MATT RECEIVES SUNDRY HOSPITALITIES
But the prodigal son was not fated to see any of his relatives
immediately upon his return to his native land except his mother, and
this was scarcely his mother, this pale creature with eyes vacant of all
save tears, who babbled to him, with heart-rending verbal repetitions,
of Revelation and the Beast, not even mistaking him for his dead father.
She had survived her life.
From Halifax Matt did not proceed forthwith to Cobequid Village,
joining, instead, a crew of mackerel-fishers, in the hope of earning
enough to repay Madame Strang immediately; for his soul, reinvigorated
by the sea-breezes of the voyage and the skies of his childhood, had
returned to its healthy repugnance to debt, and was ashamed of its
lapse.
It was a mixed company that he sailed away with--the bulk decent Nova
Scotians, of old fisher stock, but some rougher and more casual, and a
few--though these were harmless enough--despised “Portigees.” The
fishing was not devoid of danger. The men had to row out from the
schooner in twos or threes to tend the nets spread on the mackerel
banks, and sometimes a fog would come on and ingulf the ship, and the
fishers with their mocking freight would row for hours and hours, and at
times for days and days, on the ghostly sea in search of their floating
home. And sometimes they, too, would be swallowed up in the mystery of
sea and fog, and wives and mothers, running anxiously to the wharf to
meet them, would learn that an older fisher had netted his prey.
To Matt the hard work and the peril were alike welcome; the very mists
were poetry after the yellow charnel-house vapors of London, which now
lay behind him like a nightmare, and with it his dream of Art. His soul
had swung round violently. In the strain of hauling up the nets in the
misty moonlight, in the silence of sea and sky and night, he found
repose from his morbid craving to reproduce this mighty Nature, which
stretched away all around him in large, sane serenity, as indifferent to
the puny images of Art as the waste of waters to the little dory rocking
on its bosom. And the rugged simplicity of his briny, horny-handed mates
was equally restful after the garish brilliance of the young artists
about town; after all, his heart was with homely folk, went out to
sea-folk; he was his father’s son and the brother of all those who go
down to the sea in ships and do business in the great waters. How like a
child’s cackle Cornpepper’s epigrams sounded across the silence of the
lonely deep! Under the hushed stars, touching the infinite spaces with
awful beauty, all these feverish figures of the smoking-room showed
like fretful midges.
When the cruise was over, and the spoil had been unloaded and sold on
the fishy wharf, or steeped in brine and packed in the vats, Matt was
able to send ten dollars to England, besides keeping up his usual
allowance to Cobequid Village and maintaining himself--a triple task
which weighed heavily upon his brain, and gave him frequent moments of
corroding, nervous apprehension. For his health was only partially
re-established, and his correspondence with Cobequid Village was not
reassuring. His brothers and sisters were growing up without finding
much to do; Billy moped a great deal, and though he thanked his brother
for the engraving of the “Angelus,” which Matt sent him, he intimated
that he would have been better pleased had Matt spent his money on books
of travel and adventure for him. And Abner wrote, with pathetic
facetiousness, that he was “tolerable pleased” that his brother-in-law
had not come home, as they would have been “mighty squeezed” to put him
up, for, what with the increase of Abner’s own progeny and the growth of
the Strangs, even the best room with the cane chairs had long since been
turned into a bedroom, though it could still be restored to its pristine
magnificence on state occasions.
From the neighboring fishing-ground Matt gravitated back to Halifax. His
thoughts, divorced from Art, centred on money. His artistic fibre was
coarser now than in those days of almost religious enthusiasm for Art.
He had an idea of opening a drawing-school and becoming the local
“Grainger,” but the initial funds were to seek. He got a few
drawing-lessons, but the stupidity of his pupils was maddening, and his
communion with their parents fretted him after the larger mind of
London. He feared he would have to take to the road again in search of
sitters, and the prospect of weary tramps in quest of patronizing
store-keepers and farmers was not alluring, even though that fine
squeamish horror at the idea of Art to order had been knocked out of
him. He was saved from the tramping by becoming assistant in a
photographic caravan, which toured the country, leaving in each village
a trail of attitudinizing inhabitants mounted and framed; in the course
of which campaign, by a pleasanter stroke of fortune, he painted the
portraits of a minister of fisheries and of the cook he had married, and
so gained enough money to quit the caravan and start a carriage-painting
shop in the village where the happy couple had their country home. As
the poorest inhabitants were carriage-folk--for horses and oats and hay
were cheap, and carriage taxes unknown--Matt Strang, with a commercial
instinct sharpened and an artistic interest blunted by miseries,
calculated to do well. His sign-board, executed by his own hand, ran:
+-------------------------------------+
| CARRIAGES PAINTED, |
| ALSO SLEIGHS. |
| HOUSE DECORATING, PORTRAITS, AND |
| DRAWING-LESSONS. |
+-------------------------------------+
The shop was a success. Ere the summer waned many of the villagers had
their idle sleighs brilliantly illumined, and when winter came their
faded carriages were handed over to Matt to be berouged or otherwise
beautified. Each man had his equipage decorated after his own taste or
whim, though he always began by leaving it entirely to the artist. One
would order lemon-yellow underworks, with vermilion stripes and an
olive-green body, for another the ideal of beauty lay in lake and
russet-and-green, while the fancy of a third would turn lightly to
Prussian blue and gold stripes; and Matt, devoid now of artistic
interest and thus of artistic irritability, faithfully obeyed the
behests of his employers, and filled the leafy streets with a riotous
motley of perambulating color. The little village was pranked and
rejuvenated. It wore a sempiternally festive air. The sign-boards were
spick-and-span, the house fronts fresh and bright, the vehicles gayly
a-glitter, the glass windows of the stores black with self-laudatory
lettering by day, while at night the buff store-blinds repeated the
brag; and over all the village was a sense of “wet paint.” Thus did the
artist throw a glamour over life, and touch the sleeping souls of his
fellows to livelier issues, though his own interest in Art was numb.
But prices were small, and paid mainly in kind, and when once the place
was transmogrified there was nothing further to be done, the latter
items of his sign-board evoking no response. So Matt shifted his ensign
to Starsborough, a ship-building village on the coast, where he found
new scope for his versatile craftsmanship, as witness two new items
added to his painted prospectus:--
FIGURE-HEADS CARVED.
SHIP DECORATING.
He got leave to set up in the ship-yard, speculated in a set of
carving-tools, and supplied the prows of the ships with those
picturesque wooden persons whose uselessness is of the essence of Art.
He occupied a corner in the calker’s shop, reeking with tarry odors, and
worked hemmed in by the oakum-pickers, who relieved the tedium of toil
by smoking and singing lewd songs. One of his works, a Turkish lady
eight feet high, to get which done in time cost him much sweat and
sacrifice of other work, pleased the ship-builder so vastly that he gave
Matt the contract--in preference to all the other candidates who sent in
estimates--for painting his next ship within and without. The delighted
young man saw his way to speedy competence, the long-torpid thought of
Art began to stir drowsily, only it was Paris that now gleamed fitfully
in the background of his day-dreams. He talked over the decorations with
the ship-builder, and agreed to pay the men from week to week, and to
supply the tools, paints, and gold-leaf till the job was completed, when
his employer undertook to pay him the sum agreed upon in actual coin. As
Matt was able to get the materials from a store on three months’ credit,
and to pay his men with orders on the same all-embracing store on the
same terms, and the job would be finished in less than three months, the
arrangement promised to be very profitable. Alas! it proved the crash
and break-down of all his new prosperity. In the middle of the work the
ship-builder failed heavily, and Matt found himself on the point of
bankruptcy too, for, though he sent in his claim against the estate,
there seemed scant chance of his obtaining anything. Even the Turkish
woman had not been paid for, Matt having consented to receive her price
with the rest of the money, for the sake of getting silver in lieu of
goods. His account with the store-keeper had run up to $250. He could
not see how to meet his bills; the weeks without other work had
exhausted his savings; there was even about a fourth of his debt still
to be sent to Madame Strang. He got other little jobs, but the great
shipwright’s failure had reduced Starsborough to stagnation. The time of
payment drew nigh. After sleepless nights of anguish he went to the
store-keeper and told him he could not pay. The man received him
sympathetically, said he had been expecting the confession, and
consented to give him a little time; so Matt broke up his establishment,
and journeyed by train and packet to another village nearer Halifax, and
set up his sign-board afresh. A job took him to the capital, and in the
streets he ran across his Starsborough creditor, who was come up to
order hardware, and who, apparently delighted to see him, invited him to
breakfast with him at his hotel next morning. Always glad to save a
meal, and rejoiced to find his creditor so genial and debonair, Matt
tramped into town the first thing in the morning and repaired to the
hotel. But there was no breakfast for him. A sheriff’s officer awaited
him instead, and arrested him for debt. He had been the victim of a
subterfuge, his creditor fearing from his migratory movements that he
was about to run off to the States.
And so Matt was clapped into the prison to await his trial, and became
one of the broken-down band that inhabited its spacious ward, promenaded
the long whitewashed corridor on which the lavatory gave, and slept on
the iron beds ranged against the wall. Every morning the bedclothes were
stripped off and piled in the empty cells to give the ward a more
habitable air. In this dreary bed and sitting room Matt spent days of
mental agony, though physically he fared better than under his own
parsimonious _régime_. But the sense of degradation outweighed all else.
He felt he could never look his fellow-men in the face again. His
character was gone; his ambitions had received their death-blow--nay,
his very business career in his native land was at an end. The stigma
would always soil his future. All the long travail and aspiration had
ended at what a goal! He could not understand the careless merriment of
his fellow-prisoners, who fleeted the time with cards, which they played
for love. There was a negro among them who was the whetstone of their
wit, and a Frenchman who varied his tearful narrative of the misfortune
that had brought him low, with ventriloquial performances and anecdotes
of self-made Yankee millionaires. In this gesticulating little man Matt
recognized with surprise and shamefacedness his ancient fractious
subordinate in the Halifax furniture shop, who had taken him to his
bosom after due alcohol, but he was glad to find his unconscious fellow
made no advances. At moments he forced himself to look for the comic
Bohemian side of the situation, to imagine Cornpepper’s superiority to a
debtors’ prison, the artist sublime amid the ruins of his credit,
snorting disdain for the absurd institutions of the bourgeois; but
neither this nor philosophy availed to shake his sense of shame. He
summoned the infinite to his aid, saw himself again rocking on the
little dory between sea and sky, and asked himself what anything
mattered in this vast of space and time. But these excursions of the
intellect left instinct unmoved; from childhood the word “jail” had been
fraught with shuddering associations; they could not be argued away.
Strang’s aloofness from his companions, even when an outside friend had
sent in liquor or dainties to one of them, attracted the notice of the
jailer, a kindly man in a cutaway coat, with only an official cap to
mark his calling. He talked to the sullen, brooding prisoner, conceived
a liking for him, and commissioned him to paint his portrait for ten
dollars, supplying the materials himself and providing a temporary
easel. The darkness that had threatened Matt’s reason, if not his life,
fled before this kindness; the days before the trial flew by almost
joyously, and the nights were rendered more tolerable by being passed
alone on a plank bed in one of the criminal cells, whose stout doors,
studded with iron nails and furnished with little gratings, rarely held
anybody, so that the painter easily persuaded his patron to allow him to
occupy it.
He had scarcely set up his easel when his companions clustered round,
and the Frenchman burst into tears of emotion, and professed that he,
too--he who spoke to you--was an artist. If only some one could see the
creditor who had thrown him into prison, and explain to him that his
victim was guiltless of all save genius. As Matt had heard all this
before, he pursued his work unmoved, affording a new distraction to his
mates, so that the negro’s life became endurable, and less love was lost
at cards. But ere the second sitting was over the Frenchman, who had
studied alternately the artist’s face and his canvas, uttered an
exclamation of joyous recollection and fell upon his neck, crying that
he had at last found again the comrade of his soul. When Matt had shaken
him off, he drew a romantic picture of their early affection and
collaboration for the edification of the salon, and henceforth took a
proud fraternal interest in the progress of the portrait.
The picture turned out better than Matt had expected; to his own
surprise he found himself painting more vigorously than ever; his hand,
instead of having lost its cunning, seemed to have gained by the rest.
The jailer was well content, and promised two and a half dollars over
and above the price; but as Matt had expressed his intention of sending
the money to his creditor, his new friend held over the surplus till he
should need it for himself. When at the end of the third week the trial
came on, and Matt “swore out,” solemnly asserting absolute
impecuniosity, his creditor, mollified by the ten dollars, and further
assuaged by the sale of Matt’s effects, from his tools to his
sign-board, did not press the counter-proof of competency, and so the
prisoner was set at liberty. Sundry other bankrupts “swore out” at the
same time, one or two, who had boasted privily of their means, perjuring
themselves back to freedom and prosperity.
Before Matt Strang bade farewell to the jail, the Frenchman broke off a
ventriloquial performance to beseech him with tears in the name of the
_camaraderie_ of Art, and for the sake of their ancient affection, now
that he was going forth into the free sunshine, to expostulate with that
cruel creditor and plead for unhappy genius. The persecutor--Coble by
name--would not listen to his own appeals; but if a brother-artist would
speak for him, Coble’s better nature--and every man had a better
nature--might be touched, and the skylark might soar freely again
towards the blue empyrean. He was quite honest--oh, Heaven, yes! He did
not really possess two hundred dollars, as Coble imagined, but he could
not account for them before the court--one would see why--though
privately he could account for them in a way that would satisfy every
honest man. Some emissary of Satan had put a bill into his hand which
said, “For a hundred dollars we will give you a thousand dollars of our
goods.” He had hankered, as any man might, after those thousand dollars,
and sought out the coiners (for all the world knew that was their
formula), and paid his hundred dollars. But the bag of coin they had
given him was snatched from him on his road back by one of their agents.
Determined not to be outwitted, he had gone again and invested another
hundred dollars, and posted the parcel to himself at a neighboring
post-office, but when it arrived he had found only a brick-bat inside.
He had been afraid to “swear out” lest Coble should maintain he had the
money, and thus get him indicted for perjury.
If the friend of his youth would lay these facts before the cruel Coble,
he would no longer languish in a dungeon. Would not the great artist
promise him?
The story seemed too strange to be false, and Matt promised, at the risk
of a kiss, to recount it to the cruel Coble, though he failed to see how
it proved the Frenchman’s honesty. He was, indeed, not sorry to have
something definite to do, for with the completion of the jailer’s
portrait had come a reaction, and he had lapsed, if not into his first
agony, into a listless apathy that was worse--the nerveless, purposeless
inertia of a crushed spirit. He had been in jail! Not even a miracle
could erase that blot upon his name. How could he take up the burden of
life afresh? Unless, perhaps, temporarily, with the sole object of
wiping off the debt which he owed morally, though no longer legally.
Anyway, he would see this Mr. Coble; the Frenchman seemed--curiously
enough--to attach value to life, and if a little bit of his own life
could be of any use to the poor weak creature, it was at his disposal.
Mr. Coble, too, must be a strange person to derive any satisfaction from
keeping the pygmy in prison in revenge for the loss of a few hundred
dollars.
Money! Money! Money! How it had cramped and crippled and defiled his
life!
He washed himself in the lavatory before leaving, and brushed his
clothes, which were in a very fair condition. He was startled to find
how many gray hairs streaked the curly locks he combed. “It won’t be a
monochrome much longer,” he thought, surveying his mane with bitter
merriment.
Outside it was May, but he was not brightened by the great blue sky that
roofed him once more. The bustle of life sounded pleasantly about him,
but he slunk through the busy quarters of the town with hanging head, as
if every passer-by could read his shame in his face. The horrible
thought struck him suddenly that Coble would know whence he came, but on
top of it came the happy idea of explaining he had only gone to the jail
to paint the portrait of an official.
The journey was not very long, though the road was muddy and steep. Mr.
Coble lived beyond Citadel Hill, amid whose grassy expanse a path wound
towards the more scattered portions of the town. The ice was quite off
the sunny fields, except in the shaded parts under the fences, and men
were ploughing with yokes of oxen, though here and there heaped-up piles
of snow still bordered the route, which they flooded with slush in their
gradual deliquescence. Mr. Coble’s suburban residence was a detached,
double-fronted wooden cottage, barred from the road by a neat,
white-painted picket-fence. There were attics in the roof, which, like
its neighbors, was pitched, with broad eaves, for the sliding down of
the snow. The front garden had been newly dug up and laid out to receive
seed; there was a dirty line round the house, showing where the winter
embanking had recently been removed.
Matt pushed open the white picket garden-gate and walked up the gravel
path towards the pillared porch; three wooden steps led to the little
platform, and then the door was raised one step higher to prevent snow
drifting in from without.
Matt knocked. He heard the inner door open, the patter of light
footsteps; then the outer door swung back, and a girl--passably
pretty--appeared in the little entry between the doors, which were thus
duplicated against the frost.
Matt lifted his hat and inquired for Mr. Coble. He had reverted to the
drawling accents of the colony, though not altogether to its locutions.
“Oh, pa’s down at the store,” answered the girl, staring at the visitor.
“When will he be in?” Matt asked, disappointed.
“Oh, not for hours,” said Miss Coble. “Is it anything I can tell him?”
“No, no; I don’t think so,” Matt replied, hesitatingly. “I had better
call again this evening.”
The girl lingered silently without closing the door. There was a
perceptible pause.
“Yes,” she answered, at last. “I guess you had.”
He raised his hat again and went down the gravel path. At the
garden-gate it struck him that he ought to have inquired the address of
the store in town, and so saved a second journey. He turned his head,
and saw the girl still at the door looking after him. Then it seemed
funny to go back.
He shut the gate hastily and pursued his way to town down the muddy
road, wondering what he would do next, and how he could cope with life.
The thought of the Frenchman brought up the memory of that furniture
warehouse in which they had worked together in the days of his boyish
dreams. He bent his steps towards it with a vague thought of seeking
work there again, but found it had been converted into an emporium for
sewing-machines. As he sauntered aimlessly down the street, his eye was
caught by a lurid picture in a store window. It represented a shark
snapping savagely at a diver upon the bed of the ocean. He smiled at the
crude composition, which reminded him of his own early works; then, as
he perceived its relation to the stock-in-trade, his smile became
broader. Sponge was the staple, and a gigantic delicate sponge, with
ornamental spout-holes and fragments of rock adhering realistically to
it, was a conspicuous object amid dandy-brushes and spoke-brushes and
chamois-leather and glass cases covering rock-work. There were little
sponges on a card, and Matt started violently as he read, “Coble’s
five-cent sponges.” The mountain had come to Mahomet!
He walked in, crunching over a débris of shells, grit, and sand, and
inhaling a pungent saline odor. A veritable mountain of a man towered
over him with beetling brows and snowy hair and beard. His paunch
protruded imposingly, and his eyes glittered.
“Mr. Coble?” said Matt, inquiringly.
“That’s me,” cried the mountain of flesh, in fierce accents, as if
defying contradiction.
Matt felt the business would not be easy.
“I’ve taken the liberty of coming to you--on behalf of--”
“Not that tarnation Frenchman?” shrieked Mr. Coble.
Matt reddened uncomfortably.
“That’s the fifth man he’s sent me. When did you come out of prison?”
“I’ve been painting the jailer’s portrait,” Matt stammered, with burning
cheeks. “And I used to know the poor little man years ago, and he
says--”
“I can’t listen now. Does he think I’ve no business to attend to?”
“He didn’t send me here, he sent me to your house.”
“Ho, that’s a new dodge. But I reckon he told you the old things,
eh?--that I’m a stony-hearted cuss, that I’d sneak the coppers off a
corpse’s eyes or squeeze a cent till the eagle squeaked.”
“No, really, he didn’t tell me that,” said Matt.
“Oh, you needn’t spare the old man’s feelings. I know what a man says
when he finds you won’t be swindled. He’s the everlastingest old dodger
that ever drummed for me. His tricks ’ould puzzle a Philadelphia lawyer.
The only honest bit of work he ever did in his life was that thar
pictur’ of a shark. That’s stunnin’, I admit, and I’d willingly let the
poor devil out of the cage if my darter warn’t so bitter agen him.
There, that’s the truth. I never told it to any of the other fellows,
they all looked such moulty jail-birds. Say now, you said you were a
painter, ain’t that a good pictur’?”
Although Mr. Coble’s words were now more amiable, his accent was still
fierce, and it required some courage on Matt’s part to reply that the
picture was pretty good in a manner that betokened that it was pretty
bad.
“Ho, two of a trade!” quoth the mountain of a man.
“The shark couldn’t be like that,” Matt explained, mildly. “He has to
turn on his back before biting. It isn’t true to life.”
“Waal,” said Mr. Coble, in irate tones, “as the shark’s got nothing at
all to do with the sponge business, and the divers ain’t in no sort o’
danger whatever from it, I don’t see where truth to life comes in,
anyhow.”
“Oh, but the less lies you tell in Art the better,” urged Matt. “I’ll do
you another if you like.”
“Ho, that’s your dodge, is it?”
“I’m not asking anything for it,” the young man retorted, indignantly.
“It ’ll be a return for your listening to my appeal.”
Mr. Coble was startled.
“Thunderation!” he cried, sharply. “You’re a Christian. Step outside,
and we’ll liquor up.”
The invitation was uttered so fiercely that it sounded like a command,
especially as the Titan stamped three times with his foot--only his way
of signalling to his subordinate, Matt found. In the nearest bar, which
happened to be an illicit one, approached through a porch at the back of
a temperance hotel for the convenience of avowed teetotalers, the
man-mountain imparted to Matt the information that it was the
Frenchman’s amorous advances that had imbittered his daughter. “For my
part,” he said, “so far from wantin’ to keep him in there in clover, I’d
like to lift him out on the point of my toe, and I’d make him vamoose
from the town that smart you couldn’t see his heels for the dust. I’ll
mention it to Rosina that you’ve been putting in a good word for the
skunk, but I don’t think she’ll listen, that’s a fact.”
“Oh, but I’m sure she will,” said Matt. “She looks a kindhearted young
lady.”
“You haven’t seen her!” exclaimed Mr. Coble, fiercely.
“Yes; I saw her this afternoon,” said Matt.
“Then you’ve seen the purtiest gal you’ll see this year. Set ’em up
again. This old rye’s whopping good. Always rely on a temperance hotel
for good whiskey. And as my gal has a goodish bit of money,” pursued
the old man, smacking his lips and growing communicative without losing
any of the sternness of his accent, “you can understand what made the
wretched little froggy roll his eyes and twist his mustache at her. How
he found it out will be a mystery to my dyin’ day, for I’m careful never
to breathe a whisper of it to a single soul, but he ferreted out somehow
or t’other that when she’s twenty-one my Rosie will step into an income
of eight hundred dollars.”
He shouted the statement so loudly that the whole bar pricked up its
ears. Matt quite believed that Coble was incapable of whispering
anything to anybody. He had a vague envy of the fortunate girl.
“Not to mention three thousand dollars I’ve put aside myself to hand her
on her wedding-day,” continued Coble. “Young folks are lucky nowadays.
When I married I had to lend my father-in-law ten dollars to rig himself
up respectable for church.”
Before they parted the mountain of flesh had consented thunderously to
Matt’s supplying another picture of the dangers of sponge-fishing, but
would not bind himself, although in his third glass, to do more in
return than lay the matter before his daughter. Once alone in the
streets again, Matt felt he had made a bad bargain. The two and a half
dollars the jailer had given him were all his funds, and even the few
nickels that would have to be expended on common water-colors and the
double-royal card-board were a consideration. But he loyally executed
the work in the bedroom he had ventured to take, finding rather a relief
in this further postponement of the problem of his future. By the
following afternoon he was back at Coble’s with a brilliant sketch far
more arrestive than the Frenchman’s. The shark was more formidable, the
nude diver more graceful, his netted bag more accurate, and the
ocean-bed was a veritable fairy-land of sea-lichens and polyps. Coble
glared long at the sketch as Matt held it up, but he said nothing.
“What do you think of it?” asked Matt, apprehensively, at last.
“What do I think of it?” roared old Coble, and rushing to the window he
grabbed the old, inaccurate shark, tore it savagely in two, snatched
the new picture from the hands of the astonished Matt, filled up the
vacancy with it, dashed outside to survey it from the sidewalk, and
reappearing at the door, bellowed, “Step this way, young man,” and
stamped three times on the threshold.
Over the old rye he reported to the artist that he had found his Rosie
more placable than usual; that she was even willing to listen to the
young man’s plea, though she seemed to want to hear it from his own
mouth before deciding. Matt gladly consented to sup that evening with
the mountain and his daughter. Free drinks never surprised him, but a
free square meal was like having larks flying into one’s mouth ready
roasted.
It was the happiest evening he had spent for many a long day. There was
a spotless cloth on the round table, and the food was good, if solid.
Miss Coble made herself agreeable, and if she was not so pretty as her
father saw her, her plump cheek was sufficiently rosy and her figure
sufficiently comely and her frock sufficiently nice to be grateful to
the eye of an artist and a young man just emerged from prison society,
and starving for the amenities of life. Her light-blue eyes lit up
pleasantly when he addressed her, or when she helped him to more
griddle-cakes. Some stuffed birds over a low bookcase that contained a
few brightly bound volumes reminded him pleasurably of past miseries.
The stentorian voice of old Coble almost monopolized the conversation.
He had much to say that was not worth listening to--on the bad crops of
the year before last, the scarcity of helps, and the failure of the
colony to go ahead, which was apparently connected with the
uncleanliness of the inhabitants, as manifest from the small sales of
bath-sponges. After dinner the mountain smoked, and after smoking the
volcano slept.
“I’m afraid you think pa’s got a bad temper,” said Miss Coble, abruptly.
She had hastily cleared away the supper dishes, and had seated herself,
half recumbent amid a litter of sewing, upon a couch opposite the
easy-chair which Matt now occupied. The young man instinctively glanced
towards her trumpeting parent.
“Oh, he’s sound enough; can’t you hear?” she said, laughing gayly. “I
only hope he doesn’t disturb you. I’m used to it.”
“I only hope I sha’n’t disturb _him_,” answered Matt.
“I guess he’s making more noise than us,” laughed Miss Coble. “He can’t
even be quiet when he’s asleep. I was going to explain to you that he
can’t help it; there’s something wrong with his throat. It happened when
his voice broke in his boyhood, and it always sounds as if he was
angry--it always frightens off strangers, but he is really the
best-tempered papa in the township.”
Matt smiled. “I did think he was rather a fire-eater at first,” he
admitted. “But I’ve found him real jolly, and couldn’t quite make it out
all this time.” He continued to smile at the drollness of Coble’s
disability, and the girl’s eyes met his in an answering gleam of
merriment.
“Pa says you’re a powerful painter, Mr. Strang,” she said after a
silence, filled up by ruttling sounds from pa’s larynx.
“Oh, your pa’s only seen a rough thing I did for him,” he protested,
diffidently.
“Never mind.” She shook her head sagely. “I’m going down town to see it
to-morrow,” and she flashed a sunny smile at him that showed her teeth
were white.
Matt murmured, uneasily: “Oh, it’s not worth the trouble.”
“It’ll do me good, anyway. I’m getting fat, pa says. Wouldn’t it be
awful if I was to take after him? You know he lives away from town so as
to have exercise up and down Citadel Hill, but he might as well have
lived over the store.” And she giggled, not unmusically.
“You can’t tell what he would have been,” Matt reminded her with a
smile.
“Gracious! you frighten me. He might have come through the walls! Do you
think there is really any danger of my growing like him? Do tell!”
“There’s no danger of your losing your good looks,” replied Matt,
gallantly.
“You mean I never had any,” she said, with a roguish gleam that made the
plump face piquant.
“Oh, you know what I mean,” he protested, lamely.
Miss Coble meditatively picked up a piece of tape from the litter of
sewing and put it round her waist. Then she measured her bust.
“Is that the proper proportion?” she said, holding it up. “Artists are
supposed to know, aren’t they?”
“The figure couldn’t be better,” said Matt.
The girl shook her head in laughing reproof.
“I guess I’d better measure you and prove it, then,” said Matt, rising.
“My, how that lamp flares!” cried Miss Coble, rushing towards the table,
and carefully fumbling with the regulator. Matt resumed his seat,
feeling rather foolish; but soon, when the girl turned the talk on
himself, the reserved, solitary young man found himself telling her of
adventures by sea and land, which he had not told anybody, perhaps
because nobody had ever asked him. He gave Halifax prison a wide berth,
warding off her casual questions about his position and prospects by
general statements about his artistic aspirations. Concerning aspects of
London life Miss Coble’s curiosity was at its keenest, her own
experience of existence having been limited, she said, to Halifax and
its environs, with faint, childish reminiscences of Greencastle,
Pennsylvania, where her mother had died thirteen years before, when she
was six years old.
“Oh, but I didn’t mean to tell you my age,” she said, pouting. “In ten
years’ time you will know I am nearly thirty.”
Matt was about to reassure her by declaring that in ten years’ time he
would have forgotten all about her, when the fall of the sleeper’s pipe
checked the unchivalrous statement.
He rose to go as soon as the mountain awoke, for he had a goodish tramp
before him.
Miss Coble accompanied him to the outer door. His eye was caught by the
beauty of the moon, gleaming irregularly from a lurid rack of clouds. He
stood in charmed silence gazing upward.
“What are you staring at? Aren’t you going to say good-night?” asked
Miss Coble, rather tartly.
His spirit returned to earth.
“Oh, good-night,” he said, holding out his hand.
She put her fingers--rougher, but warmer--into his for the first time.
“Good-night,” she said, softly.
He did not let her hand go immediately. At the last instant he was
invaded by an indefinite conviction that something--he knew not
what--had still to be done or said. He stood silent on the little
platform.
As if echoing his thought, “Haven’t you forgot something?” she asked.
His heart leaped violently with a thrilling suggestion. He looked into
her quizzing eyes. They were on a level with his own, her shorter figure
having the advantage of the raised threshold.
“I thought you came to speak to me about a Frenchman?” she went on.
He was relieved and disappointed.
“Of course; what a fool I am! I haven’t said a word about him.”
“Well, it’s too late now. I can’t stand talking here; the neighbors
might see us.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Matt, in a woe-begone tone.
“Well, you’ll have to come again to-morrow evening, then, if you want to
go on with it, that’s certain. Good-night again.”
“Till to-morrow, then,” said Matt, raising his hat.
He walked briskly down the gravel-path, glowing with the pleasure of the
evening, and looking forward to another pleasant free meal on the
morrow. Then his eye sought the moon again, but the cloud-rack had
covered it up entirely.