chamber whence she had issued radiantly rosy a few moments before,
once more abandoning Dickie Blue to an interval of salutary
reflection. To intrude in pursuit, of course--for the whole troop of
us to intrude, curious and gaping, upon those swift measures which
Peggy Lacey was impetuously executing in relief of the shafts of her
accusing conscience--would be a breach of manners too gross even to
contemplate; but something may be inferred from a significant
confusion of sounds which the closed door failed altogether to
conceal. There was clink of pitcher and basin; there was a great
splash of water, as of water being poured with no caution to confine
it to the receptacle provided to receive it; there was the thump of a
pitcher on the floor; and there was more splashing, then a violent
agitation, and the trickle and drip of water, and a second and a third
violent agitation of the liquid contents of what appeared to be a
porcelain bowl--the whole indicating that the occupant of the chamber
was washing her face in haste with a contrite determination to make a
thorough success of the ablution. And there was silence, broken by
gasps and stifled sobs--doubtless a vigorous rubbing was in course;
and then the door was flung open from within, and Peggy Lacey dashed
resolutely in the direction of the kitchen.
A moment later Peggy Lacey confronted Dickie Blue. She was reckless;
she was defiant. She was tense; she was piercing.
"Look at me!" she commanded.
Dickie Blue was mild and smiling. "I'm lookin'," said he. "I can look
no other where."
"Is you lookin' close?"
"Ay. My look's hungry for the sight o' your dear face. I'm blind with
admiration. I wants t' gaze forever."
"Where's my roses now?"
"They've fled. What matter?"
"Ay--fled! An' where?"
"They've retreated whence they came so prettily. 'Tis a lure o' that
sweet color t' come an' go."
Peggy gasped.
"Whence they came!" she faltered. "Ah, where did they come from,
Dickie? Don't ye know?"
"A while gone you was flushed with a pretty modesty," Dickie replied,
smiling indulgent explanation, "an' now you is pale with a sad fright
at my rough love-makin'."
"I'm not frightened at all. Look at my nose!"
"'Tis the sauciest little knob in the world!"
"Look with care. Count 'em!"
"Count what?"
"There's three freckles on it."
"Ay?"
"An' a half."
"Is it so?"
"There, now! I've told you the truth. I'm pallid. I'm freckled. What
d'ye think o' me now?"
"I loves you."
"You don't love me at all. You're quite mistaken. You don't know what
you're sayin'."
Dickie was bewildered.
"What's all this pother, Peggy?" he pleaded. "I don't know what you're
drivin' at, at all."
"I'm pallid again, isn't I?"
"What matter?" said Dickie. "Ah, Peggy, dear," he protested softly, as
he advanced, glowing, upon the trembling little maid before him, "all
I knows is that I loves you! Will you wed me?"
Peggy Lacey yielded to his embrace. She subsided there in peace. It
was safe harbor, she knew; and she longed never to leave its endearing
shelter.
"Yes, sir," she whispered.
At that moment Dickie Blue was the happiest man in the world. And he
ought to have been, too! Dang me if he shouldn't! And as for Peggy
Lacey, she was the happiest maid in the world, which is somewhat
surprising, I confess--never so happy as when, before she sought sleep
to escape the sweet agony of her joy, she flung the widow Nash's
wicked little box of rouge into the driving darkness and heard it
splash in the harbor below her chamber window.
* * * * *
III
THE ART OF TERRY LUTE
* * * * *
III
THE ART OF TERRY LUTE
When the _Stand By_ went down in a northeasterly gale off Dusty Reef
of the False Frenchman, the last example of the art of Terry Lute of
Out-of-the-Way Tickle perished with her. It was a great picture. This
is an amazing thing to say. It doubtless challenges a superior
incredulity. Yet the last example of the art of Terry Lute was a very
great picture. Incredible? Not at all. It is merely astonishing. Other
masters, and of all sorts, have emerged from obscure places. It is not
the less likely that Terry Lute was a master because he originated at
Out-of-the-Way Tickle of the Newfoundland north coast. Rather more so,
perhaps. At any rate, Terry Lute _was_ a master.
James Cobden saw the picture. He, too, was astounded. But--"It is the
work of a master," said he, instantly.
Of course the picture is gone; there is no other: Cobden's word for
its quality must be taken. But why not? Cobden's judgments are not
generally gainsaid; they prove themselves, and stand. And it is not
anywhere contended that Cobden is given to the encouragement of anæmic
aspiration. Cobden's errors, if any, have been of severity. It is
maintained by those who do not love him that he has laughed many a
promising youngster into a sour obscurity. And this may be true. A
niggard in respect to praise, a skeptic in respect to promise, he is
well known. But what he has commended has never failed of a good
measure of critical recognition in the end. And he has uncovered no
mares'-nests.
All this, however,--the matter of Cobden's authority,--is here a waste
discussion. If Cobden's judgments are in the main detestable, the tale
has no point for folk of the taste to hold against them; if they are
true and agreeable, it must then be believed upon his word that when
the _Stand By_ went down off Dusty Reef of the False Frenchman a great
picture perished with her--a great picture done in crayon on manila
paper in Tom Lute's kitchen at Out-of-the-Way Tickle. Cobden is
committed to this. And whether a masterpiece or not, and aside from
the eminent critical opinion of it, the tale of Terry Lute's last
example will at least prove the once engaging quality of Terry Lute's
art.
* * * * *
Cobden first saw the picture in the cabin of the _Stand By_, being
then bound from Twillingate Harbor to Out-of-the-Way, when in the
exercise of an amiable hospitality Skipper Tom took him below to stow
him away. Cobden had come sketching. He had gone north, having read
some moving and tragical tale of those parts, to look upon a grim sea
and a harsh coast. He had found both, and had been inspired to convey
a consciousness of both to a gentler world, touched with his own
philosophy, in Cobden's way. But here already, gravely confronting
him, was a masterpiece greater than he had visioned. It was framed
broadly in raw pine, covered with window-glass, and nailed to the
bulkhead; but it was nevertheless there, declaring its own dignity, a
work of sure, clean genius.
Cobden started. He was astounded, fairly dazed, he puts it, by the
display of crude power. He went close, stared into the appalling
depths of wind, mist, and the sea, backed off, cocked his astonished
head, ran a lean hand in bewilderment through his gray curls, and then
flashed about on Skipper Tom.
"Who did that?" he demanded.
"That?" the skipper chuckled. "Oh," he drawled, "jus' my young
feller." He was apologetic; but he was yet, to be sure, cherishing a
bashful pride.
"How young?" Cobden snapped.
"'Long about fourteen when he done that."
"A child!" Cobden gasped.
"Well, no, sir," the skipper declared, somewhat puzzled by Cobden's
agitation; "he was fourteen, an' a lusty lad for his years."
Cobden turned again to the picture; he stood in a frowning study of
it.
"What's up?" the skipper mildly asked.
"What's up, eh?" says Cobden, grimly. "That's a great picture, by
heaven!" he cried. "_That's_ what's up."
Skipper Tom laughed.
"She isn't so bad, is she?" he admitted, with interest. "She sort o'
scares me by times. But she were meant t' do that. An' dang if I isn't
fond of her, anyhow!"
"Show me another," says Cobden.
Skipper Tom sharply withdrew his interest from the picture.
"Isn't another," said he, curtly. "That was the last he done."
"Dead!" Cobden exclaimed, aghast.
"Dead?" the skipper marveled. "Sure, no. He've gone an' growed up." He
was then bewildered by Cobden's relief.
Cobden faced the skipper squarely. He surveyed the genial fellow with
curious interest.
"Skipper Tom," said he, then, slowly, "you have a wonderful son." He
paused. "A--wonderful--son," he repeated. He smiled; the inscrutable
wonder of the thing had all at once gently amused him--the wonder that
a genius of rarely exampled quality should have entered the world in
the neighborhood of Out-of-the-Way Tickle, there abandoned to chance
discovery of the most precarious sort. And there was no doubt about
the quality of the genius. The picture proclaimed it; and the picture
was not promise, but a finished work, in itself an achievement, most
marvelously accomplished, moreover, without the aid of any tradition.
Terry Lute's art was triumphant. Even the skeptical Cobden, who had
damned so much in his day, could not question the lad's mastery. It
did not occur to him to question it.
Skipper Tom blinked at the painter's wistful gravity. "What's the
row?" he stammered.
Cobden laughed heartily.
"It is hard to speak in a measured way of all this," he went on, all
at once grave again. "After all, perhaps, one guesses; and even the
most cautious guesses go awry. I must not say too much. It is not the
time, at any rate, to say much. Afterward, when I have spoken with
this--this young master, then, perhaps. But I may surely say that the
fame of Terry Lute will soon be very great." His voice rose; he spoke
with intense emphasis. "It will continue, it will grow. Terry Lute's
name will live"--he hesitated--"for generations." He paused now, still
looking into the skipper's inquiring eyes, his own smiling wistfully.
Dreams were already forming. "Skipper Tom," he added, turning away,
"you have a wonderful son."
"Ay," said the skipper, brows drawn; "an' I knows it well enough." He
added absently, with deep feeling, "He've been--_jus' fair
wonderful_."
"He shall learn what I can teach him."
"In the way o' sketchin' off, sir?" There was quick alarm in this.
Cobden struck a little attitude. It seemed to him now to be a moment.
He was profoundly moved. "Terry Lute," he replied, "shall be--a
master!"
"Mr. Cobden, sir," Skipper Tom protested, his face in an anxious
twist, "I'll thank you t' leave un alone."
"I'll make a man of him!" cried Cobden, grieved.
Skipper Tom smiled grimly. It was now his turn to venture a curious
survey. He ran his eye over the painter's slight body with twinkling
amusement. "Will you, now?" he mused. "Oh, well, now," he drawled,
"I'd not trouble t' do it an I was you. You're not knowin', anyhow,
that he've not made a man of _hisself_. 'Tis five year' since he done
that there damned sketch." Then uneasily, and with a touch of sullen
resentment: "I 'low you'd best leave un alone, sir. He've had trouble
enough as it is."
"So?" Cobden flashed. "Already? That's _good_."
"It haven't done no harm," the skipper deliberated; "but--well, God
knows I'd not like t' see another young one cast away in a mess like
that."
Cobden was vaguely concerned. He did not, however, at the moment
inquire. It crossed his mind, in a mere flash, that Skipper Tom had
spoken with a deal of feeling. What could this trouble have been?
Cobden forgot, then, that there had been any trouble at all.
"Well, well," Skipper Tom declared more heartily, "trouble's the foe
o' folly."
Cobden laughed pleasantly and turned once more to the picture. He was
presently absorbed in a critical ecstasy. Skipper Tom, too, was by
this time staring out upon the pictured sea, as though it lay in
fearsome truth before him. He was frowning heavily.
* * * * *
It was the picture of a breaker, a savage thing. In the foreground,
lifted somewhat from the turmoil, was a black rock. It was a
precarious foothold, a place to shrink from in terror. The sea reached
for it; the greater waves boiled over and sucked it bare. It was wet,
slimy, overhanging death. Beyond the brink was a swirl of broken
water--a spent breaker, crashing in, streaked with irresistible
current and flecked with hissing fragments.
Adjectives which connote noise are unavoidable. Cobden has said that
the picture expressed a sounding confusion. It was true. "You could
_hear_ that water," says he, tritely. There was the illusion of
noise--of the thud and swish of breaking water and of the gallop of
the wind. So complete was the illusion, and so did the spirit of the
scene transport the beholder, that Cobden once lifted his voice above
the pictured tumult. Terry Lute's art was indeed triumphant!
A foreground, then, of slimy rock, an appalling nearness and an
inspiration of terror in the swirling breaker below. But not yet the
point of dreadful interest. That lay a little beyond. It was a black
ledge and a wave. The ledge still dripped the froth of a deluge which
had broken and swept on, and there was now poised above it, black,
frothy-crested, mightily descending, another wave of the vast and
inimical restlessness of the sea beyond.
There was a cliff in the mist above; it was a mere suggestion, a gray
patch, but yet a towering wall, implacably there, its presence
disclosed by a shadow where the mist had thinned. Fog had broken over
the cliff and was streaming down with the wind. Obscurity was
imminent; but light yet came from the west, escaping low and clean.
And there was a weltering expanse of sea beyond the immediate turmoil;
and far off, a streak of white, was the offshore ice.
It was not a picture done in gigantic terms. It was not a climax.
Greater winds have blown; greater seas have come tumbling in on the
black rocks of Out-of-the-Way. The point is this, Cobden says, that
the wind was rising, the sea working up, the ice running in, the fog
spreading, thickening, obscuring the way to harbor. The imagination
of the beholder was subtly stimulated to conceive the ultimate worst
of that which might impend, which is the climax of fear.
Cobden turned to Skipper Tom.
"What does Terry Lute call it?" he asked.
"Nothin'."
"H-m-m!" Cobden deliberated. "It must bear a name. A great picture
done by a great hand. It must bear a name."
"Terry calls it jus' 'My Picture.'"
"Let it be called 'The Fang,'" said Cobden.
"A very good name, ecod!" cried Skipper Tom. "'Tis a picture meant t'
scare the beholder."
* * * * *
Terry Lute was not quite shamelessly given to the practice of
"wieldin' a pencil" until he discovered that he could make folk laugh.
After that he was an abandoned soul, with a naughty strut on the
roads. For folk laughed with flattering amazement, and they clapped
Terry Lute on his broad little back, and much to his delight they
called him a limb o' the devil, and they spread his fame and his
sketches from Out-of-the-Way and Twillingate Long Point to Cape Norman
and the harbors of the Labrador. Caricatures, of course, engaged
him--the parson, the schoolmaster, Bloody Bill Bull, and the crusty
old shopkeeper. And had a man an enemy, Terry Lute, at the price of a
clap on the back and an admiring wink, would provide him with a
sketch which was like an arrow in his hand. The wink of admiration
must be above suspicion, however, else Terry's cleverness might take
another direction.
By these saucy sketches, Terry Lute was at one period involved in
gravest trouble; the schoolmaster, good doctor of the wayward,
thrashed him for a rogue; and from a prophetic pulpit the parson,
anxious shepherd, came as near to promising him a part in perdition as
honest conviction could bring him to speak. Terry Lute was startled.
In the weakness of contrition he was moved to promise that he would
draw their faces no more, and thereafter he confined his shafts of
humor to their backs; but as most men are vulnerable to ridicule from
behind, and as the schoolmaster had bandy legs and the parson meek
feet and pious shoulders, Terry Lute's pencil was more diligently, and
far more successfully, employed than ever. The illicit exercise, the
slyer art, and the larger triumph, filled him with chuckles and winks.
"Ecod!" he laughed to his own soul; "you is a sure-enough, clever
little marvel, Terry Lute, me b'y!"
What gave Terry Lute's art a profound turn was the sheer indolence of
his temperamental breed. He had no liking at all for labor; spreading
fish on the flakes, keeping the head of his father's punt up to the
sea on the grounds, splitting a turn of birch and drawing a bucket of
water from the well by the Needle, discouraged the joy of life. He
scolded, he begged, he protested that he was ailing, and so behaved in
the cleverest fashion; but nothing availed him until after hours of
toil he achieved a woeful picture of a little lad at work on the flake
at the close of day. It was Terry Lute himself, no doubt of it at all,
but a sad, worn child, with a lame back, eyes of woe, gigantic
tears--a tender young spirit oppressed, and, that there might be no
mistake about the delicacy of his general health, an angel waiting
overhead.
"Thomas," wept Terry Lute's mother, "the wee lad's doomed."
"Hut!" Skipper Tom blurted.
"Shame t' you!" cried Terry's mother, bursting into a new flood of
tears.
After that, for a season, Terry Lute ran foot-loose and joyous over
the mossy hills of Out-of-the-Way.
"Clever b'y, Terry Lute!" thinks he, without a qualm.
It chanced by and by that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at
the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist
of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the
seat of the scorner. It was observed presently--no eyes so keen for
such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way--that Bill Bull was coming
under conviction of his conscience; and when this great news got
abroad, Terry Lute, too, attended upon Parson Down's preaching with
regularity, due wholly, however, to his interest in watching the
tortured countenance of poor Bill Bull. It was his purpose when first
he began to draw to caricature the vanquished wretch. In the end he
attempted a moving portrayal of "The Atheist's Stricken State," a
large conception.
It was a sacred project; it was pursued in religious humility, in a
spirit proper to the subject in hand. And there was much opportunity
for study. Bill Bull did not easily yield; night after night he
continued to shift from heroic resistance to terror and back to heroic
resistance again. All this time Terry Lute sat watching. He gave no
heed whatsoever to the words of Parson Down, with which, indeed, he
had no concern. He heard nothing; he kept watch--close watch to
remember. He opened his heart to the terror of poor Bill Bull; he
sought to feel, though the effort was not conscious, what the atheist
endured in the presence of the wrath to come. He watched; he memorized
every phrase of the torture, as it expressed itself in the changing
lines of Bill Bull's countenance, that he might himself express it.
Afterward, in the kitchen, he drew pictures. He drew many; he
succeeded in none. He worked in a fever, he destroyed in despair, he
began anew with his teeth clenched. And then all at once, a windy
night, he gave it all up and came wistfully to sit by the kitchen
fire.
"Is you quit?" his mother inquired.
"Ay, Mother."
"H-m-m!" says Skipper Tom, puzzled. "I never knowed you t' quit for
the night afore I made you."
Terry Lute shot his father a reproachful glance.
"I must take heed t' my soul," said he, darkly, "lest I be damned for
my sins."
Next night Terry Lute knelt at the penitent bench with old Bill Bull.
It will be recalled now that he had heard never a word of Parson
Down's denunciations and appeals, that he had been otherwise and
deeply engaged. His response had been altogether a reflection of Bill
Bull's feeling, which he had observed, received, and memorized, and so
possessed in the end that he had been overmastered by it, though he
was ignorant of what had inspired it. And this, Cobden says, is a
sufficient indication of that mastery of subject, of understanding and
sympathy, which young Terry Lute later developed and commanded as a
great master should, at least to the completion of his picture, in the
last example of his work, "The Fang."
