The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Master; a Novel
Title: The Master; a Novel
Author: Israel Zangwill
Release date: August 27, 2015 [eBook #49795]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
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Some typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. List of Illustrations (etext transcriber's note) |
THE MASTER
A Novel
BY
I. ZANGWILL
AUTHOR OF “THE KING OF SCHNORRERS”
“CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO” ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | ||
| PROEM | 1 | |
| Book I | ||
|---|---|---|
| CHAP. | ||
| I. | SOLITUDE | 5 |
| II. | THE DEAD MAN MAKES HIS FIRST AND LAST APPEARANCE | 23 |
| III. | THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH | 33 |
| IV. | “MAN PROPOSES” | 45 |
| V. | PEGGY THE WATER-DRINKER | 58 |
| VI. | DISILLUSIONS | 69 |
| VII. | THE APPRENTICE | 83 |
| VIII. | A WANDER-YEAR | 99 |
| IX. | ARTIST AND PURITAN | 113 |
| X. | EXODUS | 123 |
| Book II | ||
| I. | IN LONDON | 132 |
| II. | GRAINGER’S | 145 |
| III. | THE ELDER BRANCH | 161 |
| IV. | THE PICTURE-MAKERS | 181 |
| V. | A SYMPOSIUM | 202 |
| VI. | THE OUTCAST | 218 |
| VII. | TOWARDS THE DEEPS | 229 |
| VIII. | “GOLD MEDAL NIGHT” | 245 |
| IX. | DEFEAT | 259 |
| X. | MATT RECEIVES SUNDRY HOSPITALITIES | 273 |
| XI. | A HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE | 290 |
| Book III | ||
| I. | CONQUEROR OR CONQUERED? | 308 |
| II. | “SUCCESS” | 325 |
| III. | “VAIN-LONGING” | 342 |
| IV. | FERMENT | 364 |
| V. | A CELEBRITY AT HOME | 384 |
| VI. | A DEVONSHIRE IDYL | 408 |
| VII. | THE IDYL CONCLUDES | 438 |
| VIII. | ELEANOR WYNDWOOD | 460 |
| IX. | RUTH HAILEY | 487 |
| X. | THE MASTER | 499 |
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE MASTER
PROEM
Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, ’twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards.
At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew, lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats; listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church procession passed through the drowsy streets. They had escaped the Great Expulsion, nor had joined in the exodus of “Evangeline,” and, sprinkled about the country, were compatriots of theirs who had drifted back when the times grew more sedate; but for the most part it was the Saxon that profited by the labors of the pioneer Gaul, repairing the tumble-down farms and the dilapidated dykes, possessing himself of embanked marsh lands, and replanting the plum-trees and the quinces his predecessor had naturalized. For the revolt of the States against Britain sent thousands of American loyalists flocking into this “New Scotland,” which thus became a colony of “New England.” Scots themselves flowed in from auld Scotland, and the German came to sink himself in the Briton, and a band of Irish adventurers, under the swashbuckling Colonel McNutt, arrived with a grant of a million acres that they were not destined to occupy. The Acadian repose had fled forever. The sparse Indian hastened to make himself scarcer, conscious there was no place for him in the new order, and disappearing deliciously in hogsheads of rum. The virgin greenwood rang with axes, startling the bear and the moose. Crash! Down went pine and beech, hemlock and maple, their stumps alone left to rot and enrich the fields. Crash!—thud! The weasel grew warier, the astonished musquash vanished in eddying circles. Bridges began to span the rivers where the beaver built its dams in happy unconsciousness of the tall cylinder that was about to crown civilization. The caribou and the silver fox pressed inland to save their skins. The snare was set in the wild-wood, and the crack of the musket followed the ring of the axe. The mackerel and the herring sought destruction in shoals, and the seines brimmed over with salmon and alewives and gaspereux. The wild land that had bloomed with golden-rod and violets was tamed with crops, and plump sheep and fat oxen pastured where the wild strawberry vine had trailed or the bull-frog had croaked under the alders. A sturdy, ingenious race the fathers of the new settlement, loving work almost as much as they feared God; turning their hand to anything, and opening it wide to the stranger. They raised their own houses, and fashioned their own tools, and shod their own horses, and later built their own vessels, and even sailed them to the great markets laden with the produce of their own fields and the timber from their own saw-mills. There were women in this workaday paradise—shapely, gentle creatures, whose hands alone were rough with field and house-work; women who span and sang when the winter night-winds whistled round the settlement. The dramas of love and grief began to play themselves out where the raccoon and the chickadee had fleeted the golden hours in careless living. Children came to make the rafters habitable, and Death to sanctify them with memories. The air grew human with the smoke of hearths, the forest with legends and histories. And as houses grew into homes and villages into townships, Church and State arose where only Faith and Freedom had been.
The sons and heirs of the fathers did not always cling to the tradition of piety and perseverance. The “Bluenose” grew apathetic, content with the fatness of the day; or, if he exerted himself, it was too often to best a neighbor. The great magnets of New York and Boston drew off or drew back all that was iron in the race.
And amid these homely emotions of yeomen, amid the crude pieties or impieties of homespun souls, amid this sane hearty intercourse with realities or this torpor of sluggish spirits, was born ever and anon a gleam of fantasy, of imagination: bizarre, transfiguring, touching things with the glamour of dream. Blind instincts—blinder still in their loneliness—yearned towards light; beautiful emotions stirred in dumb souls, emotions that mayhap turned to morbid passion in the silence and solitude of the woods, where character may grow crabbed and gnarled, as well as sound and straight. For whereas to most of these human creatures, begirt by the glory of sea and forest, the miracles of sunrise and sunset were only the familiar indications of a celestial timepiece, and the starry heaven was but a leaky ceiling in their earthly habitation, there was here and there an eye keen to note the play of light and shade and color, the glint of wave and the sparkle of hoar-frost and the spume of tossing seas; the gracious fairness of cloud and bird and blossom, the magic of sunlit sails in the offing, the witchery of white winters, and all the changing wonder of the woods; a soul with scanty self-consciousness at best, yet haply absorbing Nature, to give it back one day as Art.
Ah, but to see the world with other eyes than one’s fellows, yet express the vision of one’s race, its subconscious sense of beauty, is not all a covetable dower.
The islands of Acadia are riddled with pits, where men have burrowed for Captain Kidd’s Treasure and found nothing but holes. The deeper they delved the deeper holes they found. Whoso with blood and tears would dig Art out of his soul may lavish his golden prime in pursuit of emptiness, or, striking treasure, find only fairy gold, so that when his eye is purged of the spell of morning, he sees his hand is full of withered leaves.
Book I—CHAPTER I
SOLITUDE
“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.
“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: