MASTER AND MAN
The two men, left alone, turned each toward the interior of the store,
and their eyes met. Alike in gray eyes and in dark blue there was
laughter. “Kittle folk, the Quakers,” said the storekeeper, with a
shrug, and went to put away his case of pins and needles. Haward, going
to the end of the store, found a row of dusty bottles, and breaking the
neck of one with a report like that of a pistol set the Madeira to his
lips, and therewith quenched his thirst. The wine cellar abutted upon
the library. Taking off his riding glove he ran his finger along the
bindings, and plucking forth The History of a Coy Lady looked at the
first page, read the last paragraph, and finally thrust the thin brown
and gilt volume into his pocket. Turning, he found himself face to face
with the storekeeper.
“I have not the honor of knowing your name, sir,” remarked the latter
dryly. “Do you buy at this store, and upon whose account?”
Haward shook his head, and applied himself again to the Madeira.
“Then you carry with you coin of the realm with which to settle?”
continued the other. “The wine is two shillings; the book you may have
for twelve-pence.”
“Here I need not pay, good fellow,” said Haward negligently, his eyes
upon a row of dangling objects. “Fetch me down yonder cane; ’t is as
delicately tapered and clouded as any at the Exchange.”
“Pay me first for the wine and the book,” answered the man composedly.
“It’s a dirty business enough, God knows, for a gentleman to put finger
to; but since needs must when the devil drives, and he has driven me
here, why, I, Angus MacLean, who have no concerns of my own, must e’en
be faithful to the concerns of another. Wherefore put down the silver
you owe the Sassenach whose wine you have drunken and whose book you
have taken.”
“And if I do not choose to pay?” asked Haward, with a smile.
“Then you must e’en choose to fight,” was the cool reply. “And as I
observe that you wear neither sword nor pistols, and as jack boots
and a fine tight-buttoned riding coat are not the easiest clothes to
wrestle in, it appears just possible that I might win the cause.”
“And when you’ve thrown me, what then?”
“Oh, I would just draw a rope around you and yonder cask of Jamaica,
and leave you to read your stolen book in peace until Saunderson
(that’s the overseer, and he’s none so bad if he was born in Fife)
shall come. You can have it out with him; or maybe he’ll hale you
before the man that owns the store. I hear they expect him home.”
Haward laughed, and abstracting another bottle from the shelf broke
its neck. “Hand me yonder cup,” he said easily, “and we’ll drink to
his home-coming. Good fellow, I am Mr. Marmaduke Haward, and I am glad
to find so honest a man in a place of no small trust. Long absence and
somewhat too complaisant a reference of all my Virginian affairs to my
agent have kept me much in ignorance of the economy of my plantation.
How long have you been my storekeeper?”
Neither cup for the wine nor answer to the question being forthcoming,
Haward looked up from his broken bottle. The man was standing with his
body bent forward and his hand pressed against the wood of a great cask
behind him until the finger-nails showed white. His head was high, his
face dark red and angry, his brows drawn down until the gleaming eyes
beneath were like pin points.
So sudden and so sinister was the change that Haward was startled. The
hour was late, the place deserted; as the man had discovered, he had no
weapons, nor, strong, active, and practiced as he was, did he flatter
himself that he could withstand the length of brawn and sinew before
him. Involuntarily, he stepped backward until there was a space between
them, casting at the same moment a glance toward the wall where hung
axe and knife and hatchet.
The man intercepted the look, and broke into a laugh. The sound was
harsh and gibing, but not menacing. “You need not be afraid,” he said.
“I do not want the feel of a rope around my neck,--though God knows
why I should care! Here is no clansman of mine, and no cursed Campbell
either, to see my end!”
“I am not afraid,” Haward answered calmly. Walking to the shelf that
held an array of drinking vessels, he took two cups, filled them with
wine, and going back to his former station, set one upon the cask
beside the storekeeper. “The wine is good,” he said. “Will you drink?”
The other loosened the clasp of his hand upon the wood and drew
himself upright. “I eat the bread and drink the water which you give
your servants,” he answered, speaking with the thickness of hardly
restrained passion. “The wine cup goes from equal to equal.”
As he spoke he took up the peace offering, eyed it for a moment with a
bitter smile, then flung it with force over his shoulder. The earthen
floor drank the wine; the china shivered into a thousand fragments. “I
have neither silver nor tobacco with which to pay for my pleasure,”
continued the still smiling storekeeper. “When I am come to the end of
my term, then, an it please you, I will serve out the damage.”
Haward sat down upon a keg of powder, crossed his knees, and, with
his chin upon his hand, looked from between the curled lengths of his
periwig at the figure opposite. “I am glad to find that in Virginia, at
least, there is honesty,” he said dryly. “I will try to remember the
cost of the cup and the wine against the expiry of your indenture. In
the mean time, I am curious to know why you are angry with me whom you
have never seen before to-day.”
With the dashing of the wine to earth the other’s passion had
apparently spent itself. The red slowly left his face, and he leaned
at ease against the cask, drumming upon its head with his fingers. The
sunlight, shrinking from floor and wall, had left but a single line of
gold. In the half light strange and sombre shapes possessed the room;
through the stillness, beneath the sound of the tattoo upon the cask
head, the river made itself heard.
“For ten years and more you have been my--master,” said the
storekeeper. “It is a word for which I have an invincible distaste. It
is not well--having neither love nor friendship to put in its place--to
let hatred die. When I came first to this slavery, I hated all
Campbells, all Whigs, Forster that betrayed us at Preston, and Ewin Mor
Mackinnon. But the years have come and the years have gone, and I am
older than I was at twenty-five. The Campbells I can never reach: they
walk secure, overseas, through Lorn and Argyle, couching in the tall
heather above Etive, tracking the red deer in the Forest of Dalness.
Forster is dead. Ewin Mackinnon is dead, I know; for five years ago
come Martinmas night I saw his perjured soul on its way to hell. All
the world is turning Whig. A man may hate the world, it is true, but he
needs a single foe.”
“And in that capacity you have adopted me?” demanded Haward.
MacLean let his gaze travel over the man opposite him, from the looped
hat and the face between the waves of hair to the gilt spurs upon the
great boots; then turned his eyes upon his own hand and coarsely clad
arm stretched across the cask. “I, too, am a gentleman, the brother of
a chieftain,” he declared. “I am not without schooling. I have seen
something of life, and of countries more polite than the land where
I was born, though not so dear. I have been free, and have loved my
freedom. Do you find it so strange that I should hate you?”
There was a silence; then, “Upon my soul, I do not know that I do,”
said Haward slowly. “And yet, until this day I did not know of your
existence.”
“But I knew of yours,” answered the storekeeper. “Your agent hath an
annoying trick of speech, and the overseers have caught it from him.
‘Your master’ this, and ‘your master’ that; in short, for ten years it
hath been, ‘Work, you dog, that your master may play!’ Well, I have
worked; it was that, or killing myself, or going mad. I have worked
for you in the fields, in the smithy, in this close room. But when you
bought my body, you could not buy my soul. Day after day, and night
after night, I sent it away; I would not let it bide in these dull
levels, in this cursed land of heat and stagnant waters. At first it
went home to its own country,--to its friends and its foes, to the
torrent and the mountain and the music of the pipes; but at last the
pain outweighed the pleasure, and I sent it there no more. And then it
began to follow you.”
“To follow me!” involuntarily exclaimed Haward.
“I have been in London,” went on the other, without heeding the
interruption. “I know the life of men of quality, and where they most
resort. I early learned from your other servants, and from the chance
words of those who had your affairs in charge, that you were young,
well-looking, a man of pleasure. At first when I thought of you the
blood came into my cheek, but at last I thought of you constantly,
and I felt for you a constant hatred. It began when I knew that Ewin
Mackinnon was dead. I had no need of love; I had need of hate. Day
after day, my body slaving here, my mind has dogged your footsteps. Up
and down, to and fro, in business and in pleasure, in whatever place I
have imagined you to be, there have I been also. Did you never, when
there seemed none by, look over your shoulder, feeling another presence
than your own?”
He ceased to speak, and the hand upon the cask was still. The sunshine
was clean gone from the room, and without the door the wind in the
locust-tree answered the voice of the river. Haward rose from his seat,
but made no further motion toward departing. “You have been frank,” he
said quietly. “Had you it in mind, all this while, so to speak to me
when we should meet?”
“No,” answered the other. “I thought not of words, but of”--
“But of deeds,” Haward finished for him. “Rather, I imagine, of one
deed.”
Composed as ever in voice and manner, he drew out his watch, and held
it aslant that the light might strike upon the dial. “’T is after six,”
he remarked as he put it away, “and I am yet a mile from the house.”
The wine that he had poured for himself had been standing, untouched,
upon the keg beside him. He took it up and drank it off; then wiped his
lips with his handkerchief, and passing the storekeeper with a slight
inclination of his head walked toward the door. A yard beyond the man
who had so coolly shown his side of the shield was a rude table, on
which were displayed hatchets and hunting knives. Haward passed the
gleaming steel; then, a foot beyond it, stood still, his face to the
open door, and his back to the storekeeper and the table with its
sinister lading.
“You do wrong to allow so much dust and disorder,” he said sharply. “I
could write my name in that mirror, and there is a piece of brocade
fallen to the floor. Look to it that you keep the place more neat.”
There was dead silence for a moment; then MacLean spoke in an even
voice: “Now a fool might call you as brave as Hector. For myself, I
only give you credit for some knowledge of men. You are right. It is
not my way to strike in the back an unarmed man. When you are gone, I
will wipe off the mirror and pick up the brocade.”
He followed Haward outside. “It’s a brave evening for riding,” he
remarked, “and you have a bonny bit of horseflesh there. You’ll get to
the house before candlelight.”
Beside one of the benches Haward made another pause. “You are a
Highlander and a Jacobite,” he said. “From your reference to Forster,
I gather that you were among the prisoners taken at Preston and
transported to Virginia.”
“In the Elizabeth and Anne of Liverpool, _alias_ a bit of hell afloat;
the master, Captain Edward Trafford, _alias_ Satan’s first mate,” quoth
the other grimly.
He stooped to the bench where lay the débris of the coast and mountains
he had been lately building, and picked up a small, deep shell. “My
story is short,” he began. “It could be packed into this. I was born
in the island of Mull, of my father a chieftain, and my mother a lady.
Some schooling I got in Aberdeen, some pleasure in Edinburgh and
London, and some service abroad. In my twenty-third year--being at home
at that time--I was asked to a hunting match at Braemar, and went. No
great while afterwards I was bidden to supper at an Edinburgh tavern,
and again I accepted the invitation. There was a small entertainment to
follow the supper,--just the taking of Edinburgh Castle. But the wine
was good, and we waited to powder our hair, and the entertainment could
hardly be called a success. Hard upon that convivial evening, I, with
many others, was asked across the Border to join a number of gentlemen
who drank to the King after our fashion, and had a like fancy for oak
boughs and white roses. The weather was pleasant, the company of the
best, the roads very noble after our Highland sheep tracks. Together
with our English friends, and enlivened by much good claret and by
music of bagpipe and drum, we strolled on through a fine, populous
country until we came to a town called Preston, where we thought we
would tarry for a day or two. However, circumstances arose which
detained us somewhat longer. (I dare say you have heard the story?)
When finally we took our leave, some of us went to heaven, some to
hell, and some to Barbadoes and Virginia. I was among those dispatched
to Virginia, and to all intents and purposes I died the day I landed.
There, the shell is full!”
He tossed it from him, and going to the hitching-post loosed Haward’s
horse. Haward took the reins from his hand. “It hath been ten years and
more since Virginia got her share of the rebels taken at Preston. If I
remember aright, their indentures were to be made for seven years. Why,
then, are you yet in my service?”
MacLean laughed. “I ran away,” he replied pleasantly, “and when I was
caught I made off a second time. I wonder that you planters do not
have a Society for the Encouragement of Runaways. Seeing that they are
nearly always retaken, and that their escapades so lengthen their term
of service, it would surely be to your advantage! There are yet several
years in which I am to call you master.”
He laughed again, but the sound was mirthless, and the eyes beneath
the half-closed lids were harder than steel. Haward mounted his horse
and gathered up the reins. “I am not responsible for the laws of the
realm,” he said calmly, “nor for rebellions and insurrections, nor for
the practice of transporting overseas those to whom have been given
the ugly names of ‘rebel’ and ‘traitor.’ Destiny that set you there
put me here. We are alike pawns; what the player means we have no way
of telling. Curse Fate and the gods, if you choose,--and find that
your cursing does small good,--but regard me with indifference, as one
neither more nor less the slave of circumstances than yourself. It has
been long since I went this way. Is there yet the path by the river?”
“Ay,” answered the other. “It is your shortest road.”
“Then I will be going,” said Haward. “It grows late, and I am not
looked for before to-morrow. Good-night.”
As he spoke he raised his hat and bowed to the gentleman from whom he
was parting. That rebel to King George gave a great start; then turned
very red, and shot a piercing glance at the man on horseback. The
latter’s mien was composed as ever, and, with his hat held beneath his
arm and his body slightly inclined, he was evidently awaiting a like
ceremony of leave-taking on the storekeeper’s part. MacLean drew a long
breath, stepped back a pace or two, and bowed to his equal. A second
“Good-night,” and one gentleman rode off in the direction of the great
house, while the other went thoughtfully back to the store, got a cloth
and wiped the dust from the mirror.
It was pleasant riding by the river in the cool evening wind, with the
colors of the sunset yet gay in sky and water. Haward went slowly,
glancing now at the great, bright stream, now at the wide, calm fields
and the rim of woodland, dark and distant, bounding his possessions.
The smell of salt marshes, of ploughed ground, of leagues of flowering
forests, was in his nostrils. Behind him was the crescent moon; before
him a terrace crowned with lofty trees. Within the ring of foliage
was the house; even as he looked a light sprang up in a high window,
and shone like a star through the gathering dusk. Below the hill the
home landing ran its gaunt black length far out into the carmine
of the river; upon the Golden Rose lights burned like lower stars;
from a thicket to the left of the bridle path sounded the call of a
whippoorwill. A gust of wind blowing from the bay made to waver the
lanterns of the Golden Rose, broke and darkened the coral peace of the
river, and pushed rudely against the master of those parts. Haward laid
his hand upon his horse that he loved. “This is better than the Ring,
isn’t it, Mirza?” he asked genially, and the horse whinnied under his
touch.
The land was quite gray, the river pearl-colored, and the fireflies
beginning to sparkle, when he rode through the home gates. In the dusk
of the world, out of the deeper shadow of the surrounding trees, his
house looked grimly upon him. The light had been at the side; all the
front was stark and black with shuttered windows. He rode to the back
of the house and hallooed to the slaves in the home quarter, where were
lights and noisy laughter, and one deep voice singing in an unknown
tongue.
It was but a stone’s throw to the nearest cabin, and Haward’s call made
itself heard above the babel. The noise suddenly lessened, and two or
three negroes, starting up from the doorstep, hurried across the grass
to horse and rider. Quickly as they came, some one within the house was
beforehand with them. The door swung open; there was the flare of a
lighted candle, and a voice cried out to know what was wanted.
“Wanted!” exclaimed Haward. “Ingress into my own house is wanted! Where
is Juba?”
One of the negroes pressed forward. “Heah I is, Marse Duke! House all
ready for you, but you done sont word”--
“I know,--I know,” answered Haward impatiently. “I changed my mind. Is
that you, Saunderson, with the light? Or is it Hide?”
The candle moved to one side, and there was disclosed a large white
face atop of a shambling figure dressed in some coarse, dark stuff.
“Neither, sir,” said an expressionless voice. “Will it please your
Honor to dismount?”
Haward swung himself out of the saddle, tossed the reins to a negro,
and, with Juba at his heels, climbed the five low stone steps and
entered the wide hall running through the house and broken only by the
broad, winding stairway. Save for the glimmer of the solitary candle
all was in darkness; the bare floor, the paneled walls, echoed to his
tread. On either hand squares of blackness proclaimed the open doors of
large, empty rooms, and down the stair came a wind that bent the weak
flame. The negro took the light from the hand of the man who had opened
the door, and, pressing past his master, lit three candles in a sconce
upon the wall.
“Yo’ room’s all ready, Marse Duke,” he declared. “Dere’s candles
enough, an’ de fire am laid an’ yo’ bed aired. Ef you wan’ some supper,
I kin get you bread an’ meat, an’ de wine was put in yesterday.”