At any rate, it must be added that after his conversion Terry Lute was
a very good boy for a time.
* * * * *
Terry Lute was in his fourteenth year when he worked on "The Fang."
Skipper Tom did not observe the damnable disintegration that occurred,
nor was Terry Lute himself at all aware of it. But the process went
on, and the issue, a sudden disclosure when it came, was inevitable in
the case of Terry Lute. When the northeasterly gales came down with
fog, Terry Lute sat on the slimy, wave-lapped ledge overhanging the
swirl of water, and watched the spent breaker, streaked with current
and flecked with fragments; and he watched, too, the cowering ledge
beyond, and the great wave from the sea's restlessness as it thundered
into froth and swept on, and the cliff in the mist, and the approach
of the offshore ice, and the woeful departure of the last light of
day. But he took no pencil to the ledge; he memorized in his way. He
kept watch; he brooded.
In this way he came to know in deeper truth the menace of the sea; not
to perceive and grasp it fleetingly, not to hold it for the uses of
the moment, but surely to possess it in his understanding.
His purpose, avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder
of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly
into peril of his soul.
"I 'low," says he between his teeth to Skipper Tom, "that she'll scare
the wits out o' _you_, father."
Skipper Tom laughed.
"She'll have trouble," he scoffed, "when the sea herself has failed."
"You jus' wait easy," Terry grimly promised him, "till I gets her off
the stocks."
At first Terry Lute tentatively sketched. Bits of the whole were
accomplished,--flecks of foam and the lines of a current,--and torn
up. This was laborious. Here was toil, indeed, and Terry Lute bitterly
complained of it. 'Twas bother; 'twas labor; there wasn't no _sense_
to it. Terry Lute's temper went overboard. He sighed and shifted,
pouted and whimpered while he worked; but he kept on, with courage
equal to his impulse, toiling every evening of that summer until his
impatient mother shooed him off to more laborious toil upon the task
in his nightmares. The whole arrangement was not attempted for the
first time until midsummer. It proceeded, it halted, it vanished.
Seventeen efforts were destroyed, ruthlessly thrust into the kitchen
stove with no other comment than a sigh, a sniff of disgust, and a
shuddering little whimper.
It was a windy night in the early fall of the year, blowing high and
wet, when Terry Lute dropped his crayon with the air of not wanting to
take it up again.
He sighed, he yawned.
"I got her done," says he, "confound her!" He yawned again.
"Too much labor, lad," Skipper Tom complained.
"Pshaw!" says Terry, indignantly. "I didn't _labor_ on her."
Skipper Tom stared aghast in the presence of this monstrously futile
prevarication.
"Ecod!" he gasped.
"Why, father," says Terry, airily, "I jus'--sketched her. Do she scare
you?"
From Terry Lute's picture Skipper Tom's glance ran to Terry Lute's
anxious eyes.
"She do," said he, gravely; "but I'm fair unable t' fathom"--pulling
his beard in bewilderment--"the use of it all."
Terry Lute grinned.
* * * * *
It did not appear until the fall gales were blowing in earnest that
"The Fang" had made a coward of Terry Lute. There was a gray sea that
day, and day was on the wing. There was reeling, noisy water
roundabout, turning black in the failing light, and a roaring lee
shore; and a gale in the making and a saucy wind were already jumping
down from the northeast with a trail of disquieting fog. Terry Lute's
spirit failed; he besought, he wept, to be taken ashore. "Oh, I'm
woeful scared o' the sea!" he complained. Skipper Tom brought him in
from the sea, a whimpering coward, cowering degraded and shamefaced in
the stern-sheets of the punt. There were no reproaches. Skipper Tom
pulled grimly into harbor. His world had been shaken to ruins; he was
grave without hope, as many a man before him has fallen upon the
disclosure of inadequacy in his own son.
It was late that night when Skipper Tom and the discredited boy were
left alone by the kitchen fire. The gale was down then, a wet wind
blowing wildly in from the sea. Tom Lute's cottage shook in its
passing fingers, which seemed somehow not to linger long enough to
clutch it well, but to grasp in driven haste and sweep on. The boy sat
snuggled to the fire for its consolation; he was covered with shame,
oppressed, sore, and hopeless. He was disgraced: he was outcast, and
now forever, from a world of manly endeavor wherein good courage did
the work of the day that every man must do. Skipper Tom, in his slow
survey of this aching and pitiful degradation, had an overwhelming
sense of fatherhood. He must be wise, he thought; he must be wise and
very wary that fatherly helpfulness might work a cure.