and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for the weather,
permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever.
He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemned
and rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come in
twice a day and keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged ten, and
looked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but somewhere inside
his bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion. He found fuel for
the cracked stove, somehow or other. He brought it in a dirty sack which
he carried on his back, and he kept warmth in Tig's miserable body.
Moreover, he found food of a sort--cold, horrible bits often, and Tig
wept when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him.
Tig was getting better, though he was conscious of a weak heart and a
lamenting stomach, when, to his amazement, the Sparrow ceased to visit
him. Not for a moment did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that only
something in the nature of an act of Providence, as the insurance
companies would designate it, could keep the little bundle of bones away
from him. As the days went by, he became convinced of it, for no Sparrow
came, and no coal lay upon the hearth. The basement window fortunately
looked toward the south, and the pale April sunshine was beginning
to make itself felt, so that the temperature of the room was not
unbearable. But Tig languished; sank, sank, day by day, and was kept
alive only by the conviction that the letter announcing the award of the
thousand-dollar prize would presently come to him. One night he reached a
place, where, for hunger and dejection, his mind wandered, and he seemed
to be complaining all night to Nora of his woes. When the chill dawn
came, with chittering of little birds on the dirty pavement, and an
agitation of the scrawny willow “pussies,” he was not able to lift his
hand to his head. The window before his sight was but “a glimmering
square.” He said to himself that the end must be at hand. Yet it was
cruel, cruel, with fame and fortune so near! If only he had some food,
he might summon strength to rally--just for a little while! Impossible
that he should die! And yet without food there was no choice.
Dreaming so of Nora's dinners, thinking how one spoonful of a stew such
as she often compounded would now be his salvation, he became conscious
of the presence of a strong perfume in the room. It was so familiar
that it seemed like a sub-consciousness, yet he found no name for this
friendly odor for a bewildered minute or two. Little by little, however,
it grew upon him, that it was the onion--that fragrant and kindly bulb
which had attained its apotheosis in the cuisine of Nora Finnegan of
sacred memory. He opened his languid eyes, to see if, mayhap, the plant
had not attained some more palpable materialization.
Behold, it was so! Before him, in a brown earthen dish,--a most familiar
dish,--was an onion, pearly white, in placid seas of gravy, smoking and
delectable. With unexpected strength he raised himself, and reached for
the dish, which floated before him in a halo made by its own steam. It
moved toward him, offered a spoon to his hand, and as he ate he heard
about the room the rustle of Nora Finnegan's starched skirts, and now
and then a faint, faint echo of her old-time laugh--such an echo as one
may find of the sea in the heart of a shell.
The noble bulb disappeared little by little before his voracity, and in
contentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back upon his pillow
and slept.
Two hours later the postman knocked at the door, and receiving no
answer, forced his way in. Tig, half awake, saw him enter with no
surprise. He felt no surprise when he put a letter in his hand bearing
the name of the magazine to which he had sent his short story. He was
not even surprised, when, tearing it open with suddenly alert hands, he
found within the check for the first prize--the check he had expected.
All that day, as the April sunlight spread itself upon his floor, he
felt his strength grow. Late in the afternoon the Sparrow came back,
paler, and more bony than ever, and sank, breathing hard, upon the
floor, with his sack of coal.
“I've been sick,” he said, trying to smile. “Terrible sick, but I come
as soon as I could.”
“Build up the fire,” cried Tig, in a voice so strong it made the Sparrow
start as if a stone had struck him. “Build up the fire, and forget you
are sick. For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be hungry no
more!”
FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to
listen, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people,
and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great
schools at Reykjavik. She is especially prized by them here in this
new country where the Icelandmen are settled--this America, so new in
letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books.
So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be
very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the
free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her
pipe and begins her tale.
She is very old. Her daughters and sons are all dead, but her
granddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a physician,
says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are others who
say that she is older still. She watches all that the Iceland people do
in the new land; she knows about the building of the five villages on
the North Dakota plain, and of the founding of the churches and the
schools, and the tilling of the wheat farms. She notes with suspicion
the actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store,
instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she
shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every
fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in
the fire faster than it can be turned from the churn.
