Israel Zangwill

“Matt, Matt, what’s thet thar noise?”

Matt opened his eyes vaguely, shaking off his younger brother’s frantic clutch.

“It’s on’y the frost,” he murmured, closing his eyes again. “Go to sleep, Billy.”

Since the sled accident that had crippled him for life, Billy was full of nervous terrors, and the night had been charged with mysterious noises. Within the lonely wooden house weather-boards and beams cracked; without, twigs snapped and branches crashed; at times Billy heard reports as loud as pistol-shots. One of these shots meant the bursting of the wash-basin on the bedroom bench, Matt having forgotten to empty its contents, which had expanded into ice.

Matt curled himself up more comfortably and almost covered his face with the blanket, for the cold in the stoveless attic was acute. In the gray half-light the rough beams and the quilts glistened with frozen breaths. The little square window-panes were thickly frosted, and below the crumbling rime was a thin layer of ice left from the day before, solid up to the sashes, and leaving no infinitesimal dot of clear glass, for there was nothing to thaw it except such heat as might radiate through the bricks of the square chimney that came all the way from the cellar through the centre of the flooring to pop its head through the shingled roof.

“Matt!” Billy was nudging his brother in the ribs again.

“Hullo!” grumbled the boy.

“Thet thar ain’t the frost. Hark!”

“‘Tis, I tell ye. Don’t you hear the pop, pop, pop?”

“Not thet; t’other down-stairs.”

“Oh, thet’s the wind, I reckon.”

“No; it’s some ’un screamin’!”

Matt raised himself on his elbow, and listened.

“Why, you gooney, it’s on’y mother rowin’ Harriet,” he said, reassuringly, and snuggled up again between the blankets.

The winter, though yet young, had already achieved a reputation. Blustrous north winds had driven inland, felling the trees like lumbermen. In the Annapolis Basin myriads of herrings, surprised by Jack Frost before their migratory instinct awoke, had been found frozen in the weirs, and the great salt tides overflowing the high dykes had been congealed into a chocolate sea that, when the liquid water beneath ran back through the sluices, lay solid on the marshes. By the shores of the Basin of Minas sea-birds flapped ghostlike over amber ice-cakes, whose mud-streaks under the kiss of the sun blushed like dragon’s blood.

Snow had fallen heavily, whitening the “evergreen” hemlocks, and through the shapeless landscape half-buried oxen had toiled to clear the blurred roads bordered by snow-drifts, till the three familiar tracks of hoofs and sleigh-runners came in sight again. The stage to Truro ploughed its way along, with only dead freight on its roof and a furred animal or two, vaguely human, shivering inside. Sometimes the mail had to travel by horse, and sometimes it altogether disappointed Billy and his brothers and sisters of the excitement of its passage; for the stage road ran by the small clearing, in the centre of which their house and barn had been built—a primitive gabled house, like a Noah’s ark, ugliness unadorned, and a cheap log barn of the “lean-to” type, with its cracks corked with moss, and a roof of slabs.

Jack Frost might stop the mail, but he could not stop the gayeties of the season. “Wooden frolics” and quilting-parties and candy-pullings and infares and Baptist revival-meetings had been as frequent as ever; and part of Matt’s enjoyment of his couch was a delicious sense of oversleeping himself legitimately, for even his mother could hardly expect him to build the fire at five when he had only returned from Deacon Hailey’s “muddin’ frolic” at two. He saw himself coasting down the white slopes in his hand-sled, watching the wavering radiance of the northern lights that paled the moon and the stars, and wishing his mother would not spoil the after-glow of the night’s pleasure and the poetic silence of the woods by grumbling about his grown-up sister Harriet, who had deserted them for an earlier escort home. He felt himself well rewarded for his afternoon’s labor in loading marsh mud for the top-dressing of Deacon Hailey’s fields; and a sudden remembrance of how his mother had been rewarded for helping Mrs. Hailey to prepare the feast made him nudge Billy in his turn.

“Cheer up, Billy. We’ve brought back a basket o’ goodies: there’s plum-cake, doughnuts—”

“It’s gettin’ worst,” said Billy. “Hark!”

Matt mumbled impatiently and redirected his thoughts to the “muddin’ frolic.” The images of the night swept before him with almost the vividness of actuality; he lost himself in memories as though they were realities, and every now and then a dash of sleep streaked these waking visions with the fantasy of dream.

“My, how the fiddle shrieks!” runs the boy’s reminiscence. “Why don’t ole Jupe do his tunin’ to home, the pesky nigger? We’re all waitin’ for the reel—the ‘fours’ are all made up; Ruth Hailey and me hev took the floor. Ruth looks jest great with thet white frock an’ the pink sash, thet’s a fact. Hooray!—‘The Devil among the Tailors!’—La, lalla, lalla, lalla, lalla, flip-flop!” He hears the big winter top-boots thwack the threshing-floor. Keep it up! Whoop! Faster! Ever faster! Oh, the joy of life!

Now he is swinging Ruth in his arms. Oh, the merry-go-round! The long rows of candles pinned by forks to the barn walls are guttering in the wind of the movement; the horses tied to their mangers neigh in excitement; from between their stanchions the mild-eyed cows gaze at the dancers, perking their naÏve noses and tranquilly chewing the cud. A bat, thawed out of his winter nap by the heat of the temporary stove, flutters drowsily about the candles; and the odors of the stable and of the packed hay mingle with the scents of the ball-room. Matt’s exhaustive eye, though never long off pretty Ruth’s face, takes in even the grains of wheat that gild many a tousled head of swain or lass as the shaking of the beams dislodges the unthreshed kernels in the mow under the eaves, and, keener even than the eye of his collie, Sprat, notes the mice that dart from their holes to seize the fallen drops of tallow. But perhaps Sprat is only lazy, for he will not vacate his uncomfortable snuggery under the stove, though he has to shift his carcass incessantly to escape the jets of tobacco-juice constantly squirted in his direction. It serves him right, thinks his young master, for persisting in coming, though, for the matter of that, the creature, having superintended the mud-hauling, has more right to be present than Bully Preep. “Wonder why sister Harriet lets him dance with her so of’n!” the panorama of his thought proceeds. “What kin she see in the skunk, fur lan’ sakes? I told her ’bout the way he bully-ragged me when he was boss o’ the school and I was a teeny shaver. But she don’t seem to care a snap. Girls are queer critters, thet’s a fact. He used to put a chip on my shoulder, an’ egg the fellers on to flick it off. But, gosh! didn’t I hit him a lick when he pulled little Ruth’s hair? He’d a black eye, thet’s a fact, though he giv’ me two, an’ mother an’ teacher ’ud a giv’ me one more apiece, but there warn’t no more left. I took it out in picters though, I guess. My! didn’t ole McTavit’s face jest look reedic’lous when he discovered Bully Preep in the fly-leaf of every readin’-book. Thet’s jest how mother is glarin’ at Harriet this moment. Pop! pop! pop! What a lot o’ ginger-beer an’ spruce-beer Deacon Hailey is openin’! Pop! pop! pop! He don’t seem to notice them thar black bottles o’ rum. He’s ’tarnal cute, is ole Hey. Seems like he’s talkin’ to mother. Wonder how she kin understand him. He allus talks as if his mouth was full o’ words—but it’s on’y tobacco, I reckon. Pop! pop! pop! Thet’s what I allus hear him say, windin’ up with a ‘Hey’—an’ it does rile me some to refuse pumpkin-pie, not knowin’ he’s invitin’ me to anythin’ but hay. I ’spect mother’s heerd him talk considerable, just es I’ve heerd the jays an’ the woodpeckers; though she kin’t tell one from t’other, I vow, through bein’ raised at Halifax. Thunderation! thet’s never her dancin’ with ole Hey! My stars, what’ll her elders say? Well, I wow! She is backslidin’. Ah, she recollecks! She pulls up, her face is like a beet. Ole Hey is argufyin’, but she hangs back in her traces. I reckon she kinder thinks she’s kicked over the dashboard this time. Ah, he’s gone and taken Harriet for a pardner instead; he’ll like sister better, I guess. By gum! He’s kickin’ up his heels like a colt when it fust feels the crupper. I do declare Marm Hailey is lookin’ pesky ugly ’bout it. She’s a mighty handsome critter, anyways. Pity she kin’t wear her hat with the black feather indoors—she does look jest spliffin’ when she drives her horses through the snow. Whoop! Keep it up! Sling it out, ole Jupe! More rosin. Yankee doodle, keep it up, Yankee doodle dandy! Go it, you cripples; I’ll hold your crutches! Why, there’s Billy dancin’ with the crutch I made him!” he tells himself as his vision merges in dream. “Pop! pop! pop! How his crutch thumps the floor! Poor Billy! Fancy hevin’ to hop through life on thet thar crutch, like a robin on one leg! Or shall I hev to make him a longer one when he’s growed up? Mebbe he won’t grow up—mebbe he’ll allus be the identical same size; and when he’s an ole man he’ll be the right size again, an’ the crutch’ll on’y be a sorter stick. I wish I hed a stick to make this durned cow keep quiet—I kin’t milk her! So! so! Daisy! Ole Jupe’s music ain’t for four-legged critters to dance to! My! what’s thet nonsense ’bout a cow? Why, I’m dreamin’. Whoa, there! Give her a tickler in the ribs, Billy. Hullo! look out! here’s father come back from sea! Quick, Billy, chuck your crutch in the hay-mow. Kin’t you stand straighter nor that? Unkink your leg, or father’ll never take you out to be a pirate. Fancy a pirate on a crutch! It was my fault, father, for fixin’ up thet thar fandango, but mother’s lambasted me a’ready, an’ she wanted to shoot herself. But it don’t matter to you, father—you’re allus away a’most, an’ Billy’s crutch kin’t get into your eye like it does into mother’s. She was afeared to write to you ’bout it. Thet’s on’y Billy in a fit—you see, Daisy kicked him, and they couldn’t fix his leg back proper; it don’t fit, so he hes fits now an’ then. He’ll never be a pirate now. Drive the crutch deeper into the ice, Charley; steady there with the long pole. The iron pin goes into the crutch, Billy; don’t get off the ashes, you’ll slide under the sled. Now, then, is the rope right? Jump on the sled, you girls and fellers! Round with the pole! Whoop! Hooray! Ain’t she scootin’ jest! Let her rip! Pop! Snap! Geewiglets! The rope’s give! Don’t jump off, Billy, I tell you; you’ll kill yourself! Stick in your toes an’ don’t yowl; we’ll slacken at the dykes. Look at Ruth—she don’t scream. Thunderation! We’re goin’ over into the river! Hold tight, you uns! Bang! Smash! We’re on the ice-cakes! Is thet you thet’s screamin’, Billy? You ain’t hurt, I tell you—don’t yowl—you gooney—don’t—”

But it was not Billy’s voice that he heard screaming when the films of sleep really cleared away. The little cripple was nestling close up to him with the same panic-stricken air as when they rode that flying sled together. This time it was impossible to mistake their mother’s voice for the wind—it rose clearly in hysterical vituperation.

“An’ you orter be ’shamed o’ yourself, I do declare, goin’ home all alone in a sleigh with a young man—in the dead o’ night, too!”

“There were more nor ourn on the road; and since Abner Preep was perlite enough—”

“Yes, an’ you didn’t think o’ me on the road oncet, I bet! If young Preep wanted to do the perlite, he’d’ a’ took me in his father’s sleigh, not a wholesome young gal.”

“But I was tar’d out with dancin’ e’en a’most, and you on’y—”

“Don’t you talk about my dancin’, you blabbin’ young slummix! Jest keep your eye on your Preeps with their bow-legs an’ their pigeon-toes.”

“His legs is es straight es yourn, anyhow.”

“P’raps you’ll say thet I’ve got Injun blood next. Look at his round shoulders and his lanky hair—he’s a Micmac, thet’s what he is. He on’y wants a few baskets and butter-tubs to make him look nateral. Ugh! I kin smell spruce every time I think on him.”

“It’s you that hev hed too much spruce-beer, hey?”

“You sassy minx! Folks hev no right to bring eyesores into the world. I’d rather stab you than see you livin’ with Abner Preep. It’s a squaw he wants, thet’s a fact, not a wife!”

“I’d rather stab myself than go on livin’ with you.”

For a moment or two Matt listened in silent torture. The frequency of these episodes had made him resigned, but not callous. Now Harriet’s sobs were added to the horror of the altercation, and Matt fancied he heard a sound of scuffling. He jumped out of bed in an agony of alarm. He pulled on his trousers, caught up his coat, and slipped it on as he flew barefoot down the rough wooden stairs, with his woollen braces dangling behind him.

In the narrow icy passage at the foot of the stairs, in the bleak light from the row of little crusted panes on either side of the door, he found his mother and sister, their rubber-cased shoes half-buried in snow that had drifted in under the door. Mrs. Strang was fully dressed in her “frolickin’” costume, which at that period included a crinoline; she wore an astrakhan sacque, reaching to the knees, and a small poke-bonnet, plentifully beribboned, blooming with artificial flowers within and without, and tied under the chin by broad, black, watered bands. Round her neck was a fringed afghan, or home-knit muffler. She was a tall, dark, voluptuously-built woman, with blazing black eyes and handsome features of a somewhat Gallic cast, for she came of old Huguenot stock. She stood now drawing on her mittens in terrible silence, her bosom heaving, her nostrils quivering. Harriet was nearer the door, flushed and panting and sobbing, a well-developed auburn blonde of sixteen, her hair dishevelled, her bodice unhooked, a strange contrast to the other’s primness.

“Where you goin’?” she said, tremulously, as she barred her mother’s way with her body.

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” answered her mother, carefully smoothing out her right mitten.

“Nonsense, mother,” broke in Matt. “You kin’t go out—it’s snowin’.”

He brushed past the pair and placed himself with his back to the door, his heart beating painfully. His mother’s mad threats were familiar enough, yet they never ceased to terrify. Some day she might really do something desperate. Who knew?

“I’m goin’ to drownd myself,” repeated Mrs. Strang, carefully winding the muffler round her head.

She made a step towards the door, sweeping the limp Harriet roughly behind her.

“You kin’t get out,” Matt said, firmly. “Why, you hevn’t hed breakfast yet.”

“What do I want o’ breakfus? Your sister is breakfus ’nough for me. Clear out o’ the way.”

“Don’t you let her go, Matt!” cried Harriet. “I’ll quit instead.”

“You!” exclaimed her mother, turning fiercely upon her, while her eyes spat fire. “You are young and wholesome—the world is afore you. You were not brought from a great town to be buried in a wilderness. Marry your Preeps an’ your Micmacs, and nurse your pappooses. God has cursed me with froward children an’ a cripple, an’ a husband that goes gallivantin’ onchristianly about the world with never a thought for his ’mortal soul, an’ the Lord has doomed me to worship Him in the wrong church. Mother yourselves; I throw up the position.”

“Is it my fault if father hesn’t wrote you lately?” cried Harriet. “Is it my fault if there’s no Baptist church to Cobequid village?”

“Shut your mouth, you brazen hussy! You’ve drove your mother to her death! Stand out o’ my way, Matthew; don’t you disobey my dyin’ reques’.”

“I sha’n’t,” said the boy, squaring his shoulders firmly against the door. “Where kin you drownd yourself? The pond’s froze an’ the tide’s out.”

He could think of no other argument for the moment, and he had an incongruous vision of her sliding down to the river on her stomach, as the boys often did, down the steep, reddish-brown slopes of greasy mud, or sinking into a squash-hole like an errant horse.

“HE PLACED HIMSELF WITH HIS BACK TO THE DOOR”
“HE PLACED HIMSELF WITH HIS BACK TO THE DOOR”

“Why, there’s on’y mud-flats,” he added.

“I’ll wait on the mud-flats fur the merciful tide.” She fastened her bonnet-strings firmly.

“The river is full of ice,” he urged.

“There will be room fur me,” she answered. Then, with a sudden exclamation of dismay, “My God! you’ve got no shoes and socks on! You’ll ketch your death. Go up-stairs d’reckly.”

“No,” replied Matt, becoming conscious for the first time of a cold wave creeping up his spinal marrow. “I’ll ketch my death, then,” and he sneezed vehemently.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks d’reckly, you wretched boy. You know what a bother I hed with you last time.”

He shook his head, conscious of a trump card.

“D’ye hear me! Put on your shoes and socks!”

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque,” retorted Matt, clinching his fists.

“Put on your shoes an’ socks!” repeated his mother.

“Take off your bonnet an’ sacque, an’ I’ll put on my shoes an’ socks.”

They stood glaring defiance at each other, like a pair of duellists, their breaths rising in the frosty air like the smoke of pistols—these two grotesque figures in the gray light of the bleak passage, the tall, fierce brunette, in her flowery bonnet and astrakhan sacque, and the small, shivering, sneezing boy, in his patched homespun coat, with his trailing braces and bare feet. They heard Harriet’s teeth chatter in the silence.

“Go back to bed, you young varmint,” said Matt, suddenly catching sight of Billy’s white face and gray night-gown on the landing above. “You’ll ketch your death.”

There was a scurrying sound from above, a fleeting glimpse of other little night-gowned figures. Matt and his mother still confronted each other warily. And then the situation was broken up by the near approach of sleigh-bells. They stopped slowly, mingling their jangling with the creak of runners sliding over frosty snow, then the scrunch of heavy boots travelled across the clearing. Harriet flushed in modest alarm and fled up-stairs. Mrs. Strang hastily retreated into the kitchen, and for one brief moment Matt breathed freely, till, hearing the click of the door-latch, he scented gunpowder. He dashed towards the door and pressed the thumb-latch, but it was fastened from within.

“Harriet!” he gasped, “the gun! the gun!”

He beat at the door, his imagination seeing through it. His loaded gun was resting on the wooden hooks fastened to the beam in the ceiling. He heard his mother mount a chair; he tried to break open the door, but could not. The chances of getting round by the back way flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed as quickly. There was no time—in breathless agony he waited the report of the gun. Crash! A strange, unexpected sound smote his ears—he heard the thud of his mother’s body striking the floor. She had stabbed herself, then, instead. Half mad with excitement and terror, he backed to the end of the passage, took a running leap, and dashed with his mightiest momentum against the frail battened door. Off flew the catch, open flew the door with Matt in pursuit, and it was all the boy could do to avoid tumbling over his mother, who sat on the floor among the ruins of a chair, rubbing her shins, her bonnet slightly disarranged, and the gun, still loaded, demurely on its perch. What had happened was obvious; some of the little Strang mice, taking advantage of the cat’s absence at the “muddin’ frolic,” had had a frolic on their own account, turning the chair into a sled, and binding up its speedily-broken leg to deceive the maternal eye. It might have supported a sitter; under Mrs. Strang’s feet it had collapsed ere her hand could grasp the gun.

“The pesky young varmints!” she exclaimed, full of this new grievance. “They might hev crippled me fur life. Always a-tearin’ an’ a-rampagin’ an’ a-ruinatin’. I kin’t keep two sticks together. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position.”

The sound of the butt-end of a whip battering the front-door brought her to her feet with a bound. She began dusting herself hastily with her hand.

“Well, what’re you gawkin’ at?” she inquired. “Kin’t you go an’ unbar the door, ’stead o’ standin’ there like a stuck pig?”

Matt knew the symptoms of volcanic extinction; without further parley he ran to the door and took down the beechen bar. The visitor was “ole Hey,” who drove the mail. The deacon came in, powdered as from his own grist-mill, and added the snow of his top-boots to the drift in the hall. There were leather-faced mittens on his hands, ear-laps on his cap, tied under the chin, a black muffler, hoary with frost from his breath, round his neck and mouth, and an outer coat of buffalo-skin swathing his body down to his ankles, so that all that was visible of him was a little inner circle of red face with frosted eyebrows.

Mrs. Strang stood ready in the hall with a genial smile, and Matt, his heart grown lighter, returned to the kitchen, extracted the family foot-gear from under the stove, where it had been placed to thaw, and putting on his own still-sodden top-boots, he set about shaving whittlings and collecting kindlings to build the fire.

“Here we are again, hey!” cried the deacon, as heartily as his perpetual, colossal quid would permit.

“Do tell! is it really you?” replied Mrs. Strang, with her pleasant smile.