Haward nodded, and taking the candle began to mount the stairs. Half
way up he found that the man in the sad-colored raiment was following
him. He raised his brows, but being in a taciturn humor, and having,
moreover, to shield the flame from the wind that drove down the stair,
he said nothing, going on in silence to the landing, and to the great
eastward-facing room that had been his father’s, and which now he meant
to make his own. There were candles on the table, the dresser, and the
mantelshelf. He lit them all, and the room changed from a place of
shadows and monstrous shapes to a gentleman’s bedchamber,--somewhat
sparsely furnished, but of a comfortable and cheerful aspect. A
cloth lay upon the floor, the windows were curtained, and the bed
had fresh hangings of green and white Kidderminster. Over the mantel
hung a painting of Haward and his mother, done when he was six years
old. Beneath the laughing child and the smiling lady, young and
flower-crowned, were crossed two ancient swords. In the middle of the
room stood a heavy table, and pushed back, as though some one had
lately risen from it, was an armchair of Russian leather. Books lay
upon the table; one of them open, with a horn snuffbox keeping down the
leaf.
Haward seated himself in the great chair, and looked around him with
a thoughtful and melancholy smile. He could not clearly remember his
mother. The rings upon her fingers and her silvery laughter were all
that dwelt in his mind, and now only the sound of that merriment
floated back to him and lingered in the room. But his father had died
upon that bed, and beside the dead man, between the candles at the head
and the candles at the foot, he had sat the night through. The curtains
were half drawn, and in their shadow his imagination laid again that
cold, inanimate form. Twelve years ago! How young he had been that
night, and how old he had thought himself as he watched beside the
dead, chilled by the cold of the crossed hands, awed by the silence,
half frighted by the shadows on the wall; now filled with natural
grief, now with surreptitious and shamefaced thoughts of his changed
estate,--yesterday son and dependent, to-day heir and master! Twelve
years! The sigh and the smile were not for the dead father, but for his
own dead youth, for the unjaded freshness of the morning, for the world
that had been, once upon a time.
Turning in his seat, his eyes fell upon the man who had followed
him, and who was now standing between the table and the door. “Well,
friend?” he demanded.
The man came a step or two nearer. His hat was in his hand, and his
body was obsequiously bent, but there was no discomposure in his
lifeless voice and manner. “I stayed to explain my presence in the
house, sir,” he said. “I am a lover of reading, and, knowing my
weakness, your overseer, who keeps the keys of the house, has been so
good as to let me, from time to time, come here to this room to mingle
in more delectable company than I can choose without these walls.
Your Honor doubtless remembers yonder goodly assemblage?” He motioned
with his hand toward a half-opened door, showing a closet lined with
well-filled bookshelves.
“I remember,” replied Haward dryly. “So you come to my room alone at
night, and occupy yourself in reading? And when you are wearied you
refresh yourself with my wine?” As he spoke he clinked together the
bottle and glass that stood beside the books.
“I plead guilty to the wine,” answered the intruder, as lifelessly as
ever, “but it is my only theft. I found the bottle below, and did not
think it would be missed. I trust that your Honor does not grudge it
to a poor devil who tastes Burgundy somewhat seldomer than does your
Worship. And my being in the house is pure innocence. Your overseer
knew that I would neither make nor meddle with aught but the books,
or he would not have given me the key to the little door, which I now
restore to your Honor’s keeping.” He advanced, and deposited upon the
table a large key.
“What is your name?” demanded Haward, leaning back in his chair.
“Bartholomew Paris, sir. I keep the school down by the swamp, where
I impart to fifteen or twenty of the youth of these parts the
rudiments of the ancient and modern tongues, mathematics, geography,
fortifications, navigation, philosophy”--
Haward yawned, and the schoolmaster broke the thread of his discourse.
“I weary you, sir,” he said. “I will, with your permission, take my
departure. May I make so bold as to beg your Honor that you will not
mention to the gentlemen hereabouts the small matter of this bottle of
wine? I would wish not to be prejudiced in the eyes of my patrons and
scholars.”
“I will think of it,” Haward replied. “Come and take your snuffbox--if
it be yours--from the book where you have left it.”
“It is mine,” said the man. “A present from the godly minister of this
parish.”
As he spoke he put out his hand to take the snuffbox. Haward leaned
forward, seized the hand, and, bending back the fingers, exposed the
palm to the light of the candles upon the table.
“The other, if you please,” he commanded.
For a second--no longer--a wicked soul looked blackly out of the face
to which he had raised his eyes. Then the window shut, and the wall
was blank again. Without any change in his listless demeanor, the
schoolmaster laid his left hand, palm out, beside his right.
“Humph!” exclaimed Haward. “So you have stolen before to-night? The
marks are old. When were you branded, and where?”
“In Bristol, fifteen years ago,” answered the man unblushingly. “It was
all a mistake. I was as innocent as a newborn babe”--
“But unfortunately could not prove it,” interrupted Haward. “That is of
course. Go on.”
“I was transported to South Carolina, and there served out my term. The
climate did not suit me, and I liked not the society, nor--being of a
peaceful disposition--the constant alarms of pirates and buccaneers.
So when I was once more my own man I traveled north to Virginia with
a party of traders. In my youth I had been an Oxford servitor, and
schoolmasters are in demand in Virginia. Weighed in the scales with
a knowledge of the humanities and some skill in imparting them, what
matters a little mishap with hot irons? My patrons are willing to let
bygones be bygones. My school flourishes like a green bay-tree, and the
minister of this parish will speak for the probity and sobriety of my
conduct. Now I will go, sir.”
He made an awkward but deep and obsequious reverence, turned and went
out of the door, passing Juba, who was entering with a salver laden
with bread and meat and a couple of bottles. “Put down the food, Juba,”
said Haward, “and see this gentleman out of the house.”
An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside
the table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The
overseer had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by
a message from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business;
the negro women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the
noises from the quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still.
In his rich, figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward
sat and drank his wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying
and the filling of the slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was
open, and the wind blowing in made the candles to flicker. With the
wind came a murmur of leaves and the wash of the river,--stealthy and
mournful sounds that sorted not with the lighted room, the cheerful
homeliness of the flowered hangings, the gleeful lady and child above
the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity: a slow sea voyage, and
a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred and twenty years
before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned him, he thought,
from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed them, and would
have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the walnut-tree outside
his window, and in the distance, as far away as the creek quarter, a
dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and began to walk
to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The past had
its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only itself
could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored future;
but on such a night of silence that was not silence, of loneliness that
was filled with still, small voices, of heavy darkness without, of
lights burning in an empty house, it was rather of ashes of roses that
one thought.
Haward went to the open window, and with one knee upon the window seat
looked out into the windy, starlit night. This was the eastern face
of the house, and, beyond the waving trees, there were visible both
the river and the second and narrower creek which on this side bounded
the plantation. The voice with which the waters swept to the sea came
strongly to him. A large white moth sailed out of the darkness to the
lit window, but his presence scared it away.
Looking through the walnut branches, he could see a light that burned
steadily, like a candle set in a window. For a moment he wondered
whence it shone; then he remembered that the glebe lands lay in that
direction. The parish was building a house for its new minister, when
he left Virginia, those many years ago. Suddenly he recalled that the
minister--who had seemed to him a bluff, downright, honest fellow--had
told him of a little room looking out upon an orchard, and had said
that it should be the child’s.
It was possible that the star which pierced the darkness might mark
that room. He knit his brows in an effort to remember when, before this
day, he had last thought of a child whom he had held in his arms and
comforted, one splendid dawn, upon a hilltop, in a mountainous region.
He came to the conclusion that he must have forgotten her quite six
years ago. Well, she would seem to have thriven under his neglect,--and
he saw again the girl who had run for the golden guinea. It was true
that when he had put her there where that light was shining, it was
with some shadowy idea of giving her gentle breeding, of making a
lady of her. But man’s purposes are fleeting, and often gone with the
morrow. He had forgotten his purpose; and perhaps it was best this
way,--perhaps it was best this way.
For a little longer he looked at the light and listened to the voice of
the river; then he rose from the window seat, drew the curtains, and
began thoughtfully to prepare for bed.