harshly. ‘Did you think now that I’ve found you, I would let you slip
through my fingers again?’ Then, as his eyes fell on the collar, he
closed his hand on it, saying, ‘That will be very useful to me just now;
my plans aren’t working well. Forget that you found this, my girl, and
if you are wise, don’t scream.’ Then ten words oozed from Annie’s lips,
‘John Scott, let go! I said I’d never meet you.’
“It was my brother,—at best, a would-be thief,—dogging my sweetheart.
He was bearded when I left home, and so I did not know him. For a second
my right hand was on the pistol that I always carry when at work; then I
suddenly realized what it would mean to the two women I best loved if I
shot my brother. If Annie would only scream, some of the gentlemen who
slept in a chamber beyond the billiard room could hardly be asleep, and
they would come. But how to make her?
“Dr. Russell, there’s something works in us besides ourselves at times.
Yes, I see you know it, too. Scarce knowing what I did, I turned my
bull’s-eye straight and full on Annie; with one hand reaching for the
trap, I shook those fool rats loose, and they, half blinded, ran down
the light streak toward her. Next thing I knew, she was up on a chair,
and shriek upon shriek rang through the house. Before I could scarce
move, the room was full of the gentlemen, Mr. —— and the artist being
in the lead. The man, bewildered by the suddenness of it all, loosed his
hold on the jewels, and vanished through the pantry, as if he dived into
water, but quick as he went, they both knew that I had seen.
“Before either of us could offer a word of explanation, my employer took
in the whole matter at a glance, as he thought, recognized Annie as the
maid of one of his guests, and, laying the uproar only to the rats and
me, laughed at it as a great joke, while the artist fellow, seeing
Annie, who kept on screaming and was too frightened to get down from the
chair, called,—‘By Jove! What a picture! Stay there just for a minute
while I make a memory sketch,’—at least, I think that’s what he called
it.
* * * * *
“Well, sir, we were married New Year’s Eve, and neither of us have since
ever put in _words_ what we saw and heard that night, just before I
loosed the rats.
“A year after, I was overlooking some work in a picture gallery, when I
came face to face with the picture as it’s there now, and I knew I’d
have to buy it first or last, sir, even if it bit a hole in my savings,
for even a rat-catcher, as I was then, if he had a good mother of his
own, doesn’t want his wife, with no shoes and her petticoats up to her
knees, to be seen outside his own home.
“Oh, yes, of course, that was twenty-five years ago. The rat money went
into well-advised real estate; we are settled here, and the missus and
the girls have gone to bring my mother, past seventy, to live with us.
No, I didn’t go; I couldn’t. My brother is back on the place, and
married to a girl with some property. Made money himself in Australia,
they say,—God knows how.
“When you know that the things you remember aren’t there, and other
things _are_, it’s best not to go back. Now, Dr. Russell, tell me,
should I tell my girls, and the men that will want to marry them some
day, the story that I’ve told you? What do you think?”
“I think,” said father, standing up so that they stood face to face,
“that you are a gentleman; that being said is all, and there is my hand
upon it. Nine o’clock already; we must be going.”
Tom Scott picked up his ratting bag that held some of his famous traps,
and, taking the old card from the shelf, was about to throw it into the
fire, then hesitated, and put it back in the case facing his mother’s
picture, saying with a smile, half sad, half humorous, “I’m afraid, sir,
there’s that about the old business that would make me lonely if I
forgot.”
* * * * *
A month later a paragraph appeared in the local papers that read as
follows: “Mr. Thomas Scott of our town has made good his promise of
ending the scourge of rats, and has turned over the sum of two hundred
dollars, he having doubled the amount of the reward offered, to the
Bridgeton Hospital.
“There is a pretty little incident connected with this work. Mr. Scott,
who has made a fortune in real estate, got his first start by inventing
and patenting a particularly clever rat-trap, and it was with some of
these traps, put by and almost forgotten, that he has been of so much
use to his fellow-townsmen, for which they now take this way of
expressing their thanks.”
XII
TRANSITION
=DECEMBER=—THE MOON OF SNOWSHOES
I
“Good King Wenceslas looked out,
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep and crisp and even!”
sang the violin with pathetic accent, and then stopped abruptly, as the
player dropped the bow and pressed his face against the window. The
stars shone from the cold blue of a cloudless sky; below lay the city
ablaze with light. It was a Danish city, and the player was a Dane, but
when a violin sings, it speaks to each one in his own language. Bells
pealing from a neighbouring church took up the same carol of
Christmastide, and young voices echoed it faintly from within the doors
of many homes.
On that Christmas night, two young women were drilling childish voices
in the singing of the same tune. These women had never met, or either
even dreamed of the other’s existence, yet a current, as actual as the
sound-waves of the music, at that moment began to draw them together,
the player of the violin, Gurth Waldsen, being the unconscious medium.
Waldsen looked from the window at the outlines of the palace across the
water, its ramparts twinkling with lights that looked like reflections
of the brilliant winter stars, but his thoughts did not follow his
sight. In a few days he would be an exile from both home and country,
and though the leaving was wholly voluntary, yet the past and present
struggled together. A visionary in many respects, refusing to understand
social classification as read by his family, he had, in his mother’s
eyes, capped the climax of his folly on his graduation from the
University by refusing a diplomatic career, insisting upon earning his
bread literally by the sweat of his brow, and betrothing himself to a
pretty, modest, blue-eyed girl of a near-by village,—“A girl of the
people,” his mother called her, for though she had been carefully
reared, her father, a poor pastor, had been taken from his peasant
brothers and educated for the ministry because he was both docile and
fragile.
Waldsen’s mother was the controlling power of the family. His father,
long since dead, had been a dreamer, a musician, and something of a
poet, whose wife had married him in a fit of girlish romance, and then
lived to scorn him for his lack of ambition and reproach herself for
marrying beneath her. Her only son should make no such mistake; she
would oversee at least his social education, but she completely
overlooked the matter of heredity.
So little Gurth grew up with only one parent. At ten the boy was tall
and undeveloped, with a shock of strange golden-brown hair that he shook
back as he played the violin, his greatest pleasure; but at twenty-two
he was a slender man with a gold-tipped beard, straight nose, and
blue-gray eyes, that looked at and through what he saw, all his features
being softened by his father’s dreamy temperament.
Mrs. Waldsen, therefore, set her face against the marriage with the
bitterness of her disappointment stung to fury by the memory of her own
past. If she loved her son, it was for her own gratification, not for
his, and now, as her world was beginning to talk of him, his bearing and
gentle accomplishments, should she allow him to be taken from her?
Gurth had waited several months after the first rebuff, hoping that time
would mend matters. Andrea could not marry yet; she was the
foster-mother to four small brothers, and managed the little household
for her overworked and underpaid father, but in another year Theresa,
the younger sister, would be able to take her place. Time, however, did
nothing but rivet Mrs. Waldsen’s decision, and in the interval the
knowledge of her treatment of his father came to Gurth, and he knew then
that argument was hopeless. He had some money of his own, though merely
a trifling legacy from an uncle, and his last interview with his mother
brought to an end all idea of remaining in Denmark. This was what he was
fighting alone in his study that Christmas night, when, turning to his
violin for sympathy, it sang the half-sad carol that Andrea had been
teaching her little brothers the last time that he supped with her.
Gurth now regretted the time that had passed in temporizing, in
drifting. To-night would end it all, and freed, as far as possible for a
man to free himself, he would carry out in detail a plan of life that
had often before vaguely offered him escape—not merely liberty to marry
as he pleased, but also release from the particular social conditions
into which he was born, that had at all times cramped him. He loved
Nature and his fellow-men, in a genuine and wholesome fashion, but with
the institution called Society, as it existed about him, he seemed
pre-natally at war.
Putting aside what he had been, he chose to go as an emigrant, elbow to
elbow with labourers; going to gain a living from the soil by his own
toil, to try if the strength of body in him matched the strength of
intention. He meant to follow an outdoor life, and thus make a home for
Andrea, wearing the path a little before he let her willing feet tread
it with him.
As he looked about his rooms he almost smiled at his few possessions.
Some long shelves of books, a rack of music, a few pelt rugs, a
high-post bed behind an alcove curtain, chairs, a long oak table upon
the end of which stood a great bird-cage, while half a dozen smaller
ones hung by the window. A porcelain stove stood under the mantel-shelf,
and above it was a litter of pipes and broken foils, while on one
corner, in a little place apart, shrine-like and surrounded by growing
ivy, the portrait of a young girl looked at him. It was merely a
photograph taken with the crude art of a provincial town, but the stiff
posing could not mar the charm of the face, and Gurth looked longingly.
Leaving the window he moved slowly toward it until, resting his elbows
on the shelf, he touched her lips with his, and then started at the
unconscious act. To see her once more, to-morrow, Stephen’s Day, and
then go away! His heart and its primitive instinct whispered, “Marry
her—take her with you!” What he considered his reason said,—“Where to?
It is winter; the sea is deep and wide, the journey long. Make the home;
wait for spring!” Ah, this was one of the many matters in which what is
called impulse would have been wiser because the more direct of the two.
It was morning before Gurth had thought the matter to a conclusion, and
the streets had slept and were waking again before he threw himself upon
the bed, still dressed.
He spent the following day in destroying papers and in writing letters
to a friend or two. He had the equivalent of about five thousand
dollars, to begin life with, and he resolved to hoard the money as
carefully as if he were indeed a peasant starting for the New World.
This money represented the land, the home; his own brain and hands must
do the rest. A trunk of books, his violin, some of his plainest clothes,
were all that he would take; a rough coat and a fur cap must be bought
to supplement his wardrobe.
The bullfinch by the window piped gaily, and the chaffinches in the
cages with fantastic dormers chirped in reply, reminding him of their
necessities, and, after feeding them, he unhooked their cages and,
fastening them, covered them and prepared to go out. He had promised
Andrea that he would be with her for supper. It was already five
o’clock, and the Clausens lived far outside the city, an hour’s sharp
driving on the Klampenborg road, and the sleigh that he had ordered was
waiting. Packing the cages under the fur robes, he started the horse at
a brisk pace. It seemed already, so powerful is imagination, as if this
decision had given him a greater sense of liberty.
In a long, low-studded room, whose polished board floor was relieved by
a few squares of bright carpet, two young girls were preparing the
supper table. The youngest was at an age when her closely braided hair
lacked the dignity of being put up, and her skirts were still a few
inches from the ground. She was squarely built, fair-haired, blue-eyed,
and rosy with good nature. She held a large loaf, beautifully light and
baked evenly brown, which she was regarding with great glee. “Lift it,
Andrea!” she cried. “See how light it is, and how sweet it smells! Now
that my baking is as good as yours, you can be married, for you know
that father said a year ago you could not marry until I baked good
bread!” and Theresa laughed teasingly. Andrea, so addressed, looked at
the loaf carefully, then silently kissed the face that was smiling above
it. She was half a head taller than her sister, with an oval face
surrounded by thick, smooth, bright golden hair that was parted and
braided in two wide bands and coiled around her head. Her cheek-bones, a
trifle high for good proportion, were relieved by great, dark-blue eyes,
with jet-black lashes; the chin was firm, the mouth not small but
opening over long white teeth. The indescribable charm of the face came
from the eyes. The kiss was the only answer that she gave her sister,
who rattled on from one theme to another as she brought in the different
dishes, occasionally joining in with the four little boys who were
singing carols in a group around a battered piano at the other end of
the room, mingling their shrill voices with the pastor’s tenor.
“Mark my footsteps, good my page,
Tread thou in them boldly:
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage
Freeze thy blood less coldly!”
Gurth paused on the threshold an instant listening to the singing, then
entered without knocking. The little boys rushed to hang about him and
explore his pockets, and the pastor and Theresa welcomed him warmly. It
was Andrea alone who saw a change in his whole demeanour, and wondered
at the bird-cages. The evening meal was soon eaten, and the boys went to
the kitchen with the toys that Gurth had brought them; the pastor,
scenting something, sat erect in his arm-chair, all forgetful of his
pipe and expectant of some news, while Theresa hung over him. Gurth
stood by the stove, nervous and uncertain how to begin.
Andrea went to him, and, putting her hand through his arm, said quietly,
but with an infinite tenderness in her voice, “You are going away,
dearest, and you have brought your birds for me to keep for you.”
It was as if her voice smoothed away his fears and perplexities, so all
four together they discussed the situation without reserve.
Gurth, forgetting his prudent plans, begged the pastor to marry them
then, or at the latest in a few days, when the necessary legalities
could be complied with, so that he might leave Andrea as his wife. Upon
this point the pastor was obdurate. His practical instinct, born partly
of the peasant suspicion of another class, and partly of hard
experience, forbade this. Among his parishioners many a wedding had
taken place on the eve of parting, and the husband had been swallowed up
in that vast new world, while the poor girl at home waited in vain, not
knowing whether she was wife or widow.
He liked Gurth in a way, but he was sadly disappointed in his failure to
reconcile his mother to the marriage, and, while he believed him sincere
at present, he did not know how the separation might affect either of
the young people; so he insisted upon delay. If Gurth had established
himself by the next Christmas, he might return and marry. If not—well,
there were other men who, under the circumstances, would be more
suitable for Andrea, though he did not voice his opinion. In reality he
had no romance in his nature, and he disbelieved in unequal marriages,
especially if money was not coupled with the rank.
If, after a year’s trial, Gurth was in a position to come for
Andrea,—well and good,—but further than that the pastor could be
neither coaxed nor driven.
Moreover, he allowed them little privacy for saying good-by.
“I know how to work, and I like it, but you must learn how,” Andrea
whispered, as she clung to him. “But I will be ready, Gurth, and, more,
if you can’t return, I will go to you!” This understanding was their
farewell.
His mother, when she found that he had gone, laughingly told her friends
that Gurth had a foolish love affair, and, taking her advice, he had
gone away to travel it off.
II
There is nothing that tends so to destroy the conceit of a man little
used to the sea, as an ocean voyage in midwinter, especially if it is
made on board an emigrant ship. On a good liner he may prop up his
flimsy importance in a dozen ways, from feeing stewards to bring him six
meals a day while he lies in his berth, to pulling himself together and
wearing the distinction of being the only cabin passenger at table
during a furious squall. But on an emigrant ship it is impossible to
veil or soften stern reality.
Gurth had chosen this way of travel that he might more quickly realize
his changed circumstances. For two weeks or perhaps three he must live
in this community. Previously he had a theoretical knowledge of the
conditions that surround and make poverty. Now for the first time he saw
the reality. His first thought was of the wonderful patience of these
people; the next conviction was of their unconquered hope.
A dozen perhaps had settled homes in America and had returned to their
native land merely to visit, but the multitude were going, they were not
quite sure where, to earn their bread, they did not know how. Doubts did
not trouble them, their pink pasteboard tickets seemed the pledge of
landing somewhere, and as for the rest, they were used to uncertainty.
The fourth day out, a day when a mild streak and a few hours’ sunshine
brought all the grotesque animated bundles of clothes from their berths,
Gurth took his violin and, without ado, began to play a native ballad,
and then another. Silently the people grouped about him, some stealing
below to coax up a comrade who was ill.
The intensely earnest look on their faces stimulated him, and he played
on and on, grading his music from grave to gay, to suit each in turn,
until at last, feeling his wrist failing, he made the national hymn a
final effort. Scarcely had the tune taken form than a chorus rose, at
first swaying and uncertain, and then gaining power and steadiness,
until the last word was reached. The men rubbed their eyes with the
backs of horny hands, and women hugged him, and before he realized the
situation, one stolid, square-faced man, who had virtually declined to
talk to him the day before, was passing around his peaked fur cap to
receive a ready shower of small coin, which Gurth could not refuse. So
thus he earned his first money. By his violin and its speech, which,
however exquisite, no man feels above him, he was admitted to the
freemasonry of his companions.
A carpenter who had been home to see his old parents asked Gurth where
he was going to settle, and then he realized that he did not know, save
what his port was, and that he did not wish to locate far from the sea,
nor in a sultry climate. The carpenter drew from him such scant outline
of his schemes as he wished to tell—his plan of buying a farm, after he
had learned the country’s ways. This man told him about the village
where he lived, which was near a New England town whose railways offered
a market for small fruits, and he advised Gurth to work for his board
and lodging with one of the numerous fruit-growers until he learned the
craft, saying that as he spoke English well, Waldsen might earn a trifle
above his board, but that a man who had never done hard work was not
worth much.
III
It was a bitterly cold winter; the wind swept fiercely through the cut
between Sunset and Rocky hills, rushing down the main street at Glen
Village, separating the neighbours on either side more effectively than
drifts of snow could have done. However deep, there is something
cheerful and exhilarating about snow. Children think that it is sent for
their special amusement; the shy young man, who drives his sweetheart
over to the “Social” in the next village, needs no excuse for putting
his arm around her, for light sleighs have been known to upset suddenly
without the slightest warning. The old folks are cheerful in their
reminiscences of just such episodes, and compare each storm with some
long-remembered one in the thirties, noting always the frail and
inferior wearing quality of modern snow.
But Wintry Wind is the most exasperating and prying of nature’s
messengers, whose mission is the uncovering of weaknesses in all things
animate and inanimate. It soon discovers if your eyes are sensitive,
your hat a size too small, that you are subject to rheumatism, that your
breath is short when you walk uphill, and that your knees bend as you go
down, and so turns your cloak over your head like an extinguisher. It
knows precisely which shingle lacks a nail, and will lay bare spots
calculated to make obstinate leaks. It also spies out the blind whose
catch is loose, the gate with one hinge, the elm that is split in the
crotch, and the particular chimney flue that leads to the room where
your most important relation (who suffers from bronchitis) is being
entertained at tea, and it gauges accurately which article on the
clothes-line you value the most.
It was this sort of weather, combined with his daughter Margaret’s
delicate health, that made Ezra Tolford, living at the Glen Mill, for
which the village was named, resolve to have a hired man.
Now Ezra Tolford had many titles to local distinction. He was Deacon of
the First Church, and his parents had been zealous before him, his
grandfather having had the hardihood to fly to the woods with the church
plate on the approach of the British in 1779, thereby risking his life
_via_ wild beasts, Hessians, and exposure,—a fact that is brought up in
every local historical discourse to this day. Incidentally it might be
mentioned that the plucky ancestor (owing to fright and darkness) was
never able afterwards to locate the marshy spot where the precious metal
was buried; this fact, however, is usually omitted.
Ezra was also Judge of Probate, thanks to a fragmentary law course taken
in days when a fond mother had pinched and saved that her only boy might
“make his mark.” Thirdly, he was the owner of the best mill on the
Pequotuck. A mill that, in spite of the sale of flour and meal at the
village store, kept its wheel going five days out of seven during nine
months of the year, sawing wood when no one wished flour, and turning
out middlings for the cattle when the stacks grew low. So swift was the
river that ice very seldom silenced the song the old wheel hummed as it
worked.
Lastly, by wise drainage the deacon had turned a dozen acres of
protected meadow-land, heretofore regarded as next to useless, into one
of the thriftiest fruit farms in southern New England.
All these things made Ezra’s daughter Margaret of special importance in
many eyes besides his own, and it was for her sake that he resolved to
have a man to hook up the team for her, when he was busy in the mill or
away in the village, and do a thousand and one little errands that the
sturdier daughters of his neighbours accomplished for themselves.
The Mill House, as it was called, stood on a hill between the Pequotuck
and a little brook that, curving, joined the river below the dam. It was
a placid-looking white house of a style of architecture that might be
called New England Restored. It had been Colonial, but a modern
bay-window, a piazza, and a lean-to in the rear had hybridized it; yet
it still possessed a dignity never seen in the rural interpretations of
the Queen Anne villa.