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.
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.
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: