THE MANSE IN THE BUSH
Straight north from the St. Lawrence runs the road through the Indian
Lands. At first its way lies through open country, from which the forest
has been driven far back to the horizon on either side, for along the
great river these many years villages have clustered, with open fields
about them stretching far away. But when once the road leaves the
Front, with its towns and villages and open fields, and passes beyond
Martintown and over the North Branch, it reaches a country where the
forest is more a feature of the landscape. And when some dozen or more
of the crossroads marking the concessions which lead off to east and
west have been passed, the road seems to strike into a different world.
The forest loses its conquered appearance, and dominates everything.
There is forest everywhere. It lines up close and thick along the road,
and here and there quite overshadows it. It crowds in upon the little
farms and shuts them off from one another and from the world outside,
and peers in through the little windows of the log houses looking
so small and lonely, but so beautiful in their forest frames. At the
nineteenth cross-road the forest gives ground a little, for here the
road runs right past the new brick church, which is almost finished, and
which will be opened in a few weeks. Beyond the cross, the road leads
along the glebe, and about a quarter of a mile beyond the corner there
opens upon it the big, heavy gate that the members of the Rev. Alexander
Murray's congregation must swing when they wish to visit the manse. The
opening of this gate, made of upright poles held by auger-holes in a
frame of bigger poles, was almost too great a task for the minister's
seven-year-old son Hughie, who always rode down, standing on the hind
axle of the buggy, to open it for his father. It was a great relief
to him when Long John Cameron, who had the knack of doing things for
people's comfort, brought his ax and big auger one day and made a kind
of cradle on the projecting end of the top bar, which he then weighted
with heavy stones, so that the gate, when once the pin was pulled out
of the post, would swing back itself with Hughie straddled on the top of
it.
It was his favorite post of observation when waiting for his mother to
come home from one of her many meetings. And on this particular March
evening he had been waiting long and impatiently.
Suddenly he shouted: “Horo, mamma! Horo!” He had caught sight of the
little black pony away up at the church hill, and had become so wildly
excited that he was now standing on the top bar frantically waving his
Scotch bonnet by the tails. Down the slope came the pony on the gallop,
for she knew well that soon Lambert would have her saddle off, and that
her nose would be deep into bran mash within five minutes more. But her
rider sat her firmly and brought her down to a gentle trot by the time
the gate was reached.
“Horo, mamma!” shouted Hughie, clambering down to open the gate.
“Well, my darling! have you been a good boy all afternoon?”
“Huh-huh! Guess who's come back from the shanties!”
“I'm sure I can't guess. Who is it?” It was a very bright and very
sweet face, with large, serious, gray-brown eyes that looked down on the
little boy.
“Guess, mamma!”
“Why, who can it be? Big Mack?”
“No!” Hughie danced delightedly. “Try again. He's not big.”
“I am sure I can never guess. Whoa, Pony!” Pony was most unwilling to
get in close enough to the gate-post to let Hughie spring on behind his
mother.
“You'll have to be quick, Hughie, when I get near again. There now!
Whoa, Pony! Take care, child!”
Hughie had sprung clean off the post, and lighting on Pony's back just
behind the saddle, had clutched his mother round the waist, while the
pony started off full gallop for the stable.
“Now, mother, who is it?” insisted Hughie, as Lambert, the
French-Canadian man-of-all-work, lifted him from his place.
“You'll have to tell me, Hughie!”
“Ranald!”
“Ranald?”
“Yes, Ranald and his father, Macdonald Dubh, and he's hurted awful bad,
and--”
“Hurt, Hughie,” interposed the mother, gently.
“Huh-huh! Ranald said he was hurted.”
“Hurt, you mean, Hughie. Who was hurt? Ranald?”
“No; his father was hurted--hurt--awful bad. He was lying down in the
sleigh, and Yankee Jim--”
“Mr. Latham, you mean, Hughie.”
“Huh-huh,” went on Hughie, breathlessly, “and Yankee--Mr. Latham asked
if the minister was home, and I said 'No,' and then they went away.”
“What was the matter? Did you see them, Lambert?”
“Oui” (“Way,” Lambert pronounced it), “but dey not tell me what he's
hurt.”
The minister's wife went toward the house, with a shadow on her face.
She shared with her husband his people's sorrows. She knew even better
than he the life-history of every family in the congregation. Macdonald
Dubh had long been classed among the wild and careless in the community,
and it weighed upon her heart that his life might be in danger.
“I shall see him to-morrow,” she said to herself.
For a few moments she stood on the doorstep looking at the glow in the
sky over the dark forest, which on the west side came quite up to the
house and barn.
“Look, Hughie, at the beautiful tints in the clouds, and see the dark
shadows pointing out toward us from the bush.” Hughie glanced a moment.
“Mamma,” he said, “I am just dead for supper.”
“Oh, not quite, I hope, Hughie. But look, I want you to notice those
clouds and the sky behind them. How lovely! Oh, how wonderful!”
Her enthusiasm caught the boy, and for a few moment she forgot even his
hunger, and holding his mother's hand, gazed up at the western sky. It
was a picture of rare beauty that lay stretched out from the manse back
door. Close to the barn came the pasture-field dotted with huge stumps,
then the brule where the trees lay fallen across one another, over
which the fire had run, and then the solid wall of forest here and there
overtopped by the lofty crest of a white pine. Into the forest in the
west the sun was descending in gorgeous robes of glory. The treetops
caught the yellow light, and gleamed like the golden spires of some
great and fabled city.