“Yes—dooty is dooty, I allus thinks,” he said, spitting into the snow-drift and flicking the snow over the tobacco-juice with his whip. “Whatever Deacon Hailey’s hand finds to do he does fust-rate—thet’s a fact. It don’t seem so long a while since you and me were shakin’ our heels in the Sir Roger. Nay, don’t look so peaked—there’s nuthin’ to make such a touse about. You air a partic’ler Baptist, hey? An’ I guess you kinder allowed Deacon Hailey would be late with the mail, hey? But he’s es spry es if he’d gone to bed with the fowls. You won’t find the beat of him among the young fellers nowadays—thet’s so. They’re a lazy, slinky lot; and es for doin’ their dooty to their country or their neighbor—”

“Hev you brought me a letter?” interrupted Mrs. Strang, anxiously.

“I guess—but you’re goin’ out airly?”

“I allowed I’d walk over to the village to see if it hed come.”

“Oh, but it ain’t the one you expec’.”

“No?” she faltered.

“I guess not. Thet’s why I brought it myself. I kinder scented it was suthin’ special, and so I reckoned I’d save you the trouble of trudgin’ to the post-office. Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to spare himself trouble to obleege a fellow-critter. Do es you’d be done by, hey?” The deacon never lost an opportunity of pointing the moral of a position. Perhaps his sermonizing tendency was due to his habit of expounding the Sunday texts at a weekly meeting, or perhaps his weekly exposition was due to his sermonizing tendency.

“Thank you.” Mrs. Strang extended her hand for the letter. He produced it slowly, apparently from up the sleeve of his top-most coat, a wet, forlorn-looking epistle, addressed in a sprawling hand. Mrs. Strang turned it about, puzzled.

“P’raps it’s from Uncle Matt,” ejaculated Matt, appearing suddenly at the kitchen door.

“You’ve got Uncle Matt on the brain,” said Mrs. Strang. “It’s a Halifax stamp.” She could not understand it; her own family rarely wrote to her, and there was no hand of theirs in the address. Deacon Hailey lingered on, apparently prepared, in his consideration for others, to listen to the contents of his “fellow-critter’s” letter.

“Ah, sonny,” he said to Matt, “only jest turned out, and not slicked up yet. When I was your age I hed done my day’s chores afore the day hed begun. No wonder the Province is so ’tarnally behindhand, hey?”

“Thet’s so,” Matt murmured. Pop! pop! pop! was all that he heard, so that ole Hey’s moral exhortations left him neither a better nor a wiser boy.

Mrs. Strang still held the letter in her hand, apparently having become indifferent to it. Ole Hey did not know she was waiting for him to go, so that she might put on her spectacles and read it. She never wore her spectacles in public, any more than she wore her nightcap. Both seemed to her to belong to the privacies of the inner life, and glasses in particular made an old woman of one before one’s time. If she had worn out her eyes with needle-work and tears, that was not her neighbors’ business.

The deacon, with no sign of impatience, elaborately unbuttoned his outer buffalo-skin, then the overcoat beneath that, and the coat under that, and then, pulling up the edge of his cardigan that fitted tightly over his waistcoats, he toilsomely thrust his horny paw into his breeches-pocket and hauled out a fig of “black-jack.” Then he slowly produced from the other pocket a small tool-chest in the guise of a pocket-knife, and proceeded to cut the tobacco with one of the instruments.

“Come here, sonny!” he cried.

“The deacon wants you,” said Mrs. Strang.

Matt moved forward into the passage, wondering. Ole Hey solemnly held up the wedge of black-jack he had cut, and when Matt’s eye was well fixed on it he dislodged the old “chaw” from his cheek with contortions of the mouth, and blew it out with portentous gravity. Lastly, he replaced it by the wedge of “black-jack,” mouthed and moulded the new quid conscientiously between tongue and teeth, and passed the ball into his right cheek.

“Thet’s the way to succeed in life, sonny. Never throw away dirty afore you got clean, hey?”

Poor Matt, unconscious of the lesson, waited inquiringly and deferentially, but the deacon was finished, and turned again to his mother.

“I ’spect it ’ll be from some of the folks to home, mebbe.”

“Mebbe,” replied Mrs. Strang, longing for solitude and spectacles.

“When did you last hear from the boss?”

“He was in the South Seas, the capt’n, sellin’ beads to the savages. He’d a done better to preach ’em the Word, I do allow.”

“Ah, you kin’t expect godliness from sailors,” said the deacon. “It’s in the sea es the devil spreads his nets, thet’s a fact.”

“The Apostles were fishermen,” Mrs. Strang reminded him.

“Yes; but fishers ain’t sailors, Mrs. Strang. It’s in furrin parts that the devil lurks, and the further a man goes from his family the nearer he goes to the devil, hey?”

Mrs. Strang winced. “But he’s gittin’ our way now,” she protested, unguardedly. “He’s comin’ South with a freight.”

“Ah, joined the blockade-runners, hey?”

Mrs. Strang bit her lip and flushed. “I don’t kear,” the deacon said, reassuringly. “I don’t see why Nova Scotia should go solid for the North. What’s the North done for Nova Scotia ’cept ruin us with their protection dooties, gol durn ’em. They won’t have slaves, hey? Ain’t we their slaves? Don’t they skin us es clean es a bear does a sheep? Ain’t they allus on the lookout to snap up the Province? But I never talk politics. If the North and South want to cut each other’s throats, that’s not our consarn. Mind your own business, I allus thinks, hey? And if your boss kin make a good spec by provisionin’ the Southerners, you’ll be a plaguy sight better off, I vow. And so will I—for, you know, I shall hev to call in the mortgage unless you fork out thet thar interest purty slick. There’s no underhandedness about Deacon Hailey. He gives you fair warnin’.”

“D’rectly the letter comes you shall have it—I’ve often told you so.”

“Mebbe thet’ll be his letter, after all—put his thumb out, I guess, and borrowed another feller’s, hey?”

“No—he’d be nowhere near Halifax,” said Mrs. Strang, her feverish curiosity mounting momently. “Don’t them thar sleigh-bells play a tune! I guess your horses air gettin’ kinder restless.”

“Well—there’s nuthin’ I kin do for you to Cobequid Village?” he said, lingeringly.

Mrs. Strang shook her head. “Thank you, I guess not.”

“You wouldn’t kear to write an answer now—I’d be tolerable pleased to post it for you down thar. Allus study your fellow-critters, I allus thinks.”

“No, thank you.”

Deacon Hailey spat deliberately on the floor.

“Er—you got to home safe this mornin’?”

“Yes, thank you. We all come together, me and Harriet and Matt. ’Twere a lovely walk in the moonlight, with the Aurora Borealis a-quiverin’ and a-flushin’ on the northern horizon.”

“A-h-h,” said the deacon slowly, and rather puzzled. “A roarer! Hey?”

At this moment a sudden stampede of hoofs and a mad jangling of bells were heard without. With a “Durn them beasts!” the deacon breathlessly turned tail and fled in pursuit of the mail-sleigh, mounting it over the luggage-rack. When he had turned the corner, Matt’s grinning face emerged from behind the snow-capped stump of a juniper.

“I reckon I fetched him thet time,” he said, throwing away the remaining snowball, as he hastened gleefully inside to partake of the contents of the letter.

He found his mother sitting on the old settle in the kitchen, her spectacled face gray as the sand on the floor, her head bowed on her bosom. One limp hand held the crumpled letter. She reminded him of a drooping foxglove. The room had a heart of fire now, the stove in the centre glowed rosily with rock-maple brands, but somehow it struck a colder chill to Matt’s blood than before.

“Father’s drownded,” his mother breathed.

“He’ll never know ’bout Billy now,” he thought, with a gleam of relief.

Mrs. Strang began to wring her mittened hands silently, and the letter fluttered from between her fingers. Matt made a dart at it, and read as follows:

Dear Marm,—Don’t take on but ime sorrie to tell you that the Cap is a gone goose we run the block kade oust slick but the 2 time we was took by them allfird Yanks we reckkend to bluff ’em in the fog but about six bells a skwad of friggets bore down on us sudden like ole nick the cap he sees he was hemd in on a lee shoar and he swears them lubberly northers shan’t have his ship not if he goes to Davy Jones his loker he lufs her sharp up into the wind and sings out lower the longbote boys and while the shot was tearin and crashin through the riggin he springs to the hall-yards and hauls down the cullers then jumps through the lazzaret into the store room kicks the head of a carsk of ile in clinches a bit of oakem dips it in the ile and touches a match to it and drops it on the deck into the runin ile and then runs for it hisself jumps into the bote safe with the cullers and we sheer off into the fog mufflin our oars with our caps and afore that tarnation flame bust out to show where we were we warnt there but we heard the everlastin fools poundin away at the poor old innocent Sally Bell till your poor boss dear marm he larfs and ses he shipmets ses he look at good old Sally she’s stickin out her yellow tongue at em and grinnin at the dam goonies beg pardon marm but that was his way he never larfed no more for wed disremembered the cumpess and drifted outer the fog into a skwall and the night was comin on and we drov blind on a reef and capsized but we all struck out for shore and allowed the cap was setting sale the same way as the rest on us but when we reached the harbor the cap he warnt at the helm and a shipmet ses ses he as how he would swim with that air bundle of cullers that was still under his arm and they tangelled round his legs and sorter dragged him under and kep him down like sea-weed and now dear marm he lays in the Gulf of Mexiker kinder rapped in a shroud and gone aloft I was the fust mate and a better officer I never wish to sine with for tho he did sware till all was blue his hart was like an unborn babbys and wishing you a merry Christmas and God keep you and the young orfuns and giv you a happy new year dear marm you deserve it.

ime yours to command,

Hoska Cuddy (Mate).

p s.—i would have writ erlier, but i couldn’t get your address till i worked my way to Halifax and saw the owners scuse me not puttin this in a black onwellop i calclated to brake it eesy.

Matt hastily took in the gist of the letter, then stood folding it carefully, at a loss what to say to the image of grief rocking on the settle. From the barn behind came the lowing of Daisy—half protestation, half astonishment at the unpunctuality of her breakfast. Matt found a momentary relief in pitying the cow. Then his mother’s voice burst out afresh.

“My poor Davie,” she moaned. “Cut off afore you could repent, too deep down fur me to kiss your dead lips. I hevn’t even got a likeness o’ you; you never would be took. I shall never see your face again on airth, and I misdoubt if I’ll meet you in heaven.”

“Of course you will—he saved his flag,” said Matt, with shining eyes.

His mother shook her head, and set the roses on her bonnet nodding gayly to the leaping flame. “Your father was born a Sandemanian,” she sighed.

“What is thet?” said Matt.

“Don’t ask me; there air things boys mustn’t know. And you’ve seen in the letter ’bout his profane langwidge. I never would’ve run off with him; all my folks were agen it, and a sore time I’ve hed in the wilderness ’way back from my beautiful city. But it was God’s finger. I pricked the Bible fur a verse, an’ it came: ‘An’ they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly affirmed it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel.’”

She nodded and muttered, “An’ I was his angel,” and the roses trembled in the firelight. “If you were a good boy, Matt,” she broke off, “you’d know where thet thar varse come from.”

“Hedn’t I better tell Harriet?” he asked.

“Acts, chapter eleven, verse fifteen,” muttered his mother. “It was the finger of God. What’s thet you say ’bout Harriet? Ain’t she finished tittivatin’ herself yet—with her father layin’ dead, too?” She got up and walked to the foot of the stairs. “Harriet!” she shrieked.

Harriet dashed down the stairs, neat and pretty.

“You onchristian darter!” cried Mrs. Strang, revolted by her sprightliness. “Don’t you know father’s drownded?”

Harriet fell half-fainting against the banister. Mrs. Strang caught her and pulled her towards the kitchen.

“There, there,” she said, “don’t freeze out here, my poor child. The Lord’s will be done.”

Harriet mutely dropped into the chair her mother drew for her before the stove. Daisy’s bellowing became more insistent.

“An’ he never lived to take me back to Halifax, arter all!” moaned Mrs. Strang.

“Never mind, mother,” said Harriet, gently. “God will send you back some day. You hev suffered enough.”

Mrs. Strang burst into tears for the first time. “Ah, you don’t know what my life hes been!” she cried, in a passion of self-pity.

Harriet took her mother’s mittened hand tenderly in hers. “Yes we do, mother—yes we do. We know how you hev slaved and struggled.”

As she spoke a panorama of the slow years was fleeting through the minds of all three—the long blank weeks uncolored by a letter, the fight with poverty, the outbursts of temper; all the long-drawn pathos of lonely lives. Tears gathered in the children’s eyes—more for themselves than for their dead father, who for the moment seemed but gone on a longer voyage.

“Harriet,” said Mrs. Strang, choking back her sobs, “bring down my poor little orphans, and wrap them up well. We’ll say a prayer.”

Harriet gathered herself together and went weeping up the stairs. Matt followed her with a sudden thought. He ran up to his room and returned, carrying a square sheet of rough paper.

His mother had sunk into Harriet’s chair. He lifted up her head and showed her the paper.

“Davie!” she shrieked, and showered passionate kisses on the crudely-colored sketch of a sailor—a figure that had a strange touch of vitality, a vivid suggestion of brine and breeze. She arrested herself suddenly. “You pesky varmint!” she cried. “So this is what become o’ the fly-leaf of the big Bible!”

Matt hung his head. “It was empty,” he murmured.

“Yes, but there’s another page thet ain’t—thet tells you to obey your parents. This is how you waste your time ’stead o’ wood-choppin’.”

“Uncle Matt earns his livin’ at it,” he urged.

“Uncle Matt’s a villain. Don’t you go by your Uncle Matt, fur lan’s sake.” She rolled up the drawing fiercely, and Matt placed himself apprehensively between it and the stove.

“You said he wouldn’t be took,” he remonstrated.

Mrs. Strang sullenly placed the paper in her bosom, and the action reminded her to remove her bonnet and sacque. Harriet, drooping and listless, descended the stairs, carrying the two-year-old and marshalling the other little ones—a blinking, bewildered group of cherubs, with tousled hair and tumbled clothes. Sprat came down last, stretching himself sleepily. He had kept the same late hours as Matt, and, returning with him from the “muddin’ frolic,” had crept under his bed.

The sight of the children moved Mrs. Strang to fresh weeping. She almost tore the baby from Harriet’s arms.

“He never saw you!” she cried, hysterically, closing the wee yawning mouth with kisses. Her eyes fell on Billy limping towards the red-hot stove where the others were already clustered.

“An’ he never saw you,” she cried to him, as she adjusted the awed infant on the settle. “Or it would hev broke his heart. Kneel down and say a prayer for him, you mischeevious little imp.”

Billy, thus suddenly apostrophized, paled with nervous fright. His big gray eyes grew moist, a lump rose in his throat. But he knelt down with the rest and began bravely:

“Our Father, which art in heaven—”

“Well, what are you stoppin’ about?” jerked his mother, for the boy had paused suddenly with a strange light in his eyes.

“I never knowed what it meant afore,” he said, simply.

His mother’s eye caught the mystic gleam from his.

“A sign! a sign!” she cried, ecstatically, as she sprang up and clasped the little cripple passionately to her heaving bosom.

CHAPTER II
THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE

The death of his father—of whom he had seen so little—gave Matt a haunting sense of the unsubstantiality of things. What! that strong, wiry man, with the shrewd, weather-beaten face and the great tanned hands and tattooed arms, was only a log swirling in the currents of unknown waters! In vain he strove to figure him as a nebulous spirit—the conception would not stay. Nay, the incongruity seemed to him to touch blasphemy. His father belonged to the earth and the seas; had no kinship with clouds. How well he remembered the day, nearly three years ago, when they had parted forever, and, indeed, it had been sufficiently stamped upon his memory without this final blow.

It is a day of burning August—so torrid that they have left their coats on the beach. They are out on the sand flats, wading for salmon among the giant saucers of salt water, the miniature lakes left by the tide, for this is one of the rare spots in the Province where the fish may be taken thus. What fun it is spearing them in a joyous rivalry that makes the fishers wellnigh jab each other’s toes with their pitchforks, and completely tear each other’s shirt-sleeves away in the friendly tussle for a darting monster, so that the heat blisters their arms with great white blobs that stand out against the brown of the boy’s skin and the ornamental coloring of the man’s. Now and then in their early course, when tiny threads of water spurt from holes in the sand, they pause to dig up the delicate clam, with savory anticipations of chowder. Farther and farther they wander till their backs are bowed with the spoil, the shell-fish in a little basket, the scaly fish strung together by a small rope passing through their gills. The boy carries the shad and the man the heavier salmon. At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene, the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds, the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty.

“Come along, sonny,” says his father, looking back.

But the boy lingers still till the man rejoins him, puzzled.

“What’s in the wind?” he asks. “Is Farmer Wade’s barn on fire?”

“Everythin’s on faar,” says the boy, waving his pitchfork comprehensively. His dialect differs a whit from his more-travelled father’s. In his little God-forsaken corner of Acadia the variously-proportioned mixture of English and American which, with local variations of Lowland and Highland Scotch, North of Ireland brogue and French patois, loosely constitutes a Nova-Scotian idiom, is further tinged with the specific peculiarities that spring from illiteracy and rusticity.

David Strang smiles. “Why, you are like brother Matt,” he says, in amused astonishment. All day his son’s prattle has amused the stranger, but this is a revelation.

“Like your wicked brother Matt?” queries the boy in amaze. David’s smile gleams droller.

“Avast there, you mustn’t hearken to the mother. She knows naught o’ Matt ’cept what I told her. She is Halifax bred, and we lived ’way up country. I ran away to sea, and left him anchored on dad’s farm. When I made port again dad was gone to glory, and Matt to England with a petticoat in tow.”

“But mother said he sold the farm, an’ your share, too.”

“And if he didn’t it’s a pity. He had improved the land, hadn’t he? and I might have been sarved up at fish dinners for all he knew. I don’t hold with this Frenchy law that says all the bairns must share and share alike. The good old Scotch fashion is good ’nough for me—Matt’s the heir, and God bless him.”

“Then why didn’t you marry a Scotchwoman?” asked Matt, with childish irrelevance.

“‘Twas your mother’s fault,” answers David, with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic expression.

“And why didn’t you take her to sea with you?”

“Nay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I either. And then there was Harriet—a little body in long clothes. And the land was pretty nigh cleared,” he adds, with a suspicion of apology in his accent, “and we couldn’t grow ’nough to pay the mortgage if I hadn’t shipped again.”

“And why am I like uncle?”

“Oh, he used to be allus lookin’ at the sky—not to find out whether to git the hay in, mind you, but to make little picturs on the sly in the hay-mow on Sundays, and at last he sold the farm and went to London to make ’em.”

Matt’s heart begins to throb—a strange new sense of kinship stirs within him.

“Hev you got any of them thar picturs?” he inquires, eagerly.

“Not one,” says David, shaking his head contemptuously. “His clouds were all right, because clouds may be anything; but when he came to cows, their own dams wouldn’t know ’em; and as for his ships—why, he used to hoist every inch o’ canvas in a hur’cane. I wouldn’t trust him to tattoo a galley-boy. But he had a power of industry, dear old Matt; and I guess he’s larnt better now, for when I writ to him tellin’ him I was alive and goin’ to get spliced, he writ back he was settled in London in the pictur line, and makin’ money at it, and good-luck to him.”

Matt’s heart swells. That one can actually make money by making pictures is a new idea. He has never imagined that money can be made so easily. Why, he might help to pay off the mortgage! He does not see the need of going to London to make them—he can make them quite well here in his odd moments, and one day he will send them all to this wonderful kinsman of his and ask him to sell them. Five hundred at sixpence each—why, it sounds like one of those faËry calculations with which McTavit sometimes dazzles the school-room. He wonders vaguely whether pictures are equally vendible at that other mighty city whence his mother came, and, if so, whether he may not perhaps help her to accomplish the dream of her married life—the dream of going back there.

“An’ uncle’s got the same name as me!” he cries, in ecstasy.

“I should put it t’other way, sonny,” says his father, dryly; “though when I give it you in his honor I didn’t calc’late it ’ud make you take arter him. But don’t you git it into your figurehead that you’re goin’ to London—you’ve jest got to stay right here and look arter the farm for mother. See? The picturs that God’s made are good ’nough for me—that’s so.”

“Oh yes, dad, I shall allus stay on here,” answers Matt, readily. “It’s Billy who allus wants to be a pirate. Silly Billy! He says—”

His father silences him with a sudden “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?” he asks, startled.

