Fessenden shivered and sat up in bed. It was the first time he had
ever heard sounds in the house at this hour, and even the birds and
the cocks were still asleep. He felt more oppressed than curious, and,
dressing hastily, opened his window and slipped out upon the veranda.
The moon shone on vast fields of ice and snow, on white peaks sharply
defined against the dark starry sky, on great stretches of woods whose
heavy spruce and naked maples were laden and glittering. The lake was a
sheet of ice several feet in depth. Fessenden had driven a team across
it yesterday to the opposite woods, where the men were chopping trees
blown down in a recent storm. The thermometer was very low, but the air
so still that the cold had no sting in it. Without the house the world
might have been dead; but not so within. Several people seemed to be
moving about in a curious and stealthy manner. Suddenly some one ran
down the hall and back again. Immediately after there was a scream from
Christina, followed by a silence so sudden and complete that it seemed
profounder than that without.
How he realized at once that Mrs. Nettlebeck was dead he never knew.
She had not been a strong woman for years, and had spent more and
more of her time in the big rocking-chair, looking out on the lake
or reading her Bible; but when he had kissed her as usual the night
before, she had prodded him playfully in search of damaged bones, and
told him in her broken English that she forgot she was too old to work
while she watched him skate and turn somersaults on the ice. Fessenden
knew that she loved him more than she did her own children, for he
interested her and they did not, and he showed her much demonstrative
affection, which they thought beneath their religiously acquired
Americanism--if indeed there were any impulses left in those dry
economical natures. And now Fessenden looked about vaguely as if in
search of the fleeing spirit. For the moment it seemed to him that he
vibrated in unison with the great forces beyond the Universe. It was
several days before he was conscious of grief and his loss, but he
tingled with cosmic curiosity.
Morris’s window was open, and himself buried under so many blankets
that he did not hear Fessenden enter the room. He sprang up when
gripped by the shoulder, however, and after a brief visit to the
death-chamber returned and endeavored until morning to answer his
pupil’s eager almost incoherent questions. He expounded every belief he
had investigated. After Fessenden had concluded that he would prefer to
think of his poor old friend in that Nirvana where there was no more
work, he went out and spent the day in the woods by himself. This new
idea of Death and its impenetrability to mortal light seemed to him
magnificent; and Christina, hastily patching together a shroud out of
sheets--old sheets at that--and Fritz and Dolf, not even assisted by
the hired man--who was sent to chop wood as usual--hammering together a
rude coffin, while a few neighbors stamped through the defiles to “help
lay the old lady out,” filled his ardent young mind with revolt.
The burial-ground was ten miles distant, close by a church, a mountain
store, a post-office, and three or four houses--a hamlet in a clearing
through which a stage passed twice a week. Once a month the church was
visited by an itinerant preacher. Mrs. Nettlebeck, to the satisfaction
of her family, had accommodated her setting forth to the Methodist’s
returning flight, and, as there was no time to lose, her remains, on
the night following her death, were placed on the “jumper”--a low
sledge--and driven through the snowdrifts of the forest by torchlight.
Fritz drove; Christina stood beside him, arrayed in fragments of
hastily contributed black; Fessenden and his faithful chum tramped
in the rear; and Dolf and the hired man lighted the way with great
pine torches. The jumper was on runners; the men and the boys wore
snow-shoes, for the snow was often five or six feet deep; now and then
the rude vehicle plunged into a drift and had to be dug out, while the
coffin was deposited beyond the reach of the plunging horses. Once the
coffin disappeared, and as no one could remember exactly where it had
been placed, and the pitch-pine was smoking heavily, it was some time
before the treacherous catafalque was discovered. After the box had
been dug out and safely hearsed, Fessenden let fly his wrath.
“Why on earth can’t you bury the poor old lady in the forest?” he
demanded. “You’re treating her horribly, in my opinion; and I’d like to
know what better church-yard any one wants than the woods.”
“I guess this family’ll git Christian burial every time,” replied
Fritz. “But I must say it’s mighty inconvenient dyin’ in the winter.
Still, we can spare the time better than if we was sowin’ or
harvestin’; there’s something in that. You can’t for to git everything
right in this world.”
And the tramp went on through the forest, where the late moon rarely
penetrated, and the wild torches peopled the caverns of the dark with
the evil spirits which had haunted the forests of the old peasant’s
childhood, and cast sinister shadows over the stark outline bumping
close to the ground. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been a bit of a cynic in
her way, for she had never been persuaded that the transit from her
quaint comfortable village in the toy state of Hamburg to this souring
struggle for existence in an aboriginal wilderness had exalted her
second condition over her first; and Fessenden wondered if she were
smiling grimly in her coffin at the hardships of her final journey.
They arrived at the settlement in the late sunrise, but although
several neighbors had assembled to help them, neither pick nor spade
made any impression on the frozen snow, many feet in depth, which
covered the church-yard and its graves. The preacher managed to
flounder through the drifts to his duty, and preached a long and dismal
sermon on the platitudes of life and death, which further outraged
Fessenden; and then Mrs. Nettlebeck was stowed away in a little room
behind the pulpit to wait till the spring came and the “ice went out.”