London, Limners’ Club.Dear Nephew,—Your letter gave me mingled pain and pleasure. I was deeply grieved to hear of the sad death of your dear father. My poor brother had not written to me nor had I seen him since his marriage, but I knew I should somehow hear of it if anything went wrong with him. I am shocked to have remained ignorant for so many months after his death. I really think your mother should have let me know, as she could have discovered my address through my wife’s relatives, who live in Halifax. However, I hope God has given her strength to bear the blow. And now, my dear Matthew, let me tell you your letter is very childish, and not what I should have expected of a young man of fourteen as you describe yourself. It is very nice to amuse yourself by painting pictures; it keeps you out of mischief. But how can you fancy that your pictures are worth any money? Why, painting is the most difficult of all the arts; it requires years and years of study under great masters, and it costs a heap of money to pay models—that is, men or women who sit or stand in uncomfortable positions while you are painting them. No picture is any good that is done without models; if you wanted to paint a horse you would have to hire a horse, and that is even more expensive than hiring a man. Otherwise your horse would be all wrong. Why, a friend of mine painted a picture of a forge, and he had to have it all built up in his studio, and it cost a hundred and twenty pounds. Studio! The word reminds me that an artist must have a special room towork in, with windows on top, and these rooms are very expensive. London is crammed full of artists who have had all these advantages and yet they are starving. The pictures that you do now everybody would laugh at. And where would you get the money for frames? A nice gold frame might redeem your pictures, but gold frames are dear. No, my dear Matthew, you must not be a little fool. How could you, a poor orphan, think of coming to London? Why, you would die in the streets. No; remain where you are, and thank God that you are earning your clothes and your keep with an honest sawyer in a land of peace and plenty, and are not a burden on your poor mother. I hope you will listen to your uncle like a good boy, and grow up to be grateful to him for saving you from starvation. Believe me,Your affectionate uncle,Matthew Strang.
London, Limners’ Club.
Dear Nephew,—Your letter gave me mingled pain and pleasure. I was deeply grieved to hear of the sad death of your dear father. My poor brother had not written to me nor had I seen him since his marriage, but I knew I should somehow hear of it if anything went wrong with him. I am shocked to have remained ignorant for so many months after his death. I really think your mother should have let me know, as she could have discovered my address through my wife’s relatives, who live in Halifax. However, I hope God has given her strength to bear the blow. And now, my dear Matthew, let me tell you your letter is very childish, and not what I should have expected of a young man of fourteen as you describe yourself. It is very nice to amuse yourself by painting pictures; it keeps you out of mischief. But how can you fancy that your pictures are worth any money? Why, painting is the most difficult of all the arts; it requires years and years of study under great masters, and it costs a heap of money to pay models—that is, men or women who sit or stand in uncomfortable positions while you are painting them. No picture is any good that is done without models; if you wanted to paint a horse you would have to hire a horse, and that is even more expensive than hiring a man. Otherwise your horse would be all wrong. Why, a friend of mine painted a picture of a forge, and he had to have it all built up in his studio, and it cost a hundred and twenty pounds. Studio! The word reminds me that an artist must have a special room towork in, with windows on top, and these rooms are very expensive. London is crammed full of artists who have had all these advantages and yet they are starving. The pictures that you do now everybody would laugh at. And where would you get the money for frames? A nice gold frame might redeem your pictures, but gold frames are dear. No, my dear Matthew, you must not be a little fool. How could you, a poor orphan, think of coming to London? Why, you would die in the streets. No; remain where you are, and thank God that you are earning your clothes and your keep with an honest sawyer in a land of peace and plenty, and are not a burden on your poor mother. I hope you will listen to your uncle like a good boy, and grow up to be grateful to him for saving you from starvation. Believe me,
Your affectionate uncle,
Matthew Strang.
Matt’s tears blistered the final sheet of this discouraging document. His roseate visions of the future faded to cold gray, his heart ached with a sudden sense of the emptiness of existence. But when he had come to the last word his hand clinched the letter fiercely. A great glow of resolution pervaded his being, like the heat that returns after a cold douche. “I will be a painter. I will, I will, I will!” he hissed. And he tore up the embryo of the dime novel and wrote again to his uncle:
My dear Uncle,—How good you are to write to me and tell me everything I want to know. Don’t be afraid that I will starve in London, dear uncle. I could always earn my living there in the fields and paint late at night, but I won’t come till I have enough money for lessons and models and a studio, though I think I could draw horses without hiring them. I have always been very good at animals. Besides, what do they do when they want bears, as the geography book says there aren’t any bears in England? I could live in the attic, and knock a hole in the roof. My mother doesn’t need anything from me, thank God, as she is married again and bears the blow well, and my sister Harriet is married too, so you see it will be easy for me to save up money. As soon as my apprenticeship is over I shall go on to the States, where the greatest fools make heaps of money, and so in a few years, please God, I shall be able to come over like you did, and be a great artist like you. Good-bye, dear uncle, God bless you.From your loving nephew,Matthew Strang.P.S.—When I come over I will change my name if you like, so as not to clash with yours. I know you would not like it if people thought you had done my pictures.P.P.S.—Besides, my real name now might be Matthew Hailey, as mother has changed hers to that.
My dear Uncle,—How good you are to write to me and tell me everything I want to know. Don’t be afraid that I will starve in London, dear uncle. I could always earn my living there in the fields and paint late at night, but I won’t come till I have enough money for lessons and models and a studio, though I think I could draw horses without hiring them. I have always been very good at animals. Besides, what do they do when they want bears, as the geography book says there aren’t any bears in England? I could live in the attic, and knock a hole in the roof. My mother doesn’t need anything from me, thank God, as she is married again and bears the blow well, and my sister Harriet is married too, so you see it will be easy for me to save up money. As soon as my apprenticeship is over I shall go on to the States, where the greatest fools make heaps of money, and so in a few years, please God, I shall be able to come over like you did, and be a great artist like you. Good-bye, dear uncle, God bless you.
From your loving nephew,
Matthew Strang.
P.S.—When I come over I will change my name if you like, so as not to clash with yours. I know you would not like it if people thought you had done my pictures.
P.P.S.—Besides, my real name now might be Matthew Hailey, as mother has changed hers to that.
This letter evoked no answer.
When Matt’s apprenticeship was at an end, the first item of his programme broke down, for he lacked the money to carry him to the States, so he had to stay on at Cattermole’s farm at a petty wage, though a larger than Mrs. Cattermole was aware of, till he had scraped a little together. And then an accident occurred that bade fair to dispose of all the other items. He was at work in the saw-mill, when his leg got jammed between the log he was operating upon and the carriage that was bearing it towards the gang of up-and-down saws. There would not be room for his body to pass between the gang of saws and the framework that held them. It was an awful instant. He cried out, but his voice was lost in the roar of the water and the clatter of the machinery. Round went the water-wheel, the carriage glided along, offering inch after inch of the log to the cruel teeth, and Matt was drawn steadily with it towards the fatal point. With an inspiration he drew out the stout string he always carried in his pocket, and, making a noose, threw it towards a lever. It caught, and Matt was saved, for he had only to pull this lever to close the gate in the flume and shut out the water. When the machinery stopped the racket ceased, too, and Matt’s voice could be heard, and Cattermole rushed in from the adjoining furniture manufactory, and, knocking away the dogs at the end of the log, lifted it and released the prisoner, and then made him kneel down and offer a prayer for his salvation. Matt’s awakening sense of logic dimly insinuated that this was thanking Providence for having failed to mutilate him, but the atmosphere of Puritan acceptance in which he moved and had his being asphyxiated the nascent scepticism.