“I guess you’re the silly Billy, standin’ jabberin’ when the tide’s a-rushin’ in. We’ll have to run for it.”

Matt gives a hasty glance to the left, then takes to his heels straight across the sands in pace with his father. The famous “bore” of the Bay of Fundy, in a northerly inlet of which they have been fishing, is racing towards them from the left, and to get to shore they must shoot straight across the galloping current. They are at the head of the bay, where the tide reaches a maximum speed of ten miles an hour, and the sailor, so rarely at home, has forgotten its idiosyncrasy.

“You might ha’ kep’ your weather-eye open,” he growls. “I wonder you’ve never been drownded afore.”

“We shall never do it, father,” pants Matt, taking no notice of the reproach, for the waves are already lapping the rim of the little sand island (cut out by fresh-water rivulets) on which they find themselves, and the pools in which they had waded are filling up rapidly.

“Throw ’em away,” jerks the father; and Matt, with a sigh of regret, unstrings his piscine treasures, and, economically putting the string into his pocket, speeds on with renewed strength. But the sun flares mercilessly through the fulgent haze; and when they reach the end of their island they step into three feet of water, with the safe shore a quarter of a mile off. David Strang, a human revolver in oaths, goes off in a favorite sequence of shots, but hangs fire in the middle, as if damped.

“Strikes me the mother ’ll quote Scripture,” he says, grimly, instead.

“I suppose you can’t swim, sonny?” he adds.

“Not so fur nor thet,” says Matt, meekly.

David grunts in triumphant anger, and, shifting his pitchfork to his left hand, he grasps Matt with his right, and lifts him back on to the burning sand, already soddened by a thin frothy wash.

“Now then, han’ us your fork,” he says, crossly. He knocks out the iron prongs of both the pitchforks, ties the wooden handles securely together by the string from Matt’s discarded fish, and fixes the apparatus across the boy’s breast and under his arms. To finish the job easily he has to climb back on the sand island; for, though he stands in a little eddy, it is impossible to keep his feet against the fierce swirl of the waters; and even on the island, where there are as yet only a few inches of sea, the less sturdy Matt is almost swept away to the right by the mad cavalry charge of the tide on his left flank.

“Now then,” cries David, “it’s about time we were home to supper. I’ll swim ye for your flapjacks.”

“But, father,” says Matt, “you’re not going to carry the fish on your back?”

“They won’t carry me on theirs,” David laughs, regaining his good-humor as the critical moment arrives. “What would the mother think if we came home without a prize in tow! Avast there! I’ll larn you how I’ll get out of carryin’ ’em on my back.”

And with a chuckle he launches himself into the eddy, and shoots forward with a vigorous side-stroke. “This side up with care,” he cries cheerily. “Jump, sonny, straight for’ards.” And in a moment the man and the boy are swimming hard for the strip of shore directly opposite the sand island, the spot where they had left their coats hours before; but neither has the slightest expectation of reaching it, for the tide is sweeping them with fearful velocity to the right of it, so that their course is diagonal; and if they make land at all, it will be very far from their original starting-point. David keeps the boy to port, and adjusts his stroke to his. After a while, feeling himself well buoyed up by the handles, Matt breathes more easily, and gradually becomes quite happy, for the water is calm on the surface, and of the warmth and color of tepid cafÉ au lait, quite a refreshing coolness after the tropical air, and he watches with pleasure the rosy haze deepening into purple without losing its transparency. They pass sea-gulls fighting over the dead fish which Matt left behind, and which have been carried ahead of him in their unresisting course.

“We’re drifting powerful from them thar coats,” grumbles David. “’Twill be a tiresome walk back. If it warn’t for them we could cut across country when we make port.”

Matt strains his vision to the left, but sees only the purple outline of Five Islands, and in the far background the faint peaks of the Cobequid Hills.

“Waal, I’m darned!” exclaims his father, suddenly. “If them thar coats ain’t comin’ to meet us, it’s a pity.”

And presently, sure enough, Matt catches sight of the coats hastening along near the shore.

“We must cut ’em off afore they pass by,” cries his father, hilariously. “Spurt, sonny, spurt. ’Tis a race ’twixt them and us.”

Sea-birds begin to circle low over their heads, scenting David’s fish; but he pushes steadily on, animating his son with playful racing cries.

“We oughter back the coats,” he observes. “They’ve backed us many a time. Just a leetle quicker,” he says, at last, “or they’ll git past yonder p’int, and then they’re off to Truro.”

Matt kicks out more lustily, then his heart almost stops as he suddenly sees Death beneath the lovely purple haze. It is the human swimmers who are in danger of being carried off to Truro if they do not make the shore earlier than “yonder p’int,” for Matt remembers all at once that it is the last point for miles, the shore curving deeply inward. Even if they reach the point in time, they will be thrown back by the centrifugal swirl; they must touch the shore earlier to get in safely. He perceives his father has been aware of the danger from the start, and has been disguising his anxiety under the pretext of racing the coats. He feels proud of this strong, brave man, the cold terror passes from his limbs, and he spurts bravely.

“That’s a little man,” says David; “we’ll catch ’em yet. Lucky it’s sandstone yonder ’stead o’ sand—no fear o’ gettin’ sucked in.”

Now it is the shore that seems racing to meet them—the red reef sticks out a friendly finger, and in another five minutes they are perched upon it, like Gulliver on the Brobdingnagian’s thumb; and what is more, they tie with their coats, meeting them just at the landing-place.

David laughs a long Homeric laugh at the queerness of the incident, quivering like a dog that shakes himself after a swim, and Matt smiles too.

“Them thar sea-birds air a bit off their feed, that’s a fact,” chuckles David, as he surveys his fish; and then the two cut across the forest, drying and steaming in the sun, the elder exhorting the younger to silence, and hiding the prongless pitchforks in the hay-mow before they enter the house, all smiles and salmon.

At the early tea-supper they sit in dual isolation at one end of the table, their chairs close. But lo! Mrs. Strang, passing the hot flapjacks, or “corn-dodgers,” with the superfluous perambulations of an excitable temperament, brushes the back of her hand against Matt’s shoulder, starts, pauses, and brushes it with her palm.

“Why, the boy’s wringin’ wet!” she cries.

“We went wadin’,” David reminds her, meekly.

“Yes, but you don’t wade on your heads,” she retorts.

“I sorter tumbled,” Matt puts in, anxious to exonerate his father.

Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husband’s jacket.

“An’ father kinder stooped to pick me up,” adds Matt.

“You’re a nice Moloch to trust with one’s children!” she exclaims in terrible accents.

David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat drying under it.

“An’ when you kin’t manage to drownd ’em you try to kill ’em with rheumatics, and then I hev all the responsibility. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both o’ you.”

Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces—their shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strang’s voice brings up the rear, and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his oath-repeater—for he never swears before mother and the children except when he is not angry—suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship at St. John’s by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes down to the sea in a ship, and does more business—of a mysterious sort—in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he kisses his bairns and his wife—all amorousness and amiability again—and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so—into the great Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas, all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings; passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny, sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt—no vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green, sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his mother’s face furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep; he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of Harriet’s face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billy’s case Death were no such grisly mystery.

Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy last year’s accident had taken the zest out of Matt’s enjoyment of the ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece—a machine of his own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But this year the glow of the skater’s blood became the heat of remorse when he saw or remembered Billy’s wistful eyes; he gave up skating and contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school at Cobequid Village.

In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the forelock) his father’s death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent (with an emphasis on the “r”) of the “pear’ls of the watter,” and calling for their night’s letters held converse with the postmistress on “the watter and its pear’ls,” and expectorated copiously, presumably in lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in their buffalo robes and “boots”; and it lent an added solemnity to the appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing, balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strang’s from popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow. She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of the “pear’ls of the land,” and walking home from the singing-class the sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of drink, and commiseration for “Ole Hey,” and all the adjacent villages went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum) remarked in his nasal address, “universally respected.” And everybody, including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome graveyard—some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh—a far-stretching, black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences, past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes of the pines.

CHAPTER III
THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH

Other rumors, too, came by coach to the village—rumors of blizzard and shipwreck—each with its opportunities of exhortation and expectoration. But in the lonely forest home, past which the dazzling mail-coach rattled with only a blast on the horn, the tragic end of David Strang stood out in equal loneliness. For Death, when he smites the poor, often cuts off not only the beloved, but the bread-winner; and though, in a literal sense, the Strangs made their own bread, yet it was David who kept the roof over their head and the ground under their feet. But for his remittances the interest on the mortgage, under which they held the farm and the house, could not have been paid, for the produce of the clearing, the bit of buckwheat and barley, barely maintained the cultivators, both Harriet and Matt eking out the resources of the family by earning a little in kind, sometimes even in money. Matt was a skilful soapmaker, decorating his bars with fanciful devices; and he delighted in “sugaring”—a poetic process involving a temporary residence in a log-hut or a lumberman’s cabin in the heart of the forest.

Now that the overdue mortgage money had gone to the bottom of the sea, more money must be raised immediately. That the dead man had any claim upon the consideration of his employers did not occur to the bereaved family; rather, it seemed, he owed the owners compensation for the lost Sally Bell. A family council was held on the evening of the day so blackly begun. Not even the baby was excluded—it sat before the open-doored stove on its mother’s lap and crowed at the great burning logs that silhouetted the walls with leaping shadows. Sprat, too, was present, crouched on “Matt’s mat” (as the children called the rag mat their brother had braided), thrusting forward his black muzzle when the door rattled with special violence, and by his side lay the boy staring into the tumbling flames, yet taking the lead in the council with a new authoritative ring in his voice.

Wherever the realities of life beleaguer the soul, there children are born serious, and experience soon puts an old head on young shoulders. The beady-eyed pappoose that the Indian squaw carries sandwichwise ’twixt back and board does not cry. Dump it down, and it stands stolid like a pawn on a chessboard. Hang it on a projecting knot in the props of a wig-wam, and it sways like a snared rabbit. Matt Strang, strenuous little soul, had always a gravity beyond his years: his father’s removal seemed to equal his years to his gravity. He knew himself the head of the house. Harriet, despite her superior summers, was of the wrong sex, and his mother, though she had physical force to back her, was not a reasoning being. For a time, no doubt, she would be quieted by the peace of the grave which all but the crowing infant felt solemnizing the household, but Matt had no hope of more than a truce.

It was the boy’s brain and the boy’s voice that prevailed at the council-fire. Daisy was to be killed and salted down and sold—fortunately she was getting on in years, and, besides, they could never have had the heart to eat their poor old friend themselves, with her affectionate old nose and her faithful udders. The calves were to become veal, and all this meat, together with the fodder thus set free, Deacon Hailey was to be besought to take at a valuation, in lieu of the mortgage money, for money itself could not be hoped for from Cobequid Village. Though the “almighty dollar” ruled here as elsewhere, it was an unseen monarch, whose imperial court was at Halifax. There Matt might have got current coin, here barter was all the vogue. Accounts were kept in English money; it was not till a few years later that the dollar became the standard coin. For their own eating Matt calculated that he would catch more rabbits and shoot more partridges than in years of yore, and in the summer he would work on neighboring farms. Harriet would have to extend her sewing practice, and collaborate with Matt in making shad-nets for the fishermen, and Mrs. Strang would get spinning jobs from the farmers’ wives. Which being settled with a definiteness that left even a balance of savings, the widow handed the infant in her arms to Harriet, and, replacing it by the big Bible, she slipped on her spectacles with a nervous, involuntary glance round the kitchen, and asked the six-year-old Teddy to stick a finger into the book. Opening the holy tome at that place, she began to read from the head to the end of the chapter in a solemn, prophetic voice that suited with her black cap pinched up at the edges. She had no choice of texts; pricking was her invariable procedure when she felt a call to prelection, and the issue was an uncertainty dubiously delightful; for one day there would be a story or a miracle to stir the children’s blood, and another day a bald genealogy, and a third day a chapter of Revelation, all read with equal reverence as equally inspiring parts of an equally inspired whole.

Matt breathed freely when his mother announced Ezra, chap. x., not because he had any interest in Ezra, but because he knew it was a pictureless portion. When the text was liable to be interrupted by illustrations, the reading was liable to be interrupted by remonstrances, for scarce a picture but bore the marks of his illuminating brush, and his rude palette of ground charcoal, chalk, and berry-juice. He had been prompted to color before his hand itched to imitate, and in later years these episodes of the far East had found their way to planed boards of Western pine, with the figures often in new experimental combinations, and these scenes were in their turn planed away to make room for others equally unsatisfactory to the critical artist. But his mother had never been able to forgive the iniquities of his prime, not even after she had executed vengeance on the sinner. She had brought the sacred volume from her home at Halifax, and a colored Bible she had never seen; color made religion cheerful, destroyed its essential austerity—it could no more be conceived apart from black and white than a minister of the Gospel. An especial grievance hovered about the early chapters of Exodus, for Matt had stained the Red Sea with the reddish hue of the Bay of Fundy—a sacrilege to his mother, to whose fervid imagination the Sea of Miracles loomed lurid with sacred sanguineousness to which no profane water offered any parallel.

But Ezra is far from Exodus, and to-night the reminder was not likely. A gleam of exaltation illumined the reader’s eyes when she read the first verse; at the second her face seemed to flush as if the firelight had shot up suddenly.

“‘Now when Ezra hed prayed an’ when he hed confessed, weepin’ an’ castin’ himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children: fur the people wept very sore.

“‘An’ Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam, answered an’ said unto Ezra, We hev trespassed against our God, an’ hev taken strange wives of the people of the land....’”

She read on, pausing only at the ends of the verses. Harriet knitted stockings over baby’s head; the smaller children listened in awe. Matt’s thoughts soon passed from Shechaniah, the son of Jehiel, uninterested even by his relationship to Elam. Usually when the subject-matter was dull, and when he was tired of watching the wavering shadows on the gray-plastered walls, he got up a factitious interest by noting the initial letter of each verse and timing its length, in view of his Sunday-school task of memorizing for each week a verse beginning with some specified letter. His verbal memory being indifferent, he would spend hours in searching for the tiniest verse, wasting thereby an amount of time in which he could have overcome the longest; though, as he indirectly scanned great tracts of the Bible, it may be this A B C business was but the device of a crafty deacon skilled in the young idea. However this be, Matt’s mind was deeplier moved to-night. The shriek of the blind wind without contrasted with the cheerful crackle of the logs within, and the woful contrast brought up that weird image destined to haunt him for so long.

He shuddered to think of it—down there in the cold, excluded forever from the warm hearth of life. Was not that its voice in the wind—wailing, crying to be let in, shaking the door? His eyes filled with tears. Vaguely he heard his mother’s voice intoning solemnly.

“‘An’ of the sons of Immer; Hanani, and Zebadiah. An’ of the sons of Harim; Maaseiah, an’ Elijah, an’ Shemaiah, an’ Jehiel, an’ Uzziah. An’ of the sons of Pashur....’”

The baby was still smiling, and tangling Harriet’s knitting, but Billy had fallen asleep, and presently Matt found himself studying the flicker of the firelight upon the little cripple’s pinched face.

“‘An’ of the sons of Zattu; Elioenai, Eliashib, Mattaniah, an’ Jeremoth, an’ Zabad, an’ Aziza. Of the sons also of Bebai....’”

The prophetic voice rose and fell unwaveringly, unwearyingly.

“Don’t you think I ought to write and tell Uncle Matt?” came suddenly from the brooding boy’s lips.

“Silence, you son of Belial!” cried his mother indignantly. “How dare you interrupt the chapter, so near the end, too! Uncle Matt, indeed! What’s the mortal use of writin’ to him, I should like to know? Do you think he’s likely to repent any, to disgorge our land? Why, he don’t deserve to know his brother’s dead, the everlastin’ Barabbas. If he’d hed to do o’ me he wouldn’t hev found it so easy to make away with our inheritance, I do allow, and my poor David would hev been alive, and to home here with us to-night, thet’s a fact. Christ hev mercy on us all.” She burst into tears, blistering the precious page. Harriet ceased to ply her needles; they seemed to be going through her bosom. The baby enjoyed a free hand with the wool. Billy slept on. Presently Mrs. Strang choked back her sobs, wiped her eyes, and resumed in a steady, reverential voice:

“‘Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai, Azareel, an’ Shelemiah, Shemariah, Shallum, Amariah, an’ Joseph. Of the sons of Nebo; Jeiel, Mattithiah, Zabad, Zebina, Jadau, an’ Joel, Benaiah.

“‘All these hed taken strange wives, an’ some of them hed wives by whom they hed children.’”

Her voice fell with the well-known droop that marked the close. “Anyways,” she added, “I don’t know your uncle’s address. London is a big place—considerable bigger nor Halifax; an’ he’ll allow we want to beg of him. Never!” She shut the book with an emphatic bang, and Matt rose from Sprat’s side and put it away.

“Of course, I sha’n’t go back to school any more,” he said, lightly, remembering the point had not come up.

“Oh yes, you will.” His mother’s first instinct was always of contradiction.

“I may get a job an’ raise a little money towards the mortgage.”

“What job kin you get in the winter?”

“Why, I kin winnow wheat some,” he reminded her, “an’ chop the neighbors’ wood, an’ sort the vegetables in their cellars.”

“An’ whatever you make by thet,” she reminded him, “you’ll overbalance by what you’d be givin’ away to the school-master. You’ve paid Alic McTavit to the end o’ the season.”

“I guess you’re off the track this load o’ poles, mother,” said Matt, amused by her muddled finance.

Yet it was the less logical if even more specious argument of completing the snow months (for only young and useless children went to school in the summer) that appealed to him. The human mind is strangely under the sway of times and seasons, and the calendar is the stanchest ally of sloth and procrastination, and so Mrs. Strang settled in temporary triumph to her task of making new black mourning dresses for the girls out of her old merino, and a few days afterwards, when Matt had carried out his financial programme satisfactorily (except that Deacon Hailey’s valuation did not afford the estimated surplus), he joined the other children in their pilgrimage schoolward. The young Strangs amounted to a procession. At its head came Matt, drawing Billy on a little hand-sled by a breast-rope that came through the auger-holes in the peaks of the runners, and the end of Sprat, who sneaked after the children, formed a literal tail to it, till, arriving too far to be driven back, the animal ran to the front in fearless gambollings. This morning the air was keen and bright, the absence of wind preventing the real temperature from being felt, and the sun lit up the white woods with cold sparkle. Ere the children had covered the two miles most of them conceived such a new appetite that their fingers itched to undo their lunch packets. A halt was called, the bread-and-molasses was unwrapped, and while the future was being recklessly sacrificed to the present by the younger savages, Matt edified them by drawing on the snow with the point of Billy’s crutch. They followed the development of these designs with vociferous anticipation, one shouting, “A cow,” and another “Ole Hey” before more than a curve was outlined. Matt always amused himself by commencing at the most unlikely part of the figure, and working round gradually in unexpected ways, so as to keep the secret to the last possible moment. Sometimes, when it had been guessed too early, he would contrive to convert a fox into a moose, his enjoyment of his dexterity countervailing the twinge of his conscience. To-day all the animals were tamer than usual. The boy drew listlessly, abstractedly, unresentful when his secret was guessed in the first stages. And at last, half of itself, the crutch began to shape a Face—a Face with shut eyes and dripping hair, indefinably uncanny.

“Father!” cried Ted, in thick, triumphant tones, exultation tempered by mastication. But the older children held their breath, and Teddy’s exclamation was succeeded by an awesome silence. Suddenly a sagging bough snapped and fell, the collie howled, and Matt, roused from his reverie, saw that Billy’s face had grown white as the dead snow. The child was palsied with terror; Matt feared one of his fits was coming on. In a frenzy of remorse he blurred out the face with the crutch, and hustled the sled forward, singing cheerily:

The children took up the burden, sifting themselves instinctively into trebles and seconds in a harmony loud enough to rouse the hibernating bear. Billy’s face returned to its normal pallor, and Matt’s to its abstraction.

In the school-room—a bare, plastered room, cold and uninviting, with a crowd of boys and girls at its notched pine desks—he continued pensive. There was nothing to distract his abstraction, for even Ruth Hailey was away. The geography lesson roused him to a temporary attention. London flitted across his dreams—the Halifax of England, that mighty city in which pictures were saleable for actual coin, and a mighty picture-maker, the Matt Strang of England, was paid for play as if for work. But the reading-book, with its menu of solid stories and essays, peppered with religious texts, restored him to his reveries. McTavit, who was shaping quills with his knife, called upon him to commence the chapter; but he stared at the little pedagogue blankly, unaware of the call. He was noting dreamily how his jagged teeth showed beneath the thin, snuffy upper lip, and the trick the mouth had of remaining wide open after it had ceased talking. He tried to analyze why McTavit was not smiling. Months ago, seeking to make his figures smile, the boy had discovered the rident effect of a wide mouth, and now he essayed to analyze the subtle muscular movements that separate the sublime from the ridiculous. Suddenly the haunting thought recurred to him with a new application. Even McTavit’s freckled face would one day be frozen—those twitching eyelids still, the thin wide lips shut forever. How long more would he stride about his motley school-room, scattering blows and information? Would he come to a stop in the school-room as the clock sometimes did, grown suddenly silent, its oil congealed by the intense cold? Or would Death find him in bed, ready stretched? And the restless boys and girls around him—good God!—they, too, would one day be very peaceful—mere blocks—Carroty Kitty, who was pinching Amy Warren’s arm, and Peter Besant, who was throwing those pellets of bread, and even Simon the Sneak’s wagging tongue would be still as a plummet. They would all grow rigid alike, not all at once, nor in one way, but some very soon, perhaps, and others when they were grown tall, and yet others when they were bent and grizzled; some on sea and some on land, some in this part of the map and some in that, some peacefully, some in pain; petrified one by one, ruthlessly, remorselessly, impartially; till at last all the busy hubbub was hushed, and of all that lively crew of youngsters not one was left to feel the sun and the rain. The pity of it thrilled him; even McTavit’s freckled face grew softer through the veil of mist. Then, as his vision cleared, he saw the face was really darker: strange emotions seemed to agitate it.

“So ye’re obstinate, are ye?” it screamed, with startling suddenness. At the same instant something shining flew through the air, and, whizzing past Matt’s ear, sent back a little thud from behind. Matt turned his head in astonishment, and saw a penknife quivering in the wall. He turned back in fresh surprise, and saw that McTavit’s face had changed, lobster-like, from black to red, as its owner realized how near had been Matt’s (and his own) escape.

“Eh, awake at last, sleepy-head,” he blustered. “There’s na gettin’ your attention. Well, what are ye starin’ at? Are ye na goin’ to fetch me my knife?”

“I’m not a dog,” answered Matt, sullenly.

“Then dinna bark! Ye think because ye’ve lost your father ye’re preevileged—to lose your manners,” he added, with an epigrammatic afterthought that mollified him more than an apology. “I’m verra obleeged to you,” he concluded, with elaborate emphasis, as Simon the Sneak handed him the knife.

“Now, then, sleepy-head,” he said again, “p’r’aps ye’ll read your paragraph—that’s richt, Simon; show him the place.”

McTavit hailed from Cape Breton Isle, and was popularly supposed to soliloquize in Gaelic. This hurt him when he proposed to the postmistress, who had been to boarding-school in Truro. She declared she would not have a man who did not speak good English.

“I do speak guid English,” he protested, passionately. “Mebbe not in the school-room, when I’m talkin’ only to my pupils, and it dinna matter, but in private and in society I’m most parteecular.”

McTavit was still a bachelor, and still spoke guid English. When the reading-lesson had come to an end, Matt was left again to his own thoughts, for while poor McTavit gave the juniors an exercise in grammar which they alleviated by gum-chewing, Matt and a few other pupils were allotted the tranquillizing task of multiplying in copy-books £3949 17s. 11¾d. by 7958. The sums were so colossal that Matt wondered whether they existed in the world; and if so, how many pictures it would be necessary to make to obtain them. An awful silence brooded over the room, for when written exercises were on, the pupils took care to do their talking silently, lest they should be suspected of copying, this being what they were doing. There was a little museum case behind McTavit’s desk, containing stuffed skunks and other animals and local minerals lovingly collected by him—stilbite and heulandite and quartz and amethyst and spar and bits of jasper and curiously clouded agate, picked up near Cape Blomidon amid the dÉbris of crumbling cliffs. At such times McTavit would stand absorbed in the contemplation of his treasures, his rod carelessly tucked under his arm, as one “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Then the tension of silence became positively painful, for the school-room had long since discovered that the museum case was a reflector, and McTavit, though he prided himself on the secret of his Argus eye, never caught any but novices not yet initiated into the traditions. Imagine, therefore, the shock both to him and the room, when to-day the acute stillness was broken by a loud cry of “Bang! bang! bang!” An irresistible guffaw swept over the school, and under cover of the laughter the cute and ready collogued as to “answers.”

“Silence!” thundered McTavit. “Who was that?”

In the even more poignant silence of reaction a small still voice was heard.

“Please, sir, it was me,” said Matt, remorsefully.

“Oh, it was you, was it? Then here’s bang! bang! bang! for ye.” And as he spoke the angry little man accentuated each “bang” with a vicious thwack. Then his eye caught sight of Matt’s copy-book. In lieu of ranged columns of figures was a rough pen-and-ink sketch of a line of great war-ships overhung by smoke-clouds, and apparently converging all their batteries against one little ship, on whose deck a stalwart man stood solitary, wrapped in a flag.

McTavit choked with added rage.

“D-defacin’ your books agen. What—what d’ye call that?” he spluttered.

“Blockade,” said Matt, sulkily.

“Blockhead!” echoed McTavit, and was so pleased with the universal guffaw (whereof the cute and ready took advantage to compare notes as before) that he contented himself with the one slash that was necessary to drive the jest home. But it was one slash too much. Matt’s vocal cannonade had been purely involuntary, but he was willing to suffer for his over-vivid imagination. The last insult, however—subtly felt as an injury to his dead father, too—set his blood on fire. He suddenly remembered that this blockhead was, at any rate, the “head” of a family; that he could no longer afford to be degraded before the little ones, who were looking on with pain and awe. He rose and walked towards the door.

“Where are ye goin’?” cried McTavit.

“To find Captain Kidd’s treasure. I’ve learned all I want to know,” said Matt.

“Ye’d better come back.”

Matt turned, walked back to his seat, possessed himself of his half-empty copy-book, and walked to the door.

“Good-bye, you fellers,” he said, cheerfully, as he passed out. The girls he ignored.

McTavit gave chase with raised rod, regardless of the pandemonium that rose up in his wake. Matt was walking slowly across the field, with Sprat leaping up to lick his face. The dog had rejoined him. McTavit went back, his rod hanging down behind.

Matt walked on sadly, his blood cooled by the sharp air. Another link with the past was broken forever. He looked back at the simple wooden school-house, with the ensign of smoke fluttering above its pitched roof; kinder memories of McTavit surged at his heart—his little jests at the expense of the boys, his occasional reminiscences of his native Cape Breton and of St. John, New Brunswick, with its mighty cathedral, the Life of Napoleon he had lent him last year, his prowess with line and hook the summer he boarded with the Strangs in lieu of school-fees, and then—with a sudden flash—came the crowning recollection of his talent for cutting turreted castles, and tigers, and anything you pleased, out of the close-grained biscuits and the chunks of buckwheat-cake the children brought for lunch. Matt’s thoughts went back to the beginnings of his school career, when McTavit had spurred him on to master the alphabet by transforming his buckwheat-cake into any animal from ass to zebra. He remembered the joy with which he had ordered and eaten his first elephant. Pausing a moment to cut a stick and drive Sprat off with it, he walked back into the wondering school-room.

“Please, sir, I’m sorry I went away so rudely,” he said, “and I’ve cut you a new birch rod.”

McTavit was touched.

“Thank you,” he said, simply, as he took it. “What’s the matter?” he roared, seeing Simon the Sneak’s hand go up.

“Please, sir, hedn’t you better try if he hesn’t split it and put a hair in?”

“Grand idea!” yelled McTavit, grimly. “How’s that?”

And the new birch rod made its trial slash at the raised hand.

CHAPTER IV
“MAN PROPOSES”

Mrs. Strang was busy in Deacon Hailey’s kitchen. The providential death of Mrs. Hailey had given her chores to do at the homestead; for female servants—or even male—were scarce in the colony, and Ruth had been brought up by her mother to play on the harpsichord.

When Mrs. Strang got home after a three mile walk, sometimes through sleet and slush, she would walk up and down till the small hours, spinning carded wool into yarn at her great uncouth wheel, and weeping automatically at her loneliness, reft even of the occasional husband for whom she had forsaken the great naval city of her girlhood, the beautiful century-old capital. “It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position,” she would cry hysterically to the deaf rafters when the children were asleep and only the wind was awake. But the droning wheel went round just the same, steady as the wheel of time (Mrs. Strang moving to and fro like a shuttle), till the task was completed, and morning often found her ill-rested and fractious and lachrymose. Matt would have pitied her more if she had pitied herself less. In the outside world, however, she had no airs of martyrdom, bearing herself genially and independently. At the “revivals” held in private houses she was an important sinful figure, though neither Harriet nor Matt had yet found grace or membership. She smiled a pleasant response to-night when Deacon Hailey came in from the tannery and said “Good-evenin’.” It was a large, low kitchen, heated by an American stove, with a gleaming dresser and black wooden beams, from which hams hung. The deacon felt more comfortable there than in the room in which Ruth was at that moment engaged in tinkling the harpsichord, a room that contained other archaic heirlooms: old china, a tapestry screen, scriptural mottoes worked in ancestral hair, and a large colored lithograph of the Ark on Mount Ararat, for refusing to come away from which Matt had once been clouted by his mother before all the neighbors. The house was, indeed, uncommonly luxurious, sheltered by double doors and windows, and warmly wrapped in its winter cincture of tan-bark.

“An’ how’s Billy?” asked the deacon. “Some folks ’ud say how’s Billy’s mother, but thet I can see fur myself—rael bonny and han’sum, thet’s a fact. It’s sick folk es a Christian should inquire arter, hey?”

“Billy’s jest the same,” replied Mrs. Strang, her handsome face clouding.

“No more fits, hey?”

“No; not for a long time, thank God. But he’ll never be straight again.”

“Ah, Mrs. Strang, we’re all crooked somehow. ’Tis the Lord’s will, you may depend. Since my poor Susan was took, my heart’s all torn and mangled; my heartstrings kinder twisted ’bout her grave. Ah! never kin I forgit her. Love is love, I allus thinks. My time was spent so happy, plannin’ how to make her happy—for ’tis only in makin’ others happy that we git happy ourselves, hey? Now I hev no wife to devote myself to my han’s are empty. I go ’bout lookin’ everyways fur Sunday.”

“Oh, but I’m sure you’ve never got a minute to spare.”

“You may depend,” said the deacon, proudly. “If I ain’t ’tarnally busy what with the tannery an’ the grist-mill an’ the farm an’ the local mail, it’s a pity. I don’t believe in neglectin’ dooty because your heart’s bustin’ within.” He spat sorrowfully under the stove. “My motto is, ‘Take kear o’ the minutes, and the holidays ’ll take kear o’ themselves.’ A man hes no time to waste in this oncivilized Province, where stinkin’ Indians, that never cleared an acre in their lazy lives, hev the right to encamp on a man’s land, an’ cut down his best firs an’ ashes fur their butter-butts and baskets, and then hev the imperence to want to swop the identical same for your terbacco. It’s thievin’, I allus thinks; right-down breakin’ o’ the Commandments, hey?”

“Well, what kin you expec’ from Papists?” replied Mrs. Strang. “Why, fur sixpence the holy fathers forgive ’em all their sins.”

“‘Tain’t often they’ve got sixpence, hey? When ’lection-day comes round agen I won’t vote fur no candidate that don’t promise to coop all them greasy Micmacs up in a reservation, same es they do to Newfoundland. They’re not fit to mix with hard-workin’ Christian folk. Them thar kids o’ yourn, now, I hope they’re proper industrious. A child kin’t begin too airly to larn field-work, hey?”

“Ah, they’re the best children in the world,” said Mrs. Strang. “They’ll do anythin’ an’ eat anythin’ e’en a’most, an’ never a crost word; thet’s a fact.”

The deacon suppressed a smile of self-gratulation. Labor was scarcer than ever that year, and in his idea of marrying Harriet Strang, which he was now cautiously about to broach, the possibility of securing the gratuitous services of the elder children counted not a little, enhancing the beauty of his prospective bride. He replied, feelingly:

“I’m everlastin’ glad to hear it, Mrs. Strang, for I know you kin’t afford t’ employ outside labor. They’re goin’ to arx three shillin’s a day this summer, the blood-suckers.”

“The laborer is worthy of his hire,” quoted Mrs. Strang.

“Yes; but he allus wants to be highered, hey? A seasonable joke ain’t bad in its right place, I allus thinks. You needn’t allus be pullin’ a long face. Thet Matt of yourn, now, I’ve seen him with a face like ole Jupe’s fiddle, and walkin’ along es slow es a bark-mill turns a’most.”

Mrs. Strang sighed.

“Ah, you’re a good woman, Mrs. Strang. There’s no call to blush, fur it’s true. D’ye think Deacon Hailey hesn’t got eyes for what’s under his nose? The way you’re bringing up them thar kids is a credit to the Province. I only hopes they’ll be proper thankful fur it when they’re growed up. It makes my heart bleed a’most, I do declare. Many a time I’ve said to myself, ‘Deacon Hailey, ’tis your dooty to do somethin’ fur them thar orphans.’ Many a time I’ve thought I’d take the elder ones off your han’s. There’s plenty o’ room in the ole farm—’twere built for children, but there’s on’y Ruth left. An’ she isn’t my own, though when you see a gal around from infancy you forgits you ain’t the father, hey? What a pity poor Sophia’s two boys were as delicate as herself.”

“Sophia?” murmured Mrs. Strang, interrogatively.

“Thet was my fust wife afore you came to these parts. She died young, poor critter. Never shall I forgit her. Ah, there’s nothin’ like fust love, I allus thinks. If I hedn’t wanted to hev children to work fur, I should never ha’ married agen. But it’s a selfish business, workin’ for one’s own han’, I allus thinks, knowin’ thet when you die all you’ve sweated fur ’ll go to strangers. An’ now thet I’ve on’y got one soul dependent on me, I feels teetotally onswoggled. What do you say? s’pose I relieve you of Matt—dooty don’t end with passin’ the bag round in church, hey?—it’s on this airth that we’re called upon to sacrifice ourselves—or better still—s’pose I take Harriet off your han’s?”

Mrs. Strang answered, hesitatingly: “It is rael kind o’ you, deacon. But, of course, Harriet couldn’t live here with you.”

“Hey? Why not?”

“She’s too ole.”

“An’ how ole might she be?”

“Gittin’ on for seventeen.”

“I guess thet’s not too ole for me,” he said, with a guffaw.

Mrs. Strang paused, startled. The idea took away her breath. The deacon smiled on. In the embarrassing silence the tinkle of Ruth’s harpsichord sounded like an orchestra.

“You—would—raelly—like my Harriet?” Mrs. Strang said, at last.

“You may depend—I’ve thought a good deal of her, a brisk an’ handy young critter with no boardin’-school nonsense ’bout her.” He worked his quid carefully into the other cheek, complacently enjoying Mrs. Strang’s overwhelmed condition, presumably due to his condescension. “Of course there’s heaps of han’sum gals every ways, but booty is only skin-deep, I allus thinks. She’s very young, too, but thet’s rather in her favor. You can eddicate ’em if you take ’em young. Train up a child, hey?”

“But I’m afeared Harriet wouldn’t give up Abner Preep,” said Mrs. Strang, slowly. “She’s the most obstinate gal, thet’s a fact.”

“Hey? She walks out with Abner Preep?”

“No—not thet! I’ve sot my face agin thet. But I know she wouldn’t give him up, thet’s sartin.”

Ruth’s harpsichord again possessed the silence, trilling forth “Doxology” with an unwarranted presto movement. Mrs. Strang went on: “The time o’ your last muddin’ frolic she danced with him all night e’en a’most and druv off home in his sleigh, an’ there ain’t a quiltin’ party or a candy-pullin’ or an infare but she contrives to meet him.”

“Scendalous!” exclaimed the deacon.

“I don’t see nothin’ scendalous!” replied Mrs. Strang, indignantly. “The young man wants to marry her genuine. ’Pears to me your darter is more scendalous a’most, playin’ hymns as if they were hornpipes. I didn’t arx my folks if I might meet my poor Davie; we went to dances and shows together, and me a Baptist, God forgive me! And Harriet’s jest like that—the hussy—she takes arter her mother.”

“But if you were to talk to her!” urged the deacon.

Mrs. Strang shook her head.

“She’d stab herself sooner.”

“Stab herself sooner’n give up Abner Preep!”

“Sooner’n marry any one else.”

The deacon paused to cut himself a wedge of tobacco imperturbably. There was no trace of his disappointment visible; with characteristic promptitude he was ready for the next best thing.

“Well, who wants her to marry anybody else?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “You don’t, do you?”

“N-n-o,” gasped Mrs. Strang, purpling.

“Thet’s right. Give her her head a bit. It don’t do to tie a grown-up gal to her mammy’s apron-strings. You may take a horse to the water, but you kin’t make her drink, hey? No, no, don’t you worry Harriet with forcin’ husbands on her.”

“I—I—kinder—thought—” gasped Mrs. Strang, looking handsomer than ever in the rosy glow of confusion.

“You kinder thought—” echoed Old Hey, spitting accurately under the stove.

“Thet you wanted Harriet—”

“Thet’s so. I guessed she could live here more comfortable than to home. I don’t ask no reward; ‘the widder and the orphan,’ as Scripter says—hey?”

“You didn’t mean marriage?”

“Hey?” shouted the deacon. “Marriage? Me? Well, I swow! Me, whose Susan hes only been dead five months! A proper thing to suspec’ me of! Why, all the neighbors ’ud be sayin’, ‘Susan is hardly cold in her grave afore he’s thinkin’ of another.’”

“I beg your pardin,” said the abashed woman.

“An’ well you may, I do declare! Five months arter the funeral, indeed! Why, ten months at least must elapse! But you teetotally mistook my meanin’, Mrs. Strang; it’s a woman I’d be wantin’—a woman with a heart an’ a soul, not an unbroken filly. All I was a-thinkin’ of was, Could thet thar Abner Preep clothe and feed your darter? But I ain’t the man to bear malice; and till you kin feel you kin trust her to him or some other man, my house is open to her. I don’t draw back my offer, and when I made it I was quite aware you would hev to be on the spot, too, to look arter her—hey?”

“Me?”

“Well, you’re not too ole, anyways.” And the deacon smiled again. “A’ready you’re here all day e’en a’most.” Here he half knelt down to attend to the stove, which was smoking very slightly. “It wouldn’t be much of a change to sleep here, hey?”

“Oh, but you’re forgittin’ the other children, deacon.”

“Deacon Hailey ain’t the man to forgit anythin’, I guess,” he said, over his shoulder. “Afore he talks he thinks. He puts everythin’ in the tan-pit an’ lets it soak, hey? Is it likely I’d take you over here an’ leave the little uns motherless? I never did like this kind of stove.” He fidgeted impatiently with the mechanism at the back, making the iron rattle.

“I—I—don’t—understand,” faltered Mrs. Strang, her heart beginning to beat painfully.

“How you do go on ter-day, Mrs. Strang! When I ain’t talkin’ o’ marriage you jump at it, and when I am you hang back like a mare afore a six-foot dyke. Ah! thet’s better,” and he adjusted the damper noisily, with a great sigh of satisfaction.

“You want to marry me?” gasped Mrs. Strang. The dark, handsome features flushed yet deeper; her bosom heaved.