She watches yet other things. All winter long the white snows reach
across the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold. In the
morning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she notes
golden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray--which is not
often--she notes that they grow as ashen as a face with the death shadow
on it. Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves. But
at these things she looks only casually. It is when the blue shadows
dance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove, and
stands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of her
cane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restored
after four decades of decrepitude.
The young Icelandmen say:
“Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance of
the shadows.”
“There are no clouds,” she replies, and points to the jewel-like blue of
the arching sky.
“It is the drifting air,” explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who has
been in the Northern seas. “As the wind buffets the air, it looks blue
against the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that makes the dancing
shadows.”
But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, and
those who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, and
contortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone.
“But Urda Bjarnason,” says Ingeborg Christianson, the pert young wife
with the blue-eyed twins, “why is it we see these things only when we
stand beside you and you help us to the sight?”
“Because,” says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes,
“having eyes ye will not see!” Then the men laugh. They like to hear
Ingeborg worsted. For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one from
Mountain, and another from Winnipeg?
Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things.
“To-day,” says Urda, standing by the little window and watching the
dance of the shadows, “a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West,
and then it died.”
The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stopped
at the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so--that John
Christianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but that
he breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died.
“Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton,” says Urda; “all are
laden with wheat, and in one is a stranger. He has with him a strange
engine, but its purpose I do not know.”
Six hours later the drivers of three empty sledges stop at the house.
“We have been to Milton with wheat,” they say, “and Christian Johnson
here, carried a photographer from St. Paul.”
Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselves
through the silent and white winters. And they prefer above all things
to talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race for a
thousand years. Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, for
she is the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughter
of storytellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to John
Thorlaksson to sing--he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snow
at night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors to
listen, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking music.
In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda's
granddaughter, it sometimes happens that twenty men will gather about
the stove. They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put their fur
gauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm, and then
stretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire. The room is
fetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair in
the warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake their
heads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythm
from between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that of
the dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in all
the world--language so simple that even great scholars could find no
simpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand.
“Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of the
Island of Fire, and when the children looked from their windows they saw
only wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep gleam of the
sea. They caught the shine of the sea through an eye-shaped opening in
the rocks, and all the long night of winter it gleamed up at them, like
the eye of a dead witch. But when it sparkled and began to laugh, the
children danced about the hut and sang, for they knew the bright summer
time was at hand. Then their father fished, and their mother was gay.
But it is true that even in the winter and the darkness they were happy,
for they made fishing nets and baskets and cloth together,--Jon and Loa
and their father and mother,--and the children were taught to read in
the books, and were told the sagas, and given instruction in the part
singing.
“They did not know there was such a thing as sorrow in the world, for no
one had ever mentioned it to them. But one day their mother died. Then
they had to learn how to keep the fire on the hearth, and to smoke the
fish, and make the black coffee. And also they had to learn how to live
when there is sorrow at the heart.
“They wept together at night for lack of their mother's kisses, and in
the morning they were loath to rise because they could not see her face.
The dead cold eye of the sea watching them from among the lava rocks
made them afraid, so they hung a shawl over the window to keep it out.
And the house, try as they would, did not look clean and cheerful as it
had used to do when their mother sang and worked about it.
“One day, when a mist rested over the eye of the sea, like that which
one beholds on the eyes of the blind, a greater sorrow came to them, for
a stepmother crossed the threshold. She looked at Jon and Loa, and made
complaint to their father that they were still very small and not likely
to be of much use. After that they had to rise earlier than ever, and to
work as only those who have their growth should work, till their hearts
cracked for weariness and shame. They had not much to eat, for their
stepmother said she would trust to the gratitude of no other woman's
child, and that she believed in laying up against old age. So she put
the few coins that came to the house in a strong box, and bought little
food. Neither did she buy the children clothes, though those which their
dear mother had made for them were so worn that the warp stood apart
from the woof, and there were holes at the elbows and little warmth to
be found in them anywhere.
“Moreover, the quilts on their beds were too short for their growing
length, so that at night either their purple feet or their thin
shoulders were uncovered, and they wept for the cold, and in the
morning, when they crept into the larger room to build the fire, they
were so stiff they could not stand straight, and there was pain at their
joints.
“The wife scolded all the time, and her brow was like a storm sweeping
down from the Northwest. There was no peace to be had in the house.
The children might not repeat to each other the sagas their mother had
taught them, nor try their part singing, nor make little doll cradles of
rushes. Always they had to work, always they were scolded, always their
clothes grew thinner.
