over the

twinkling harbor like a great gold coin, and as the vessel spread its

canvas wings and glided out of the confusion of shipping, Matt felt that

its name was not the least happy omen in this auspicious moment. The

ship was named _The Enterprise_.

* * * * *

That night, finding some confusion about the distribution of bunks, Matt

lay down on deck, with _Artistic Anatomy_ and _Practical House

Decoration_ for his pillows, and slept the sleep of the weary, tempered

by a farrago of inconsequent dreams.

When he woke up next morning he rubbed his eyes from more than

sleepiness. Halifax seemed still to confront his vision--its hills, its

forts, its wharves, George Island, the Point, and the great harbor in

which _The Enterprise_ rocked gently. What was this hallucination?

He soon discovered that it was reality. There had been a head-wind in

the night, and the ship had dropped her anchor in the harbor for safety.

The incident was typical. In the course of the voyage Matt learned to

know the captain--a grizzled old sea-dog with the heart of a bitch. The

ship was his own, and he sailed it himself to save expense and check

dishonesty. There is a proverb about saving a pennyworth of tar, and

Captain Bludgeon illustrated it. No man was ever so unfitted to walk the

quarter-deck. His idea of navigation was to hug the coast, and he seized

every pretext for putting in at creeks or ports and anchoring for the

night, when the crew would go ashore and come back incapable. The

schooner itself was an old tub, a cumbrous, dingey-like craft, but sound

in timber. Matt had a rough time, though the reading of the _Arabian

Nights_ made the voyage enchanted. The passengers were a plebeian

crowd--a score of women, mostly servant-girls and single, fifteen men

emigrating to the States, and a few children. There were only six bunks.

The mate had given up his state-room--which Matt was to have shared--to

some of the women. Those who could not secure bunks herded dressed in a

big field bed, which also accommodated some of the men, likewise

sleeping in their clothes. For toilet operations all the women resorted

to the state-room, which held a mirror and washing apparatus. Etiquette

was free-and-easy. The food was horrible, the cook’s menus being almost

ingenious in their unpalatableness. Fortunately most of the passengers

were sick already. Matt had no immunity. All the pangs of his first pipe

were repeated, without the moral qualms which rationalized those. He

continued to sleep on deck as often as he could, making friends with the

stars; when the night was too chilly he couched on the wood-pile near

the stove. Thus was he spared licentious spectacles, and his innocence

was granted a little longer term. They passed the signals and flag-staff

of Sable Point safely, Captain Bludgeon’s face as white as the breakers

that girdled its barren rock; then, instead of making a bee-line for

Boston, the captain fetched a semicircle, following the New England

coast line, and holding on to the apron-strings of his mother earth.

Such voyaging he conceived to be sure, if slow; mistakenly enough,

considering the iron-bound character of the coast.

The passengers--once they had got over their sickness--did not complain,

for they had the leisure of poverty, and the prospect of indefinite

board and lodging was not unpleasing, and their frequent stopping-places

diversified the monotony of the voyage with little excursions. One

night, having been driven into harbor by a capful of wind, they

witnessed the torch-light fishing. It was a scene that set Matt’s

fingers itching for the brush--waving torches glittering on the water

from dozens of boats, and lighting up the tanned faces of the fishers,

who were scooping up the herrings with nets. Every detail gave him the

keenest joy--the wavering refractions in the water, the leaping silver

of the fish touched with gold flame, the sombre mystery of sea and sky

above and around. The night was made even more memorable, for some of

the girls who had landed brought back in giggling triumph many bundles

of cured herrings, which they had pilfered from an unguarded

smoke-house, and these they generously distributed, so that the whole

ship supped deliciously in defiance of the cook.

On another occasion--in the afternoon at high-water--Matt and about a

score of the passengers, the majority females, went on shore to pick

gray-beards, as they called the gray cranberries that grew in the

swamps. And they tarried so long that when they came back to the boat

they found the tide turned, and two hundred yards of mud between them

and the water. One of the men tried the mud, and sank to the knees in

slimy batter. In the end there was nothing for it but to launch the

empty boat, and then wade to it. The launching was easy, the boat

slipping along as on grease, but the sequel was boisterous. Jack Floss,

a strapping Anglo-Saxon with a blond mustache and a devil-may-care

humor, set the example of giving a woman a pick-a-back to save her

skirts, and the few other men followed suit, returning again and again

for fresh freight. The air resounded with hysterical giggling and

screaming as the women frantically clutched their bearers, some of whom

extorted unreluctant kisses under jocose threats of tumbling their

burdens over into the mud. One or two actually carried out their

threats, by involuntarily stepping suddenly into a gutter worn by the

rains and sinking up to the waist, but the mishaps abated no jot of the

madcap merriment--it rather augmented the rowdiness as the women were

hauled from their mud-baths. For his part Matt waded warily, more

conscious of the responsibility than of the fun, for he was doing his

duty manfully, as became a lad stout, sturdy, and sixteen. His second

burden was a slim, pretty servant-girl named Priscilla, and when he was

depositing her, speckless, in the boat, she took the opportunity of the

embrace to kiss him in hearty gratitude. Matt dropped her like a hot

coal. He felt scorched and flustered, and had a bewildered moment of

burning blushes ere he ploughed his way back to rescue another of the

distressed damsels. That sudden kiss was an epoch in his growth. A

discomfort at the time, the after-taste of it lent new warmth to his

interest in the royal amours of the _Arabian Nights_. In his dreams he

bore delectable Eastern princesses across perilous magic marshes, and

their gratitude found him stockish no longer.

The next episode in this curious creeping voyage was superficially more

critical for Matt. A sudden gale upset all poor Captain Bludgeon’s

calculations. He was near shore as usual, and tried to beat into harbor

almost under bare poles; but the haven was of a dangerous entrance,

narrow and choked in the throat by a rock, and no one on board had

sufficient seamanship to get the schooner in. The mate advised

abandoning the hope of harbor, and setting the jib and the jib-foresail

to make leeway. The captain swore by everything unholy he would not go a

cable farther out to sea. The night was closing in, but, the wind dying

away, _The Enterprise_ anchored outside the harbor. But in the night the

wind sprang up from the opposite quarter fiercer than ever, and the

vessel dragged her anchors and drove towards the rock that squatted on

guard at the mouth of the harbor, pitching helplessly in the shifting

troughs. In the inky blackness great swamping waves carried off her

boats, her top-sails, and both houses. Her anchors were left behind her,

and part of the bulwarks was likewise torn away. Fortunately her cables

held out as she drove bumping along, though they did not moderate her

pace sufficiently to prevent her keel being partially torn away when she

bumped upon a reef. Yet she jolted over the reef and drifted blindly on

and on, none knew whither.

Within the schooner the scene was almost as wild as without. The women’s

screams rivalled those of the wind; the distracted creatures ran up and

down the companion-ladder, getting in the way of the crew; the captain

went below to quiet them--and did not return. Apparently he preferred

the society of his own sex. The mate, thus left in command, boarded up

the companion-way to stop the aimless scurrying, and told off some of

the crew to help him unload the cargo, which consisted of plaster, and

to pitch it overboard. Matt and the cook bore a hand in the work. Not

daring to unhatch for fear of being water-logged, they had to pass the

plaster through the lazaret.

Jack Floss did his best to comfort the females by profanities. He

laughed, and hoped the Lord would damn the old hulk, whose fleas were

big enough to swim ashore on. His cool blasphemies calmed some, but

others plainly regarded him as a Jonah. Matt was half perturbed, half

fascinated by this unconventional vagabond; of the real danger his own

buoyancy made light.

When the morning light came at last, it showed that they had

providentially skirted the grim rock and were drifting into harbor. The

deck was covered with débris and with sand, which the ship had stirred

and raked up in her dragging progress along the shallow waters. Piles of

grit had accumulated in the corners, and the waves on which she tossed

were discolored with dirt. Very soon she passed a little island where a

brig lay moored; and with great difficulty--for the sea was still

running high--the brig sent her a hawser and made her fast. Then they

were enabled to realize further the extent of their luck, for the harbor

was strewn with wreckage. No fewer than seven schooners had gone down,

and only two men had been saved. The harbor was alive with boats looking

for the dead. Captain Bludgeon, bestriding his desolate quarter-deck,

congratulated himself on his seamanship. He arranged with a tug to draw

_The Enterprise_ back to St. John, New Brunswick, for repairs. The few

impatient passengers who could afford to pay an extra fee went on to

Boston by the rescuing brig, but the majority stuck to _The Enterprise_

and Captain Bludgeon, who was compelled to board and lodge them at a

cheap water-side hotel while the schooner was laid up. Thus were the

fates kind to these waifs on the ocean of life, who enjoyed the holiday

after their manner--plain living and high jinks--and had no need of

Satan, or even Jack Floss, to find mischief for their idle hands to do.

Matt, however, was not of the roysterers. He had remained with _The

Enterprise_, of course, not having the money to exchange; but the

scenery of a new town--and that a hill-girt town like St. John, with a

cathedral, a silver water, and a forest afire with flowers--was always

sufficient business for him. The cathedral was not so colossal as it had

loomed to his childish fancy through McTavit’s reminiscences. After a

day or two Matt found an even more delightful occupation. He happened to

remark to Jack Floss that the ceiling of the hotel sitting-room would be

all the better for a little ornamentation, and that worthy straightway

sought out the proprietor, a gentleman of Scotch descent, and expressed

himself so picturesquely that Matt was offered a dollar to make the

ceiling worthy of being sat under by artistic souls like Jack Floss.

Thereupon Jack Floss and everybody else, except Matt, were turned out of

the sitting-room, and the boy, guided by his _Practical House

Decoration_ in the mixing of colors and the preparation of plaster,

stood on the ladder and stencilled one of his imaginative medleys. His

fellow-passengers were not permitted to see it till it was ready, but

speculation was rife, and the rumor of its glories had spread about the

water-side, and on show-day the room was packed with motley spectators,

gazing reverently heavenward as at fireworks, some breaking out into

rapturous exclamations that made the boy more hot and uncomfortable than

even the damsel’s kiss had done. He was glad he was almost invisible,

squeezed into a corner by the crowd. And despite his discomfort,

aggravated by a crick in the back of the neck, due to painting with his

hand over his head, there was a subtle pleasure for him in his

fellow-passengers’ facile recognition of the torch-light fishing scene

which formed the centre of the decorations. The hotel bar did good

business that day.

Just before _The Enterprise_ started again for Boston a man came to see

the ceiling, and immediately offered the artist a commission. There was

a paint-shop in the railway-carriage works, and Matt could have a

situation just vacant there at ten dollars a week. Dazzled by these

fabulous terms, which seemed almost to realize his ambition at a bound,

Matt accepted; and _The Enterprise_, patched up and refitted, sailed

without him. A few hours later he discovered that it had also sailed

without Priscilla, that seductive young person having found a berth as

chambermaid in the hotel. She came into Matt’s room to tidy up, and

expressed her joy at the prospect of looking after his comfort. But the

boy told her he must seek less comfortable quarters, and, despite her

protests and her offers to help him temporarily, he departed for cheaper

lodgings, leaving behind him a perfunctory promise to call and see her

soon. Jack Floss, whom Matt gratefully regarded as the architect of his

fortunes, had half a mind to stay behind, too. He said he wanted to go

under, and _The Enterprise_ didn’t seem to have any luck. But at the

last moment he found that he could not desert the ladies.

Matt was more sorry to part from him than from Priscilla; there was

something in the young man’s devil-may-care manner that appealed to the

germs of Bohemianism in the artistic temperament. The young artist had,

however, an unpleasant reminder of the defects of the Bohemian

temperament, for Jack Floss was forced to confess that he had lost the

copy of the _Arabian Nights_ which he had persuaded Matt to lend him to

beguile the tedium of the days of waiting. The boy was grievously

distressed by the loss; it seemed an insult to Ruth Hailey and a

misprision of her kindly wishes. However, it was no use crying over

spilled milk, and Jack Floss slightly assuaged his chagrin by fishing

out from among his miscellaneous effects a volume of Shelley in small

type, and another--with an even more microscopic text--containing the

complete works of Lord Byron. Both books opened as by long usage at

their most erotic pages. Through these ivory gates the boy passed into

the great world of romantic poetry. Whole stanzas remained in his

memory. The brain that had refused to retain Bible verses, spending

hours in quest of the tiniest, absorbed the sensuous images of the poets

without effort; he fell asleep with them on his lips.

In the railway-carriage shop--a spacious saloon as full of painters as

an atelier in the Quartier Latin--Matt was allowed a free hand on great

canvases that, when filled with flowers and landscapes, were nailed to

the roofs of the carriages by electroplated pins. He also decorated the

wooden panels with scroll-work and foliage, and gilded the lettering

outside the doors. Thus was the citizen fed on art at every turn,

standing under his ceiling, or sitting on his chair, or lying on his

sofa, or travelling on his railway. Art is notoriously elevating; but as

the depraved quarters of the town continued to flourish, the art must

have been bad.