“You’ve struck it! I do want ter, thet’s plain!” He rose to his feet, and threw his head back and his chest forward. “You’ll allus find me straightforward, Mrs. Strang. I don’t beat about the bush, hey? But I shouldn’t hev spoke so prematoor if you hedn’t druv me to it by your mistake ’bout Harriet. Es if I could marry a giddy young gal with her head full o’ worldly thoughts! Surely you must hev seen how happy I’ve been to hev you here, arnin’ money to pay off your mortgage. Not that I’d a-called it in anyways! What’s thet thar little sum to me? But I was thinkin’ o’ your feelin’s; how onhappy you would be to owe me the money. And then thinkin’ how to do somethin’ for your children, I saw it couldn’t be done without takin’ you into account. A mother clings to her children. Nater is nater, I allus thinks. And the more I took you into account, the more you figured up. There’s a great mother, I thinks; there’s a God-fearin’ woman. An’ a God-fearin’ woman is a crown to her husban’, hey? If ever I do bring myself to marry agen, thet’s the woman for my money, I vow! When I say money, it’s on’y speakin’ in parables like, ’cause I’m not thet sort o’ man. There air men as ’ud come to you an’ say, ‘See here, Mrs. Strang, I’ve got fifty acres of fust-class interval-land, an’ a thousand acres of upland and forest-land, an’ thirty head o’ cattle, an’ a hundred sheep a’most, an’ a tannery thet, with the shoemaker’s shop attached, brings me in two hundred pound a year, an’ a grist-mill, an’ I carry the local mail, an’ I’ve shares and mortgages thet would make you open your eyes, I tell you, an’ I’m free from encumbrances e’en a’most, whereas you’ve got half a dozen.’ But what does Deacon Hailey say? He says, jest put all thet outer your mind, Mrs. Strang, an’ think on’y o’ the man—think o’ the man, with no one to devote himself to.”

He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it. Emotion made her breathing difficult. In the new light in which he appeared to her she saw that he was still a proper man—straight and tall and sturdy and bright of eye, despite his grizzled beard and hair.

“An’ if you kin’t give him devotion in return, jest you say so plump; take a lesson from his straightforwardness, hey? Don’t you think o’ your mortgage, or his money-bags, ’cause money ain’t happiness, hey? An’ don’t you go sacrificin’ yourself for your children, thinkin’ o’ poor little Billy’s future, ’cause I don’t hold with folks sacrificin’ themselves wholesale; self-preservation is the fust law of nater, hey? an’ it wouldn’t be fair to me. All ye hev to arx yourself is jest this: Kin you make Deacon Hailey happy in his declinin’ years?” He drew himself up to his full height without letting go her hand, and his eyes looked into hers. “Yes, I say declinin’ years—there’s no deception, the ’taters air all up to sample. How ole might you think me?”

“Fifty,” she said, politely.

“Nearer sixty!” he replied, triumphantly. “But I hev my cold bath every mornin’—I’m none o’ your shaky boards that fly into etarnal bits at the fust clout, hey?”

“But you hev been married twice,” she faltered.

“So will you be—when you marry me, hey?” And the deacon lifted her chin playfully. “We’re neither on us rough timber—we’ve both hed our wainy edges knocked off, hey? My father hed three wives—and he’s still hale and hearty—a widower o’ ninety. Like father like son, hey? He’s a deacon, too, down to Digby.”

As Deacon Hailey spoke of his father he grew middle-aged to Mrs. Strang’s vision. But she found nothing to reply, and her thoughts drifted off inconsequently on the rivulet of sacred music.

“But Ruth won’t like it,” she murmured at last.

“Hey? What’s Ruth got to say in the matter? I guess Ruth knows her fifth commandment, an’ so do I. My father is the on’y person whose blessin’ I shall arx on my ’spousals. I allus make a pint o’ thet, you may depend.”

The pathetic picture of Deacon Hailey beseeching his father’s blessing knocked off ten years more from his age, and it was a young and ardent wooer whose grasp tightened momently on Mrs. Strang’s hand.

“We might go to see him together,” he said. “It’s an everlastin’ purty place, Digby.”

“I’d rayther see Halifax,” said Mrs. Strang, weakly. In the whirl of her thoughts Ruth’s tinkling tune seemed the only steady thing in the universe. Oh, if Ruth would only play something bearing on the situation, so that Heaven might guide her in this sudden and fateful crisis!

“Halifax, too, some day,” said the deacon, encouragingly, laying his disengaged hand caressingly on her hair. “We’ll go to the circus together.”

She withdrew herself spasmodically from his touch.

“Don’t ask me!” she cried; “you’re Presbyterian!”

“Well, and what was your last husban’?”

“Don’t ask me. Harriet and Matt air ongodly ’nough as it is; they’ve neither on ’em found salvation.”

“Well, I won’t interfere with your doctrines, you bet. Freedom o’ conscience, I allus thinks. We all sarve the same Maker, hey? I guess you’re purty reg’lar at our church, though.”

“Thet’s God’s punishment on me for runnin’ away from Halifax, where I hed a church of my own to go to, but he never cared nuthin’ ’bout the ’sential rite, my poor Davie. I ought to ha’ been expelled from membership there and then, thet’s a fact, but the elders were merciful. Sometimes I think ’tis the old French nater that makes me backslide; my grandfather came from Paris in 1783, at the end o’ the Amur’can war, and settled to St. Margaret’s Bay; but then he married into a god-fearin’ German family that emigrated there the same time a’most, and that ought to ha’ made things straight agen.”

Mrs. Strang talked on, glad to find herself floating away from the issue. But the deacon caught her by the hand again and hauled her back.

“There won’t be no backslidin’ in Deacon Hailey’s household, you may depend,” he said. “When a woman hes a godly stay-to-home husband, Satan takes to his heels. It’s widders and grass-widders es he flirts with, hey?”

Mrs. Strang colored up again, and prayed silently for help from the harpsichord.

“I kin’t give you an answer yet,” she said, feebly.

Old Hey slowly squirted a stream of tobacco-juice into the air as imperturbably as a stone fountain figure.

“I don’t want your answer yet. Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t dream of marryin’ agen for ages? It don’t matter your bein’ in a hurry ’cause your pardner left you three years back, but I hev the morals o’ the township to consider; it’s our dooty in life to set a good example to the weaker brethren, I allus thinks. Eight months at least must elapse! I on’y spoke out now ’cause o’ your onfortunate mistake ’bout Harriet, and all I want is to be sure thet when I do come to ask you in proper form and in doo course, you won’t say ‘no.’”

Mrs. Strang remained silent. And the harpsichord was silent too. Even that had deserted her; its sound might have been tortured into some applicability, but its silence could be construed into nothing, unless it was taken to give consent. And then all at once Ruth struck a new chord. Mrs. Strang strained her ears to catch the first bar. The deacon could not understand the sudden gleam that lit up her face when the instrument broke into the favorite Nova Scotian song, “The Vacant Chair!” At last Heaven had sent her a sign; there was a vacant chair, and it was her mission to fill it.

“Well, is thet a bargen?” asked the deacon, losing patience.

“If you’re sure you want me,” breathed Mrs. Strang.

In a flash the deacon’s arms were round her and his lips on hers. She extricated herself almost as quickly by main force.

“‘Twarn’t to be yet,” she cried, indignantly.

“Of course not, Mrs. Strang,” retorted the deacon, severely. “On’y you asked if I was sure, and I allowed I’d show you Deacon Hailey was genuine. It’s sorter sealin’ the bargen, hey? I couldn’t let you depart in onsartinty.”

“Well, behave yourself in future,” she said, only half mollified, as she readjusted her hair, “or I’ll throw up the position. I guess I’ll be off now,” and she took bonnet and mantle from a peg.

“Not in anger, Mrs. Strang, I hope. ‘Let all bitterness be put away from you,’ hey? Thet thar han’sum face o’ yourn warn’t meant for thunder-clouds.”

He hastened to help her on with her things, and in the process effected a reconciliation by speaking of new ones—”store clothes”—that would set off her beauty better. Mrs. Strang walked airily through the slushy forest road as on a primrose path. She was excited and radiant—her troubles were rolled away, and her own and her children’s future assured, and Heaven itself had nodded assent. Her lonely heart was to know a lover’s tenderness again; it was swelling now with gratitude that might well blossom into affection. How gay her home should be with festive companies, to be balanced by mammoth revivalist meetings! She would be the centre of hospitality and piety for the country-side.

But as she neared the house—which seemed to have run half-way to meet her—the primroses changed back to slush, and her face to its habitual gloom.

Matt and Harriet were alone in the kitchen. The girl was crocheting, the boy daubing flowers on a board, which he slid under the table as he heard his mother stamping off the wet snow in the passage. Mrs. Strang detected the board, but she contented herself by ordering him to go to bed. Then she warmed her frozen hands at the stove and relapsed into silence. Twenty times she opened her lips to address Harriet, but the words held back. She grew angry with her daughter at last.

“You’re plaguy onsociable to-night, Harriet,” she said, sharply.

“Me, mother?”

“Yes, you. You might tell a body the news.”

“There’s no news to Cobequid. Ole Jupe’s come back from fiddlin’ at a colored ball way down Hants County. He says two darkies hed a fight over the belle.”

Harriet ceased, and her needles clicked on irritatingly. Mrs. Strang burst forth:

“You might ask a body the news.”

“What news can there be down to Ole Hey’s?” Harriet snapped.

“Deacon Hailey,” began Mrs. Strang, curiously stung by the familiar nickname, and pricked by resentment into courage; then her voice failed, and she concluded, almost in a murmur, “is a-thinkin’ of marryin’ agen.”

“The ole wretch!” ejaculated Harriet, calmly continuing her crocheting.

“He’s not so ole!” expostulated Mrs. Strang, meekly.

“He’s sixty! Why, you might as well think o’ marryin’! The idea!”

“Oh, but I’m on’y thirty-five, Harriet!”

“Well, it’s jest es ole. Love-makin’ is on’y for the young.”

“Thet’s jest where you’re wrong, Harriet. Youth is enjoyment enough of itself. It is the ole folks that hev nothin’ else to look fur thet want to be loved. It’s the on’y thing thet keeps ’em from throwin’ up the position, an’ they marry sensibly. Young folks oughter wait till they’ve got sense.”

“The longer they wait the less sense they’ve got! If two people love each other they ought to marry at once, thet’s a fact.”

“Yes; if they’re two ole sensible people.”

“I’m tar’d o’ this talk o’ waitin’,” said Harriet, petulantly. “How ole were you when you ran away with father?”

“You ondecent minx!” ejaculated Mrs. Strang.

“You weren’t no older nor me,” persisted Harriet, unabashed.

“Yes, but I lived in a great city. I saw young men of all shapes and sizes. I picked from the tree—I didn’t take the fust thet fell at my feet; an’ how you can look at an onsightly critter like Abner Preep! I’d rayther see you matched with Roger Besant, for though his left shoulder is half an inch higher than the right a’most, from carrying heavy timbers in the ship-yard, he don’t bend his legs like a couple o’ broken candles.”

“Don’t talk to me o’ Roger Besant—he’s a toad. It’s Abner I love. I don’t kear ’bout his legs; his heart’s in the right place!”

“You mean he’s give it to you!”

“I reckon so!”

“An’ you will fly in my face?”

“I must,” said Harriet, sullenly, “if you don’t take your face out o’ the way.”

“You imperent slummix! An’ you will leave your mother alone?”

“Es soon es Abner kin build a house.”

“Then if you marry Abner Preep,” said Mrs. Strang, rising in all the majesty of righteous menace, “I’ll marry Deacon Hailey.”

“What!” Harriet also rose, white and scared.

“You may depend! I’m desprit! You kin try me too far. You know the wust, now. I will take my face out o’ the way, you onnatural darter! I will take it to one thet ’preciates it.”

There was a painful silence. Mrs. Strang eyed her daughter nervously. Harriet seemed dazed.

“You’d marry Ole Hey?” she breathed at last.

“You’d marry young Preep!” retorted the mother

“I’m a young gal!”

“An’ I’m an ole woman! Two ole folks is es good a match es two young uns.”

“Ah, but you don’t allow Abner and me is a good match!” said Harriet, eagerly.

“If you allow the deacon and me is.”

Their eyes met.

“You see, there’s the young uns to think on,” said Mrs. Strang. “If you were to go away, how could I get along with the mortgage?”

“Thet’s true,” said Harriet, relenting a little.

“An’ if we were all to go to the farm, there’d be the house for you and Abner.”

Harriet flushed rosily.

“An’ mebbe the deacon wouldn’t be hard with the mortgage!”

“Mebbe,” murmured Harriet. Her heart went pit-a-pat. But suddenly her face clouded.

“But what will Matt say?” she half whispered, as if afraid he might be within hearing. “I guess he’ll be riled some.”

“Oh, he’ll be all right if you kinder break the news to him an’ explain the thing proper. I reckon he won’t take to the deacon at first.”

“The deacon! It’s Abner I’m thinkin’ on!”

“Abner! What does it matter what he thinks of Abner? ’Tain’t es if Matt was older nor you. He’s got nothin’ to say in the matter, I do allow.”

“But he calls him Bully Preep, and says he used to wallop him at McTavit’s.”

“And didn’t he desarve it?” asked Mrs. Strang, indignantly.

“He says he won’t hev him foolin’ aroun’. He calls him a mean skunk.”

“And who’s Matt, I should like to know, to pass his opinions on his elders an’ betters? You jest take no notice of his ’tarnation imperence and he’ll dry up. It’s hevin’ a new father he’ll be peaked about. Thet’s why you’d better do the talkin’ to Matt!”

“Then you’ll hev to tell him ’bout Abner,” bargained Harriet.

But neither had the courage.

CHAPTER V
PEGGY THE WATER-DRINKER

The old year had rolled off into the shadows, and the new had spun round as far as April. Spring came to earth for a few hours a day, and behind her Winter, whistling, clanged his iron gates, refreezing the morass to which she had reduced the roads. Even at noon there was no genial current in the air, unless you took the sheltered side of hills and trees, and found Spring nestling shyly in windless coverts, though many a se’n-night had still to pass ere, upon some more shaded hummock, the harbinger Mayflower would timidly put forth a white bud laden with delicate odor. Everywhere, down the hills and along the tracks, in every rut and hollow, the sun saw a thousand dancing rivulets gleam and run, and great freshets stir up the sullen, ice-laden rivers to sweep away dams and mills, but the moon looked down on a white country demurely asleep.

Early in the month, Matt having previously said farewell in earnest to McTavit’s school-room, left home for the spring sugaring. Billy, alas! could not accompany him as of yore, so Sprat was left behind, too, by way of compensation to Billy. For company and co-operation, Matt took with him an Indian boy whose Christian name (for he was a Roman Catholic) was Tommy.

Matt had picked up Tommy in the proximate woods, where the noble savage ran wild in cast-off Christian clothes. Tommy belonged to a tribe that had recently pitched its wigwams in the backlands, a mile from Cobequid Village. To Mrs. Strang, who despatched the sugaring expedition and provisioned it, he was merely “a filthy brat who grinned like a Chessy cat,” but to Matt he incarnated the poetry of the primitive, and even spoke it. Not that Matt had more than a few words of Algonquinese, but Tommy broke English quite unhesitatingly; and his remarks, if terse and infrequent, were flowery and sometimes intelligible. They generally ran backward, after the manner of Micmac, which is as highly inflected as Greek or Hebrew. For the admiring Matt there was an atmosphere of romance about the red man which extended even to the red boy, and he had set himself to win Tommy’s heart in exchange for tobacco, which was itself obtained by another piece of barter. Tommy smoked a clay pipe, being early indurated to hardship, after the Spartan custom of his tribe. There were sketches of Tommy, colored like the Red Sea or the Bay of Fundy, in Matt’s secret gallery. Tommy was easy to do, owing to his other tribal habit of sitting silent for hours without moving a muscle. It was only rarely that Matt could extract from him native legends about Glooscap, the national hero, and Mundu, the devil.

The two boys set out together for a rock-maple district five miles off, drawing their impedimenta heaped high on a large sled. They were fortified for a three weeks’ stay. Mrs. Strang had baked them several batches of bread, and with unwonted enthusiasm supplied them with corn-meal for porridge, and tea and sugar, and butter and molasses, and salt pork and beef, all stowed into the barrel that would come home full of sugar. Their kitchen paraphernalia embraced a teapot and a teakettle, a frying-pan and a pot, while their manufacturing apparatus comprised tin pails, Yankee buckets, dippers, and axes. Guns, ammunition, and blankets completed their equipment. Matt’s painting materials were stowed away on his person unobtrusively.

They took possession of a disused log-cabin, formerly the property of a woodsman, as the advertising agent would have put it, had he penetrated to the backwoods. Possibly under his roseate vision it might have expanded into a detached villa without basement, or a bungalow standing in its own grounds, but a non-professional eye would have seen nothing but four walls and a pitched roof with a great square hole in it to let the light in and the smoke out. These walls were built of unhewn logs in their rough, natural bark. The floor was even more primitive, being simply the soil. It was necessary to thaw it by lighting the fire on it before the stakes could be driven in to support the cross-pieces from which the sugar-pot depended.

Then the boys chopped down a vast store of hardwood for fuel, and lanced the tall maples, catching their blood in birch-bark troughs through pine spills. They emptied the troughs into pails, and carried the sap to their cabin, and boiled it in the big pot, and cooled it again to sugar. A halcyon fortnight passed, full of work, yet leaving Matt leisure for daubing boyish fancies on pieces of birch-bark to cover withal the wooden walls of his home, which the aforesaid advertiser might not unwarrantably have described as a studio with a novel top-light in a quiet neighborhood. Possibly Matt’s mural decorations would have enhanced the description. They comprised a fantastic medley of angels with faces more or less like Ruth Hailey, and devils fashioned more or less after the similitude of Bully Preep, and strange composite animals more or less like nothing on earth, moving amid hills and ships and lurid horizons. One night Matt sat by the fire in the centre of the hut painting a more realistic picture and meditating a weeding of his gallery. There had been no sap running that day, a sudden return of winter had congealed it, and so this extra artistic output during the comparatively idle hours had almost exhausted his hanging-space. While he painted he gave an eye to the seething pot in which the sap must change to molasses, and then thicken to maple syrup, and then to maple wax ere it was ladled into the birch-bark dishes and set to cool outside the hut. A piece of fat pork hanging from a hook in the cross-piece just touched the surface of the sap and prevented it from effervescing. Tommy was asleep on a heap of fir boughs in a corner, for the boys took it in turn to watch the pot and replenish the fire. The soundness of Tommy’s sleep to-night astonished Matt, for usually the young Micmac slept the sleep of the vigilant, a-quiver at the slightest unwonted sound. Matt did not know that his ingenious partner had just completed the distillation of a crude rum from a portion of sap arrested at the molasses stage, and that he had imbibed gloriously thereof.

Matt’s painting-stool was an inverted bucket. He wore a fur cap with pendent earlaps that gave him an elderly appearance; and his feet were cased in moccasins, made from the green shank of a cow. For some time he painted steadily, trying to reproduce the picturesque interior of the cabin with his rude home-made colors and brush. The air was warm and charged with resinous odors. The camp-fire burned brightly, the hardwood flaming without snapping or crackling, with only the soft hissing and spurting of liberated gases; the fire purred as if enjoying the warmth. The yellow billows curled round the bulging bottom of the three-legged pot, and sent up delicate spirals of blue smoke, tinged below with flame, to mingle with the white sappy steam that froze as soon as it got outside and disentangled itself from the wood smoke by falling as hoar-frost. At moments when all this smoke lifted Matt could see the stars shining on him through the hole in the roof, stainless and far away in a deep blue patch of heaven. Somehow they made him dissatisfied with his work; they seemed like calm, sovran eyes watching his puny efforts to reproduce, with his pitiable palette, the manifold hues and shades of the simple scene around him—the greasy copper of the Indian boy’s face, glistening against the yellow blanket which covered him and the olive-green boughs on which he lay; the motley firewood, the dull brown tones of the spruce branches, the silver of birch, the yellow of beech; the empty birch-bark troughs, silver-white outside and dull salmon within, touched with tints of light gold or gray. Why, there was a whole color-scheme of subdued rich tints in the moss alone—the dead dry moss that filled up the uneven rifts in the log-roof, and gleamed with a mottle of green and olive and russet. He threw down his brush in despair, longing for the rich, thick paints he vaguely imagined his uncle in London must have—real paints that did not fade as his did, despite the gums he mixed experimentally with them—pure reds and blues and greens and yellows, capable of giving real skies and real grass and real water, and of being mixed into every shade of color the heart could desire. Then he slipped out through the door, shutting it quickly to prevent the hut filling with smoke. The ground was white under a brilliant moon, with here and there patches of silver that wellnigh sparkled. Overhead mystic pallid-gold rays of northern light palpitated across the clear star-strewn heaven. The trees showed more sombre, the birches and maples bare of leafage, the spruces and hemlocks and all the tangled undergrowth reduced to a common gray in the moonlight. Here and there a brown hummock stood solemnly with bared head. And from all this sleeping woodland rose a restless breathing, that incessant stir of a vast alien, self-sufficient life, the rustle of creatures living and moving and having their being in another world than the human, in that dim, remote, teeming underworld of animal life, with its keen joys and transient pains. And every now and then a definite sound disengaged itself from the immense murmur: a chickadee chirped, a black-headed snow-bird twittered, a cat-owl hooted, a rabbit ran from the underwood, as faintly distinguishable from the snow in his white winter coat as he had been from the dead leaves over which he pattered in autumn in his gray homespun.

Matt stood leaning against the door, absorbed into the multifarious night, and hardly conscious of the cold; then he went in, thrilling with vague, sweet emotion, and vast manful resolutions that cast out despair. But he did not take up his brush again. He sat down before the fire in dreamy bliss; all the asperities of his existence softened by its leaping light, and even that dead face of his father thawed into the pleasant motions of life. The past shone through a mellow, rosy mist, and the future was like the scarlet sunrise of the forest, flaming from splendor to splendor—a future of artistic achievement upon which Ruth Hailey’s face smiled applause; a future of easy, unsought riches which banished the gloom upon his mother’s.

And then all of a sudden he caught sight of Tommy’s clay pipe, fallen from his mouth on to the blanket; and an unforeseen desire to smoke it and put the seal on this hour of happiness invaded the white boy’s breast. He rose and picked it up. It was full of charred tobacco. The craving to light it and taste its mysterious joys grew stronger. His mother had sternly forbidden him to smoke, backing up her prohibition by the text in Revelation—“And he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.” But now he remembered he had left school; he was a man. He put the stem into his mouth and plucked a brand from the fire, then stood for a moment irresolute. He wondered if any instinct warned his mother of what he was doing, and from that thought it was an easy transition to wondering what she was doing. His fancy saw her still running backward and forward, working that great buzzing wheel with stern, joyless face. He put down his pipe.

There was a fresh element in his dreamy bliss as he resumed his seat before the fire, a sense of something high and tranquillizing like the clear stars, yet touching the spring of tears. His head drooped in the drowsy warmth, he surrendered himself to voluptuous sadness, and the outside world grew faint and fading.

When he looked up again his heart almost ceased to beat. At his side loomed a strange female figure, her head covered with a drab shawl that hid her face. She stood in great snow-shoes as on a pair of pedestals, and the log walls repeated her form in contorted shadow.

The gentle purring of the fire, the Indian boy’s breathing, sounded painfully in the weird stillness. From without came the manifold rustle of the night.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Give me a glass of water,” she replied, sweetly.

“I hev’n’t any water,” he breathed.

“I am afire with thirst,” she cried. “Quench me! quench me!” Her shawl slipped back, revealing a face of wild, uncanny beauty crowned with an aureola of golden hair. But the awesome thrill that had permeated Matt’s being passed into one of Æsthetic pleasure mingled with astonished recognition.

“Why, it’s Mad Peggy!” he murmured.

“Aye, it’s the Water-Drinker!” assented the beautiful visitor, in soft, musical tones, thereupon crying out, “Water, water, for God’s sake!”

“I hev’n’t any water, I tell you. Not till I git some from the spring in the mornin’. Hev some sap!”

And Matt, starting to his feet, plunged the dipper into the barrel of raw sap that stood on the floor. Mad Peggy seized it greedily and drained the great ladle to the dregs. Then she filled it again with delicious fluid, and then again, and yet again, leaving Matt aghast at her gigantic capacity. She was filling the dipper a fourth time, but he pulled it out of her hand, fearing she would do herself a mischief.

“I’m so thirsty!” she whispered, plaintively, in her musical accents.

“What are you doin’ in the woods at this hour?” answered Matt, sternly.

“I’m looking for Peter. What a bonny fire!” And she bent over it, holding out her long, white hands to the flames.

Matt divined vaguely that Peter must be the sweetheart whose desertion had crazed the poor creature. It was reported in Cobequid Village that the handsome German immigrant who had been betrothed to her had gone off forever on the pretext of “sugaring” when he learned that she was one of the Water-Drinkers—the unhappy family whose ancestor had refused a cup of cold water to a strange old woman, who thereupon put the curse upon him and his descendants that they

might drink water and drink water and never quench their thirst. Peggy was reputed quite harmless.

“You haven’t seen Peter, have you?” she cooed, suddenly.

“No,” replied Matt, with a fresh, nervous thrill. “But this is not a night for you to be out and about. It’s bitter cold.”

“It’s bitter cold,” she repeated, “bitter cold for an old man like you, but not for a girl like me, loved by the handsomest young fellow in the Province; the heart within me keeps me warm, always warm and thirsty. Give me more water.”

“No, you’ve hed ’nough,” said Matt. “It’s a shame your folks don’t look arter you better.”

“Look after me! They’re all up at the ball, the heartless creatures; but I saw the weddings, both of them, in spite of them all, and I think it’s high time Peter came back from the sugaring to our wedding, and I’ve come to tell him so. This is the spot he used to sugar at. Are you sure you haven’t seen him? You are his partner; confess, now,” she wound up, cajolingly, turning her lovely face towards his troubled gaze.

“Can’t you see I’m only a boy?” he replied.

“Nonsense. You’re not a boy. Boys always call after me and pull my shawl. I know all the boys.”

Matt felt the moisture gathering afresh under his eyelids.

“What’s your name, then?” she went on, sweetly.

“Matt,” he murmured.

“Ah, mad!” she cried, in ecstasy. “We are cousins—I knew it! That’s what they call me.”

Her wild eyes shone in the firelight. The boy shuddered.

“Not mad, but Matt!” he corrected her.

“Ah, yes, Mad Matt! Cousins! Mad Peggy—Mad Matt!”

“I’m not mad,” he protested, feebly.

“Yes, yes, you are!” she cried, passionately. “I can see it in your face. And yet you won’t give me a cup of water.”

“You’ve drunk ’nough,” said the boy, soothingly.

“Oh, what lovely little devils,” she exclaimed, catching sight of the wall decorations. “Do you see devils, too? Didn’t I say we were cousins? Why, there’s one of the bridegrooms—ha! ha! ha! I guess he didn’t show the cloven hoof this morning.”

“Which is the bridegroom?” asked Matt, piqued into curiosity.

“There—there he is! There is the boy!” She pointed to the best portrait of Bully Preep. “He always called after me, the little devil.”

Matt’s heart beat excitedly, his face crimsoned. But his strange visitor’s next words threw him back into uneasy chaos.

“Oh, but everybody is saying how scandalous it is! with his wife only six months in her grave. Look how long Peter and I have waited. Most of the girls in the village get engaged half a dozen times; they don’t know what love is, they don’t know anything, they’ve got no education. But I’ve only been engaged once, and I’m so thirsty. And you’ve got her too, the little angel! Everybody is saying how hard it is for her! And yet they all go to the ball. May they dance till they drop, the hypocrites!”

“What are you sayin’?” faltered Matt. “Hard for Ruth Hailey? Why, she’s only a little girl.”

“She isn’t a little girl. Little girls run after me. I know all the little girls. She’s a little angel! Just as you’ve pictured her. Give me some more water.”

This time Matt surrendered the dipper to her.

“Thank you, Cousin Matt,” she said, and drank feverishly. But seeing that she was about to dip again, he placed himself between her and the barrel. She turned away with a marvellously dexterous movement considering her cumbrous foot-gear, and dipped the ladle into the seething caldron instead. But Matt seized her arm and stayed her from extracting the dipper.

“You’ll scald yourself,” he said.

“Let go my arm,” she cried, threateningly. “How dare you touch me—you are not Peter!”

“You mustn’t drink any more.”

“You are very cruel!” she moaned. “Who is that sleeping there? Perhaps it is Peter. I will wake him up; he will give me water. I am so thirsty.” She moaned and crooned over the three-legged caldron, stirring the sap feebly with the ladle in her efforts to wrest herself free, and the white steam curled about her face, and gave her the air of a young, beautiful witch bent over a caldron. Matt forgot everything except that he would like to make a picture of her as she appeared now.

“You’d best go to sleep,” he said at last, awakening to a remembrance of the strange situation. “There’s my bed—those fir-boughs—you kin lie down there till the mornin’, and I’ll cover you with my blanket.”

“I want water,” she crooned.

“You kin’t get it,” said Matt.

“Then may the curse light on you and yours,” she cried, stirring the sap more fiercely in her struggle, while the vapor and the wood smoke rose in denser volumes around her. “May you thirst and thirst, and never be satisfied! And that is to be your fate, Cousin Matt. I read it in your face, in your eyes. Never to quench your thirst—never, never, never! To thirst and thirst and thirst for everything, and never to be satisfied, never to have anything you want. Mad Matt and Mad Peggy—cousins, you and I! Ha! ha! ha!” Her laugh of malicious glee made the boy’s blood run cold. From without came the answering screech of a wild-cat.

“Lie down and rest!” repeated Matt, imperatively.

“What! stay here with you? No, no, no, Cousin Matt. I know what you want. You want to paint me and put me on the wall among the devils! No, no, I must be off to find Peter. I shall stay with him in his cabin.”

Her grip of the dipper relaxed; it reeled against the side of the pot. She turned away, and Matt let go her arm and watched her, spellbound. She drew the thick dun shawl over her head, again veiling the glory of the golden hair, and almost brought the edges together over her sad beautiful face, so that the eyes alone shone out with unearthly radiance. Then she moved slowly towards the door and thrust it open, and the wind came in, and filled the entire cabin with heavy, acrid smoke, which got into Matt’s eyes and throat, and woke even the Indian boy, who sat up choking and rubbing his black, beady eyes.

“Dam door shuttum!” he cried, with unusual vehemence.

The words broke Matt’s spell. He rushed to the door, but his smarting eyes could detect no gray-shawled figure gliding among the gray trunks. He closed the door, wondering if he had been dreaming.

“‘Tain’t your turn yet, Tommy,” he said, waving away the smoke with his hand, and Tommy fell back asleep, as if mesmerized. Matt was as relieved at not having to explain as at Tommy’s momentary wakefulness, which had braced him against the superstitious awe that had been invading him while the mad beauty cursed him with that sweet voice of hers that no anger could make harsh. He thought of the apparition with pity, mingled with a thrill of solemn adoration; she had for him the beauty and wildness of the elemental, like the sky or the sea. And yet she had left in him other feelings—not only the doubt of her reality, but an uneasy stirring of apprehensions. Was there nothing but insane babble in this talk of Ruth Hailey and Abner Preep? A fear he could not define weighed at his heart. Even if he had been dreaming, if he had drowsed over the fire—as he must in any case have done not to have heard the scrape and clatter of snow-shoes entering—the dream portended something evil. But, no! it was not a dream. Assuredly the sap in the barrel had sunk to a lower level. With a new thought he lit a resinous bough and slipped out quickly and examined the dry stiff snow. The double trail of departing snow-shoes was manifest, meandering among the bark dishes and irregularly intersecting the trail of arrival. The radiant moonlight falling through the thin bare maple-boughs made his torch superfluous, except in the fuscous glade of leafy evergreens, along which he followed the giant footmarks for some little distance. He paused, leaning against a tall hemlock. Doubt was impossible. He had really entertained a visitor. Not seldom in former years had he entertained visitors who came to camp out for the night, which they made uproarious. But never had his hut sheltered so strange a guest. He was moved at the thought of her drifting across the wastes of snow like some fallen spirit. He looked up and abstractedly watched a crow sleeping with its head under its wing on the top of the hemlock, then his vision wandered to the flashing streamers of northern light, and, higher still, to those keen depths of frosty sky where the stars stood beautiful, and they drew up his thoughts yearningly to the infinite spaces. Something cried within him for he knew not what—save that it was very great and very majestic and very beautiful, mystically blending the luminousness of light and color with the scent of flowers and the troubled sweetness of music; and at the back of his dim, delicious craving for it was a haunting certainty that he would never reach up to it, never, never. The prophecy of mad Peggy recurred to the boy like a cutting blast of wind. Was it true, then, that he would thirst and thirst, and nothing ever quench his thirst? He held up his torch yearningly to the stars, while the night moaned around him, and the flaring pinewood cast a grotesque shadow of him on the pure white snow, an uncouth image that danced and leered as in mockery.

CHAPTER VI
DISILLUSIONS

As soon as he could get away next morning Matt drew on his oversocks and started for home, racked by indefinite fears. He had not troubled to rouse Tommy to take his watch, for he knew he himself would not sleep a wink, and it seemed a pity to disturb so deep and healthy a slumber; so he bustled about to blur his thoughts, and had breakfast ready an hour after sunrise, which his anxiety did not prevent him from observing. To see sky and forest take fire in gradual glory was an ecstasy transcending the apprehensions of the moment.

Tommy had asked no questions during the morning meal, and made no complaints about Matt’s failure to rouse him; but on being apprised of his companion’s intended journey, he had pointed to the scanty wood-pile—a reminder that had delayed Matt by a couple of hours spent in felling and chopping up a straddle or two. But at last he got away, Tommy undertaking, in a minimum of monosyllables, to attend to everything else. Matt felt afresh the strength and stability of Tommy. Tommy was like Sprat—firm, faithful, and uninquisitive.

He had five miles of clogged walking before him, but he made fairly good progress, for he was unencumbered by snow-shoes, having a light step and an instinct for hollows and drifts, and his oversocks, which reached beyond the knee, kept out the snow when he trod deep. The freshness and buoyancy of the morning dispelled his alarm; dread was impossible under that wonderful blue sky. But as he got deeper and deeper into the recesses under thick boughs that shut out the living blue with dead gray, and took the sparkle out of the snow, his gloom returned, and lasted till he was nearly at his journey’s end, when the road caught the sunlight again just as the thought of home flooded his soul. And soon a bend brought the goal in sight. There it was, the dear old house, standing back from the road, in the midst of its little clearing, the sun shining on its bleached clapboards, the black window-sashes standing out fantastically against the white panes, opaque with frosty designs. The smoke curled tranquilly from the chimney towards the overarching azure, making the home seem a living creature whose breath was thus condensed to visibility. It seemed months since he had left it, yet it was absolutely unchanged. And then he heard the cock crow from the rear, and his last fears vanished like evil spirits of the night, and a wave of pleasurable anticipation bore him to the porch.

He opened the door—no one ever fastened doors by day, for burglars came only in the milder form of peddlers, and other visitors were accustomed to stable their horses and take their seats at the board without ceremony or warning. It was not far from noon, but he heard no sounds about the house, except the crowing of the cock, which continued, and brought up to memory a grotesque and long-obliterated image of his mother holding on to the leg of a soaring hawk that had picked up a chicken. He listened for the lowing of Daisy; then, remembering she was dead and salted, he moved forward into the passage. But he found nobody in the living-room. There was not even a fire. The clumsy spinning-wheel stood silent. The table was bare and tidy; the chairs were neatly ranged. He ran into the kitchen—it radiated bleaker desolation. Matt fought against the cold chill that was gathering at his heart. Of course there would be nobody at home. Harriet was sewing somewhere, most of the children were at school; and his mother, instead of leaving the baby in the kitchen with one of them, must have taken it with her to her work. And yet it was all very depressing and very disappointing. Then he remembered, with a fresh shock, the smoke he had seen curling from the roof, and for an instant he was oppressed by a sense of the uncanny. An atmosphere of horror seemed to brood over the house. But the recollection of a proverb of Deacon Hailey’s, “There’s no smoke without fire, hey?” uttered in a moment of unusual articulateness, brought back common-sense. He ran up to the bedrooms, but there was not even a stove, except in his mother’s room—a room tapestried with texts worked in Berlin wool on perforated card-board—where the bed had not been made, and where there were traces of extinct logs. Immeasurably puzzled, and wondering if the smoke had been an optical illusion, he returned to the living-room. There was only one room he had not gone into—the best room—and when he at last recollected the existence of it he did not immediately enter it. Only visitors had the enjoyment of this room and the privilege of sitting gingerly on its cane chairs and surveying its papered walls; and, in the absence of the family, there could be no reception in progress. When, for the sake of logical exhaustiveness, he did approach the door, it was listlessly and with a certain constraint, amounting to awe. His nostrils already scented the magnificent mustiness of its atmosphere. He opened the door with noiseless reverence. Then he stood rigid, like one turned to stone by the sight of Medusa’s head. It was indeed a head that petrified him—or, rather, two heads, one pressed against the other. Though he had only a back view of them, he knew them both. The lank black hair was Bully Preep’s, the long auburn-brown tresses were Harriet Strang’s. A fire had been lighted, regardless of the polish of the Franklin stove and the severity of its fancy scroll-work and ornamental urn; and before this fire his sister sat on Abner’s knee, and Abner sat on a cane chair, tilting it with a familiarity that hovered on contempt. The treble shock was too great. Matt was dumb and sick and cold, though red-hot thoughts hurtled in his brain. What! The skunk had sneaked in during his mother’s absence, and it was thus that Harriet did the honors!

He struggled to get his voice back. “Harriet!” he cried, in raucous remonstrance.

Harriet gave a little shriek and turned her head. The color fled from her soft cheeks as she caught sight of her outraged junior, then the blush returned in fuller crimson. Matt fixed her with a stern, imperious eye.

“What are you doin’ in the best room?” was the phrase that leaped to his angry lips.

Abner turned on him a face of smiling friendship.

“The best thing,” he replied, gayly.

“How dare you kiss my sister?” thundered Matt.

“Don’t be a fool, Matt!” said Abner, amiably. “She isn’t on’y your sister—she’s my wife.”

“Your wife!” breathed Matt.

“Yes, don’t be streaked, dear. We were married yesterday.” And Harriet disentangled herself from Abner and ran to throw her arms round Matt. But the boy repulsed her with a commanding gesture.

“Don’t come near me!” he cried, huskily. “Where’s mother? Does she know?”

“Oh, Matt!” cried Harriet, reproachfully, “d’you think I’d marry without her consent!”

“I call it rael mean, anyways,” he cried, tears of vexation getting into his eyes and his voice, “to take advantage of a feller like that, jest because his back’s turned!”

“Waal, we won’t do it agen!” cried Abner, with unshakable good-humor. “See here, Matt,” and he rose, too, revealing the slight tendency to crookedness of lower limb that offended the exigent eye of his mother-in-law, “let’s be pals. You were allus a spunky little chap, and I liked you from the day you stood up agin me and blacked my eye, though you had to jump up a’most to reach it. I was a beast in them thar days, but I raelly ain’t now, thanks to Harriet—God bless her! I know you don’t like my legs,” he added, with a flash of humor, “but there’s on’y two of ’em, anyways.”

“An’ thet’s two too many, you crawlin’ reptile,” retorted Matt. Then, turning to Harriet, he went on in slow, measured accents, “And is this—chap—goin’ to—live here?”

“He is so,” retorted Harriet.

“Then,” said Matt, with ominous calm—”then you won’t hev me here, thet’s all.”

“Of course we won’t,” said Harriet, with a pleasant laugh. “You’ll live with mother.”

“With mother?” repeated Matt, staring.

“Yes; down to Deacon Hailey’s.”

“Hes mother gone to live to Deacon Hailey’s?” he asked, excitedly.

“You bet!” put in Abner, grinning genially.

“What—altogether?” exclaimed Matt. The world seemed going round as it did in the geography books.

“I guess so.”

“I won’t hev it!” cried Matt, agitatedly. “I won’t hev her slavin’ like a nigger. It was bad enough afore, when she hed to go there every day. But now she’s naught but a servant. It’s a shame, I do declare. An’ you, Harriet!” he said, turning fiercely on her again; “ain’t you ’shamed o’ yourself, drivin’ mother out of house and home?”

“No,” said Harriet, stoutly.

The laughter that lurked about her mouth filled him with a trembling presentiment of the truth.

“Don’t you understand?” said Abner, kindly. “Your mother’s been and gone and married the deacon, and a good thing for all o’ you, I do allow.”

“You’re a liar!” hissed the boy. The world spun round more fiercely.

Abner shrugged his shoulders good-temperedly.

“You see, it was all arranged in a hurry, Matt,” said Harriet, deprecatingly. “An’ mother thought we’d best get it all over, an’ so we were both married yesterday, an’ we thought it a pity to bother you to come all the way. But you hevn’t finished, hev you? Where’s the sugar?”

“An’ a nice scandal, I vow!” he cried, furiously. “Everybody is talkin’ ’bout it.”

“Oh come, Matt, thet’s a good un,” laughed Abner. “Why, you’ve heerd nuthin’ ’bout it.”

“Oh, hevn’t I?” returned Matt, with sullen mysteriousness. “I don’t know thet everybody went there an’ everybody said it was a shame. Oh no; I’m blind and deaf, thet’s what I am.”

“Don’t make such a touse, Matt,” said Harriet, putting her hair behind her ears with some calmness. “Don’t you see things air ever so much better? I’ve got a man to support me,” and she put her arms lovingly round Abner’s neck, as if supporting him, “an’ mother’ll be quite a lady, not a servant, as you were silly ’nough to allow, an’ you won’t hev to work so hard. An’ I’ll tell you what, Matt, you shall come here sometimes an’ draw your picters, an’ mother won’t know.”

But Matt clinched his teeth. The bait was tempting, but unfortunately it reminded him of his obedience to his mother the night before, when in deference to her views he had denied himself the joy of Tommy’s pipe. Oh, how he had been duped and bamboozled! At the very hour his inner eye had seen her toiling, sorrowful at her spinning-wheel, she was frolicking at her wedding-ball in gay attire. A vast self-compassion softened his indignation and raw misery. He turned his back on the newly-married couple, and strode from the house, lest they should misinterpret his tears. But the tears did not come—anger rekindling evaporated them unshed. What right had the deacon to steal his mother without even asking him? And how ignoble of his mother to forget his father thus! He figured Ruth Hailey replacing himself by another boy merely because he was dead. It seemed sacrilege. And yet no doubt Ruth was as bad as the rest of her sex. Had she not submitted tamely to the supplanting of her dead mother—nay, was she not a necessary accomplice in the conspiracy to keep him ignorant of the double marriage? Then he had a vague remembrance that he had once heard she was not originally the deacon’s daughter, but only the late Mrs. Hailey’s, which somehow seemed to exonerate her from the full burden of his doings. Still, she had unquestionably been sly.

His feet had turned instinctively back towards the lonely forest. No, he would not go and live with the deacon, not even though it brought Ruth within daily proximity. His attitude towards the deacon had never been cordial—nay, the auditory strain upon him when “Ole Hey” spoke to him had gone far towards making him antipathetic. It seemed monstrous that such an old mumbler should have been deemed fit to replace the cheery sailor who had gone down wrapped in his flag. No, Matt at least would have none of him. Life under his roof would be a discord of jarring memories. He would go back to his hut and live in the wood. He would shoot enough to live upon, and there, alone and self-sufficient and free as its denizens, he would pass his life painting and sketching. Or, if he wanted society, he would seek that of the Indian, the simple, noble Indian, and pitch his lot with his for a time or forever. Or perhaps Tommy would stay with him—Tommy who was deep without being wily, and restful without being dull. What a pity Billy was disabled; they might have seceded together, but fate had separated them, not his will.

The five miles were longer now, and the sky had grown a shade colder, but he trod the gloomiest paths unchilled. His heart was hot with revolt. As he came to the little open space round the hut a curious phenomenon arrested his attention. There was no smoke curling above the chimney-hole. A problem—the exact reverse of that which had greeted him at the other terminus of his journey—clamored for solution. Surely Tommy had not let the fire go out! He hastened his steps, and saw that the door stood wide open on its leather hinges, projecting outwards into the forest. Outside, too, empty birch-bark troughs were scattered about in lieu of being piled up neatly. The air of desolation sobered him like a cold douche. He was frightened. He had not even courage to dwell on the thought of what foreboding whispered. But perhaps Tommy had only gone to sleep again, and forgotten about the fire. With a gleam of hope he ran to the entrance, then leaped back with a wild thrill, and slammed the door to and put his back to it and stood palpitating, restrained only by excitement from breaking down in childish tears. The interior of the hut had been transformed as by enchantment. Of barrels, axes, ironware, provender, even of his rude paints, there was not a trace, though the birch-bark picture exhibition was undisturbed. The birch-boughs were littered over the floor. There was no Tommy. But in the centre of the cabin, where the fire had been, lay a matted bear, voluptuously curled up on the warm ashes, and licking the mellifluous soil, which was syrup-sodden by drops that had fallen from the sap-pot. The beautiful sunshine had lured the animal from its winter sleeping-chamber, famished after its long fast.

It was a moment Matt never forgot; one of those moments that age and imbitter. As he stood with squared shoulders against the rough, battened door, that was built of stout slabs, he shook from head to foot with mingled emotions. Numb misery alternated with burning flashes of righteous indignation against humanity, red and white. And with it all was a stirring of the hunter’s instinct—an itching to shoot the creature on the other side of the door—which aggravated his vexation by the reminder that even his gun had been stolen. It eased him a little to let his mind dwell on the prospect of potting such glorious game; but first of all he must run Tommy to earth. Tommy could not have gone far, burdened as he would be with the spoil.

The broken-hearted boy moved stealthily from the door and pushed up a small trunk that he had cut down that morning, but not yet chopped up. With some difficulty he raised this and propped it against the door, which, being already latched, could not easily be burst open by the bear. The creature was, moreover, likely to resume its winter nap in the snug, sweet quarters in which it found itself. Having thus trapped his bear, Matt started off by a cross-cut in the direction of the Indian encampment, to which he presumed Tommy would naturally have returned full-handed. But he had not gone a hundred yards before he called himself a fool, and ran back. In his agitation he had forgotten to note the trail of the sled in which Tommy must have drawn off the things. This he now discovered ran quite in the opposite direction, and was complicated not only by Tommy’s footmarks, but by a man’s. Whither had Tommy decamped? The day seemed made up of surprises and puzzles. However, there was everything to gain, or rather regain, by following the dusky young impostor and the accomplice who had helped him to draw the heavy sled. Matt discovered that the trail led towards Long Village, two and a half miles off, and instantly it flashed upon him that Tommy had gone there to dispose of the things. He quickened his pace, and in less than half an hour strode into a truer solution of the mystery, for suddenly he found himself amid dogs grubbing in the sunshine and swaddled pappooses swinging on the poles of birch-bark wigwams, and perceived that the vagrant Micmacs had shifted their encampment during the fortnight. Tommy’s knowledge of the migration argued secret correspondence, unless a tribal tempter had visited him accidentally during Matt’s absence—which seemed rather improbable.

Matt’s soul was aflame with wrath and resentment. He rushed about among the wigwams, unceremoniously peering behind the blankets that overhung the doorways, which were partly blocked by spruce boughs arranged to spring back and forth. Bow-legged, round-shouldered, dumpy men, with complexions of grayish copper, squatting cross-legged on fir boughs before the central fire, smoked on unresentful, a few ejaculating sullenly, “Kogwa pawotumun?” (“What is your wish?”) Their faces had nothing of the American hatchet-shape; they would have been round but for the angularity of the jaw, and Chinese but for the eyes, which did not slant upward, but were beady and wide apart. The cheek-bones were high, the nose was of a negro flatness, and the straight black hair was long and matted. In attire the men had an air of shabby civilization, which went ill with the blankets and skins overwrapping the white men’s leavings. Near the door—in the quarter of less distinction—sitting with feet twisted round to one side, one under the other, as befits the inferior sex—were women good-looking but greasy, who wore shawls and blankets over their kerchiefed heads, and necklaces of blue beads twinkling against their olive throats, and smoked as gravely as their lords. But Tommy was invisible. Nor could Matt see anything of the stolen goods. But in one tent he found Tommy’s father, and, discourteously omitting the “Kwa” of greeting, plied him with indignant questions in a mixture of bad English and worse Indian.

Tommy’s father understood little and knew nothing. He did not invite the visitor into the tent, but smoked on peacefully and whittled a shaving, and Matt’s admiration of the red man’s taciturnity died a painful death. Had Tommy’s father not even seen Tommy? No; Tommy’s father had not seen Tommy for half a moon, and the smoke curled peacefully round Tommy’s father’s greasy head. Never had the unspeakable uncleanliness of the picturesque figure struck Matt as it did now. He moved away with heavy heart and heavy footstep, and interviewed other Indians, equally dingy and equally reticent; even the squaws kept the secret.

Matt went back in despairing anger and poured out his passion in a flood of remonstrance upon the unwashed head of Tommy’s father; he pointed to the trail of the sled that drew up at Tommy’s father’s tent, he reasoned, he threatened, he clinched his fist and stamped his foot; and Tommy’s father smoked the pipe of peace and whittled the shaving. The Indian held the stick on his knee and drew the knife towards himself, unlike the white man, who cuts away from himself. It was a crooked knife, with a notch for the thumb in the handle. Matt’s spirit oozed away before its imperturbable movement to and fro. He felt sick and faint; he became vaguely conscious that he had eaten nothing since breakfast. Then he remembered the bear waiting in the cabin—waiting to be killed. With a happy thought he informed Tommy’s father that he had trapped a bear and could conduct him to the spot, and Tommy’s father instantly began to understand him better; and when Matt proceeded to offer him the beast in exchange for the stolen goods, the Micmac betrayed a complete comprehension of the offer, and with a courteous exclamation of “Up-chelase,” invited him into the furthermost and most honorable portion of the tent. He even rose and held colloquy with some of his brethren gathered round. A bear was a valuable property—dead. His snout alone was worth five dollars, when presented as a death certificate to a grateful government, anxious to extinguish him. These five dollars were a great consideration to a tribe paid mainly in kind, and hard pushed to find coin for the annual remission of sin at the hands of the priests. The bear’s skin would fetch four or five dollars more; while its three or four hundred pounds of flesh would set up the larder for the season. As a result of the native council, Tommy’s father informed Matt that he had just learned Tommy had been seen that morning, but that he had hauled the sled past the encampment on his way to Long Village to sell the freight (which nobody had suspected was not his own property, the much dam thief). He had, however, left a gun with a boy friend, and if Matt was content to swop the bear for this, he could have it. Matt, fuming at his own helplessness, consented. The gun was accordingly produced; Matt recognized his old friend, but Tommy’s father explained in easy pantomime that when bear was dead boy would get gun, and not before; and he handed it to a blanketless by-stander, who had evidently bartered external heat for internal fire-water. Then, shouldering his own gun, he motioned to Matt to lead the way. The little procession of three set forth, the second Indian prudently providing himself with a flat, wide sledge. The afternoon was waning, the blue overhead had lost in luminousness, leaving the coloring of the earth more vivid. But the shifting of nature’s kaleidoscope had ceased to interest Matt; humanity occupied him exclusively, and the evil that was done under the sun. Man or woman, white or red, they were all alike—a skulking, shifty breed. It was not only he that had been betrayed; it was truth, it was honor. Were these things, then, merely lip-babble?

On their arrival at the hut Matt explained the position. He was about to remove the log that braced up the door, but Tommy’s father pulled him violently back, and gestured that it was much more convenient to shoot the animal through the chimney-hole. Matt felt a qualm of disgust and remorse. It seemed cowardly to give the poor beast that had taken refuge in his hut no chance. He leaned sullenly against the door, feeling almost like one who had betrayed the laws of hospitality, and conscious, moreover, of a strange savage sympathy with the bear in its strife with humanity. His last respect for the noble red man vanished when the two Micmacs clambered upon the low-pitched roof. They uttered “ughs” of satisfaction as they peeped over the great square hole and perceived their prey asleep. After some amiable banter of the animal they began to put their guns into position. But Tommy’s father insisted on having the glory of the deed, since he was paying for the bear with Matt’s gun, and his rival ungraciously yielded. In his cocksureness, however, Tommy’s father merely hit the bear’s shoulder. The creature started up with a fierce growl, and began biting savagely at the bleeding wound. Excited by his failure and the brute’s leap up, Tommy’s father leaned more over the hole for his second shot; but his companion, exclaiming that it was his turn now, pushed him back, and strove to get his body in front. Tommy’s father, who was now effervescing with excitement, thrust himself more forward still, and in his zeal succeeded so well that he suddenly found himself flying head-foremost into the hut, while the gun went off at random. The bullet missed, but the man struck the obfuscated creature with a thud, ricochetted off its back, and lay prostrate on the branch-strewn floor.

The sound of the fall, the explosion, the cry of dismay from the roof, informed Matt of what had happened. In a flash his sympathy went back to man. He cried to the other Indian to shoot, but the latter’s arm was shaking, and the bear, after a few seconds of bewilderment, had risen on its hind legs and stood over the fallen man growling fiercely, so that the Micmac was afraid of hitting his friend. Matt reached up impatiently for his gun, which the Micmac readily handed to him in unforeseen violation of orders, and Matt, overthrowing the door-prop with the butt end, lifted the latch and dashed in. Tommy’s father was already in the bear’s grip, the infuriated animal’s elastic fore-paws beginning to press horribly upon his ribs. Matt clapped the barrel of the gun to the bear’s ear; then he was overswept by a fearsome doubt lest the gun had been unloaded since it had left his hands. But his suspense was short. He pressed the trigger; there was a ringing explosion, and the creature bounded into the air, relaxing its hold of the Indian, upon whom it fell again in its death-agony. Matt, aided by the other Micmac, who hurried in, grunting, disentangled Tommy’s father from the writhing heap, and found him bruised and breathless, but practically uninjured. Tommy’s father vowed eternal gratitude to his rescuer, and said his life was henceforward at Matt’s disposal. The boy curtly asked for his property instead, whereupon the Indian shook his head and shrugged his shoulders in token of impotence. Rolling the bear over with a prod of his contemptuous foot, he produced his knife and started scalping and skinning the dead enemy, while his brother-in-arms lit some boughs, and cut a juicy steak from the carcass and set it to broil. The warmth was grateful, for the shadows were fast gathering and the hyperborean hours returning. A covey of bob-whites whirred past, and the weird note of a hoot-owl was borne on the bleak air.

The Indians offered the boy “a cut from the joint,” and he refused sulkily—a deadly insult in normal circumstances. But the keen pangs of hunger and the delicious odor of the meat weakened him, and a later invitation to join the squatting diners found him ravenously responsive, though he felt he had bartered away his righteous indignation for a mess of pottage. During the meal his guests or his hosts (he knew not which they were) betrayed considerable interest in his mural decorations, which they evidently regarded as symptoms of a relapse from Christianity, and they were astonished, too, at his refusal to quaff more than a mouthful or two of their rum—the coarse concoction locally nicknamed “rot-gut.” While Matt, who had started last, was still eating from the birch-bark dish he had utilized for the purpose, Tommy’s father lit his after-dinner pipe, and, having taken a few whiffs, passed it on to his companion, who in turn held out to Matt the long, reedy stem with its feather ornaments.

The offer sent a thrill through the boy’s whole being. All his grievances ascended afresh from the red stone bowl and mingled with the fragrant smoke. How good, how obedient he had been! And all for what? A lump gathered in his throat, so that he could not swallow his bit of bear. He nodded assent, his heart throbbing with defiant manhood, and motioned to the Micmac to place the pipe beside his dish till he was ready for it. The two Indians then hauled the carcass athwart the sledge hastily, for night had come on as though shed from the starless sky, and they called to Matt to come along, but Matt shouted back that he did not intend to accompany them. He no longer craved to cast in his lot with the red man. Yet he went to the door of his tent to watch his fellow-hunters disappear among the sombre groves, and a deeper dusk seemed to fall on the landscape when the very rustle of their passage died away. But as he turned in again and fastened up the door, his heart leaped up afresh with the leaping flames. The sense of absolute solitude became exultation—a keen, bitter joy. Here was his home; he had no other. He had parted company with humanity forever.

He reseated himself on a little pile of fir boughs in his deserted home, that was naked but for the wall-pictures—the least comforting of all possible salvage, since they were the only things Tommy had not thought worth stealing. As Matt sat brooding, darker patches on the soil, and spots upon some of those pictures, caught his eye. He saw they were of blood. In one place there was quite a little pool which had not yet sunk into the earth or evaporated. He touched it curiously with his finger, and wiped away the stain against a leaf. Then with a sudden thought he curled a piece of bark and scooped up the blood into his birchen dish, as a possible color, murmuring, gleefully:

In moving the “little dish” he laid bare Tommy’s father’s calumet, forgotten. He took it up. How the universe had changed since last he held a pipe in his hand—only last night! Again he heard the howl of a wild-cat, and he looked round involuntarily, as if expecting to find Mad Peggy at his elbow. But he had no sense of awe just now—though he had barred his door inhospitably against further bears—only the voluptuousness of liberty and loneliness, the healthy after-glow of satisfied appetite, and the gayety born of flaming logs and a couple of mouthfuls of fire-water. The Water-Drinker’s prophecy seemed peculiarly inept in view of the pipe he held in his hand. With tremulous anticipation of more than mortal rapture he relit it. The sensation was unexpectedly pungent, but Matt puffed away steadily in hope and trust that this was merely the verdict of an unaccustomed palate, and he found a vast compensatory pleasure in his ability to make the thing work, to send the delicate wreaths into the air as ably as any Micmac or deacon of them all.

But soon even this pleasure began to be swamped by a wave of less agreeable sensation, and Matt, puzzled and chagrined, after a gallant stand, threw down the calumet, and hastened into the cold air with palpitating heart and splitting head, and there, in the maple wood, Bruin was avenged. That night, despite his vigil of the night before, Matt Strang vainly endeavored to close his eyes upon an unsatisfactory world.

CHAPTER VII
THE APPRENTICE

The long, endless years, crowded with petty episodes and uniformities, and moving like a cumbrous, creeping train that stops at every station, flash like an express past the eye of memory. Yet it is these unrecorded minutiÆ of monotonous months that color the fabric of our future lives, eating into our souls like a slow acid. When, in after years, Matt Strang’s youth defiled before him, the panorama seemed more varied than when he was living the scenes in all their daily detail of dull routine, and when, whatever their superficial differences, they were all linked for him by an underlying unity of toil and aspiration.

First came his apprenticeship in Cattermole’s saw-mill, at the opposite outskirt of the forest, twenty miles from Cobequid. For, though he early tired of savagery, as a blind-alley on the road to picture-painting, he refused, in the dogged pride of his boyish heart, to return to his folks, contenting himself with informing them of his whereabouts and of his intention to apprentice himself (with or without their consent). Labor being so scarce that year, Deacon Hailey drove over in great haste to offer him a loving home. Matt, who happened to be in the house, which was only parted from the mill-stream by a large vegetable-garden, saw through a window the deacon’s buggy arrive at the garden-path, and the deacon himself alight to open the wooden gate. The boy’s resentment flamed afresh, and it was supplemented by dread of the deacon’s inarticulate conversation. He fled to Mrs. Cattermole in the kitchen.

She was a shrewish, angular person, economical of everything save angry breath. A black silk cap with prim bows and ribbons sat severely on her head, and a thread-net confined her hair. Cattermole, a simple, religious, hen-pecked creature, had gone to the village store to trade off butter.

“There’s Ole Hey coming!” cried Matt, breathlessly.

“Kin’t you speak quietly?” thundered Mrs. Cattermole. “You made my heart jump like a frog. You don’t mean Ole Hey from Cobequid, the man es you said married your mother?”

“Yes, thet’s the skunk. I reckon he’s come to take me back.”

Mrs. Cattermole’s eyes flashed angrily. “Well, I swan! But you’ve promised to bide with us.”

“Thet’s so. I wouldn’t go back fur Captain Kidd’s treasure! I won’t see him.”

“I’ll tell him you’re gone away.”

“No,” said Matt, sturdily. “I wrote that I was goin’ to be ’prenticed here, and there ain’t any call for lies. Tell him I’m in the kitchen and I won’t come out, and I don’t want to hev anythin’ to do with him. See!”

“Well, set there and mind the cradle, and I’ll jest give him slockdologee. You uns allow you’re considerable smart, Cobequid way, but I reckon he’s struck the wrong track this time.”

Matt grinned joyously. “Spunk up to him, ma’am!” he cried, with stirring reminiscences of fights at McTavit’s. “Walk into him full split!”

“You mind the baby, young man. There won’t be no touse at all. He don’t set foot in my kitchen, and there’s an end of it.”

Mrs. Cattermole greeted the deacon politely, and informed him that the lad he was inquiring after was sulking in the kitchen, and that he refused to receive his visitor on any account. The deacon sighed unctuously with an air of patient martyrdom. Matt’s obduracy heightened his estimate of the lad’s value as a gratuitous field-worker, and sharpened his sense of being robbed of what small dowry Mrs. Strang had brought him.

“The boy is dreadful set agin me,” he complained. “But, es I told his poor mother, if you let a boy run wild, wild he runs, hey? Anyways, it ain’t fur me to fail in lovin’-kindness. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, ain’t the gospel we’re called upon to practise. I allus thinks there’s no sort o’ use in bein’ a Christian on Sundays and a heathen on week-days.”

“No, thet thar ain’t,” Mrs. Cattermole assented, amiably.

“Even to beasts a man kin be a Christian, hey? I reckon I’d better wait in your kitchen an’ give the mare a rest. If I’ve come on a fool’s errand, thet ain’t a reason my ole nag should suffer, hey?”

Mrs. Cattermole, seeing the outworks taken, directed the deacon, by a flank movement, into the parlor, as alone befitting his dignity. To Matt this parlor, far finer than the best room at home, was a chamber of awe, but also of attraction, for its walls were hung with sober Bible prints. Mrs. Cattermole stood there among her splendors with her back to the door, partly for defensive purposes, partly so as not to depreciate one of the hair-cloth chairs by sitting down. It was enough for one day that her guest sat solidly on the rocking-chair of honor.

“We’ve been hevin’ too much soft weather, Mrs. Cattermole, arter all thet heavy snow.”

“Yes, I’m afeard the dam will go out,” responded Mrs. Cattermole, gloomily.

They discussed the disastrous thaw of a few years back, with a vivid remembrance of the vegetables and dairy produce spoiled in the flooded cellars.

“But it’s the Lord’s will,” summed up the deacon. “It ain’t any use heapin’ up worldly treasure, I allus thinks.”

“Thet’s a fact.” Mrs. Cattermole shook her head in sad acquiescence.

“Heaven’s the only safe place to lay up your goods, hey? So I guess I’m just goin’ to forgive thet durned boy all the anxiety he’s giv his poor mother an’ me, an’ take him back right along.”

“Oh, but I guess you ain’t,” said Mrs. Cattermole. “We’ve promised to take him on here.”

“We’ll let you off thet thar promise, Mrs. Cattermole. We ain’t folks as allus wants to hold people tight to every onthinkin’ word. An’ you won’t be the loser hardly, for the lad ain’t worth a tin pint to mortal man. He’s a dreamy do-nuthin’, an’ the worry he’s been to his poor mother you’ve no idee—allus wastin’ the Lord’s hours, unbeknown to her, in scrawlin’ picters an’ smutchin’ boards with colors.”

“I reckon he’ll come in handy in our paint-shop, then.”

The deacon shook his head, as if pitying her bubble delusions.

“He ain’t smart, an’ he ain’t good-tempered. You see for yourself how grouty he is to the best friend a boy ever hed.”

“He ain’t smart, I know. Thet’s why we ain’t goin’ to pay him no wages.”

The deacon chawed his quid and swayed in silent discomfiture.

“Ah, it’s his poor mother I’m thinkin’ of,” he said, after a while. “She’s thet delicate she’d kinder worry if he was to—a mother’s heart, hey? If ’twas my boy, I’d be proper glad to see him in the han’s of sech a hard-workin’, God-fearin’ couple.”

“You hedn’t ought to talk to me,” said Mrs. Cattermole, softening. “Father’d be terrible ugly if I was to settle anythin’ while he was to the store.”

“And if he wouldn’t it’s a pity. Wives, obey your husbands, hey? But there ain’t no call for hurry. More haste less speed, I allus thinks. But I don’t want to keep you from your occupations. There air some visitors who forgit folks kin’t afford to keep more’n one Sunday a week, hey? Sorter devil’s darnin’-needles flyin’ into your ear—they worry you, and they don’t do themselves no good. So don’t you take no notice of me. I’ll jest talk to Matt to fill up the time.”

Mrs. Cattermole straightened herself against the door. “He won’t listen; he’s too mad.”

“I reckon I could tone him down some.”

“Guess not. He’s too sot—he won’t come in.”

“I ain’t proud. I’ll go to him. True pride is in doin’ what’s right, I allus thinks. Some folks kin’t see the difference between true pride an’ false pride. I’ll go to the kitchen.”

“I’d rayther you didn’t, deacon. It’s all in a clutter.”

The conversation drooped. The deacon’s mouth moved in mere chawing. Swallowing his quid in deference to the parlor, he cut himself a new chunk.

“You’ve heerd about the doctor, Mrs. Cattermole?” he began again.

“I dunno es I hev.”

“What! Not heerd about our doctor es was said to practise the Black Art?”

“Oh, the sorcerer es lives on the ole wood-road. My brother who drives the stage was tellin’ me ’bout it. He sets spirits turnin’ tables, tellin’ the future, an’ nobody’ll go past his house arter dark.”

“Ah, but the elders called on him last week,” said the deacon. “Of course we couldn’t hev him in the vestry. An’ he explained to the committee thet sperrits or devils ain’t got nuthin’ to do with it.”

“Lan’ sakes! An’ you believed him?”

“Waal, my motto is allus believe your fellow-critters. An evil mind sees a lookin’-glass everyways, hey? He jest showed us how to make a table turn and answer questions. He says it’s no more wonderful than turnin’ a grindstone.”

“I guess he’s pulled the wool over the eyes o’ the Church,” said Mrs. Cattermole, sceptically.

“Not hardly! He turned thet thar table in broad daylight with the Bible open upon it, to show thet Satan didn’t hev a look in.”

“The Bible on it! ’Pears to me terrible ongodly.”

“Ongodly! Why, you an’ me kin do it—two pillars o’ the Church! I guess the Evil One couldn’t come nigh us, hey?”

“I dunno es it would turn if you an’ me was to do it.”

“You bet! It told me ’bout the future world, an’ my poor Susan’s Christian name, an’ how much to ast for my upland hay.”

“Good lan’!” cried Mrs. Cattermole. “An’ would it tell me whether my sister is through her sickness yet?”

“You may depend!”

“My! Thet’s jest great!” And Mrs. Cattermole eagerly inquired how one set about interrogating the oracle.

The deacon explained, adding that the parlor table would not do. It must be a rough deal table.

“Ah, the kitchin table,” said Mrs. Cattermole, walking into the elaborately laid trap.

“I dunno,” said the deacon, shaking his head. “Air you sure it ain’t too large for us to span around?”

“We could let the flaps down.”

The deacon chawed reflectively.

“Waal, it might,” he said, cautiously, at last. “There ain’t no harm in tryin’. We hedn’t ought to give up anythin’ without tryin’, I allus thinks. One never knows, hey?”

“I kinder think we ought to try,” said Mrs. Cattermole.

The deacon rose ponderously, and followed his guide into the kitchen.

“Why, there’s Matt!” he cried, in astonished accents. “Good-day, sonny.”

Matt strained his ears, but pursed his lips and rocked the cradle in violent impassivity. The deacon was uneasy at the boy’s sullen resentment. He could not understand open enemies.

“How’s your health, hey?” he asked, affectionately.

“Oh, I’m hunky dory,” said Matt, in off-hand school-boy slang.

“I’m considerable glad you’ve found a good place with rael Christians, Matt. I on’y hope you’ve made up your mind to work hard an’ turn over a new leaf. It’s never too late to mend, I allus thinks. You’re growin’ a young man, now; no more picter-makin’, hey? If it warn’t that you air so moony an’ lay-abed I’d give you a chanst on my own land, with pocket-money into the bargain, hey, an’ p’raps a pair o’ store shoes fur a Chrismus-box.”

A flame shot from Mrs. Cattermole’s now-opened eyes. She shut the cellar door with a vicious bang, but ere she could speak Matt cried out, “I wouldn’t come, not fur five shillin’s a week!”

“An’ who wants you to come fur money? What is money, hey? Is it health? Is it happiness? No, no, sonny. If money was any use, my poor Susan would hev been alive to this day. You’ll know better when you’re my age.”

He spat out now, directing the stream into the sink under the big wooden pump.

“Don’t worry ’bout him,” interposed Mrs. Cattermole. “Here’s the table.”

Deacon Hailey waved a rebuking palm. “Dooty afore pleasure, Mrs. Cattermole. See here, sonny, I’ve been talkin’ with Mrs. Cattermole ’bout you. She’s promised me to be a mother to you, Heaven bless her! But I kin’t forget you’ve got a mother o’ your own.”

“She ain’t my mother now, she’s Ruth’s mother,” said Matt, half divining the mumble of words.

“She’s mother to both o’ you. A large heart, thet’s what she’s got. An’ if she’s Ruth’s mother, then I’m your father, hey? An’ it ain’t right of you to disobey your father and mother. But young folks nowadays treats the commandments like old boots,” and the deacon sighed, as if in sympathy with the sorrows of a neglected decalogue.

“I’ve got no father an’ no mother,” said Matt. “An’ I’m goin’ to be a picture-painter soon es I kin. I won’t do anything else, thet’s flat. An’ when I’m bigger I’m goin’ to write to my uncle Matt and see if he kin sell my pictures fur me. If you was to drag me back by force, I’d escape into the woods. An’ I’d work my way to London to be handy my uncle Matt. I reckon he takes in ’prentices same es the boss here. So you jest tell my mother I’m done with her, see! I don’t want to hear any more ’bout it.”

His face resumed its set expression, and his rocking foot its violence.

The deacon cast a reproachful, irate glance at Mrs. Cattermole.

“Did I tell you a lie when I said he warn’t worth thet thar?” he vociferated, snatching the tin dipper from the water-bucket. The noise disturbed the baby, which began to whimper feebly. Matt turned his chair’s back on the deacon and gazed studiously towards the wood-house in the yard. The deacon’s face grew apoplectic. He seemed about to throw the dipper at the back of Matt’s head, but mastering himself he let it fall with a splash, and said, quietly: “I guess you won’t hev me to blame if he turns out all belly an’ no han’s. Some folks’d say I’m offerin’ you a smart, likely young man, with his heart in the wood-pile. But thet’s not Deacon Hailey’s way. He makes a pint of tellin’ the bad pints. He’s a man you could swap a horse with, hey? I tell you, Mrs. Cattermole, thet durned boy is all moonshine an’ viciousness, stuffed with conceit from floor to ridge-piece. Picters, picters, picters, is all he thinks about! Amoosin’ himself—thet’s his idee of life in this vale of tears. I reckon he thinks he’s goin’ to strike Captain Kidd’s treasure. But, arter all, he ain’t your burden. I’ve giv his poor mother a home, an’ I ain’t the man to grudge bite an’ sup to her boy. So even now I don’t mind lettin’ you off. He’s my crost, and I’ve got to bear him. ’Tain’t no use bein’ a Christian only in church, hey?”

“I guess I’m a Christian, too,” said Mrs. Cattermole. “So I must bear with the poor lad an’ train him up some in the way he should go. An’ then there’s father. You’re a rael saint, deacon, but I sorter think where heaven is consarned father ’ud like a look-in es well. So let’s say no more ’bout it. Now, then, deacon, the table’s waitin’!”

He ignored the patient piece of furniture. “Waal, don’t blame me any if the buckwheat turns out bad,” he shouted, losing his self-control again, and spurting out his nicotian fluid at the stove like an angry cuttle-fish.

“Thet’s so,” acquiesced Mrs. Cattermole, quietly. “Now, then, Deacon Hailey, jest you set there.” She had taken a chair and placed her hands on the table.

“Hush!” said the deacon. “Don’t you see thet thar young un wakin’ up? The tarnation boy hes been shakin’ him like an earthquake. I didn’t know es you kep’ your baby in the kitchin or I wouldn’t hev troubled to come. When thet thar table kinder began to dance and jump, you wouldn’t thank me fur rousin’ the innocent baby, hey? Sleep, sleep, thet’s what a baby wants! A baby kin’t hev too much sleep an’ a grown-up person kin’t hev too little, hey? They’re a lazy slinky lot, the young men o’ the Province, sleepin’ with their mouths open, expectin’ johnny-cakes to fall into ’em. I wonder this young man here don’t get into a cradle hisself. He’d be es much use to his fellow-critters es makin’ picters, I do allow. This life’s a battle, I allus thinks, an’ star-gazin’ ain’t the way to sight the enemy, hey? I reckon I’ll git back now, Mrs. Cattermole. There’s ’nough time been wasted over thet limb of Satan. Jest you tell Cattermole what I say ’bout him, an’ if ever you git durned sick an’ tired feedin’ an onthankful lazybones, es you’re bound to git, sure es skunks, jest you remember Deacon Hailey is the Christian you’re lookin’ fur. An’ don’t you forgit it!” And very solemnly he strode without.

Mrs. Cattermole lifted her hands and brought them down again on the table with a thump. “The tarnation ole fox!” she cried, “tryin’ to bamboozle me with tales ’bout turnin’ tables. ’Tain’t likely es a table is goin’ to dance of itself, an’ tell me ’bout Maria’s sickness. Jest you come here, Matt, an’ lay your hands alongside o’ mine. What’s thet you’re doin’?”

For Matt had begun pensively adorning the hood of the cradle by means of a burned stick he had pulled from the stove.

“It’s on’y Ole Hey,” he said, reddening.

“Jest you leave off makin’ fun o’ your elders an’ betters,” she said, sharply. “There’ll be plenty of work fur you in the paint-shop.”

There was plenty of work, Matt found, in numerous other directions, too. Many more things than mechanical wood-cutting did the boy practise at Cattermole’s saw-mill. To begin with, Mrs. Cattermole’s apprehensions were justified and the spring freshets swept away the dam, and so Matt was set to work hauling brushwood and gravel and logs to build up a kind of breast-work. Cattermole was really a house-joiner and house-builder, so Matt acquired cabinet-making, decoration, and house-building. His farming and cattle-rearing experience was also considerably enlarged. He milked the cows, looked after four stage-horses (driven by Mrs. Cattermole’s brother) and thirty-six sheep, cut firewood, cleared out barns, turned churns, hoed potatoes, mowed hay, fed fowls and pigs, and rocked the cradle, and, in the interval of running the circular and up-and-down saws in the mill, worked in the paint-shop at the back, graining and scrolling the furniture and ornamenting it with roses and other gorgeous flowers, sometimes even with landscapes. This was his only opportunity of making pictures, for recreation hours he had none. He rose at four in the morning and went to bed at ten at night. His wages were his food and clothes, both left off.

Mrs. Cattermole made his garments out of her husband’s out-worn wardrobe, itself of gray homespun.

But the hours in the paint-shop threw their aroma over all the others and made them livable.

And Cattermole, though a hard was not a harsh taskmaster, and had gentle flashes of jest when Mrs. Cattermole was out of ear-shot. And, though winter was long, yet there were seasons of delicious sunshine, when the blueberries ripened on the flats, or the apples waxed rosy in the orchard; when the air thrilled with the song of birds, and the dawn was golden.

In one of these seasons of hope he wrote to his uncle of his father’s death and his own existence, and Cattermole paid the postage; an ingenuous letter full of the pathetic, almost incredible ignorance of obscure and sequestered youth, and inquiring what chances there would be for him to reap fortune by painting pictures in London. He addressed the letter—with vague recollection of something in his school reading-book—to Mr. Matthew Strang, Painter, National Gallery, London.

It was not an ill-written letter nor an ill-spelt. Here and there the orthography was original, but in the main McTavit had been not ineffectual, and there were fewer traces of illiteracy about the epistle than might have been imagined from Matt’s talk. But in Matt’s mind the written and the spoken were kept as distinct as printed type and the manuscript alphabet; they ran on parallel lines that never met, and that “Amur’can” should be spelled “American” seemed no more contradictory than that “throo” should be spelled “through.” The grammar he had used in scholastic exercises was not for everyday wear; it was of a ceremonious dignity that suited with the stateliness of epistolary communication. Alas! For all the carefulness of the composition, his uncle of the National Gallery gave no sign.

Matt’s suspense and sorrow dwindled at last into resignation, for he had come to a renewed sense of religion. As Mrs. Strang would have put it, he had found grace. There were a few pious books and tracts about the Cattermole establishment, to devour in stolen snatches or by bartering sleep for reading, and among these dusty treasures he lighted on The Pilgrim’s Progress, with quaint wood-cuts. In the moral fervor with which the dramatic allegory informed him Matt felt wickedness an impossibility henceforward; his future life stretched before him white, fleckless, unstainable. Meanness or falsehood or viciousness could never touch his soul. How curiously people must be constituted who could knowingly prefer evil, when good thrilled one with such rapture, bathed one in such peace! Already he felt the beatitude of the New Jerusalem. The pictures he painted should be good, please God. They should exhibit the baseness of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, castigate the town of Carnal Policy; he would uplift the eyes of the wicked to the contemplation of the Shining Ones. Though, after all, he began to ask himself, could any picture equal Bunyan’s book? Was not a book immeasurably the better medium of expression? The suspicion was strengthened by the reading of a dime novel which his mistress’s brother, the stage-driver, had left lying about. It was the first unadulterated novel he had read, and the sensational episodes stirred his blood, his new-born religious enthusiasm died. He loved Mike the Bush-ranger, who was the hero of the novel. Action, strong, self-dependent action, a big personality—there lay the admirable in life. The Christians and Hopefuls were pale-blooded figures after all, and unreal at that. In actual life one only came across mimics who used their language: the Deacon Haileys or the Abner Preeps, to whom even thieving Tommy were preferable. No wonder Mike had been driven to bush-ranging! What a pity he himself had not remained in his forest hut, rebel against humanity, king of the woods! Ah! and how inadequate was paint to express the fulness of life; the medium was too childishly simple. At most one could fix a single scene, a single incident, and that only in its outside aspect. Books palpitated with motion and emotion. He set to work to write a dime novel, stealing an hour from his scanty night. He made but slow progress, though he began with an exciting episode about a white boy besieged in his log-hut by a party of Indians, and saved by the sudden advent of a couple of bears. The words he wrote down seemed a paltry rendition of his thought and inner vision, they were tame and scant of syllable. He discovered that his literary palette was even more pitiful than his pictorial. Still he labored on, for the goal was grand. And, despite his mental divorce between pronunciation and orthography, his spoken English improved imperceptibly through all this contact with literature.

Then one wonderful day—to be marked with a white stone and yet also with a black—he received a letter from England. All his artistic ambition flamed up furiously again as he broke the seal:

London, Limners’ Club.

Dear Nephew,—Your letter gave me mingled pain and pleasure. I was deeply grieved to hear of the sad death of your dear father. My poor brother had not written to me nor had I seen him since his marriage, but I knew I should somehow hear of it if anything went wrong with him. I am shocked to have remained ignorant for so many months after his death. I really think your mother should have let me know, as she could have discovered my address through my wife’s relatives, who live in Halifax. However, I hope God has given her strength to bear the blow. And now, my dear Matthew, let me tell you your letter is very childish, and not what I should have expected of a young man of fourteen as you describe yourself. It is very nice to amuse yourself by painting pictures; it keeps you out of mischief. But how can you fancy that your pictures are worth any money? Why, painting is the most difficult of all the arts; it requires years and years of study under great masters, and it costs a heap of money to pay models—that is, men or women who sit or stand in uncomfortable positions while you are painting them. No picture is any good that is done without models; if you wanted to paint a horse you would have to hire a horse, and that is even more expensive than hiring a man. Otherwise your horse would be all wrong. Why, a friend of mine painted a picture of a forge, and he had to have it all built up in his studio, and it cost a hundred and twenty pounds. Studio! The word reminds me that an artist must have a special room to work in, with windows on top, and these rooms are very expensive. London is crammed full of artists who have had all these advantages and yet they are starving. The pictures that you do now everybody would laugh at. And where would you get the money for frames? A nice gold frame might redeem your pictures, but gold frames are dear. No, my dear Matthew, you must not be a little fool. How could you, a poor orphan, think of coming to London? Why, you would die in the streets. No; remain where you are, and thank God that you are earning your clothes and your keep with an honest sawyer in a land of peace and plenty, and are not a burden on your poor mother. I hope you will listen to your uncle like a good boy, and grow up to be grateful to him for saving you from starvation. Believe me,

Your affectionate uncle,

Matthew Strang.