“'Stepmother,' cried Loa one day,--she whom her mother had called the
little bird,--'we are a-cold because of our rags. Our mother would have
woven blue cloth for us and made it into garments.'
“'Your mother is where she will weave no cloth!' said the stepmother,
and she laughed many times.
“All in the cold and still of that night, the stepmother wakened, and
she knew not why. She sat up in her bed, and knew not why. She knew not
why, and she looked into the room, and there, by the light of a burning
fish's tail--'twas such a light the folk used in those days--was a
woman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she had none. All with
her hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stooping and bending, rising and
swaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in a
midwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp was blue and mystical to see,
the woof was white, and shone with its whiteness, so that of all the
webs the stepmother had ever seen, she had seen none like to this.
“Yet the sight delighted her not, for beyond the drifting web, and
beyond the weaver she saw the room and furniture--aye, saw them through
the body of the weaver and the drifting of the cloth. Then she knew--as
the haunted are made to know--that 'twas the mother of the children come
to show her she could still weave cloth. The heart of the stepmother was
cold as ice, yet she could not move to waken her husband at her side,
for her hands were as fixed as if they were crossed on her dead breast.
The voice in her was silent, and her tongue stood to the roof of her
mouth.
“After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her--the wraith
of the weaver moved her way--and round and about her body was wound the
shining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was as
hateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that her
flesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned.
“In the early morning she awoke to the voices of the children,
whispering in the inner room as they dressed with half-frozen fingers.
Still about her was the hateful, beautiful web, filling her soul with
loathing and with fear. She thought she saw the task set for her, and
when the children crept in to light the fire--very purple and thin were
their little bodies, and the rags hung from them--she arose and held out
the shining cloth, and cried:
“'Here is the web your mother wove for you. I will make it into
garments!' But even as she spoke the cloth faded and fell into
nothingness, and the children cried:
“'Stepmother, you have the fever!'
“And then:
“'Stepmother, what makes the strange light in the room?'
“That day the stepmother was too weak to rise from her bed, and the
children thought she must be going to die, for she did not scold as they
cleared the house and braided their baskets, and she did not frown at
them, but looked at them with wistful eyes.
“By fall of night she was as weary as if she had wept all the day, and
so she slept. But again she was awakened and knew not why. And again
she sat up in her bed and knew not why. And again, not knowing why, she
looked and saw a woman weaving cloth. All that had happened the night
before happened this night. Then, when the morning came, and the
children crept in shivering from their beds, she arose and dressed
herself, and from her strong box she took coins, and bade her husband go
with her to the town.
“So that night a web of cloth, woven by one of the best weavers in all
Iceland, was in the house; and on the beds of the children were blankets
of lamb's wool, soft to the touch and fair to the eye. After that the
children slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they told the sagas
their mother had taught them, or tried their part songs as they sat
together on their bench, the stepmother was silent. For she feared
to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see the
mother's wraith.”
A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
THERE was only one possible objection to the drawing-room, and that was
the occasional presence of Miss Carew; and only one possible objection
to Miss Carew. And that was, that she was dead.
She had been dead twenty years, as a matter of fact and record, and to
the last of her life sacredly preserved the treasures and traditions of
her family, a family bound up--as it is quite unnecessary to explain to
any one in good society--with all that is most venerable and heroic in
the history of the Republic. Miss Carew never relaxed the
proverbial hospitality of her house, even when she remained its sole
representative. She continued to preside at her table with dignity and
state, and to set an example of excessive modesty and gentle decorum to
a generation of restless young women.
It is not likely that having lived a life of such irreproachable
gentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any way
not pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted to
the last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar of
propriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, one
June morning, while trimming her rose trellis, and her lavender-colored
print was not even rumpled when she fell, nor were more than the tips of
her little bronze slippers visible.
“Isn't it dreadful,” said the Philadelphians, “that the property should
go to a very, very distant cousin in Iowa or somewhere else on the
frontier, about whom nobody knows anything at all?”
The Carew treasures were packed in boxes and sent away into the Iowa
wilderness; the Carew traditions were preserved by the Historical
Society; the Carew property, standing in one of the most umbrageous
and aristocratic suburbs of Philadelphia, was rented to all manner
of folk--anybody who had money enough to pay the rental--and society
entered its doors no more.
But at last, after twenty years, and when all save the oldest
Philadelphians had forgotten Miss Lydia Carew, the very, very distant
cousin appeared. He was quite in the prime of life, and so agreeable and
unassuming that nothing could be urged against him save his patronymic,
which, being Boggs, did not commend itself to the euphemists. With him
were two maiden sisters, ladies of excellent taste and manners, who
restored the Carew china to its ancient cabinets, and replaced the Carew
pictures upon the walls, with additions not out of keeping with
the elegance of these heirlooms. Society, with a magnanimity almost
dramatic, overlooked the name of Boggs--and called.
All was well. At least, to an outsider all seemed to be well. But,
in truth, there was a certain distress in the old mansion, and in
the hearts of the well-behaved Misses Boggs. It came about most
unexpectedly. The sisters had been sitting upstairs, looking out at the
beautiful grounds of the old place, and marvelling at the violets,
which lifted their heads from every possible cranny about the house, and
talking over the cordiality which they had been receiving by those upon
whom they had no claim, and they were filled with amiable satisfaction.
Life looked attractive. They had often been grateful to Miss Lydia Carew
for leaving their brother her fortune. Now they felt even more grateful
to her. She had left them a Social Position--one, which even after
twenty years of desuetude, was fit for use.
They descended the stairs together, with arms clasped about each other's
waists, and as they did so presented a placid and pleasing sight. They
entered their drawing-room with the intention of brewing a cup of tea,
and drinking it in calm sociability in the twilight. But as they entered
the room they became aware of the presence of a lady, who was already
seated at their tea-table, regarding their old Wedgewood with the air of
a connoisseur.
There were a number of peculiarities about this intruder. To begin with,
she was hatless, quite as if she were a habitué; of the house, and
was costumed in a prim lilac-colored lawn of the style of two decades
past. But a greater peculiarity was the resemblance this lady bore to a
faded daguerrotype. If looked at one way, she was perfectly discernible;
if looked at another, she went out in a sort of blur. Notwithstanding
this comparative invisibility, she exhaled a delicate perfume of sweet
lavender, very pleasing to the nostrils of the Misses Boggs, who stood
looking at her in gentle and unprotesting surprise.
“I beg your pardon,” began Miss Prudence, the younger of the Misses
Boggs, “but--”
But at this moment the Daguerrotype became a blur, and Miss Prudence
found herself addressing space. The Misses Boggs were irritated. They
had never encountered any mysteries in Iowa. They began an impatient
search behind doors and portières, and even under sofas, though
it was quite absurd to suppose that a lady recognizing the merits of the
Carew Wedgewood would so far forget herself as to crawl under a sofa.
When they had given up all hope of discovering the intruder, they saw
her standing at the far end of the drawing-room critically examining a
water-color marine. The elder Miss Boggs started toward her with stern
decision, but the little Daguerrotype turned with a shadowy smile,
became a blur and an imperceptibility.
Miss Boggs looked at Miss Prudence Boggs.
“If there were ghosts,” she said, “this would be one.”
“If there were ghosts,” said Miss Prudence Boggs, “this would be the
ghost of Lydia Carew.”
The twilight was settling into blackness, and Miss Boggs nervously lit
the gas while Miss Prudence ran for other tea-cups, preferring, for
reasons superfluous to mention, not to drink out of the Carew china that
evening.
The next day, on taking up her embroidery frame, Miss Boggs found a
number of oldfashioned cross-stitches added to her Kensington. Prudence,
she knew, would never have degraded herself by taking a cross-stitch,
and the parlor-maid was above taking such a liberty. Miss Boggs
mentioned the incident that night at a dinner given by an ancient friend
of the Carews.
“Oh, that's the work of Lydia Carew, without a doubt!” cried the
hostess. “She visits every new family that moves to the house, but she
never remains more than a week or two with any one.”
“It must be that she disapproves of them,” suggested Miss Boggs.
“I think that's it,” said the hostess. “She doesn't like their china, or
their fiction.”
“I hope she'll disapprove of us,” added Miss Prudence.
The hostess belonged to a very old Philadelphian family, and she shook
her head.
“I should say it was a compliment for even the ghost of Miss Lydia Carew
to approve of one,” she said severely.