Matt’s career in the paint-shop was neither so long nor so pleasant as

he had anticipated. His pictures did not please his fellow-artists as

much as his employers, and he became the butt of the place. A series of

impalpable irritations almost too slight for analysis, subtle with that

devilish refinement of which coarseness is only capable when it is

cruel, rendered his life intolerable. Matt’s vocabulary was too mincing

for his fellow-craftsmen; they resented his absence of expletives,

though imperceptibly he succumbed to the polluted atmosphere which had

surrounded him ever since he set foot in Halifax; and the boy, whose

mind was stored with lovely images and ethereal lyrics, began to

bespatter his talk with meaningless oaths. Nor was this his only

coquetry with corruption, for the daily taunt of “milksop” conspired

with the ferment of youth.

“Varnishing-day” was his day of danger. It was pay-day, and Matt had

boundless money. It was also the hardest day of the six, the wind-up,

when all the work of the week was varnished in an atmosphere of sixty

degrees; and the poor lad, drunk with the fumes of turpentine, sticky

from head to foot, his face besplashed, his eyes stinging, his nose red,

and his brain dizzy, threw off his apron and overalls, and reeled to the

door, and groped his way into the streets to breathe in the glorious

fresh air, and revel like the rest of his fellows in the joy of

life--aye, and the joy of license, the saturnalia of Saturday night. For

the glorious fresh air soon palled, and in the evening Matt was dragged

by his mates to a species of music-hall in a hotel near the harbor,

where, in a festive reek of bad tobacco and worse whiskey, he repeated

the choruses of winking soubrettes, dubious refrains whose inner meaning

the brag and badinage of the workshop had made obscurely clear. But

disgust invariably supervened; Byron and Shelley were his Sunday

reading, and under the spell of their romantic song, which chimed with

his soul’s awakening melodies, he revolted against his low-minded

companions, hating himself for almost sinking to their level.

He felt that he inhabited a rarer ether; he was conscious of a curious

aloofness, not only from them, but from humanity at large, and yet here

he was joining in their coarse conviviality. To such a mood the

accidental turning up of an old sketch of his Halifax divinity on her

horse appealed as decisively as an accidental text was wont to appeal to

his mother. The beautiful curves of her figure, the purity of her

complexion, rebuked him. Perhaps it was because he was an artist that

his soul was touched through the concrete. In a spasm of acuter disgust,

and in a confidence of higher destinies, he threw up his berth.

He had saved twenty dollars--twenty stout planks between him and the

deep. But the luck that had been his hitherto deserted him. In six weeks

he had only one fortunate fortnight, when he carried the hod for a

house-joiner, and was nearly choked by the veering round of a little

ladder, through which he had popped his head in mounting a bigger.

One by one his twenty planks slipped from under him, and then he found

himself struggling in the lowest depths. The few dollars he had

squandered on the music-hall haunted him with added reproach.

Too proud to beg or to go back to the paint-shop or to write to his

mother, his only possessions his clothes and a box of cheap water-colors

he carried with his slim library in his jacket pockets, he searched the

streets for an odd job, or stood about the wharves amid the stevedores

and negroes to earn a copper by unasked assistance in rolling casks into

warehouses, till at last, when the cathedral lawn was carpeted with

autumn leaves, the streets became his only lodging. Hungry and homeless,

he was beginning to regret his hut in the woods, and to meditate a

retreat from civilization, for in the frosty nights that shadowed the

genial autumn days this unsheltered life was not pleasant, when, by one

of those strokes of fortune which fall to the most unfortunate, he found

a night-refuge. A fellow-lodger of his at the Hotel of the Beautiful

Star, a glass-blower out of work with whom he had once halved his

evening bread, fell into employment, and gratefully offered him the

nocturnal hospitality of the factory. Here, voluptuously couched on warm

white sand, piles and barrels of which lay all about, the boy forgot the

gnawing emptiness of his stomach and the forlornness of his situation in

the endless fascination of the weird effects of light and shade. It was

a vast place, dim despite its gas-jets, mysterious with shadowy black

corners. The red flannel shirts of the men struck a flamboyant note of

color in the duskiness; the stokers were outlined in red before the

roaring furnaces, the blowers were bathed in a dazzling white glow from

the glass at the end of their blow-pipes, so that their brawny bare arms

and the sweat on their brows stood out luridly. With every movement,

with every flickering and waning light, there was a changing play of

color. Matt would lie awake in his corner, taking mental notes, or

recording the action of muscles by the pencilled silhouette of some

picturesque figure rolling the pliant glass. Great painters, he thought,

in his boyish ignorance, worked from imagination on a basis of memory;

but he was not strong enough yet to dispense with observation, though

observation always brought despair of his power to catch the

ever-shifting subtleties of living nature. In the enthralment of these

studies, and in his sensuous delight in the Dantesque effects, Matt

often omitted to sleep altogether. And sometimes, on that background of

ruddy gloom, other visions opened out to the boy dreaming on his bed of

sinuous sand; the real merged into the imaginative, and this again into

the fantasies of delicious drowsihead. The walls fell away, the factory

blossomed into exotic realms of romance; peerless houris, ripe in

womanhood, passed over moon-silvered waters in gliding caïques; prisoned

princesses, pining for love, showed dark starry eyes behind the

lattice-work of verandas; pensive maidens, divinely beautiful, wandered

at twilight under crescent moons rising faint and ghostly behind groves

of cedars.

London, too, figured in the pageantry of his dreams, glittering like a

city of the _Arabian Nights_, ablaze with palaces, athrob with music;

and perched on the top of the tallest cupola, on the loftiest hill,

stood his uncle Matthew, holding his paint-brush like a sceptre, king of

the realm of Art. Hark! was that not the king’s trumpeters calling,

calling him to the great city, calling him to climb up and take his

place beside the sovereign? Oh, the call to his youth, the clarion call,

summoning him forth to toils and triumphs in some enchanted land! Oh,

the seething of the young blood that thronged the halls of dream with

loveliness, and set seductive faces at the casements of sleep, and

sanctified his waking reveries with prescient glimpses of a sweet

spirit-woman waiting in some veiled recess of space and time to partake

and inspire his consecration to Art! The narrow teachings of his

childhood--the conception of a vale of tears and temptation--shrivelled

away like clouds melting into the illimitable blue, merging in a vast

sense of the miracle of a beautiful world, a world of infinitely notable

form and color. And this expansion of his horizon accomplished itself

almost imperceptibly because the oppression of that ancient low-hanging

heaven overbrooding earth, of that sombre heaven lying over Cobequid

Village like a pall, was not upon him, and he was free to move and

breathe in an independence that made existence ecstasy, even at its

harshest. So that, though he walked in hunger and cold, he walked under

triumphal arches of rainbows.

CHAPTER IX

ARTIST AND PURITAN

But the dauntless, practical youth lay beneath the dreamer, even as the

Puritan lay beneath the artist. Matt could not consent to live on his

host, the glass-blower, who shared his lunch with him--in the middle of

the night--and he was almost reduced to applying again at the

paint-shop, when the captain of a schooner gave him a chance to work his

way to Economy, on the basin of Minas, twenty-five miles below Cobequid

Village. Matt had to make up his mind in a hurry, for this was the last

ship bound north before the bay was frozen for the winter, and ships

bound south for the States seemed always to have a plethora of crew. The

mental conflict added to the pains of the situation; to go north again

was to confess defeat. But was it not a severer defeat to lessen a poor

man’s lunch, even although he accepted only a minimum on the pretext of

not being hungry? This reflection decided him; though he had no

prospects in Economy, and nothing to gain but a few days’ food and

shelter, he agreed informally to ship and to help load the schooner at

nightfall. He would have preferred to go on board at once, were it only

to dine off a ship’s biscuit; but no one suspected his straits, and so

he had an afternoon of sauntering.

On the hilly outskirts of the city he was stopped by a stylish young

lady, so dazzling in dress and beauty that for a moment he did not

recognize Priscilla. A fashionable crinoline, and a full-sleeved

astrakhan sacque, together with an afghan muffler round her throat, had

given the slim chambermaid an imposing portliness. An astrakhan toque,

with a waving red feather, was set daintily on her head, and below the

sacque her gown showed magnificent with bows and airy flounces.

Evidently her afternoon out.

“Good land!” she cried. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing. I’m in a hurry,” he said, flushing shamefacedly as he passed

hastily on.

But Priscilla caught him by the hem of his jacket.

“Don’t look so skairt! Why haven’t you been to see me all this time?”

“Too busy,” he murmured.

“Too proud, I reckon. I thought you’d come for to look at your

decorations, anyways; let’s go right along there; you ain’t lookin’ as

smart as a cricket, that’s a fact; I’ll make you a glass o’ real nice

grog to pick you up some.”

He shook his head. “I’m going away--I’m off to Economy.”

“Scat! You want to give me the mitten. Why don’t you speak straight? You

don’t like me.”

She looked at him, half provoked, half provokingly.

He looked at her with his frank, boyish gaze; he noted the red curve of

her pouting lips, the subtle light in her eyes, the warm coloring of the

skin, shadowed at the neck by waves of soft brown hair, in which the

beads of a chenille net glistened bluishly; he was pleasured by the

brave note of the red feather against the shining black of the toque,

the piquant relation of the toque to the face, and he thought how

delightful it would be to transfer all these tones and shades to canvas.

He forgot to answer her; he tried to store up the complex image in his

memory.

“I’m glad you don’t deny it,” she said, her angry face belying her

words.

He started. “Oh yes, I like you well enough,” he said, awkwardly.

Her face softened archly. “Then why don’t you come an’ see me? I won’t

bite you!”

“I’m sorry! I’m sailing to-night.”

“I guess you ain’t!” She smiled imperious solicitation. “What are you

goin’ to do in Economy? Why don’t you stick to the paint-shop?”

“I’ve left there way back in the summer.”

“What made you leave?”

“Oh, well!”

“Then you ain’t got no money?” There was tender concern in her tones.

“Not hardly.”

“How many meals have you had to-day?”

He had a flash of resentment. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said,

gruffly.

“Bother!” said Priscilla, contemptuously, though her voice faltered.

“You’re jest goin’ to come along and have a good square meal.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not hungry any.”

“Oh, Matt! Where _do_ you expect to go to?” said Priscilla, with a

roguish, disarming smile.

“Not with you,” rejoined Matt, smiling in response.

Priscilla laughed heartily. The white teeth gleamed roguishly against

the full red lips.

“Come along,” she said, with good-humored conclusiveness.

He shook a smiling head. “I’m going to Economy.”

“You’re comin’ with me; the boss’ll stand you a dinner for repairin’

your decorations.”

“Why, what’s wrong with them?” he asked, anxiously.

He knew from his book how liable such things were to decay.

“Oh, the centre of the ceilin’ is a bit off color. That silly old owl of

a Cynthia spilt a pail of water on the floor above.”

“You don’t say!” he cried, in concern.

“Honest Injun! I was jest mad. You could get lots to do if you would

stay at our shanty.”

“I’ll come and put the ceiling right,” he said, indecisively; and,

giving her his hand with shy awkwardness, was promenaded in triumph

through the dignified streets. He felt a thrill of romance as this

dazzling person clasped his hand clingingly. He wondered how she dared

be seen with so shabby a being; the juxtaposition had a touch of the

_Arabian Nights_, of the amorous adventures of his day-dreams; it was

like a princess wooing a pauper. They passed other couples better

matched--some in the first stage of courtship, some in the second. In

the first stage the female and the male walked apart--she near the wall

talking glibly, he at the edge of the sidewalk, silent, gazing straight

ahead in apparent disconnection. In the second stage the lovers walked

closer together, but now both gazed straight ahead, and both were

silent; only if one looked between them one saw two red hands clasped

together, like the antennæ of two insects in conversation. When

Priscilla and Matt met pairs in this advanced stage, her hand tightened

on his, and she sidled nearer. It was like a third stage, and Matt’s

sense of romance was modified by a blushing shamefacedness.

As they entered the hotel Matt made instinctively towards the

sitting-room to see his damaged decorations; but Priscilla, protesting

that he must feed first, steered him hurriedly up-stairs into his old

apartment. He was too faint with hunger to resist her stronger will.

“There, you silly boy!” she said, affectionately, depositing him in a

chair before the stove, which she lighted. “Now you jest set there while

I tell the boss.” She lingered a moment to caress his dark hair; then,

stooping down suddenly, she kissed him and fled.

Matt’s heart beat violently, the blood hustled in his ears. The sense of

romance grew stronger, but mingled therewith was now an uneasy,

indefinable apprehension of the unknown. The magnetism of Priscilla

repelled as much as it drew him; his romance was touched with vague

terror. Yet as the fire vivified the bleak bedroom, with its

text-ornamented walls, the warm curves of the girl’s face painted

themselves on the air, subtly alluring.

Priscilla herself was back soon, bearing some cold victual and some hot

grog, and watched with tender satisfaction the boy’s untroubled

appetite. She drank a little, too, when he was done, and they clinked

glasses, and Matt felt it was all very wicked and charming. Stanzas of

Shelley and Byron pulsed in his memory, tropical flowers of speech

blossomed in his brain.

But only weeds sprouted out. “It was real good of you, Priscilla, to

speak to the boss. I’d better see to the ceiling at once.”

“Oh, don’t; it can wait till to-morrow.”

“But I promised to go aboard to-night.”

“You nasty feller, you’re goin’ to shake me, after all.”

“Don’t say that, Priscilla,” he said, shyly. “I only wish I could do

something to show my gratitude to you.”

“No, you don’t.” Priscilla’s bosom heaved, and tears were in her eyes.

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t like me.”

“I do.”

“You don’t think I’m pretty.”

She had removed her things now, revealing the natural gracefulness of

her figure.

“Oh, Priscilla!” said Matt, looking at her. “Why, I’d give anything if I

could--” He paused, timidly.

“Well, why can’t you?” interrupted Priscilla, her face very close to

his.

“I’m not good enough yet. And the light’s failing.”

“Why! What do you want of the light?”

“I can’t paint so well by night. The color looks different in the day.

But I’d give anything to be able to paint something as pretty as you.”

Priscilla swept her glass aside, pettishly.

“Lan’ sakes, what a boy! Pictures, pictures, pictures! If it ain’t the

ceilin’, it’s me! There are better things on this earth than pictures,

Matt.”

Matt shook his head, with a sceptical smile.

Priscilla looked disconcerted. “Why, didn’t you say I was prettier than

a picture, Matt?”

“Oh, that’s different,” he parried, feebly; then, feeling her

fascination lulling him to forgetfulness of the price to be paid for his

dinner, as well as of the mute appeal of his damaged designs, he jumped

up. “I’d best see to the ceiling before it’s too late. I wonder if

they’ve kept the materials handy.”

“Set down, Matt.”

“Oh, but I mustn’t cheat the boss.”

“Who’s talkin’ o’ cheatin’? This is _my_ treat.”

“Oh, but it ain’t right o’ you, Priscilla,” he protested.

“Never mind; when I’m down on my luck you shall do as much for me.”

“I’ll send you half a dollar from Economy,” he said, resolutely. Then,

smiling to temper his ungraciousness, he added, “Short reckonings make

long friends, hey?--as an old deacon I knew used to say. I guess I’ll go

down-stairs now, Priscilla.”

“What for? You haven’t got to go aboard till nightfall?”

“You’re forgetting the ceiling. I kind o’ want to touch it up all the

same.”

“You silly boy,” she said, with a fond smile, “that was only my fun.”

“Priscilla!” He stared at her in reproachful amazement. Was his

incurable trust in humanity always to be shaken thus?

“Don’t look so solemn.”

“But you told me a fib!”

“Scat! D’you think I was goin’ to let you fool around on an empty

stomach?”

“But you told me a lie.” The boy towered over her like an irate

judgment-angel.

Priscilla had a happy thought. “But you told _me_ a lie. You said you

warn’t hungry.”

Matt looked startled.

“Oh, but that--that was different,” he stammered again.

“Can’t see it. Tit for tat.”

Matt pondered in silence.

Priscilla rose. “Set down,” she said, soothingly, and the boy, feeling

confusedly guilty, let himself be pressed down into his seat.

Priscilla nestled to him, sharing his chair, and pressing her soft cheek

to his.

“Was he mad with his poor little Priscilla?” she cooed. “No, he mustn’t

be angry, bless his handsome face.”

Matt was not angry any longer, but he was uncomfortable. He tried to

whip up his sense of romance, to feel what he felt in reading

love-poetry, to fancy that he was sitting with a pensive princess in a

cedar grove under a crescent moon. But he could only feel that

Priscilla was a real terrestrial person, and mendacious at that.

Priscilla’s lips sought his in a long kiss. “You _are_ fond o’ me, Matt,

aren’t you?” she murmured, coaxingly.

Matt’s conscience checked conventional response. He faltered, slowly: “I

guess you’re real good to me.”

A moment later the door opened. Priscilla sprang up hurriedly, and, to

be doing something, noisily pulled down the roller-blind.

“That you, Cynthia?” she said, carelessly.

“Yes, it’s me,” grumbled the old woman. “You’re wanted down-stairs.”

“In a jiffy. I’m just lighting Mr. Strang’s candles,” she said, fumbling

about for them in the darkness she had herself produced.

“Rayther early,” croaked Cynthia.

“Yes, Mr. Strang wants to paint; there ain’t enough light to see by,”

replied Priscilla, glibly, while Matt felt his cheeks must surely be

visible by the light of their own glow.

The candles were lit, and Priscilla, ostentatiously running into the

next room, returned with a sheet of white paper. “There you are, Mr.

Strang!” she cried, cheerfully, adding in a whisper, “I’ll be back

presently. You won’t go to-night, will you?” And her eyes pleaded

amorously.

No sooner had Priscilla disappeared than Matt’s perception of romance in

the position began to return; but it was an impersonal, artistic

perception; he was but a spectator of the situation. He could not

understand his own apathetic aloofness.

He walked restlessly about the room, trying to pump up Byronic emotion,

but finding the well of sentiment strangely dry. His eye wandered to the

blind, and became censoriously absorbed in the crude flowers and figures

stamped upon the arsenic-green background; he studied the effects of the

candle-light on the glaring coloration, noting how the yellow roses had

turned pink. Then Priscilla’s face flew up amid the flare of flowers,

and Matt, seizing the sheet of paper and pulling out his paint-box,

forgot everything else, even the artificial light, in the task of

expressing Priscilla in water-color.

He had nearly finished the sketch, which glowed with dainty vitality,

though the figure came out too lady-like. Suddenly the sound of voices

broke upon his ear. Priscilla and Cynthia were talking outside his door.

His critical situation recurred to him in a flash, his broken promise to

the captain if he yielded to the pertinacious Priscilla. The artist’s

imagination might enflame; the crude actuality chilled, curiosity alone

persisting. And the latent Puritan leaped up at bay; far-away

reminiscences of whispered references to the flesh and the devil

resurged, with all that mystic flavor of chill, unspeakable godlessness

that attaches to sins dimly apprehended in childhood. “Remember thy

Creator in the days of thy youth,” seen suddenly in red letters on one

of the wall-texts, was like the voice of a minatory Providence. Poor

Priscilla became an advancing serpent, dragging insidious coils.

He shut up his paint-box hastily, and scribbling beneath the sketch,

“For Priscilla--with Matt’s thanks,” he puffed at the candles. Only one

went out. Priscilla was still talking outside. His heart was thumping

with excitement as he added in a corner: “I promised the captain.

Good-bye.” Then, blowing out the other candle, he waited, striving to

draw serener breath as Priscilla still dallied without.

Only a blurred glimmer showed through the isinglass of the stove door;

the room was quite dark. He began to hope she would ascend with Cynthia,

and leave the coast temporarily clear; but at last only Cynthia’s step

receded, and he heard Priscilla turning the door-handle. It was an

anxious moment. He heard her exclamation of surprise.

“Have you gone to bed?” she cried.

He held his breath as she grazed his sleeve in the darkness. Then he

glided out, and slid boyishly down the banisters like a flash. There was

a gay hubbub of voices in the saloon; he walked unquestioned into the

street, then ran (as if pursued by a horde of Amazons) till he reached

the docks, and saw the friendly vessel moored against the wharf.

Remorse for his balked romance set in severely as soon as the bustle of

loading was over and the anchor weighed; Priscilla took on the halo of

Byronism and the _Arabian Nights_ which had steadily absented itself in

practice. Often during that miserable voyage he called himself a fool

and a milksop; for the passage was a nightmare of new duties,

complicated by sea-sickness and the weakness of a half-starved

constitution, and on that swinging schooner, with its foul-mouthed

captain, the mean bedroom he had deserted showed like a stable paradise.

But blustrous as the captain was by the side of the blubbering Bludgeon,

he had his compensations, for he made the voyage before the few

passengers had found their sea-legs. Arrived in Economy, Matt was again

face to face with starvation. But here Fortune smiled--with a suspicion

of humor in her smile; and having already climbed masts and ladders for

his dinner, her protégé was easily tempted to seek it at the top of a

steeple. The steeple, after tapering to a point two hundred feet high,

was crowned by a ball, which for years had needed regilding.

Unfortunately the architect had made the ball almost inaccessible, but

Matt, being desperate, undertook the job. The breath of winter was

already on the town; a week more and the whole steeple would be

decorated for the season with snow, so Matt’s offer was accepted, and,

his boots equipped with creepers, the young steeple-jack, begirt with

ropes, made the ascent safely in the eye of the admiring populace,

lowered the great ball and then himself, and being thereupon given board

and lodging and materials, he gilded it in the privacy of his garret.

Thus become a public hero, Matt easily got through the winter. He

decorated the ceiling of the Freemasons’ Hall, and painted a portrait of

the member of the House of Assembly, a burly farmer. This was his first

professional experience of an actual sitter, and he found himself more

hampered than helped by too close contact with reality. However, a touch

of imagination does no harm to a portrait, and Matt had by this time

acquired sufficient experience of humanity to lean to beauty’s side even

apart from his youthful tendency to idealization, which made it

impossible for him at this period to paint anything that was not

superficially beautiful or picturesque. The member pronounced the

portrait life-like, and gave Matt a bushel of home-grown potatoes over

and above the stipulated price, which was board and lodging during the

period of painting, and an order on a store for two dollars. With the

order Matt purchased a pair of Congress or side-spring boots; the

potatoes he swopped for a box of paper collars. From Economy he wrote

home to his mother, and received an incoherent letter, in which she

denounced the deacon by the aid of fulminant texts. Matt sighed

impotently, pitying her from his deeper experience of life, but hoping

she got on better with “Ole Hey” than she imagined. He had half a mind

to look up his folks, especially poor Billy; but just then he got an

order from the farmer-deputy’s brother, who wrote that he was so pleased

with his brother’s portrait that he wished Matt to paint his sign-board.

He added that, although he had not seen any specimen of Matt’s

sign-writing, he felt confident the painter of that portrait would be a

competent person. Matt accepted the new task with mixed feelings, and

got so many other commissions from the shopkeepers (for every shop had

its movable sign-board) that he soon saved fifty dollars, and seemed on

the high sea to England and his uncle. He had fixed three hundred

dollars as the minimum with which he might safely go to London to study

art. The steerage passage would cost only twenty. Unfortunately he was

persuaded to invest his savings in a partnership with a Yankee

jewel-peddler, and to travel the country with him. The peddler did not

swindle his partner, merely his clients; but Matt was so disgusted that

he refused to remain in the business. Thereupon the peddler, freed from

the obligations of partnership, treated him as an outsider, and refused

to return his principal. Matt thought himself lucky to escape in the end

with twenty-five dollars and a cleansed conscience. He went back to

sign-painting, but, taking a hint from the Yankee, continued his

travels, and became a peddler-painter. He hated the work, was out of

sympathy with his prosaic sitters, wondering by virtue of what grace or

loveliness they sought survival on canvas; but the road to Art, by way

of his uncle in London, lay over their painted bodies, so he drudged

along. And yet when the sitter was dissatisfied with the picture--it was

generally the sitter’s friends who persuaded him that he was

dissatisfied--and when Matt had to listen to the fatuous criticisms of

farmers and store-keepers, the artist flared up, and more than once the

hot-blooded boy sacrificed dollars to dignity. He was astonished to find

that in many quarters his fame had preceded him, and more astonished to

discover finally that the advance advertiser was his late partner.

Whether the Yankee compounded thus for the use of Matt’s dollars Matt

never knew, but in his kinder thought of the cute peddler the boy came

to think himself the debtor. For the dollars mounted, one on the head of

another, and the heap rose higher and higher, day by day and week by

week, till at last the magic three hundred began to loom in the eye of

hope. Three hundred dollars! saved by the sweat of the brow and

semi-starvation, and sanctified by the blood and tears of youth; sweet

to count over and to dream over, and to pile up like a tower to scale

the skies.

And so the great day drew near when Matt Strang would sail across the

Atlantic.

CHAPTER X

EXODUS

Billy Strang was dreaming happy dreams--dreams of action and adventure,

in which he figured not as the morbid cripple, but as the

straight-limbed hero. Matt was generally with him in these happy

hunting-grounds of sleep--dear old Matt, who had become a creature of

dream to his waking life. But absorbed as Billy was in this

phantasmagoric happiness, he was still the sport of every unwonted sound

from the real world. His tremulous nerves quivered at the first shock,

ready to flash back to his brain the bleaker universe of aches and

regrets and rancorous household quarrels.

To-night he sat up suddenly, with a premonition of something strange,

and gazed into the darkness of the bedroom, seeing only the dim outline

of the other bed in which his two younger brothers slept. After a long

moment of mysterious rustling, a thin ray of light crept in under the

door, then the handle turned very softly, and his mother glided in

swiftly, bearing a candle that made a monstrous shadow follow and bend

over her. She was fully dressed in out-door attire, wearing her bonnet

and sacque and muffler.

Her eyes were wide with excitement and shone weirdly, and the whole face

wore an uncanny look.

Billy trembled in cold terror. His mouth opened gaspingly.

“Sh-h-h-h!” whispered his mother, putting a forefinger to her lips.

Then, in hurried accents, she breathed, “Quick, get up and dress to

oncet!”

Magnetized by her face, he slipped hastily from the bed, too awed to

question.

“Sh-h-h-h!” she breathed again, “or you’ll wake Ruth.” Then, moving with

the same noiseless precipitancy, her shadow now growing to giant, now

dwindling to dwarf, “Quick, quick, children!” she whispered, shaking

them. The two younger boys sat up, dazed by sleep and the candle, and

were silently bundled out of bed, yawning and blinking, and

automatically commencing to draw on the socks they found thrust into

their hands.

“Your best clothes,” she whispered to Billy, throwing open the cupboard

in which they hung.

The action seemed to loosen his tongue.

“But it ain’t Sunday,” he breathed.

“Sh-h-h-h! To-day is a holiday. Put them on quick, quick!” she replied,

in the same awful whisper. “We are goin’ out of the land of bondage in

haste with our loins girded. And lo! in the mornin’ in every house there

was one dead.”

She set down the candle on the little bare wooden table, where it

gleamed solemnly in the gaunt room. Then she fell to feverishly helping

the children to dress, darting violently from one to another, and half

paralyzing Billy, whose fumbling, freezing fingers could not keep pace

with her frantic impatience. He dropped a boot, and the sound seemed to

echo through the silent house like a diabolical thunder-clap. He cowered

before her blazing eyes as she picked up the boot and violently dumped

his foot into it.

“Are we goin’ out, mother?” he said, so as not to scream. His words

sounded sinister and terrible to himself.

“Yes; I’ll go an’ see if the girls are finished dressin’.” She took up

the candle, and her whisper grew sterner. “Don’t make a sound!”

“But where are we goin’, mother?” he said, to detain her for an instant.

“Goin’ home. We’re throwin’ up the position!” And for the first time the

exultation in her voice raised it above a whisper. Then, putting her

forefinger to her lip again, “Not a sound!” she breathed, menacingly,

and moved on tiptoe to the door, her face set and shining, her shadow

tumbling grotesquely on the walls and ceilings.

“A-a-a-h!” Billy fell back on the bed, screaming. Like a flash his

mother turned; her hand was clapped fiercely over his mouth.

“You little devil!” she hissed. “What do you mean by disobeyin’?”

“The light! The light!” he gurgled.

She withdrew her hand. “What are you shakin’ ’bout? There’s light

’nough.” She drew up the blind, and a faint moonlight blurred itself

through the frosty glass. “You’re growed up now, you big booby. An’ your

brothers are with you.”

“I’ll go with you,” he gasped, clutching at her skirt.

“With that crutch o’ yours, you pesky eyesore!” she whispered, angrily.

“You’ll stay with the little uns, bless their brave little hearts.” And

she clasped the dazed children to her breast. “The Lord hes punished him

for his cruelty to you.... Finish your dressin’, quick.” She released

the two little boys and glided cautiously from the room, holding the

candle low, so that her great wavering shadow darkened the room even

before the thicker horror of blackness fell when she was gone. The three

children pressed together, their heartbeats alone audible in the awful

stillness. They were too bewildered and terrified to exchange even a

whisper. An impalpable oppression brooded over the icy room, and a dull

torpor possessed their brain, so that they made no effort to understand.

They only felt that something unreal was happening, something

preternaturally solemn. After a dream-like interval of darkness, the

mysterious rustling was repeated without, a thin line of light crept

again under the door, and their mother’s face reappeared, gleaming lurid

in the circle of the candle-rays. The two girls loomed in her wake, a

big and a little, both wrapped up for a journey, but shivering and

yawning and rubbing their eyes, still glued together by sleep. The

younger boys, who had remained numb, guiltily gave the last hasty

touches to their costume under the irate gaze of their mother. But

Billy’s face had grown convulsed.

His mother advanced towards him, dazzling his eyes with the candle and

her face, and bending down so that her eyes lay almost on his.

“Don’t you dare to have a fit now,” she hissed, her features almost as

agitated as his own, “or I’ll cut your throat like I’ve cut his.”

The intensity of her will mastered him, oversweeping even the added

horror of her words, and combined with the return of the light to ward

off the threatened paroxysm. He dragged on his top-coat. Only a few

minutes had elapsed since he had sat up in bed, yet it seemed hours. The

mother stealthily led the way through the hushed house, down the

creaking stairs, blowing out the light in the hall. When she opened the

outer door the cold air smote their faces like a whip. As she was

cautiously closing the door a dark thing ran out through the aperture.

“There goes his soul!” she whispered, in grim exultation.

But it was only Sprat.

The creature, now old and infirm, quietly took his familiar place in the

rear of the procession, which now set forth over the frozen moonlit snow

under the solemn stars in the direction of Cobequid Village. The

farm-hands, asleep in the attic built over the kitchen, in an “ell,” or

annex, to the main house, heard nothing. Ruth, sleeping the sleep of

virginal health and innocence in her dainty chamber, was deep in kindly

dreams. The woman led the way noiselessly but rapidly, so that the

little children had to run to keep pace with her, and Billy dragged

himself along by clinging to her skirt, dreading to be left behind in

the great lonely night. The road led downhill towards a little valley,

in which stood the deacon’s grist-mill, hidden by trees, but, as they

drew near it, showing dark against the white hill that rose again beyond

it. They descended towards it through a cutting in the hill lined with

overhanging snow-drifts, curled like crystallized waves. Everything

seemed dead; the mill-pond was frozen and snow-covered; frozen bundles

of green hides stood in piles against the front of the mill; there were

icicles round the edges of the sullen cascade that fell over the dam.

The mill-stream was a sheet of ice, spotted ermine-wise with black dots,

where air-holes showed the gloomy water below. The procession crossed

the little wooden bridge, bordered by bare willows, whose branches

glittered with frost, and then the snow-path rose again. Every sound was

heard intensely in the keen air--the rumbling of the little water-fall,

the gurgling of the stream under the ice, the frost fusillade of the

zigzag pole fences snapping along the route, the crunch of crisp snow

under their feet. They mounted the hill, and reached the broad, flat

fields that stretched on white and bare to Cobequid. The last inch of

Deacon Hailey’s possessions was left behind. Then the leader of the

procession slackened her pace, and lifted up her voice in raucous

thanksgiving:

“‘When Israel, of the Lord beloved,

Out from the land of bondage came,

Her fathers’ God before her moved,

An awful guide in smoke and flame.’

“Now, then, sing up, children!” she cried.

Bewildered and still half asleep, they obeyed--in bleating, quavering

tones that came through chattering teeth to an accompaniment of cloudy

breath.

The woman and her children passed on into the night, singing. Amid the

stretches of sky and space they seemed a group of black insects crawling

across a great white plain.

* * * * *

Abner Preep, coming down before dawn, found a bunch of children on the

great kitchen settee, asleep in their clothes. The mother sat on the

floor before the open stove, smiling happily and muttering to herself.

They had quietly taken possession of the old familiar room and stirred

up the slumbering fire.

For the first few seconds Abner wondered if he was dreaming, for the

next if he were mad. But another look at the crouching woman convinced

him that it was not he that was mad; while a phrase from her babbling

lips sent something of the truth home to his beating heart. He roused

Harriet and broke the news as gently as time permitted. The brave girl

bade him drive at once to Deacon Hailey’s while she kept guard over her

mother. Abner thereupon mounted his horse bare-back, to save time, and

galloped to the farm.

To his relief he found the deacon little injured. The neglect of his

beard had been “Ole Hey’s” salvation. It had sprouted thick and tangled

about his throat, and the mad woman, armed with a blunt knife, had only

inflicted a flesh-wound, leaving the trachea unsevered. The sleeping

man, suddenly awakening to the strange spectacle of his wife in out-door

attire brandishing a knife, had fainted from horror and loss of blood.

But presently recovering consciousness, he had clamored for Ruth, and

with her help bound up the wound, already half stanched by the clogging

beard.

The matter was kept in the family, but the deacon swore he would have no

more to do with the woman or her unmannerly brood beyond paying the

minimum for her incarceration where she could do no more mischief; and

so Abner took her forthwith by sleigh and train to the capital, and

placed her in a private asylum.

In this manner Mrs. Strang went back to Halifax.

* * * * *

When Matt heard the awful tidings his air-castles crashed and fell as at

the crack of doom. Abner Preep was the messenger of evil, for Matt’s

painting tour had brought him near Halifax, and Abner thought it best to

look up his boyish enemy ere he went back home.

Beneath all the tumult of consternation in Matt’s breast there throbbed

an undertone of remorse--a vague feeling that this would never have

happened had he been on the spot. His boyish wilfulness had received its

death-blow.

“But it served him right,” he cried, with irresistible bitterness, when

he heard the deacon had not only washed his hands of the family, but was

now vindictively pressing Abner for the arrears of the mortgage interest

which had been allowed to lapse while Abner was building up his

position. Abner had always understood that Mrs. Strang had exacted the

freedom of her property. But there was nothing in black and white.

“There’s no gettin’ out of it,” said Abner, gloomily. “But your poor

father must hev made an everlastin’ mess of it, fur how there comes to

be so much to pay arter all these years fur a few acres of ground an’ a

wretched shanty, durned if I can make out.”

“He cheated father, you may depend,” said Matt, hotly.

“I wouldn’t go as fur nor thet,” said Abner. “It ain’t right to call a

man a thief without proof. Anyway, I’ve got to stump up. I shouldn’t ha’

minded it in an ornery way, though I _hev_ got two babies, bless their

souls. But it comes hard jest now, with five extra mouths to feed.”

“Oh, but you are not going to feed them!”

“Who, then?”

“Me, of course.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, Matt!” said Abner. “You’ve got to go to London an’

larn paintin’. Harriet’s told me all ’bout you, an’ she’s got some o’

your picters, an’ they’re rael beautiful. There’s one in our bedroom.

Besides, they’re all growed up now a’most, an’ they’ll soon be feedin’

theirselves. An’ then, you see, the house itself is your sister’s, not

mine.”

“It’s mighty good of you,” said Matt, hoarsely, “but it isn’t fair.”

“No more it was o’ me fightin’ you thet thar time,” said Abner, smiling.

“This evens things up.”

There was a great lump in Matt’s throat so that he could not speak. He

held out his hand mutely, and Abner took it, and they gripped each other

so heartily that the tears started to the eyes of both.

“Then thet’s settled,” said Abner, with husky cheeriness.

“No, that’s only to beg your pardon,” said Matt, recovering his voice.

“I’ve been a skunk to you, that’s a fact. But I’m not going to behave

badly again. I’m just raking in the dollars now hand over fist, and

learning painting all the time into the bargain. I don’t want a bit to

go to London, and I’ve put by two hundred and eighty dollars that aren’t

the least use to me, and that ’ll just come in handy to pay the old

scoundrel. And I can easily send you five dollars a week till I earn

more. Billy alone ’ll cost you near that, I guess, and it’s my fault he

can’t earn anything hardly.”

In the end the imperious Matt had his way, and, while the boy went on to

see his mother, Abner returned home with the situation considerably

lightened, the bearer of money for Deacon Hailey, and loving messages

for all Matt’s brothers and sisters, even Harriet being now restored to

grace.

Matt found his mother in a small padded room in a house that stood on

the hill overlooking the harbor. She was gazing yearningly seaward, and

tears trickled down her doleful cheeks. Matt stood silently near the

door, surveying her askance with aching heart. Abner had told him that

her life with Deacon Hailey had grown a blank to her, and he wondered if

she would recognize him; in the last two years he had shot up from a

hobbledehoy into a tall, stalwart youth.

When she turned her head at last and espied him she leaped up with a

wild cry of joy, and folded him in her arms.

“Davie!” she cried, rapturously. “My own Davie! At last! I didn’t see

your ship come in.”

A nervous thrill ran down Matt’s spine as he submitted to her embrace.

The separate tragedies of his parents’ lives seemed poignantly knit

together in this supreme moment.

“They’re so strict with me here, Davie,” she said. “Take me away from my

folks, anywhere, where we can be happy and free. I don’t care what they

say any more--I am so tired of all this humdrum life.”

Matt pacified her as best he could, and, promising to arrange it all

soon, left her, his heart nigh breaking. He walked about the bustling

streets like one in a dream, resenting the sunshine, and wondering why

all these people should be so happy. Again that ancient image of his

father’s dead face was tossed up on the waves of memory, to keep

company henceforth with the death-in-life of his mother’s face. The

breakdown of his ambition seemed a petty thing beside these vaster

ironies of human destiny.

Book II.--CHAPTER I

IN LONDON

On a dull February day a respectably clad steerage passenger disembarked

at Southampton with little luggage and great hopes. He was only twenty,

but he looked several years older. There were deep traces of thought and

suffering in the face, bronzed though it was; and despite the vigorous

set of the mouth and the jaw, the dark eyes were soft and dreamy. He was

clean-shaven except for a dark-brown mustache, which combined with the

little tangle of locks on his forehead to suggest the artistic

temperament, and to repel the insinuation of rough open-air labor

radiating from his sturdy frame and bearing.

Matt Strang’s foot had touched England at last. Two long, monotonous

years of steadfast endurance, self-sacrifice, and sordid economies--two

years of portrait and sign painting, interrupted by spells of

wagon-striping at two and a half dollars a day, had again given him the

mastery of three hundred dollars, despite his despatch of five dollars a

week to Abner Preep, and of a final subsidy of one hundred dollars to

bridge over the time till he should have a footing in England. Gradually

the cloud of despondency had rolled off, the spring-time of life and

aspiration would not be denied, and though the pity and terror of his

mother’s tragedy had tamed his high spirit and snapped the springs of

buoyancy, the passion for painting returned with an intensity that

dulled him to every appeal of the blood in his veins; and with it a

haunting fear that he could never live to see London or his artist

uncle, that he would die in the flower of his youth, all his

possibilities latent. So impatient was he to give this fear the lie that

he suffered a vexatious loss through his hurry to realize the bills and

the goods in which his art had too often found payment. When the steamer

floundered into a field of ice off Newfoundland, his semi-superstitious

feeling wellnigh amounted to a quiet conviction that he would be

shipwrecked in sight of port, the three hundred dollars serving but to

sink him deeper.

Without stopping in Southampton to tempt Providence, he went straight on

to London, every vein in him pulsing with feverish anticipations of

mysterious splendors. The engine panted in answering exultation, and the

rattle of the carriages was a rhythmic song of triumph. At last he was

approaching the city of his dreams--the mighty capital of culture and

civilization, where Art was loved and taught and honored. For some days

now his whole being had been set in this key.

He sat at the window, gazing eagerly at the sunless landscapes that

raced past him. Gradually he became aware of the approach of the

monstrous city. Fields were interrupted by houses; later, houses were

interrupted by fields; then the rural touches grew fewer and fewer, and

at last he sped under a leaden sky amid appalling, endless, everlasting

perspectives of chimney-pots and sooty tiles, and dingy houses and dead

walls and vomiting columns and gasworks and blank-faced factories

reeking with oppressive odors--on and on and on, as amid the infinities

of a mean Inferno, whirring past geometrical rows of murky backyards

with dust-bins and clothes-lines, and fleeting glimpses of grimy women

and shock-headed children and slouching men, thundering over bridges

that spanned gray streets relieved by motley traffic and advertisement

hoardings, and flashing past gaunt mansions of poverty--bald structures

with peeling fronts and bleared windows. There was a sombre

impressiveness in the manifold frowziness, the squalid monotony; it was

the sublime of the sordid. Fresh as Matt was from the immensities of sea

and sky, the shabbiness of the spectacle caught at his throat; he

thought chokingly of the unnumbered, unnoticed existences dragging

dismally along within those bleak, congested barracks.

What had all this to do with Art? The glow of his blood died away, to be

rekindled only by the seething streets into which he emerged from the

clangorous maze of Waterloo Station; the throb of tumultuous life that

beat as a drum and stirred the blood as a trumpet. Yet he had not come

up to conquer London, but to sit at its feet. His bitter experience of

life had destroyed every vestige of cocksureness, almost of confidence,

leaving him shy and sometimes appalled at his own daring, as he realized

the possibilities of self-delusion. He knew that fame and money were the

guerdons of Art, but these were only indirectly in his mind. If they

sometimes flashed to his heart in intoxicating instants of secret hope,

he was too full of the consciousness of his disadvantages and

imperfections to think much of anything beyond getting the necessary

training. Far down the vista of thought and years lay this rosy rim of

splendor, a faint haze dimly discerned, but the joy of learning and

practising his art was the essence of his yearning. And yet there were

moments, like this of feeling London under his foot for the first time,

when a consciousness of power welled up in his soul--a sense of

overflowing energy and immovable purpose that lifted him high above the

crowd of shadows.

Escaping the touts and cabmen, he carried his valise across a great

noiseful bridge to the nearest inexpensive-looking hotel, intending to

secure a base of operations from which to reconnoitre London before

looking up his uncle. But though he was at once booked for a room, the

genteel air of the place, with its well-dressed customers and white-tied

waiters, terrified him with the prevision of a portentous bill. He would

have backed out at once had he dared, but, he thought, now that he was

in for it, he would give it a week’s trial. He took only his breakfasts

there, however, though the unnatural hour at which he took them made him

an object of suspicion. He seemed always on the point of catching an

early train. His other meals were taken at those modest restaurants

where twopence is not a tip, but the price of a dish, and the menu is

cut up into slips and pasted across the shop-window.

His first visit on the day of his arrival was to the National Gallery,

not only to fulfil a cherished dream, but to see his uncle’s pictures,

to talk of which might smooth the meeting. But he could nowhere come

across the works of Matthew Strang, and a catalogue he could not

afford; and he soon forgot the unseen pictures in the emotions excited

by the seen, which plunged him into alternate heats of delight and

chills of despair.

Despair alone possessed him at first in his passage through the

Florentine and Sienese rooms. The symbolic figures of Catholicism had

scant appeal for a soul which in its emergence from Puritan swaddlings

had not opened out to mediævalism, and the strange draughtsmanship

blinded him to everything else. If Margaritone or even Botticelli was

Art, then his ideas must be even cruder than he had feared. He was

relieved to find, as he continued his progress, that it must be the

Madonnas that were crude, for he was apparently following the evolution

of Art. But the sense of his own superior technique was brief--despair

came back by another route. Before the later masters he was reduced to a

worshipper, thrilled to tears. And, somewhat to his own astonishment, it

was not only the poetic and imaginative that compelled this religious

ecstasy; his soul was astrain for high vision, yet it was seized at once

by Moroni’s “Portrait of a Tailor,” and by the exquisite

modelling--though he did not know the word for it--of the head in his

“Portrait of an Ecclesiastic.” To the young Nova Scotian, who had so

chafed at having to paint uncouth farmers, it was an illumination to see

how in the hands of a Teniers, or, above all, a Rembrandt, the

commonplace could be transfigured by force of technique and sympathy.

And yet he surrendered more willingly to the romantic, held by the later

“Philip the Fourth” of Velasquez, as much for its truculent kingly theme

as for the triumphantly subtle coloring, which got the effects of

modelling almost without the aid of shadows. And the fever of

inspiration and mastery, the sense of flowing paint which pervaded and

animated the portrait of the Admiral, was the more entrancing because of

the romantic figure of the Spanish sailor; while beside Rembrandt’s

“Jewish Merchant,” with its haunting suggestion of suffering and the

East, even the fine Vandyke, its neighbor, seemed to lose in poetry.

The brilliant and seizing qualities had his first vote; luminosity of

color, richness of handling, grip of composition--all that leaped to the

eye. Being alone, he had the courage of his first impressions; and

having always been alone, he had the broadness that is clipped by

school. The beautiful sense of form and landscape in Titian’s “Christ

Appearing to Mary Magdalen” captivated him, though for subject he

preferred the “Bacchus and Ariadne.” He was equally for Murillo’s “St.

John and the Lamb,” and for Andrea del Sarto’s portrait of himself; for

Palma’s Christ-like “Portrait of a Painter.” He wondered wistfully

whence Bassano’s “Good Samaritan” took the glow of its color, or

Greuze’s “Head of a Girl” its pathetic grace, and he was as struck by

the fine personal, if sometimes unsure, touch of Gainsborough as by the

vigorous handling and extraordinary painting force of Sir Joshua

Reynolds, whose children alone he found unreservedly delicious.

Amid many sound if superficial judgments were many crude admirations and

condemnations, destined to undergo almost annual revision. At the

present stage of his growth, for example, the charming Correggio was his

ideal of an artist--to wit, a skilful painter, suffusing poetical themes

with poetical feeling.

Subject counted for him: a sympathetic theme seemed to him of the

essence of Art.

But the craftsman in him was not to be suppressed. When he was absorbed

in Raphael’s “Pope Julius II.,” his practical self suggested that the

reds needed varnishing to bring up the head from the background; and

though the fine feeling of Joseph Ribera’s “Dead Christ” awoke

long-dormant chords of religious emotion, what moved him most was the

modelling of the foot caressed by the Magdalen’s hair. His emotion

subsided in the study of the painter’s mannerisms, his heavy blacks and

shadows. His delight in the luminous quality of Bordone’s “Portrait of a

Lady” was modified by an uneasy conviction that the left hand was

unnatural. Even in Moroni’s portraits the hands seemed slightly too

small. Though he was astonished at the triviality of subject in Gerard

Dow’s “Fish and Poultry Shop,” he must fain admire the exquisite quality

of the still-life passages and the loving patience of the infinite

touches; in Van Mieris’ treatment of the same subject he found a

resentful pleasure in the discovery that, despite the marvellous

accuracy of the dish of fish and the vegetables, the woman’s head was

too little, her left arm too heavy and too big for the right, her flesh

more like fish, and her very cat purring in contented ignorance of its

wrong proportions.

In the landscape galleries he was puzzled by the old classic landscape;

the occasional fineness of line, the masterly distribution of masses,

did not counterbalance his sense of unreality before these brown trees

and sombre backgrounds. Where were the sunlight and atmosphere of Nature

as he had known her, the sky over all, subtly interfused with all the

living hues, the fresh, open-air feeling which he had tried to put into

his own humble sketches of Nova-Scotian forest, and by virtue of which

he found more of the great mother in Peter de Hoogh’s pictures of the

courts of Dutch houses than in all the templed woodlands of the

pre-Gainsborough period? But Constable revealed to him the soul of

loveliness of rural England, setting in his heart a pensive yearning for

those restful woods and waters; Crome touched his imagination with the

sweep of his lonely heaths; and Turner dazzled him with irisations of

splendid dream, and subdued him with the mystery and poetry of sea and

sky.

And the total effect of this first look round was inspiration. Over all

the whirling confusion of the appeal of so many schools and ages, over

all his bewilderment before early Italian pictures that seemed to him

badly drawn and modern English that seemed banal, over all his

dispiriting diffidence before the masterpieces, was an exultant sense of

brotherhood, as of a soul come home at last. There were pictures to

which he returned again and again with a feeling of reverential kinship,

a secret audacious voice whispering that he understood those who had

painted them--that he too was of their blood and race, though come from

very far, and lonely and unknown; that he too had thrilled with the

beauty and mystery of things; that he too had seen visions and heard

voices. Quitting the gallery with regret tempered by the prospect of

many magic hours in the society of its treasures, he found out the

whereabouts of the Limners’ Club, and took his way towards Bond Street,

every sense thrilling with vivid perceptions, receiving pleasant

impressions from the shop-windows, exhilarated by the pretty women that

brushed by him with a perfume of fashion, and keenly enjoying the roar

of the town.

On the threshold of the club he inquired for Mr. Matthew Strang. The

door-keeper eyed him surlily, and said there was no such member. The

world grew suddenly dark and bleak again. He stammered in piteous

apology that Mr. Strang had given him that address; and the janitor, a

whit softened by his evident distress, admitted that Mr. Strang was

sometimes about the club, and volunteered to send the boy to see--an

offer which Matt gratefully accepted with a sense of taking alms. But

Mr. Strang was not on the premises, and Matt was further driven to

inquire where he _could_ be found. The door-keeper, tired of him,

replied to the effect that he was not Mr. Strang’s keeper, and that it

was not unusual to look for gentlemen in their own homes; whereupon Matt

turned miserably away, too disheartened to ask where his uncle’s own

home was situate, and feeling that there was nothing for it but to keep

watch over the club door till the great painter should appear. He

lingered about at a safe distance (for to be seen by the door-keeper

were terrible), scanning with eager glances the faces of the few men who

passed through the swinging glass doors, his imagination glorifying

them, and seeing rather halos than silk hats on their heads. But at last

the futility of his sentinelship dawned upon him; he could not be sure

of recognizing his uncle; he could not accost the celestials and

question them; he must come again and again till he found his uncle at

the club. The thought of facing the door-keeper made him flinch, but he

knew the road to Art was thorny and precipitous.

It was three o’clock, but he had forgotten to lunch. Now that his

emotions had been chilled, he remembered he was hungry. He looked around

in vain for a mean eating-house, then reluctantly slipped into a

public-house and ordered a glass of ale and something brown and dumpy

which he saw under a glass cover. The wench who served him smiled so

amiably that he was emboldened to ask if by chance she knew where

Matthew Strang lived. Her smile died away, and nothing succeeded it.

“Matthew Strang, the painter,” said Matt, with a ghastly suspicion that

the girl did not even know the name. London to him meant largely Matthew

Strang; it was to Matthew Strang that he had taken his ticket and booked

his passage, it was to get to Matthew Strang that he had starved and

pinched himself, and it depressed him to discover the limitations of

fame--to find that Matthew Strang was not hung in the air like

Mohammed’s coffin, ’twixt earth and heaven, for all to see.

“There’s the Directory,” said the girl, lugging it down when she

perceived that the good-looking young man with the curious drawling

accent was not quizzing her. “You’ll find painters in the Trade

Directory.”

The barmaid’s satire was unconscious. Understanding the bulky red volume

but dimly, Matt hunted up “Strang” in the general section. He was

surprised to see there was more than one person of that name. But

fortunately there was only one Matthew Strang, and he lived in a side

street off Cavendish Square. Warmly thanking the girl, Matt gulped down

his ale and hurried out to inquire the way, munching the relics of the

cake as he hastened towards the long-elusive goal. Very soon, scanning

the numbers, his eye flashed and his heart leaped up. There it was--the

magic name--actually ’twixt earth and heaven, painted above a

shop-window. Surprised, he came to a stand-still.

The window was one which would have arrested him in any case, for it was

illumined with paintings and engravings, and through the doorway Matt

saw enchanting stacks of pictures mounting from floor to ceiling, and

the side wall was a gallery of oils and water-colors, and an aroma of

art and refinement and riches seemed over everything, from the gold of

the frames of the oil-colors to the chaste creamy margins of the

engravings. He entered the shop with beating heart. His eyes lit first

on a sweet-faced matron in a cap standing at the far end of the shop,

reverentially surveying a faded “Holy Family,” and while he was

wondering whether she was the artist’s wife, a dapper young gentleman,

installed behind a broad desk near the door, startled him by asking his

business.

He coughed uneasily, overcome by sudden diffidence. The series of

barriers between him and his uncle gave the great painter an appalling

aloofness.

“I want to see Mr. Matthew Strang,” he stammered.

The dapper young gentleman looked inquiringly towards the sweet-faced

matron. “Can this gentleman see Mr. Strang, Madame?” he said. Matt

noticed that he wore a pearl horseshoe in his cravat.

“Certainly, sir. Be seated,” said the lady, with grave courtesy and a

pleasant touch of foreign accent, such as Matt had heard in the French

families of Acadia. She disappeared for a moment, and returned in the

wake of a saturnine-looking elderly gentleman, with interrogative

eyebrows, a pointed beard, and a velvet jacket, the first sight of whom

gave Matt the heart-sickness of yet another disappointment. But though

his keen eye soon snipped off the pointed beard and wiped off the

sallowness of civilization, revealing the David Strang interblent with

the Matthew, his heart-sickness remained. The gap between him and this

fine gentleman and great artist seemed too great to be bridged over thus

suddenly. He became acutely conscious of his homely clothes, of his

coarse, unlettered speech, of the low, menial occupations he had

followed; he saw himself furling the sail and carrying the hod and

sawing the wood; he felt himself far below the dapper young shopman with

the pearl horse-shoe, and his throat grew parched and his eyes misty.

“Good-afternoon, sir,” said his uncle, rubbing his hands with chilling

geniality. “What can I have the pleasure of doing for you?”

In that instant Matt perceived all the perversity of which he had been

guilty, he remembered he had flown in the face of his uncle’s kind

advice, and had not even apprised him of his departure from America.

“I want to buy some colors,” he faltered.

His uncle’s eyebrows mounted. “We do not sell colors, young man,” he

said, frigidly.

“I thought--” Matt stammered.

Matthew Strang contemptuously turned on his heel and withdrew. His

nephew lingered desperately in the shop, without the strength either to

go or to stay.

The lady, who had half followed her husband, turned back hesitatingly,

and with reassuring sweetness said: “You will get colors near at hand,

in Oxford Street. We only sell pictures.”

Under her penetrating sympathy Matt found courage to say: “I’m sorry Mr.

Strang got streaked.”

“Streaked?” echoed Madame, opening her eyes, as with a vision of

broadcloth brushing against wet canvases.

“I mean angry,” said Matt, confusion streaking his own face with red.

“Yes, I remember now,” said madam, sweetly. “It’s an American word.”

“Yes; it was in America that I heard of Mr. Strang,” he replied, slowly,

striving to accentuate his words, as though he were reading them from a

school-book.

“Indeed?” Madame flushed now.

“Yes, I heard of his fame as a painter.”

“Ah.” Her eyes sparkled. Roses leaped into her blond cheeks. “I always

told him his work was admirable,” she cried, in exultant excitement,

“but he is so easily discouraged.”

Matt thrilled with a sense of the man’s greatness.

“So you see,” he said, with a quaver of emotion in his voice, “I was

just wild to see him.”

“I am so glad,” cried Madame, with a charming smile. “I will go and tell

my husband. He really must see you. Matthew,” she called out,

tremulously, fluttering towards the passage.

The saturnine figure in the velvet coat descended again.

“You must talk to the young gentleman, dear. He has heard of your fame

in America.”

Matthew Strang’s interrogative eyebrows reached their highest point, and

Matt’s face got more streaked than ever. He felt he was in a false

position.

“I heard of you from my father,” he said, hurriedly. “What is the price

of this?” he asked in his confusion, half turning towards the shopman.

“This etching of Millet’s ‘Angelus’? Three guineas, sir.” He added,

gauging his man, “We have a photogravure of the same subject--a little

smaller--for half a guinea.”

“Your father!” repeated Mr. Strang, gruffly. “He was a brother artist, I

presume.”

Matt would have given much to say he was not an artist, but a brother.

But he replied instead: “No, not exactly. He was a captain.” He felt

somehow as if the whole guilt of his father’s calling rested upon

himself, and it was mean of him to cross the Atlantic to impose some of

it on the dignified figure before him.

“Oh, I love soldiers,” murmured Madame Strang.

Matt felt things were now entangled beyond the possibility of even

future extrication, so he desperately consented to purchase the

photogravure, threw down a sovereign, and, snatching up the change and

the picture-roll, hurried from the establishment.

“What a charming young man!” said Madame Strang.

But Matthew Strang tapped his forehead significantly.

“You always will run yourself down, dear,” murmured Madame.

“Josephine,” replied Matthew Strang, in low, solemn tones, “the fellow

is either a fool or a rogue.”

“He’s left sixpence on the desk,” broke in the voice of the shopman.

“Ha! a fool! It is enough for me to live in my son. He has advantages

which I was denied.”

“The dear boy,” breathed Madame.

The extravagant purchaser of the “Angelus” divided the rest of his week

between the National Gallery, where he concluded his uncle had not yet

been canonized, and the streets of London, which he explored fearlessly.

In a few days of industrious investigation he saw more than many a

Londoner sees in a lifetime. He had experience of the features and

cook-shops of Peckham, Rotherhithe, Clapton, Westminster, Covent Garden,

the East India Docks, the Tower, wandering wherever the shapeless city

stretched its lubber limbs, and seeing things and places that made him

glad of the protection of the pistol he carried in his hip-pocket. The

very formlessness of the city fascinated even while it dazed him. He

ceased to wonder that artists found inspiration in this atmosphere, in

which the fog itself seemed but the visible symbol of the innumerable

mysterious existences swarming in its obscure vastness. The unexpected

was everywhere, green closes in the heart of commerce, quiet quadrangles

in the byways of Fleet Street, quaint old churches by the river-side,

bawling market-places behind stately mansions, great parks set in

deserts of arid poverty, bustling docks hidden away in back streets, and

elegant villas at the end of drab, dismal, long-trailing East-end

thoroughfares, redolent of slush and cabbage-leaves and public-houses

and fried fish. Miles were of light account to one who had lived in a

land of great spaces, yet Matt was wearied by the lengthy sweep of the

great arteries and the multiplicity of their ramifications, by this

vastness that was but reiterated narrowness in its lack of the free open

horizons to which his eye was used.

But the Titanic city awoke strange responses in his soul; something in

him vibrated to the impulse of the endless panorama. Often his fingers

itched for the brush, as if to translate into color and line all this

huge pageant of life; for the spell of youthful poesy was still on his

eyes, and if he could not see London as he had seen his native fields

and sky and ocean, all fresh and pure and beautiful, if in the crude day

its sordid streets seemed labyrinths in an underworld, unlovely,

intolerable, there were atmospheres and lights in which it still loomed

upon his vision through the glamour of fantasy, and chiefly at night,

when the mighty city brooded in sombre majesty, magnificently

transfigured by the darkness, and the solemn river stretched in

twinkling splendor between enchanted warehouses, or shadowed itself with

the inverted architecture of historic piles, or lapped against the gray

old Tower dreaming of ancient battle. But he could only take rough

pencil or mental notes of the romance of it all, and it was almost

always the fantastic that touched his imagination and found expression

in the pictorial short-hand of his sketch-book--lurid splotches of

sunset against tall, grimy chimneys; tawny barges gliding over black

canal-waters shot with quivering trails of liquid gold from the morning

sun; ragged Rembrandtesque figures asleep under glooming railway arches,

over which trains flew with shining windows; street perspectives at

twilight, with strange, livid skies; filmy evening rain blurring the

lights of the town to a tender haze; late omnibuses tearing by

glistering, moonlit pavements, and casting the shadows of the outside

passengers on the sleeping houses; foggy forenoons, with the eye of day

inflamed and swollen in the yellow heaven. With his purchase of the

“Angelus,” on the other hand, he was not greatly taken, despite its

sentiment. He had seen too much of peasants; he had himself stooped over

the furrows when his heart was elsewhere; his soul turned from the mean

drudgeries and miseries of the human lot, yearning for the flash of

poetry, the glow of romance, the light of dream.

In spite of his boarding out, his bill for the week’s bed, breakfast,

and attendance reached as far as £1 19_s._ 3_d._--a terrifying total

that drove him headlong into the frowsiest coffee-house to be found in

the slums round Holborn. Here he spent a wretched, interminable night,

provoked by insects and mysterious noises into dressing again and

keeping his hand on his pistol as he sat shivering on a chair. The

staircases resounded with the incessant tramp of feet mounting and

descending, and there were bursts of rowdy laughter and blows and tipsy

jeers, and once his locked door was shaken, and Matt thought he had

fallen into a thieves’ den, and trembled for his savings. In the morning

he called for his account and left, not without having discovered the

real character of the place into which he had strayed. After some

trouble he chanced upon a clean furnished room in the same neighborhood

for four shillings and sixpence a week, attendance included. It was a

back room on the third floor, and it gave on a perspective of tiles and

shabby plaster, and the evidences of jerry-building in the doors and

windows discomforted the whilom joiner’s apprentice; but he calculated

that for less than twenty of his pounds he would have a foothold in

London for a year. He wellnigh cried to think of the weeks he had lost

in that week of hotel luxury. On sixpence a day he could sustain life.

On ninepence he could live in clover. Why, even making lavish allowance

for the technical expenses of which his uncle had warned him, he would

easily be able to stay on for a whole year. In a year--a year of

ceaseless painting--what might he not achieve?

Ah, what hopes harbored, what dreams hovered in that bleak little room!

The vague, troubled rumor of the great city rolled up in inspiring

mystery; the light played with instructive fascination upon the sooty

tiles; high over the congested chaos of house-tops he saw the evening

mists rifted with sunset, and on starry nights he touched the infinite

through his rickety casement.

CHAPTER II

GRAINGER’S

Only, where to learn? There was the rub. He had looked to his uncle to

put him in the way of instantly acquiring art, and here had he wasted a

week without acquiring even information. But in the British Museum he

lighted upon young men and women drawing from the antique, and entering

into conversation with the shabbiest of the men, who was working at the

head of a Roman emperor in chalk, pecking at it with a pointed pellet of

bread, he learned that the Roman emperor’s head was intended, in

alliance with the torso of a Greek river-god, to force the doors of the

Royal Academy Schools, the privileges of which gratuitous establishment

the aspirant duly recounted. But the examination would not take place

for some time, and Matt, though he felt it hard to have to pay fees

elsewhere in the meantime, was secretly pleased at being able to shelve

temporarily the thought of partaking in this examination, for the Roman

emperor’s head was appallingly stippled, and the student said he had

been at work on it for four months, and evidently meditated touching and

retouching it till the very eve of the examination. Matt did not think

he could ever muster sufficient interest in Roman emperors to live with

the head of one for more than a week. His heart sank at the thought of

what he might have to go through to please professors and examiners, but

he would have willingly tried his hand at copying a bust had not the

student informed him he must apply for permission and give a reference

to a reputable householder. With the exception of his unclaimed uncle,

Matt knew no one, reputable or disreputable, householder or vagrant. But

he obtained from the shabby delineator of the Roman emperor the address

of a cheap, good art-school, though he found, to his dismay, that even

at the cheapest he could only afford to take the night class, from seven

to ten, three times a week. He saw he would have to study form apart

from natural color, and apply during the days the preachings of the

three nights. Impatient, and holding his paint-box tight against his

palpitating heart, he set out that very night to join the class, but

losing himself in a labyrinth of squares exactly alike, did not find the

school till half-past seven. Passing through an open door marked

“Grainger’s Academy of Art” in ugly and faded lettering, he found

himself in a long, gloomy passage that led away from the rest of the

house; and, following the indication of a dirty finger painted on the

wall, he stole cautiously along the deserted corridor, which grew

momentarily drearier as it receded from the naked jet of gas in the

doorway, till it reached its duskiest at the point where it was bordered

by a pair of cloak-rooms. Matt peered eagerly into their shadowy depths,

which seemed to contain coals and a bicycle and litter, as well as

clothing, and to exhale a flavor of ancient stuffiness; but he could

detect no movement among the congested overcoats. At last, at the end of

the passage, he stumbled against a boy in buttons kneeling with his eye

to the key-hole of a door. Apologetically he asked the boy if this was

Grainger’s, and the boy, jumping up quickly, told him to walk in, and

retreated in haste.

Matt opened the door. A wave of insufferably hot air, reeking of

tobacco, smote his face and his nostrils; a glare of light dazzled his

eyes. He was vaguely aware of a great square room crowded with young men

in uncouth straw hats sitting or standing at work in their shirt-sleeves

before easels; but the whole scene was a blur compared with the central

point that stood out in disconcerting clearness. Immediately facing him,

on a platform at the other end of the room, a nude woman was standing.

He started back shocked, and was meditating flight, when a student near

him growled to him to shut the door. He obeyed, and had an instant of

awful loneliness and embarrassment amid this crowd of gifted strangers,

in the rear of which he stood, paint-box under arm, wondering why nobody

challenged his entry, and where Grainger was. Turning to look for him,

he upset a rickety easel and a disengaged stool, both of which seemed to

topple over at the slightest touch. But his awkwardness saved the

situation; the owner of the easel was good-natured and, perceiving he

was a new-comer, bade him seat himself on the stool and fix up an easel

next to him, the number painted on the oilcloth of the floor being

unappropriated. As Matt had no canvas, he even went outside to buy him

one for two-and-ninepence from the boy in buttons. Matt handed him the

money with a feeling of eternal gratitude.

While his amiable fellow was thus busied in his behalf, the new

student’s keen eye absorbed the scene in detail. A great square dusty

room, rimmed as to the roof by skylights, and lighted to-night from

above by a great circular gas-flare; round two of the walls, patched

here and there by the crumbling away of the plaster, ran a rack on which

innumerable canvases and drawing-boards were stacked, and underneath the

rack a streak of wood permeated the plaster to hold the pins by which

crude sketches were fastened up, evidently for criticism; here and there

hung notices of the meetings of Grainger’s Sketching Club, mixed up with

photographs and advertisements of studios, and of a drawing competition

instituted by the proprietors of a soap, and the mural ornamentation was

completed by clever nude studies, rapid _tours de force_ of the visiting

artists, as Matt discovered later; everywhere about the floor were

canvases, boards, and an unstable assortment of three-legged easels,

donkeys, quaintly carved chairs, and stools, high and low, upon which

last students of all figures and complexions, some of them smoking, sat

perched, crowned with the uncouth straw hats to keep the glare out of

their eyes, and reduced to the shirt-sleeves by the heat from so many

lights and breaths; the pendent gas-jets being supplemented by the

paraffine lamp that lighted a shadowy corner where a skull grinned on a

shelf, and by the big fire that was needed to keep the model from

shivering on the throne, where she stood statuesque against the white

background of a dirty sheet, her head resting against her arm.

And from everything breathed an immemorial dust--from the fire in the

centre of the right-hand wall an impalpable ash seemed to drift; dust

covered the mantel-piece and coated the bottles of linseed-oil and

fixative and the boxes of charcoal that stood upon it, dust draped in

gray the dilapidated squash-nosed lay-figure that leaned drunkenly

against the right side of the throne. In the corners of the room the

dust had an air of legal possession, as if the statute of limitations

had secured it against the broom. There were dusty mysteries doubled up

on shelves, a visible leopard’s skin suggesting infinite romantic

possibilities for the others, and within a dusty barrel in a corner near

him Matt saw dusty bits of velvet and of strange, splendid stuffs which

he divined were for costume models, and the floor seemed a land of lost

drawing-pins and forgotten fragments of charcoal. And then his heart

gave a great leap, for his eye, returning timidly to the throne where it

had scarcely dared as yet to rest, encountered a man’s head bending over

a writing-desk in the compartment of the floor to the left of it. Surely

it could be no other than Grainger himself, that thin, austere man with

the big bald forehead and the air of Wellington, and Matt thrilled with

proportionate reverence, and turned his eye away, as if dazzled, to

repose it on the inchoate paintings of the students who were squinting

scientifically at the model, and measuring the number of heads with

sticks of charcoal or their brush-handles. Some had her large, some

small; some turned her head this way, some that; some were painting her,

some drawing her--each from his point of sight.

As soon as his own canvas arrived, altogether forgetting his startled

modesty in the delightful interest of the work, he fell to touching in

the head with rapid strokes of a flowing brush. The woman vanished in

the woman’s form: what a privilege to enjoy and reproduce those

beautiful curves, those subtle fleshtones, those half-tints of cream and

rose, seen under gaslight!

“What are you about?” said his mentor, presently.

“Painting her portrait,” he replied, pausing, with painful foreboding.

“But where’s the charcoal outline?”

“The charcoal outline!”

“Yes. You can’t paint her without sketching her first in charcoal.”

“Can’t I?” asked Matt, with a sudden remorseful recollection of his

first sitter, the Acadian legislator whose portrait had paved his way to

sign-painting. He hastened to efface his ignorance with a palette-knife,

and to obliterate it with a rag moistened with turpentine; but he was

frightened and nervous and denuded of confidence in himself, and when he

attempted to outline the figure the charcoal boggled at the greasy

surface of the canvas; and while he was wrestling with his medium he

became conscious that the great Grainger was behind him, and a

nervousness that he had not felt when he pointed his gun at the bear in

his forest home paralyzed his hand. Grainger stood for some moments

watching his fumbling strokes, then he said:

“You want to join the Life class?”

Matt, flushing furiously, stammered an affirmative.

“Don’t you think you’d better begin with the Antique?” asked Grainger.

Matt murmured that he didn’t care about the Antique anyhow, and Grainger

shook his austere head.

“Ah! there’s no getting on without slogging away; it’s no good shirking

the ground-work. The living figure is all subtle lines. You can’t expect

to be equal to them without years of practice at the Antique and

Still-life.”

Matt plucked up courage to guess that he would have another try at the

figure, and Grainger, having pocketed a quarter’s fees, moved off,

leaving Matt amazed at his own temerity.

“Do you think he’ll be annoyed if I stay on here?” he asked his mentor,

as he resumed his work with the determination to prove himself not

unworthy of the privilege.

“If you want to chuck your money away, it’s your lookout,” said his

mentor, candidly. “You don’t hurt him.”

“Then he won’t say anything?”

“It doesn’t matter what he says. He’s not up to much.”

“No?” queried Matt, astonished. “Isn’t he a great painter?”

The student laughed silently. “A great painter keep a school!” he said.

“No; it’s only the failures that do that!”

“Then how can one learn?” asked Matt, in dismay.

“Oh, well, we have a visitor once a week--he’s rather a good man.

Tarmigan! He’s not an R.A., but he can knock off a head in twenty

minutes.”

“But the R.A.’s--what are they for?” inquired Matt, only partially

reassured.

“For show,” said the young man, smartly. “You _are_ a green un, to think

that you’re going to get Academicians for thirty bob a month. You’ve got

to go to the Academy Schools if you want _them_. And then the chaps say

they’re not much use. Most of them are out of date, and you get a

different man every month who contradicts all the others. A fellow I

know says the best of the visitors is Marmor, but he’s awfully noisy and

facetious, and claps you on the back, and tells you a story, and forgets

to criticise. And then there’s Peters--he sighs and says ‘Very tender,’

and you think you’ve improved, till you hear him say ‘Very tender’ to

the next man too. The chief advantage of going to a school is that you

get a model which you couldn’t afford to hire for yourself, and you

learn from the other fellows. And then, of course, there’s

composition--Tarmigan’s jolly good for that.”

By this time Matt had sketched his outline, and he was about to resume

the brush when the clock struck eight. The model stretched herself and

retired behind the dirty sheet, which now operated as a screen, and

there was a rising, a putting down of palettes (each with its brushes

stuck idly in its thumb-hole), an outburst of exclamations, a striking

of matches, a mechanical rolling of cigarettes, a sudden lowering of the

lights, and a general air of breaking up.

“School over already?” he asked, in a disappointed tone.

“No, they’re only turning the gas down for coolness while the model has

a rest. You see, she can’t stand two hours straight off the reel.”

“No, I guess not,” said Matt, and then repented of having said “guess,”

for he was trying to prune away his humble expressions and to remember

the idioms of the educated people with whom his new life was bringing

him into contact. “It must be awful hard,” he added.

“Yes; especially in a school where a lot of chaps are working at once,

and she can’t rest a limb because somebody might just be painting it.

One woman told me she’d rather scrub floors so as to feel her limbs

moving about. But posing pays better. This is a new model--first time

she’s been here. Pity women with such fine figures haven’t got prettier

faces. Have a cigarette?”

“No, thanks,” said Matt.

“Don’t smoke?”

“I did smoke once, but I gave it up.” Matt did not like to confess it

was because he could not afford the luxury.

“You can’t be an artist without tobacco,” said his mentor, laughingly.

“Ah, here’s the model. I’ll just go and get her address.”

He went up to the model, who had re-emerged and seated herself at ease

upon the throne, where a group of students, with pipes or cigarettes in

their mouths, was in conversation with her.

Matt followed his mentor, interested in this new specimen of humanity,

and thinking that he would prefer to paint her as she was sitting then,

nude in that dim, mysterious light, surrounded by smoke-wreathed figures

in tropic headgear, her face alive, her feet crossed gracefully, playing

a part in a real scene, yet withal unreal to the point of grotesqueness.

“Oh, I’ve sat a lot for _him_,” she was saying when Matt came up. “I

stand every morning for the portrait of Letty Gray, the skirt-dancer;

it’s for the Academy. She can’t come much, and she’s awfully unpunctual.

Of course I’m only for the figure.”

“Weren’t you in the Grosvenor Gallery last summer?” asked a bald

middle-aged man.

“Yes; I was Setter’s ‘Moonbeam,’” began the model, proudly.

“I thought I recognized you,” said the middle-aged man, with an air of

ancient friendship.

“And I was also on the line in the big room,” she added--“Colin

Campbell’s ‘Return of the Herring-Boats.’ And I got into the Royal

Institute as well--Saxon’s ‘Woman Wailing for Her Demon Lover.’”

“Ah, here you are, then!” said a red-haired young man, producing an

illustrated catalogue.

“Yes,” said she, turning over a few pages. “And there’s my

husband--Sardanapalus, 223. They often have him at the Academy Schools,”

she wound up, with conscious pride.

“Ah, perhaps we shall get him here one week,” said the middle-aged man.

While his mentor was taking down her address, Matt looked round the

room. The austere Grainger, with a cigarette in his mouth, was reading a

yellowish paper embellished with comic cuts. Most of the students were

moving about, looking at one another’s easels, the work on which, with

few exceptions, Matt was surprised to find mediocre; a few sat stolidly

humped on their stools, feet on rail and pipe in mouth; one group was

examining photographs which its central figure had taken, and which he

loudly declared knocked the painting of the Fishtown School to fits.

From all sides the buzz of voices came through the stifling, smoky,

darkened atmosphere.

“Have you seen Piverton’s new picture?”

“Rather! Another S,” contemptuously replied a very young man, seated,

smoking a very long pipe before a very indifferent canvas.

“What do you mean, Bubbles?” asked a by-stander.

“What, haven’t you noticed,” he answered, with ineffable disdain,

swinging his arm in illustration, “that the lines of his compositions

are all curly--they always make S?”

“I thought they always made £ _s._ _d._,” interjected a curly-headed

wag. And all except the very young man laughed.

“Bubbles is gone on Whistler,” observed a freckle-faced student,

compassionately.

“I admire him,” admitted the very young man, candidly, “but I don’t say

he’s the end of art.”

“No; that’s reserved for Bubbles,” laughed the freckle-faced student.

“What _is_ the end of art, Bubbles?” said another man.

“T, of course,” put in the curly-headed wag. “Five o’clock and

fashionable.”

“I say, Grainger says Miss Hennery used to work in his day class,” said

a handsome young Irishman, strolling up with a bag of cakes, from which

the model had just helped herself in the pervasive spirit of

_camaraderie_.

“Well, I don’t see anything to boast of in that,” pronounced Bubbles,

puffing at his long hookah. “She’s only a feeble female imitation of

Tarmigan. Her color’s muddy, and her brother comes into all her men’s

heads.”

“I suppose she can’t afford models,” said the Irishman, charitably.

“Have a banbury.”

Bubbles accepted, and the by-standers helped to empty the bag. Matt

moved back towards his easel, passing a little dark man with a mane, who

was explaining to a derisive audience that the reason he went to

music-halls was to study character, and brushing by a weedy giant, who

was boasting that he hardly ever went to bed, so tied was he to his

anatomy. During his progress a meagre, wrinkled old man, with

pepper-and-salt hair and a stoop, approached him, and said, in a husky

whisper:

“Excuse me introducin’ myself, but I do admire your feet so!”

Matt flushed, startled.

“My name’s Gregson--William Gregson--and I’ve made a speciality of feet.

The ’uman form divine is beautiful everywhere, sir, but the foot--ah!

there you have the combination of graces, all the beautiful curves in a

small compass; the arch of the foot, the ankle, instep, the beautiful

proportions of it all when you do get a really beautiful foot such as

yours. I come here, sir, every night to study the beautiful--for in

daily life the foot is ’idden, distorted by boots and shoes that ignore

the subtleties and delicacies of nature--and the foot is the first thing

I look at; but how rarely does a model, man or woman, ex’ibit a truly

beautiful foot! Oh, how I wish I could paint your foot, or take a cast

of it--a study from the nude, of course! But no--you will not allow me,

I know. May I at least be allowed to measure it, to take the

proportions, to add to my knowledge of the laws of the beautiful foot?”

Matt faltered that he didn’t know he had anything extraordinary in the

way of feet.

“My dear sir!” protested William Gregson, showing the whites of his

eyes.

Just then the light was turned up, and William Gregson retreated

abruptly to his easel. The model’s court scattered, and she herself

resumed her inglorious occupation of the throne, placing her feet within

a chalked-out line, and her arm against a mark in the sheet.

Matt, returning to his canvas, worked enthusiastically to finish the

figure by closing-time, and laid down his brush with some minutes to

spare, thereby drawing upon himself the attention of his mentor, who

exclaimed:

“By Jove! What made you rush along like that?”

“There was no time,” said Matt.

“Time! Why, there’s four more evenings. Every model sits a

fortnight--six nights, you know.”

“Well, she’s done, anyhow,” said Matt, in rueful amusement.

“Yes, she _is_ done anyhow.” And his mentor laughed. “Why, that ’ll

never do. You can’t show work like that.”

“Why not? It’s like her.”

“Yes, but there’s no finish in it. It’s only a sketch. You’re supposed

to make a careful study of it. Tarmigan insists on the exact character

of the model. He always says even Velasquez’s early things were tight

and careful.”

But Matt felt he could not take the thing any further--at any rate, not

that night; the fury of inspiration was over. He sat abstractedly

watching the quivering of the model’s tired limbs and her shadows on the

screen, a dusky silhouette with lighter penumbras, till the hour was up.

On Matt’s homeward journey he was overtaken by old Gregson, who

discovered that their routes coincided, and renewed his admiration of

Matt’s foot and his request to gauge its beauties, till at last,

unwilling to disoblige a brother artist, but feeling rather ridiculous,

the young man slipped off his boot in the shelter of a doorway, under

the light of a street-lamp, and the wrinkled old man, producing a

tape-measure, ecstatically recorded, on a crumpled envelope, the varied

perfections of its form.

At the next lesson Matt set to work and painted away all the force of

his study in the effort to reach the standard prevailing at Grainger’s.

But he worked dispirited and joyless, like a war-horse between the

shafts of an omnibus, or a savage in a stiff shirt and a frock-coat;

suppressing himself with the same sense of drear duty as when he had

sawn logs or drilled potatoes. During the “rest,” while Matt was

listening in amazement to some secret information concerning royal

personages, who seemed to have confided all their intrigues to Bubbles,

William Gregson drew him mysteriously into the anteroom.

“Do you know, I couldn’t sleep the other night?” said the meagre,

wrinkled old man with the pathetic stoop.

“Were you ill?” said Matt, sympathetically.

“No. Your foot kept me awake.”

Matt cast a furtive look at it, as if to read marks of guilt thereon.

“Yes; you must know I’m a shoemaker by trade, and love art, but I can’t

devote myself to it like you young fellows. I work ’ard all day

’ammerin’ and stitchin’; it’s only in the evenings that I can spare an

hour for paintin’.”

Matt’s eyes moistened sympathetically. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured.

“I knew you would be. I knew you had a beautiful nature. It always goes

with beautiful feet. Ah, you smile! I’m an enthusiast, I admit, and you

will smile more when you ’ear I sat up half the last two nights to

create an artistic boot with your beautiful lines. You had given me the

inspiration. I had to create there and then. I was tired of my day’s

work, I was poor, and my time was valuable; but before all I am an

artist. Sir, I have brought the boots with me”--here he produced a

brown-paper parcel from under his arm--”and I shall be proud if you will

accept them as a ’umble tribute from a lover of the beautiful.”

“No, no; I couldn’t think of taking them,” said Matt, blushing

furiously.

“Oh, but you will vex me, sir, if you do not. It pains me enough already

to think of you wearin’ the cumbrous, inartistic pair I see.”

“I won’t take them unless I pay you for them.”

“No, no. What is a guinea between artists?” And he pressed the parcel

into Matt’s hand.

Matt shook his head. He was appalled at the price, but he felt it

wouldn’t be fair to take the poor old man’s work for nothing. A vague

suspicion that he was being tricked flitted beneath his troubled mind,

but his worldly experiences had not yet robbed him of his guilelessness,

and there was such a fire of abnegation in the homely face that Matt

felt ashamed of his doubt, and drew out the money with a feeling that he

was, at any rate, helping a worthy artistic soul.

“Here is the price of them,” he said.

The artist took the money and looked at it.

“A guinea would give me nearly another month’s lessons,” he said,

wistfully.

“Put it in your pocket, then,” insisted Matt, his last doubt dissolving

in fellow-feeling.

But the cobbler shook his head. “No, no, sir, you mustn’t rob me of my

impulse. I cannot charge you full price. Take back the shilling. Concede

something to my feelings.”

“There--if that ’ll satisfy you,” said Matt, reaccepting it.

“You won’t tell the chaps,” besought the shoemaker, pathetically. “They

wouldn’t understand us. They would laugh at our innocent enthusiasm.”

As Matt shared this distrust of the sympathy of the studio, he was not

backward with assurances of secrecy, while he was laboriously bulking

his overcoat-pocket with the parcel.

At the end of the four lessons, when Matt’s painting seemed to him to be

getting almost as smooth as a wax figure, and as dead, Tarmigan came--a

stern, ill-dressed man, prematurely gray--at whose approach Matt’s heart

was in his mouth. The famous artist moved leisurely but inevitably

towards him, shedding criticism by grunts and phrases and gestures;

expressing the ineffable by an upward snap of the fingers, accompanied

by a Russian-sounding sibilation; inquiring sarcastically whether one

student was drawing the model or the lay-figure, and sneeringly

recommending another to move his drawing “if the model moved.” Every now

and again he sat down at an easel to get the man’s point of view, and,

taking up his brush, suggested tone and color, or, if it was a

draughtsman’s easel, borrowed his charcoal, and showed him how to put

the head on the shoulders or fit on an extremity. When at length Matt

felt the great man’s breath on his neck a cold shiver ran down his

spine, the brush clove to his paralyzed hand.

“Ah, a new man!” said the visitor. “Not bad.”

All the blood in Matt’s body seemed to be rushing to his face. His hand

began to tremble.

The visitor did not pass on immediately. He said: “Where do you come

from? There’s a want of sharpness in the shadows.”

“From America,” breathed Matt.

“I mean from what school?”

“I haven’t been to school since I was a boy.”

“Not been to an art school?” queried the visitor, in surprise.

“Nonsense! Impossible! The face is very well, but the rest is not taken

far enough. A little too clever! Search! search! Even Velasquez’s early

things were--But you must have had a deal of practice.”

“I have painted quite a little,” admitted Matt, “but not rightly, though

I did study artistic anatomy out of a book. I’ve painted hundreds of

portraits and signs and ceilings.”

The artist was examining the work more minutely. “Don’t you call that

practice?” he said, a little triumphant smile flitting across his wintry

face. “Hundreds of portraits--why, that means hundreds of models! Why,

however did you get all those commissions? It’s more than I can boast

of. Try and keep that lower in tone, and don’t use that color at all,”

he added, his fingers tattooing kindly on Matt’s shoulder. The class had

pricked up its ears, for the artist spoke by habit in a loud tone, so

that all might benefit by his criticism of the individual, and his

remarks to the new-comer were quite out of the ordinary run.

“It was only in the country places in Nova Scotia,” said Matt,

apologetically, “and people didn’t know anything about it. So long as I

made a handsome likeness, it was all they cared for. And then, of

course, they were never--never naked.”

“No?” said the celebrity, with a little laugh.

“No; they always wore their best clothes,” said Matt, smiling, too. “So

this is the first time I’ve done one like this.”

“You haven’t done it yet,” said Tarmigan, moving on. “There’s that foot

yet to be studied. Search! Finish!”

“If you please, sir,” said Matt, with an unconscious reversion to the

idiom of McTavit’s school-room, “I _have_ finished the foot.”

“Nonsense,” said Tarmigan. “You’ve got another toe to paint in.”

“I thought I had to copy the model exactly,” said Matt, meekly.

“Well, sir?” said Tarmigan, puzzled.

“Well, I only see four toes on that foot.”

The artist was startled; he cast a rapid glance at the model. “Good

Lord! the man’s right,” he murmured, for the model was indeed minus a

toe.

“I say, you men,” he said, “where are your eyes? You’ve given the model

an extra toe. How often have I told you to look before you paint?”

All eyes were bent on the foot; the model reddened. Those whose work had

not yet been examined hastened to amputate the toe; the others took on

an air of injury.

“You might have told a chap,” whispered his mentor.

“I thought you knew,” said Matt. “I saw it as soon as I began to paint,

but I didn’t take any notice of it in my first rough sketch. It was only

when you told me I must copy the model exactly that I put it in, or,

rather, left it out.”

For some time longer the fusillade of Tarmigan’s criticisms rang out

intermittently: “Not bad.” “Humph! I wouldn’t make too much of those

little things! Keep it broader!” “That’s very well!” “Psch!” “That’s

better!” “Don’t get your shadows too hot!” “That’s a good bit!” “That

leg’s too long from the knee down!” “Don’t lick it _too_ much!” “Not

bad!” “No, no; that won’t do at all!” “You’ll never get her feet into

that canvas!” “Look at the model with your eyes nearly closed and

compare the tones!” Then Tarmigan set a composition to be done at home

in illustration of “Charity,” and stalked through the door amid a chorus

of “Good-nights” in incongruous keys, and then there was a silence so

tense that the creak of his departing boots could be heard dying away in

the long passage; but it was not till the “rest” arrived, and the model,

wrapping a cloak round her, had left the room, and Grainger had

silently disappeared after his wont, that the storm burst.

Bubbles led off.

“Who ever saw a picture of a woman with four toes?” he cried,

disgustedly.

“Yes. How could he expect us to examine her blooming toes?” said the

freckle-faced student.

“Oh, I saw she had four toes right enough,” said Bubbles. “But a painter

hasn’t got to paint accidents--he’s got to paint pictures.”

“It ’ll be an accident if you paint pictures,” put in the curly-headed

wag.

“_I_ saw the missing toe,” asserted the handsome young Irishman, “when I

set her for the class. But I wasn’t going to spoil the study. One can

easily imagine a toe. He’s got no sense of poetry.”

“I saw a scratch on her wrist,” volunteered the middle-aged man. “I

wonder he didn’t want us to paint that.”

“I suppose he’ll put a background to it, and send it to the Academy,”

cackled the red-headed young man.

“They’ve got blue noses in Nova Scotia, I believe. I wonder if he put

_them_ into his portraits?” the weedy giant remarked in a loud whisper

to the little man with the mane.

Though the last two remarks were so impersonal, Matt knew well enough

they were aimed at him, and he seemed to feel an undercurrent of

resentment against himself beneath the animadversions on Tarmigan, whom

he knew the studio revered. He sat uneasily on his stool, poring

mechanically over his unhappy study from the nude, and morbidly

misreading animosity into this good-humored badinage. Before his

mother’s living death he might have replied violently with word or even

fist, but life had broken him in. Seeing the new man spiritless, another

student took up the parable:

“He’s going to leave it to the nation.”

“Then he’ll have to leave it on the door-step when nobody’s looking,”

replied the weedy giant.

Then the stream of wit ran dry, and comparative silence fell upon the

room.

Abruptly the voice of the curly-headed wag shot across the silence:

“Four-toes, R.A.”

The cry was taken up in a great shout of laughter, even the uninterested

joining in from sheer joy in a catchword. It seemed to Matt he had not a

friend in the room. But he mistook. The grizzled old shoemaker sidled up

to him.

“You’ve licked me, sir,” he said, in emotional accents. “You’ve shamed

me; me, whose speciality is feet. I never noticed there was a toe

missin’. No, sir; not even me. Your hand, sir. I bear you no malice.”

Gratefully Matt gripped the cobbler’s extended hand, and he took

occasion to apologize for not enduing the artistic boots, explaining

that he was reserving them for high days and holidays. He let the

bantering cry die away unanswered, but at heart he was sick with the

thought he was to repeat the experience of the St. John paint-shop, and

he had a fierce impulse to shake the dust of the studio off his feet,

even as he had thrown up his position in New Brunswick, and in his

resentful bitterness he allowed his sense of the inferiority of the

jeerers’ work to well up into clear consciousness. And thus he brought

himself round to the remembrance of the great Tarmigan’s words, and to a

softening sense of gratitude for the strange way in which he had been

acquiring art in his own land, even while he was yearning and planning

to get it across the seas. And so, though the nickname stuck to

him--for, indeed, Grainger’s scarcely knew his real name--he remained at

the studio, learning to take its humors more genially, and even to

partake in them, and drawn to its _habitués_ by the discovery that they,

too, were fighting their way to art from the shop, the school, or the

office, but never losing altogether the shyness and sensitiveness of a

lonely alien and high-spirited soul.

From Tarmigan, whose executive faculty and technical knowledge were

remarkable, and who, despite surface revolts behind his back, was

worshipped by the whole school, Matt got many “pointers,” as he called

them in his transatlantic idiom--traditions of the craft which he might

never have hit out for himself; though, on the other hand, in the little

studies he made at home and sometimes showed to Tarmigan, he produced

effects instinctively, the technique of which he was puzzled to explain

to the master-craftsman, who for the rest did not approve of the strange

warm luminosities Matt professed to see on London tiles, or the misty

coruscations that glorified his chimney-pots. Grainger himself never

offered criticisms to his pupils except casually, and mainly by way of

conversation, when he was bored with his own thoughts.

To the science of art which Tarmigan taught, and which was based upon

inductions from great pictures, Matt in his turn did not always take

kindly; the reduction of æsthetics to rule chafed him; he was distressed

by Tarmigan’s symmetrical formulæ against symmetry, and though some of

the canons of composition seemed to him self-evident when once pointed

out, and others not unreasonable, he could not always relish the

mechanical application of the general law to his particular case; but he

suppressed his untutored instincts, much as in her day his mother had

wrestled with Satan, and in faith, hope, and self-distrust submitted

himself duteously to law and Tarmigan. He worked fluently for the most

part, but every now and then came a sudden impotency not always due to

lack of sympathy with the model; an inability to get the exact effect he

wanted, which tortured him even more than Tarmigan’s strait-waistcoat of

dogma.

Very soon Grainger’s grew half boastful, half jealous of its American

prodigy, whom all later arrivals, catching up the nickname without the

history of its origin, imagined to be likewise abnormal in the number of

his toes. Some recalled Byron’s clubfoot, and wondered if Matt Strang’s

pedal defect had any connection with the genius of “Four-toes, R.A.”