“Oh, mamma, see that big pine top! Doesn't it look like windows?” cried
Hughie, pointing to one of the lofty pine crests through which the sky
quivered like molten gold.
“And the streets of the city are pure gold,” said the mother, softly.
“Yes, I know,” said Hughie, confidently, for to him all the scenes and
stories of the Bible had long been familiar. “Is it like that, mamma?”
“Much better, ever so much better than you can think.”
“Oh, mamma, I'm just awful hungry!”
“Come away, then; so am I. What have you got, Jessie, for two very
hungry people?”
“Porridge and pancakes,” said Jessie, the minister's “girl,” who not
only ruled in the kitchen, but using the kitchen as a base, controlled
the interior economy of the manse.
“Oh, goody!” yelled Hughie; “just what I like.” And from the plates of
porridge and the piles of pancakes that vanished from his plate no one
could doubt his word.
Their reading that night was about the city whose streets were of pure
gold, and after a little talk, Hughie and his baby brother were tucked
away safely for the night, and the mother sat down to her never-ending
task of making and mending.
The minister was away at Presbytery meeting in Montreal, and for ten
days his wife would stand in the breach. Of course the elders would take
the meeting on the Sabbath day and on the Wednesday evening, but for all
other ministerial duties when the minister was absent the congregation
looked to the minister's wife. And soon it came that the sick and the
sorrowing and the sin-burdened found in the minister's wife such help
and comfort and guidance as made the absence of the minister seem no
great trial after all. Eight years ago the minister had brought his wife
from a home of gentle culture, from a life of intellectual and artistic
pursuits, and from a circle of loving friends of which she was the pride
and joy, to this home in the forest. There, isolated from all congenial
companionship with her own kind, deprived of all the luxuries and of
many of the comforts of her young days, and of the mental stimulus of
that contact of minds without which few can maintain intellectual life,
she gave herself without stint to her husband's people, with never a
thought of self-pity or self-praise. By day and by night she labored for
her husband and family and for her people, for she thought them hers.
She taught the women how to adorn their rude homes, gathered them into
Bible classes and sewing circles, where she read and talked and wrought
and prayed with them till they grew to adore her as a saint, and to
trust her as a leader and friend, and to be a little like her. And not
the women only, but the men, too, loved and trusted her, and the big
boys found it easier to talk to the minister's wife than to the minister
or to any of his session. She made her own and her children's clothes,
collars, hats, and caps, her husband's shirts and neckties, toiling late
into the morning hours, and all without frown or shadow of complaint,
and indeed without suspicion that any but the happiest lot was hers, or
that she was, as her sisters said, “just buried alive in the backwoods.”
Not she! She lived to serve, and the where and how were not hers to
determine. So, with bright face and brave heart, she met her days and
faced the battle. And scores of women and men are living better and
braver lives because they had her for their minister's wife.
But the day had been long, and the struggle with the March wind pulls
hard upon the strength, and outside the pines were crooning softly,
and gradually the brave head drooped till between the stitches she
fell asleep. But not for many minutes, for a knock at the kitchen door
startled her, and before long she heard Jessie's voice rise wrathful.
“Indeed, I'll do no such thing. This is no time to come to the
minister's house.”
For answer there was a mumble of words.
“Well, then, you can just wait until morning. She can go in the
morning.”
“What is it, Jessie?” The minister's wife came into the kitchen.
“Oh, Ranald, I'm glad to see you back. Hughie told me you had come. But
your father is ill, he said. How is he?”
Ranald shook hands shyly, feeling much ashamed under Jessie's sharp
reproof.
“Indeed, it was Aunt Kirsty that sent me,” said Ranald, apologetically.
“Then she ought to have known better,” said Jessie, sharply.
“Never mind, Jessie. Ranald, tell me about your father.”
“He is very bad indeed, and my aunt is afraid that--” The boy's lip
trembled. Then he went on: “And she thought perhaps you might have some
medicine, and--”
“But what is the matter, Ranald?”
“He was hurted bad--and he is not right wise in his head.”
“But how was he hurt?”
Ranald hesitated.
“I was not there--I am thinking it was something that struck him.”
“Ah, a tree! But where did the tree strike him?”
“Here,” pointing to his breast; “and it is sore in his breathing.”
“Well, Ranald, if you put the saddle on Pony, I shall be ready in a
minute.”
Jessie was indignant.
“You will not stir a foot this night. You will send some medicine, and
then you can go in the morning.”
But the minister's wife heeded her not.
“You are not walking, Ranald?”
“No, I have the colt.”
“Oh, that's splendid. We'll have a fine gallop--that is, if the moon is
up.”
“Yes, it is just coming up,” said Ranald, hurrying away to the stable
that he might escape Jessie's wrath and get the pony ready.
It was no unusual thing for the minister and his wife to be called upon
to do duty for doctor and nurse. The doctor was twenty miles away. So
Mrs. Murray got into her riding-habit, threw her knitted hood over her
head, put some simple medicines into her hand-bag, and in ten minutes
was waiting for Ranald at the door.