Look upon a little child,
Pity my simplicity,
And suffer me to come to Thee.”
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!”
“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