Shortly after, Matt bade farewell to Cattermole farm, with its complex appurtenances—a proceeding which Mrs. Cattermole christened “onchristian ingratitood.” She declared that he ought to strip off the clothes she had made him, and depart naked as he had come. From a dim corner of the kitchen Cattermole’s face signalled, “Don’t mind her. God bless you.”
Softened by the saw-mill accident, Matt tramped to Cobequid to see his mother before departing for Boston, and thence ultimately for England. He felt guilty, a sort of Prodigal Son,and kept assuring himself of his innocence and economy. The third Mrs. Hailey received him with a rapture that almost surpassed Billy’s. She hugged him to her bosom with sobs and told him her grievances. These were manifold, but seemed analyzable into four categories: one, the remissness of Harriet, whose visits were rare, and whose baby had bow-legs; two, the naughtiness of the children, of whom Matt had always been the only satisfactory specimen; three, the cruelty of their step-father in chastising them for the same; four, the deacon’s breach of contract in refusing to migrate to Halifax, or to permit her to hold Baptist prayer-meetings. Her black eyes flashed with strange fire when she spoke of her new husband’s crimes and derelictions. And there was the old dreaded hysteria in her threats to throw up the position. Evidently remarriage had not made her happy, he thought with added tenderness. Perhaps nothing could. He shuddered at his own deeper perception of unhappiness implanted in temperament and finding nutriment in any conditions.
In conclusion, she besought her boy—the only person in the world who loved her, the only person to whom she could tell her troubles—to go to Halifax instead of the States. It was far nearer, and money could be made just as easily. Her folks lived at Halifax, and though he must not dream of seeking their assistance, for they had been very bad to her, mewing her up strictly so that she had been forced to elope with her poor Davie, still it would be a consolation to know that he was near her own people, likewise not far from herself, in case of anything happening to either of them. Perhaps she would persuade her husband to move there, after all—who knew? Or she might come there herself and stay with him, for a week or two at any rate, and meantime he should write to her about the dear old town. Moved by her lack of reproaches and by her misery, and impressed into his olden subjugation to the handsome, masterful woman, Matt acquiesced. Perhaps his main motives were the comparative cheapness of the journey and the reinflammation of his childish curiosity concerning the gay city.
It was Saturday, but Matt suffered such tortures under the moral but mumbled exordiums of “Ole Hey,” of which his unaccustomedear took in less than ever, that he determined to depart on the Monday. The deacon seemed to have aged considerably, his beard was matted and thick, and his dicky was stained with tobacco-juice. For the rest, Matt discovered that most of the children were employed about the farm or the works, and that they had ceased to go to school, the deacon having converted Ruth into a school-mistress when she could be spared from keeping the books of his tannery and grist-mill. Ruth herself he met with indifference that the stateliness of her unexpectedly tall presence did nothing to thaw. He was surprised to hear from Billy, whose bed he shared that night, and who was more greedy to hear Matt’s adventures than to talk, that they were all very fond of her, and that she could still romp heartily. But Ruth had gradually grown shadowy to his imagination beside his burning dreams of Art, and the sight of her seemed to add the last touch of insubstantiality to her image. And yet, in the boredom of the Sunday services, with his eye roving restlessly about the severe, unlovely meeting-house in search of distractions, he could not but be conscious that she was the sweetest and sedatest figure in the village choir that sang and flirted in the rising tiers of the gallery over the vestibule; and when Deacon Hailey, tapping his tuning-fork on the rails, imitated its note with a rasping croak, Matt had a flash of sympathy with the divined inner life of the girl in this discordant environment. He told her briefly of his plans—to save up enough money to get to his uncle in London, who would doubtless put him in the way of studying Art seriously. She said she wished she had something as fine to live and work for; still she was busy enough, what with book-keeping and teaching school, as she put it smilingly. Their parting, like their meeting, was awkward. Self-consciousness and shyness had come into their simple relation. Neither dared take the initiative of a kiss, which for the rest was a rare caress in Cobequid save between children and lovers. Relatives shook hands; even women were not free of one another’s lips. And for the lad’s part, timidity was all he felt in the presence of this sweet graceful stranger. Only at the last moment, when she handed him a keepsake in the shape of a prize copy of theArabian Nightsher music-mistresshad given her, did their looks meet as of yore, and then it was more the young painter than the old playmate who was touched by the earnest radiance of her eyes and the flicker of rose across the delicate fairness of her cheek. He made a little sketch of her in return, and sent it her from Halifax.
When he was on his way he opened the gilt-bound volume and read on the fly-leaf:
To MattFrom Ruth.God make you a great artist.
To MattFrom Ruth.God make you a great artist.
To Matt
From Ruth.
God make you a great artist.
Halifaxexceeded Matt’s expectations, and gave him a higher opinion of his mother. For the first time his soul received the shock of a great town, or what was a great town to him. The picturesque bustle enchanted him. The harbor, with its immense basin and fiords, swarming with ships and boats, was an inexhaustible pageant, and sometimes across the green water came softened music from a giant iron-clad. High in the background of the steep city that sat throned between its waters rose forests of spruce and fir. From the citadel on the hill black cannon saluted the sunrise, and Sambro Head and Sherbrooke Tower shot rays of warning across the night. The streets throbbed with traffic, and were vivid with the blues and reds of artillery and infantry; and the nigger and the sailor contributed exotic romance. On the wharves of Water Street, which were lined with old shanties and dancing-houses, the black men sawed cord-wood, huge piles of which mounted skyward, surrounded by boxes of smoked herrings. On one of the wharves endless quintals of codfish lay a-drying in the sun. And when the great tide, receding, exposed the tall wooden posts, like the long legs of some many-legged marine monster, covered with black and white barnacles and slime of a beautifularsenic green, the embryonic artist found fresh enchantment in this briny, fishy, muddy water-side. Then, too, the Government House was the biggest and most wonderful building Matt had ever seen, and the fish, fruit, and meat markets were a confusion of pleasant noises.
In the newly opened park on the “Point” the wives of the English officials and officers—grand dames, who set the tone of the city—strolled and rode in beautiful costumes. Matt thought that the detached villas in which they lived, with imposing knockers and circumscribing hedges instead of fences, were the characteristic features of great American cities. He loved to watch the young ladies riding into the cricket-ground on their well-groomed horses; beautiful, far-away princesses, whose exquisite figures, revealed by their riding-habits, fascinated rather than shocked his eye, accustomed though it was to the Puritan modesty of ill-fitting dresses, the bulky wrappings of a village where to go out “in your shape” was to betray impure instincts. He would peer into the enclosure with a strange, wistful longing, eager to catch stray music of their speech, silver ripples of their laughter. He wondered if he would ever talk to such celestial creatures, for whom life went so smooth and so fair. What charming pictures they made in the lovely summer days, when the officers played against the club, and they sat on the sward drinking tea under the shady trees, in white dresses, with white lace parasols held over their softly glinting hair to shield the shining purity of their complexions—a refreshing contrast of cool color with the scarlet of the officers’ uniforms. Sometimes the wistful eyes of the boy grew dim with sad, delicious tears. How inaccessible was all this beautiful life whose gracious harmonies, whose sweet refinements, some subtle instinct divined and responded to! At moments he felt he could almost barter his dreams of Art to move in these heavenly spheres, among these dainty creatures whose every gesture was grace, whose every tone was ravishment. There was one girl, the most bewitching of all, whom he only saw in the saddle, so that in his image of her, as in his sketches of her, she was always on a beautiful chestnut horse, which she sat with matchless ease and decision; a tall, slender girl, with yellow-brown hair thatlay soft and fluffy about the forehead of her lovely English face. Her favorite canter was along the beach-road; and here, before he had found work, he would loiter in the hope of seeing her. How he longed—yet dreaded—that she might some day perceive his presence; sometimes so high flew his secret audacious dream that in imagination he patted her horse’s glossy neck.
In such an exhilarating atmosphere the boy felt great impulses surge within him. But, alas! the seamy side of great cities was borne in on him also. He had a vile lodging in the central slums, near the roof of a tall tenement-house that tottered between two groggeries, and here drunken wharfingers and sailors and negro wenches and Irishmen reeled and swore. To a lad brought up in godly Cobequid, where drunkenness was spoken of with bated breath, this unquestionable supremacy of Satan was both shocking and unsettling. Nevertheless, Matt spent the first days in a trance of delight, for—apart from and above all other wonders—there were picture-shops in the town; and the works of O’Donovan, the local celebrity, were marked at twenty, or thirty, and even fifty dollars apiece. They were sea-paintings of considerable merit, that excited Matt’s admiration without quite overwhelming him. On the strength of O’Donovan’s colossal prices, Matt invested some of his scanty stock of dollars in a kit of paint at a fairy shop, where shone collapsible tubes of oil-color, such as he had never seen before, and delightful brushes and undreamed-of easels and canvases. He also bought two yellow-covered books, one entitledArtistic Anatomy, and the otherPractical House Decoration, which combined to oppress him with his ignorance of the human form divine and the house beautiful, and became his bed-fellows, serving to raise his pillow. His conceit fell to zero when he saw a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds among the collection in the Session Hall.
After a depressing delay, mitigated only by the sight of his fair horsewoman, he found work in a furniture shop at the top of an old rambling warehouse that was congested with broken litter and old pianos. The proprietor not only dealt in débris,but bought new furniture and had it painted in the loft. Matt received six dollars a week, half of which he saved for his English campaign. At first he had the atelier to himself, but as the proprietor’s business increased he was given a subordinate—a full-grown Frenchman, rather shorter than himself, who swore incomprehensibly and was restive under Matt’s surveyorship. By this time Matt had learned something of the wisdom of the serpent, so he treated his man to liquor. After the Frenchman had got drunk several times at the expense of his sober superior, he discovered that Matt was his long-lost brother, and peace reigned in the paint-shop.
But Matt did not remain long in Halifax. The Frenchman’s jabber of the mushroom millionaires of the States (though he failed to explain his own distance from these golden regions) fired Matt’s imagination, and he resolved to go to Boston in accordance with his original programme. He considered he had sufficiently studied his mother’s wishes, and her letters had become too incoherent for attention. It was a pain, not a pleasure, to receive them. He was not surprised to learn from Billy’s letters that domestic broils were frequent, and that the deacon’s proverbial wisdom did not avail to cope with Mrs. Strang’s threats of suicide. It was only poor Ruth’s girlish sweetness that could bring calm into these household cyclones.
And so one fine evening Matt set sail for the city of culture and “Crœsuses.” Everything seemed of good augury. Though the expense of the trip had wellnigh eaten up his savings, his heart was as light as his pocket. He was going only to the States, but he felt that, in quitting his native soil, the voyage to London, the temple of Art, and to his uncle, its high-priest, had begun. The moon shone over the twinkling harbor like a great gold coin, and as the vessel spread its canvas wings and glided out of the confusion of shipping, Matt felt that its name was not the least happy omen in this auspicious moment. The ship was namedThe Enterprise.
That night, finding some confusion about the distribution of bunks, Matt lay down on deck, withArtistic AnatomyandPractical House Decorationfor his pillows, and slept thesleep of the weary, tempered by a farrago of inconsequent dreams.
When he woke up next morning he rubbed his eyes from more than sleepiness. Halifax seemed still to confront his vision—its hills, its forts, its wharves, George Island, the Point, and the great harbor in whichThe Enterpriserocked gently. What was this hallucination?
He soon discovered that it was reality. There had been a head-wind in the night, and the ship had dropped her anchor in the harbor for safety.
The incident was typical. In the course of the voyage Matt learned to know the captain—a grizzled old sea-dog with the heart of a bitch. The ship was his own, and he sailed it himself to save expense and check dishonesty. There is a proverb about saving a pennyworth of tar, and Captain Bludgeon illustrated it. No man was ever so unfitted to walk the quarter-deck. His idea of navigation was to hug the coast, and he seized every pretext for putting in at creeks or ports and anchoring for the night, when the crew would go ashore and come back incapable. The schooner itself was an old tub, a cumbrous, dingey-like craft, but sound in timber. Matt had a rough time, though the reading of theArabian Nightsmade the voyage enchanted. The passengers were a plebeian crowd—a score of women, mostly servant-girls and single, fifteen men emigrating to the States, and a few children. There were only six bunks. The mate had given up his state-room—which Matt was to have shared—to some of the women. Those who could not secure bunks herded dressed in a big field bed, which also accommodated some of the men, likewise sleeping in their clothes. For toilet operations all the women resorted to the state-room, which held a mirror and washing apparatus. Etiquette was free-and-easy. The food was horrible, the cook’s menus being almost ingenious in their unpalatableness. Fortunately most of the passengers were sick already. Matt had no immunity. All the pangs of his first pipe were repeated, without the moral qualms which rationalized those. He continued to sleep on deck as often as he could, making friends with the stars; when the night was too chilly he couched onthe wood-pile near the stove. Thus was he spared licentious spectacles, and his innocence was granted a little longer term. They passed the signals and flag-staff of Sable Point safely, Captain Bludgeon’s face as white as the breakers that girdled its barren rock; then, instead of making a bee-line for Boston, the captain fetched a semicircle, following the New England coast line, and holding on to the apron-strings of his mother earth. Such voyaging he conceived to be sure, if slow; mistakenly enough, considering the iron-bound character of the coast.
The passengers—once they had got over their sickness—did not complain, for they had the leisure of poverty, and the prospect of indefinite board and lodging was not unpleasing, and their frequent stopping-places diversified the monotony of the voyage with little excursions. One night, having been driven into harbor by a capful of wind, they witnessed the torch-light fishing. It was a scene that set Matt’s fingers itching for the brush—waving torches glittering on the water from dozens of boats, and lighting up the tanned faces of the fishers, who were scooping up the herrings with nets. Every detail gave him the keenest joy—the wavering refractions in the water, the leaping silver of the fish touched with gold flame, the sombre mystery of sea and sky above and around. The night was made even more memorable, for some of the girls who had landed brought back in giggling triumph many bundles of cured herrings, which they had pilfered from an unguarded smoke-house, and these they generously distributed, so that the whole ship supped deliciously in defiance of the cook.
On another occasion—in the afternoon at high-water—Matt and about a score of the passengers, the majority females, went on shore to pick gray-beards, as they called the gray cranberries that grew in the swamps. And they tarried so long that when they came back to the boat they found the tide turned, and two hundred yards of mud between them and the water. One of the men tried the mud, and sank to the knees in slimy batter. In the end there was nothing for it but to launch the empty boat, and then wade to it. The launching was easy, the boat slipping along as on grease, but the sequel was boisterous. Jack Floss, a strapping Anglo-Saxon with a blond mustache anda devil-may-care humor, set the example of giving a woman a pick-a-back to save her skirts, and the few other men followed suit, returning again and again for fresh freight. The air resounded with hysterical giggling and screaming as the women frantically clutched their bearers, some of whom extorted unreluctant kisses under jocose threats of tumbling their burdens over into the mud. One or two actually carried out their threats, by involuntarily stepping suddenly into a gutter worn by the rains and sinking up to the waist, but the mishaps abated no jot of the madcap merriment—it rather augmented the rowdiness as the women were hauled from their mud-baths. For his part Matt waded warily, more conscious of the responsibility than of the fun, for he was doing his duty manfully, as became a lad stout, sturdy, and sixteen. His second burden was a slim, pretty servant-girl named Priscilla, and when he was depositing her, speckless, in the boat, she took the opportunity of the embrace to kiss him in hearty gratitude. Matt dropped her like a hot coal. He felt scorched and flustered, and had a bewildered moment of burning blushes ere he ploughed his way back to rescue another of the distressed damsels. That sudden kiss was an epoch in his growth. A discomfort at the time, the after-taste of it lent new warmth to his interest in the royal amours of theArabian Nights. In his dreams he bore delectable Eastern princesses across perilous magic marshes, and their gratitude found him stockish no longer.
The next episode in this curious creeping voyage was superficially more critical for Matt. A sudden gale upset all poor Captain Bludgeon’s calculations. He was near shore as usual, and tried to beat into harbor almost under bare poles; but the haven was of a dangerous entrance, narrow and choked in the throat by a rock, and no one on board had sufficient seamanship to get the schooner in. The mate advised abandoning the hope of harbor, and setting the jib and the jib-foresail to make leeway. The captain swore by everything unholy he would not go a cable farther out to sea. The night was closing in, but, the wind dying away,The Enterpriseanchored outside the harbor. But in the night the wind sprang up from the opposite quarter fiercer than ever, and the vessel dragged heranchors and drove towards the rock that squatted on guard at the mouth of the harbor, pitching helplessly in the shifting troughs. In the inky blackness great swamping waves carried off her boats, her top-sails, and both houses. Her anchors were left behind her, and part of the bulwarks was likewise torn away. Fortunately her cables held out as she drove bumping along, though they did not moderate her pace sufficiently to prevent her keel being partially torn away when she bumped upon a reef. Yet she jolted over the reef and drifted blindly on and on, none knew whither.
Within the schooner the scene was almost as wild as without. The women’s screams rivalled those of the wind; the distracted creatures ran up and down the companion-ladder, getting in the way of the crew; the captain went below to quiet them—and did not return. Apparently he preferred the society of his own sex. The mate, thus left in command, boarded up the companion-way to stop the aimless scurrying, and told off some of the crew to help him unload the cargo, which consisted of plaster, and to pitch it overboard. Matt and the cook bore a hand in the work. Not daring to unhatch for fear of being water-logged, they had to pass the plaster through the lazaret.
Jack Floss did his best to comfort the females by profanities. He laughed, and hoped the Lord would damn the old hulk, whose fleas were big enough to swim ashore on. His cool blasphemies calmed some, but others plainly regarded him as a Jonah. Matt was half perturbed, half fascinated by this unconventional vagabond; of the real danger his own buoyancy made light.
When the morning light came at last, it showed that they had providentially skirted the grim rock and were drifting into harbor. The deck was covered with débris and with sand, which the ship had stirred and raked up in her dragging progress along the shallow waters. Piles of grit had accumulated in the corners, and the waves on which she tossed were discolored with dirt. Very soon she passed a little island where a brig lay moored; and with great difficulty—for the sea was still running high—the brig sent her a hawser and made her fast. Then theywere enabled to realize further the extent of their luck, for the harbor was strewn with wreckage. No fewer than seven schooners had gone down, and only two men had been saved. The harbor was alive with boats looking for the dead. Captain Bludgeon, bestriding his desolate quarter-deck, congratulated himself on his seamanship. He arranged with a tug to drawThe Enterpriseback to St. John, New Brunswick, for repairs. The few impatient passengers who could afford to pay an extra fee went on to Boston by the rescuing brig, but the majority stuck toThe Enterpriseand Captain Bludgeon, who was compelled to board and lodge them at a cheap water-side hotel while the schooner was laid up. Thus were the fates kind to these waifs on the ocean of life, who enjoyed the holiday after their manner—plain living and high jinks—and had no need of Satan, or even Jack Floss, to find mischief for their idle hands to do.
Matt, however, was not of the roysterers. He had remained withThe Enterprise, of course, not having the money to exchange; but the scenery of a new town—and that a hill-girt town like St. John, with a cathedral, a silver water, and a forest afire with flowers—was always sufficient business for him. The cathedral was not so colossal as it had loomed to his childish fancy through McTavit’s reminiscences. After a day or two Matt found an even more delightful occupation. He happened to remark to Jack Floss that the ceiling of the hotel sitting-room would be all the better for a little ornamentation, and that worthy straightway sought out the proprietor, a gentleman of Scotch descent, and expressed himself so picturesquely that Matt was offered a dollar to make the ceiling worthy of being sat under by artistic souls like Jack Floss. Thereupon Jack Floss and everybody else, except Matt, were turned out of the sitting-room, and the boy, guided by hisPractical House Decorationin the mixing of colors and the preparation of plaster, stood on the ladder and stencilled one of his imaginative medleys. His fellow-passengers were not permitted to see it till it was ready, but speculation was rife, and the rumor of its glories had spread about the water-side, and on show-day the room was packed with motley spectators, gazing reverently heavenwardas at fireworks, some breaking out into rapturous exclamations that made the boy more hot and uncomfortable than even the damsel’s kiss had done. He was glad he was almost invisible, squeezed into a corner by the crowd. And despite his discomfort, aggravated by a crick in the back of the neck, due to painting with his hand over his head, there was a subtle pleasure for him in his fellow-passengers’ facile recognition of the torch-light fishing scene which formed the centre of the decorations. The hotel bar did good business that day.
Just beforeThe Enterprisestarted again for Boston a man came to see the ceiling, and immediately offered the artist a commission. There was a paint-shop in the railway-carriage works, and Matt could have a situation just vacant there at ten dollars a week. Dazzled by these fabulous terms, which seemed almost to realize his ambition at a bound, Matt accepted; andThe Enterprise, patched up and refitted, sailed without him. A few hours later he discovered that it had also sailed without Priscilla, that seductive young person having found a berth as chambermaid in the hotel. She came into Matt’s room to tidy up, and expressed her joy at the prospect of looking after his comfort. But the boy told her he must seek less comfortable quarters, and, despite her protests and her offers to help him temporarily, he departed for cheaper lodgings, leaving behind him a perfunctory promise to call and see her soon. Jack Floss, whom Matt gratefully regarded as the architect of his fortunes, had half a mind to stay behind, too. He said he wanted to go under, andThe Enterprisedidn’t seem to have any luck. But at the last moment he found that he could not desert the ladies.
Matt was more sorry to part from him than from Priscilla; there was something in the young man’s devil-may-care manner that appealed to the germs of Bohemianism in the artistic temperament. The young artist had, however, an unpleasant reminder of the defects of the Bohemian temperament, for Jack Floss was forced to confess that he had lost the copy of theArabian Nightswhich he had persuaded Matt to lend him to beguile the tedium of the days of waiting. The boy was grievously distressed by the loss; it seemed an insult to Ruth Hailey and a misprision of her kindly wishes. However, itwas no use crying over spilled milk, and Jack Floss slightly assuaged his chagrin by fishing out from among his miscellaneous effects a volume of Shelley in small type, and another—with an even more microscopic text—containing the complete works of Lord Byron. Both books opened as by long usage at their most erotic pages. Through these ivory gates the boy passed into the great world of romantic poetry. Whole stanzas remained in his memory. The brain that had refused to retain Bible verses, spending hours in quest of the tiniest, absorbed the sensuous images of the poets without effort; he fell asleep with them on his lips.
In the railway-carriage shop—a spacious saloon as full of painters as an atelier in the Quartier Latin—Matt was allowed a free hand on great canvases that, when filled with flowers and landscapes, were nailed to the roofs of the carriages by electroplated pins. He also decorated the wooden panels with scroll-work and foliage, and gilded the lettering outside the doors. Thus was the citizen fed on art at every turn, standing under his ceiling, or sitting on his chair, or lying on his sofa, or travelling on his railway. Art is notoriously elevating; but as the depraved quarters of the town continued to flourish, the art must have been bad.
Matt’s career in the paint-shop was neither so long nor so pleasant as he had anticipated. His pictures did not please his fellow-artists as much as his employers, and he became the butt of the place. A series of impalpable irritations almost too slight for analysis, subtle with that devilish refinement of which coarseness is only capable when it is cruel, rendered his life intolerable. Matt’s vocabulary was too mincing for his fellow-craftsmen; they resented his absence of expletives, though imperceptibly he succumbed to the polluted atmosphere which had surrounded him ever since he set foot in Halifax; and the boy, whose mind was stored with lovely images and ethereal lyrics, began to bespatter his talk with meaningless oaths. Nor was this his only coquetry with corruption, for the daily taunt of “milksop” conspired with the ferment of youth.
“Varnishing-day” was his day of danger. It was pay-day, and Matt had boundless money. It was also the hardest dayof the six, the wind-up, when all the work of the week was varnished in an atmosphere of sixty degrees; and the poor lad, drunk with the fumes of turpentine, sticky from head to foot, his face besplashed, his eyes stinging, his nose red, and his brain dizzy, threw off his apron and overalls, and reeled to the door, and groped his way into the streets to breathe in the glorious fresh air, and revel like the rest of his fellows in the joy of life—aye, and the joy of license, the saturnalia of Saturday night. For the glorious fresh air soon palled, and in the evening Matt was dragged by his mates to a species of music-hall in a hotel near the harbor, where, in a festive reek of bad tobacco and worse whiskey, he repeated the choruses of winking soubrettes, dubious refrains whose inner meaning the brag and badinage of the workshop had made obscurely clear. But disgust invariably supervened; Byron and Shelley were his Sunday reading, and under the spell of their romantic song, which chimed with his soul’s awakening melodies, he revolted against his low-minded companions, hating himself for almost sinking to their level.
He felt that he inhabited a rarer ether; he was conscious of a curious aloofness, not only from them, but from humanity at large, and yet here he was joining in their coarse conviviality. To such a mood the accidental turning up of an old sketch of his Halifax divinity on her horse appealed as decisively as an accidental text was wont to appeal to his mother. The beautiful curves of her figure, the purity of her complexion, rebuked him. Perhaps it was because he was an artist that his soul was touched through the concrete. In a spasm of acuter disgust, and in a confidence of higher destinies, he threw up his berth.
He had saved twenty dollars—twenty stout planks between him and the deep. But the luck that had been his hitherto deserted him. In six weeks he had only one fortunate fortnight, when he carried the hod for a house-joiner, and was nearly choked by the veering round of a little ladder, through which he had popped his head in mounting a bigger.
One by one his twenty planks slipped from under him, and then he found himself struggling in the lowest depths. Thefew dollars he had squandered on the music-hall haunted him with added reproach.
Too proud to beg or to go back to the paint-shop or to write to his mother, his only possessions his clothes and a box of cheap water-colors he carried with his slim library in his jacket pockets, he searched the streets for an odd job, or stood about the wharves amid the stevedores and negroes to earn a copper by unasked assistance in rolling casks into warehouses, till at last, when the cathedral lawn was carpeted with autumn leaves, the streets became his only lodging. Hungry and homeless, he was beginning to regret his hut in the woods, and to meditate a retreat from civilization, for in the frosty nights that shadowed the genial autumn days this unsheltered life was not pleasant, when, by one of those strokes of fortune which fall to the most unfortunate, he found a night-refuge. A fellow-lodger of his at the Hotel of the Beautiful Star, a glass-blower out of work with whom he had once halved his evening bread, fell into employment, and gratefully offered him the nocturnal hospitality of the factory. Here, voluptuously couched on warm white sand, piles and barrels of which lay all about, the boy forgot the gnawing emptiness of his stomach and the forlornness of his situation in the endless fascination of the weird effects of light and shade. It was a vast place, dim despite its gas-jets, mysterious with shadowy black corners. The red flannel shirts of the men struck a flamboyant note of color in the duskiness; the stokers were outlined in red before the roaring furnaces, the blowers were bathed in a dazzling white glow from the glass at the end of their blow-pipes, so that their brawny bare arms and the sweat on their brows stood out luridly. With every movement, with every flickering and waning light, there was a changing play of color. Matt would lie awake in his corner, taking mental notes, or recording the action of muscles by the pencilled silhouette of some picturesque figure rolling the pliant glass. Great painters, he thought, in his boyish ignorance, worked from imagination on a basis of memory; but he was not strong enough yet to dispense with observation, though observation always brought despair of his power to catch the ever-shifting subtleties of living nature. Inthe enthralment of these studies, and in his sensuous delight in the Dantesque effects, Matt often omitted to sleep altogether. And sometimes, on that background of ruddy gloom, other visions opened out to the boy dreaming on his bed of sinuous sand; the real merged into the imaginative, and this again into the fantasies of delicious drowsihead. The walls fell away, the factory blossomed into exotic realms of romance; peerless houris, ripe in womanhood, passed over moon-silvered waters in gliding caïques; prisoned princesses, pining for love, showed dark starry eyes behind the lattice-work of verandas; pensive maidens, divinely beautiful, wandered at twilight under crescent moons rising faint and ghostly behind groves of cedars.
London, too, figured in the pageantry of his dreams, glittering like a city of theArabian Nights, ablaze with palaces, athrob with music; and perched on the top of the tallest cupola, on the loftiest hill, stood his uncle Matthew, holding his paint-brush like a sceptre, king of the realm of Art. Hark! was that not the king’s trumpeters calling, calling him to the great city, calling him to climb up and take his place beside the sovereign? Oh, the call to his youth, the clarion call, summoning him forth to toils and triumphs in some enchanted land! Oh, the seething of the young blood that thronged the halls of dream with loveliness, and set seductive faces at the casements of sleep, and sanctified his waking reveries with prescient glimpses of a sweet spirit-woman waiting in some veiled recess of space and time to partake and inspire his consecration to Art! The narrow teachings of his childhood—the conception of a vale of tears and temptation—shrivelled away like clouds melting into the illimitable blue, merging in a vast sense of the miracle of a beautiful world, a world of infinitely notable form and color. And this expansion of his horizon accomplished itself almost imperceptibly because the oppression of that ancient low-hanging heaven overbrooding earth, of that sombre heaven lying over Cobequid Village like a pall, was not upon him, and he was free to move and breathe in an independence that made existence ecstasy, even at its harshest. So that, though he walked in hunger and cold, he walked under triumphal arches of rainbows.
Butthe dauntless, practical youth lay beneath the dreamer, even as the Puritan lay beneath the artist. Matt could not consent to live on his host, the glass-blower, who shared his lunch with him—in the middle of the night—and he was almost reduced to applying again at the paint-shop, when the captain of a schooner gave him a chance to work his way to Economy, on the basin of Minas, twenty-five miles below Cobequid Village. Matt had to make up his mind in a hurry, for this was the last ship bound north before the bay was frozen for the winter, and ships bound south for the States seemed always to have a plethora of crew. The mental conflict added to the pains of the situation; to go north again was to confess defeat. But was it not a severer defeat to lessen a poor man’s lunch, even although he accepted only a minimum on the pretext of not being hungry? This reflection decided him; though he had no prospects in Economy, and nothing to gain but a few days’ food and shelter, he agreed informally to ship and to help load the schooner at nightfall. He would have preferred to go on board at once, were it only to dine off a ship’s biscuit; but no one suspected his straits, and so he had an afternoon of sauntering.
On the hilly outskirts of the city he was stopped by a stylish young lady, so dazzling in dress and beauty that for a moment he did not recognize Priscilla. A fashionable crinoline, and a full-sleeved astrakhan sacque, together with an afghan muffler round her throat, had given the slim chambermaid an imposing portliness. An astrakhan toque, with a waving red feather, was set daintily on her head, and below thesacque her gown showed magnificent with bows and airy flounces. Evidently her afternoon out.
“Good land!” she cried. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing. I’m in a hurry,” he said, flushing shamefacedly as he passed hastily on.
But Priscilla caught him by the hem of his jacket.
“Don’t look so skairt! Why haven’t you been to see me all this time?”
“Too busy,” he murmured.
“Too proud, I reckon. I thought you’d come for to look at your decorations, anyways; let’s go right along there; you ain’t lookin’ as smart as a cricket, that’s a fact; I’ll make you a glass o’ real nice grog to pick you up some.”
He shook his head. “I’m going away—I’m off to Economy.”
“Scat! You want to give me the mitten. Why don’t you speak straight? You don’t like me.”
She looked at him, half provoked, half provokingly.
He looked at her with his frank, boyish gaze; he noted the red curve of her pouting lips, the subtle light in her eyes, the warm coloring of the skin, shadowed at the neck by waves of soft brown hair, in which the beads of a chenille net glistened bluishly; he was pleasured by the brave note of the red feather against the shining black of the toque, the piquant relation of the toque to the face, and he thought how delightful it would be to transfer all these tones and shades to canvas. He forgot to answer her; he tried to store up the complex image in his memory.
“I’m glad you don’t deny it,” she said, her angry face belying her words.
He started. “Oh yes, I like you well enough,” he said, awkwardly.
Her face softened archly. “Then why don’t you come an’ see me? I won’t bite you!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sailing to-night.”
“I guess you ain’t!” She smiled imperious solicitation. “What are you goin’ to do in Economy? Why don’t you stick to the paint-shop?”
“I’ve left there way back in the summer.”
“What made you leave?”
“Oh, well!”
“Then you ain’t got no money?” There was tender concern in her tones.
“Not hardly.”
“How many meals have you had to-day?”
He had a flash of resentment. “Don’t you worry about me,” he said, gruffly.
“Bother!” said Priscilla, contemptuously, though her voice faltered. “You’re jest goin’ to come along and have a good square meal.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not hungry any.”
“Oh, Matt! Wheredoyou expect to go to?” said Priscilla, with a roguish, disarming smile.
“Not with you,” rejoined Matt, smiling in response.
Priscilla laughed heartily. The white teeth gleamed roguishly against the full red lips.
“Come along,” she said, with good-humored conclusiveness.
He shook a smiling head. “I’m going to Economy.”
“You’re comin’ with me; the boss’ll stand you a dinner for repairin’ your decorations.”
“Why, what’s wrong with them?” he asked, anxiously.
He knew from his book how liable such things were to decay.
“Oh, the centre of the ceilin’ is a bit off color. That silly old owl of a Cynthia spilt a pail of water on the floor above.”
“You don’t say!” he cried, in concern.
“Honest Injun! I was jest mad. You could get lots to do if you would stay at our shanty.”
“I’ll come and put the ceiling right,” he said, indecisively; and, giving her his hand with shy awkwardness, was promenaded in triumph through the dignified streets. He felt a thrill of romance as this dazzling person clasped his hand clingingly. He wondered how she dared be seen with so shabby a being; the juxtaposition had a touch of theArabian Nights, of the amorous adventures of his day-dreams; it was like a princess wooing a pauper. They passed other couples better matched—some in the first stage of courtship, some in the second. In the firststage the female and the male walked apart—she near the wall talking glibly, he at the edge of the sidewalk, silent, gazing straight ahead in apparent disconnection. In the second stage the lovers walked closer together, but now both gazed straight ahead, and both were silent; only if one looked between them one saw two red hands clasped together, like the antennæ of two insects in conversation. When Priscilla and Matt met pairs in this advanced stage, her hand tightened on his, and she sidled nearer. It was like a third stage, and Matt’s sense of romance was modified by a blushing shamefacedness.
As they entered the hotel Matt made instinctively towards the sitting-room to see his damaged decorations; but Priscilla, protesting that he must feed first, steered him hurriedly up-stairs into his old apartment. He was too faint with hunger to resist her stronger will.
“There, you silly boy!” she said, affectionately, depositing him in a chair before the stove, which she lighted. “Now you jest set there while I tell the boss.” She lingered a moment to caress his dark hair; then, stooping down suddenly, she kissed him and fled.
Matt’s heart beat violently, the blood hustled in his ears. The sense of romance grew stronger, but mingled therewith was now an uneasy, indefinable apprehension of the unknown. The magnetism of Priscilla repelled as much as it drew him; his romance was touched with vague terror. Yet as the fire vivified the bleak bedroom, with its text-ornamented walls, the warm curves of the girl’s face painted themselves on the air, subtly alluring.
Priscilla herself was back soon, bearing some cold victual and some hot grog, and watched with tender satisfaction the boy’s untroubled appetite. She drank a little, too, when he was done, and they clinked glasses, and Matt felt it was all very wicked and charming. Stanzas of Shelley and Byron pulsed in his memory, tropical flowers of speech blossomed in his brain.
But only weeds sprouted out. “It was real good of you, Priscilla, to speak to the boss. I’d better see to the ceiling at once.”
“Oh, don’t; it can wait till to-morrow.”
“But I promised to go aboard to-night.”
“You nasty feller, you’re goin’ to shake me, after all.”
“Don’t say that, Priscilla,” he said, shyly. “I only wish I could do something to show my gratitude to you.”
“No, you don’t.” Priscilla’s bosom heaved, and tears were in her eyes.
“Yes, I do.”
“You don’t like me.”
“I do.”
“You don’t think I’m pretty.”
She had removed her things now, revealing the natural gracefulness of her figure.
“Oh, Priscilla!” said Matt, looking at her. “Why, I’d give anything if I could—” He paused, timidly.
“Well, why can’t you?” interrupted Priscilla, her face very close to his.
“I’m not good enough yet. And the light’s failing.”
“Why! What do you want of the light?”
“I can’t paint so well by night. The color looks different in the day. But I’d give anything to be able to paint something as pretty as you.”
Priscilla swept her glass aside, pettishly.
“Lan’ sakes, what a boy! Pictures, pictures, pictures! If it ain’t the ceilin’, it’s me! There are better things on this earth than pictures, Matt.”
Matt shook his head, with a sceptical smile.
Priscilla looked disconcerted. “Why, didn’t you say I was prettier than a picture, Matt?”
“Oh, that’s different,” he parried, feebly; then, feeling her fascination lulling him to forgetfulness of the price to be paid for his dinner, as well as of the mute appeal of his damaged designs, he jumped up. “I’d best see to the ceiling before it’s too late. I wonder if they’ve kept the materials handy.”
“Set down, Matt.”
“Oh, but I mustn’t cheat the boss.”
“Who’s talkin’ o’ cheatin’? This ismytreat.”
“Oh, but it ain’t right o’ you, Priscilla,” he protested.
“Never mind; when I’m down on my luck you shall do as much for me.”
“I’ll send you half a dollar from Economy,” he said, resolutely. Then, smiling to temper his ungraciousness, he added, “Short reckonings make long friends, hey?—as an old deacon I knew used to say. I guess I’ll go down-stairs now, Priscilla.”
“What for? You haven’t got to go aboard till nightfall?”
“You’re forgetting the ceiling. I kind o’ want to touch it up all the same.”
“You silly boy,” she said, with a fond smile, “that was only my fun.”
“Priscilla!” He stared at her in reproachful amazement. Was his incurable trust in humanity always to be shaken thus?
“Don’t look so solemn.”
“But you told me a fib!”
“Scat! D’you think I was goin’ to let you fool around on an empty stomach?”
“But you told me a lie.” The boy towered over her like an irate judgment-angel.
Priscilla had a happy thought. “But you toldmea lie. You said you warn’t hungry.”
Matt looked startled.
“Oh, but that—that was different,” he stammered again.
“Can’t see it. Tit for tat.”
Matt pondered in silence.
Priscilla rose. “Set down,” she said, soothingly, and the boy, feeling confusedly guilty, let himself be pressed down into his seat.
Priscilla nestled to him, sharing his chair, and pressing her soft cheek to his.
“Was he mad with his poor little Priscilla?” she cooed. “No, he mustn’t be angry, bless his handsome face.”
Matt was not angry any longer, but he was uncomfortable. He tried to whip up his sense of romance, to feel what he felt in reading love-poetry, to fancy that he was sitting with a pensive princess in a cedar grove under a crescent moon. But hecould only feel that Priscilla was a real terrestrial person, and mendacious at that.
Priscilla’s lips sought his in a long kiss. “Youarefond o’ me, Matt, aren’t you?” she murmured, coaxingly.
Matt’s conscience checked conventional response. He faltered, slowly: “I guess you’re real good to me.”
A moment later the door opened. Priscilla sprang up hurriedly, and, to be doing something, noisily pulled down the roller-blind.
“That you, Cynthia?” she said, carelessly.
“Yes, it’s me,” grumbled the old woman. “You’re wanted down-stairs.”
“In a jiffy. I’m just lighting Mr. Strang’s candles,” she said, fumbling about for them in the darkness she had herself produced.
“Rayther early,” croaked Cynthia.
“Yes, Mr. Strang wants to paint; there ain’t enough light to see by,” replied Priscilla, glibly, while Matt felt his cheeks must surely be visible by the light of their own glow.
The candles were lit, and Priscilla, ostentatiously running into the next room, returned with a sheet of white paper. “There you are, Mr. Strang!” she cried, cheerfully, adding in a whisper, “I’ll be back presently. You won’t go to-night, will you?” And her eyes pleaded amorously.
No sooner had Priscilla disappeared than Matt’s perception of romance in the position began to return; but it was an impersonal, artistic perception; he was but a spectator of the situation. He could not understand his own apathetic aloofness.
He walked restlessly about the room, trying to pump up Byronic emotion, but finding the well of sentiment strangely dry. His eye wandered to the blind, and became censoriously absorbed in the crude flowers and figures stamped upon the arsenic-green background; he studied the effects of the candle-light on the glaring coloration, noting how the yellow roses had turned pink. Then Priscilla’s face flew up amid the flare of flowers, and Matt, seizing the sheet of paper and pulling out his paint-box, forgot everything else, even the artificial light, in the task of expressing Priscilla in water-color.
He had nearly finished the sketch, which glowed with dainty vitality, though the figure came out too lady-like. Suddenly the sound of voices broke upon his ear. Priscilla and Cynthia were talking outside his door.
His critical situation recurred to him in a flash, his broken promise to the captain if he yielded to the pertinacious Priscilla. The artist’s imagination might enflame; the crude actuality chilled, curiosity alone persisting. And the latent Puritan leaped up at bay; far-away reminiscences of whispered references to the flesh and the devil resurged, with all that mystic flavor of chill, unspeakable godlessness that attaches to sins dimly apprehended in childhood. “Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” seen suddenly in red letters on one of the wall-texts, was like the voice of a minatory Providence. Poor Priscilla became an advancing serpent, dragging insidious coils.
He shut up his paint-box hastily, and scribbling beneath the sketch, “For Priscilla—with Matt’s thanks,” he puffed at the candles. Only one went out. Priscilla was still talking outside. His heart was thumping with excitement as he added in a corner: “I promised the captain. Good-bye.” Then, blowing out the other candle, he waited, striving to draw serener breath as Priscilla still dallied without.
Only a blurred glimmer showed through the isinglass of the stove door; the room was quite dark. He began to hope she would ascend with Cynthia, and leave the coast temporarily clear; but at last only Cynthia’s step receded, and he heard Priscilla turning the door-handle. It was an anxious moment. He heard her exclamation of surprise.
“Have you gone to bed?” she cried.
He held his breath as she grazed his sleeve in the darkness. Then he glided out, and slid boyishly down the banisters like a flash. There was a gay hubbub of voices in the saloon; he walked unquestioned into the street, then ran (as if pursued by a horde of Amazons) till he reached the docks, and saw the friendly vessel moored against the wharf.
Remorse for his balked romance set in severely as soon as the bustle of loading was over and the anchor weighed; Priscillatook on the halo of Byronism and theArabian Nightswhich had steadily absented itself in practice. Often during that miserable voyage he called himself a fool and a milksop; for the passage was a nightmare of new duties, complicated by sea-sickness and the weakness of a half-starved constitution, and on that swinging schooner, with its foul-mouthed captain, the mean bedroom he had deserted showed like a stable paradise. But blustrous as the captain was by the side of the blubbering Bludgeon, he had his compensations, for he made the voyage before the few passengers had found their sea-legs. Arrived in Economy, Matt was again face to face with starvation. But here Fortune smiled—with a suspicion of humor in her smile; and having already climbed masts and ladders for his dinner, her protégé was easily tempted to seek it at the top of a steeple. The steeple, after tapering to a point two hundred feet high, was crowned by a ball, which for years had needed regilding. Unfortunately the architect had made the ball almost inaccessible, but Matt, being desperate, undertook the job. The breath of winter was already on the town; a week more and the whole steeple would be decorated for the season with snow, so Matt’s offer was accepted, and, his boots equipped with creepers, the young steeple-jack, begirt with ropes, made the ascent safely in the eye of the admiring populace, lowered the great ball and then himself, and being thereupon given board and lodging and materials, he gilded it in the privacy of his garret. Thus become a public hero, Matt easily got through the winter. He decorated the ceiling of the Freemasons’ Hall, and painted a portrait of the member of the House of Assembly, a burly farmer. This was his first professional experience of an actual sitter, and he found himself more hampered than helped by too close contact with reality. However, a touch of imagination does no harm to a portrait, and Matt had by this time acquired sufficient experience of humanity to lean to beauty’s side even apart from his youthful tendency to idealization, which made it impossible for him at this period to paint anything that was not superficially beautiful or picturesque. The member pronounced the portrait life-like, and gave Matt a bushel of home-grown potatoes over and above the stipulated price, which was boardand lodging during the period of painting, and an order on a store for two dollars. With the order Matt purchased a pair of Congress or side-spring boots; the potatoes he swopped for a box of paper collars. From Economy he wrote home to his mother, and received an incoherent letter, in which she denounced the deacon by the aid of fulminant texts. Matt sighed impotently, pitying her from his deeper experience of life, but hoping she got on better with “Ole Hey” than she imagined. He had half a mind to look up his folks, especially poor Billy; but just then he got an order from the farmer-deputy’s brother, who wrote that he was so pleased with his brother’s portrait that he wished Matt to paint his sign-board. He added that, although he had not seen any specimen of Matt’s sign-writing, he felt confident the painter of that portrait would be a competent person. Matt accepted the new task with mixed feelings, and got so many other commissions from the shopkeepers (for every shop had its movable sign-board) that he soon saved fifty dollars, and seemed on the high sea to England and his uncle. He had fixed three hundred dollars as the minimum with which he might safely go to London to study art. The steerage passage would cost only twenty. Unfortunately he was persuaded to invest his savings in a partnership with a Yankee jewel-peddler, and to travel the country with him. The peddler did not swindle his partner, merely his clients; but Matt was so disgusted that he refused to remain in the business. Thereupon the peddler, freed from the obligations of partnership, treated him as an outsider, and refused to return his principal. Matt thought himself lucky to escape in the end with twenty-five dollars and a cleansed conscience. He went back to sign-painting, but, taking a hint from the Yankee, continued his travels, and became a peddler-painter. He hated the work, was out of sympathy with his prosaic sitters, wondering by virtue of what grace or loveliness they sought survival on canvas; but the road to Art, by way of his uncle in London, lay over their painted bodies, so he drudged along. And yet when the sitter was dissatisfied with the picture—it was generally the sitter’s friends who persuaded him that he was dissatisfied—and when Matt had to listen to the fatuous criticisms of farmers and store-keepers, the artist flared up, and more thanonce the hot-blooded boy sacrificed dollars to dignity. He was astonished to find that in many quarters his fame had preceded him, and more astonished to discover finally that the advance advertiser was his late partner. Whether the Yankee compounded thus for the use of Matt’s dollars Matt never knew, but in his kinder thought of the cute peddler the boy came to think himself the debtor. For the dollars mounted, one on the head of another, and the heap rose higher and higher, day by day and week by week, till at last the magic three hundred began to loom in the eye of hope. Three hundred dollars! saved by the sweat of the brow and semi-starvation, and sanctified by the blood and tears of youth; sweet to count over and to dream over, and to pile up like a tower to scale the skies.
And so the great day drew near when Matt Strang would sail across the Atlantic.
Billy Strangwas dreaming happy dreams—dreams of action and adventure, in which he figured not as the morbid cripple, but as the straight-limbed hero. Matt was generally with him in these happy hunting-grounds of sleep—dear old Matt, who had become a creature of dream to his waking life. But absorbed as Billy was in this phantasmagoric happiness, he was still the sport of every unwonted sound from the real world. His tremulous nerves quivered at the first shock, ready to flash back to his brain the bleaker universe of aches and regrets and rancorous household quarrels.
To-night he sat up suddenly, with a premonition of something strange, and gazed into the darkness of the bedroom, seeing only the dim outline of the other bed in which his two younger brothers slept. After a long moment of mysterious rustling, a thin ray of light crept in under the door, then the handle turned very softly, and his mother glided in swiftly,bearing a candle that made a monstrous shadow follow and bend over her. She was fully dressed in out-door attire, wearing her bonnet and sacque and muffler.
Her eyes were wide with excitement and shone weirdly, and the whole face wore an uncanny look.
Billy trembled in cold terror. His mouth opened gaspingly.
“Sh-h-h-h!” whispered his mother, putting a forefinger to her lips. Then, in hurried accents, she breathed, “Quick, get up and dress to oncet!”
Magnetized by her face, he slipped hastily from the bed, too awed to question.
“Sh-h-h-h!” she breathed again, “or you’ll wake Ruth.” Then, moving with the same noiseless precipitancy, her shadow now growing to giant, now dwindling to dwarf, “Quick, quick, children!” she whispered, shaking them. The two younger boys sat up, dazed by sleep and the candle, and were silently bundled out of bed, yawning and blinking, and automatically commencing to draw on the socks they found thrust into their hands.
“Your best clothes,” she whispered to Billy, throwing open the cupboard in which they hung.
The action seemed to loosen his tongue.
“But it ain’t Sunday,” he breathed.
“Sh-h-h-h! To-day is a holiday. Put them on quick, quick!” she replied, in the same awful whisper. “We are goin’ out of the land of bondage in haste with our loins girded. And lo! in the mornin’ in every house there was one dead.”
She set down the candle on the little bare wooden table, where it gleamed solemnly in the gaunt room. Then she fell to feverishly helping the children to dress, darting violently from one to another, and half paralyzing Billy, whose fumbling, freezing fingers could not keep pace with her frantic impatience. He dropped a boot, and the sound seemed to echo through the silent house like a diabolical thunder-clap. He cowered before her blazing eyes as she picked up the boot and violently dumped his foot into it.
“Are we goin’ out, mother?” he said, so as not to scream. His words sounded sinister and terrible to himself.
“Yes; I’ll go an’ see if the girls are finished dressin’.” She took up the candle, and her whisper grew sterner. “Don’t make a sound!”
“But where are we goin’, mother?” he said, to detain her for an instant.
“Goin’ home. We’re throwin’ up the position!” And for the first time the exultation in her voice raised it above a whisper. Then, putting her forefinger to her lip again, “Not a sound!” she breathed, menacingly, and moved on tiptoe to the door, her face set and shining, her shadow tumbling grotesquely on the walls and ceilings.
“A-a-a-h!” Billy fell back on the bed, screaming. Like a flash his mother turned; her hand was clapped fiercely over his mouth.
“You little devil!” she hissed. “What do you mean by disobeyin’?”
“The light! The light!” he gurgled.
She withdrew her hand. “What are you shakin’ ’bout? There’s light ’nough.” She drew up the blind, and a faint moonlight blurred itself through the frosty glass. “You’re growed up now, you big booby. An’ your brothers are with you.”
“I’ll go with you,” he gasped, clutching at her skirt.
“With that crutch o’ yours, you pesky eyesore!” she whispered, angrily. “You’ll stay with the little uns, bless their brave little hearts.” And she clasped the dazed children to her breast. “The Lord hes punished him for his cruelty to you.... Finish your dressin’, quick.” She released the two little boys and glided cautiously from the room, holding the candle low, so that her great wavering shadow darkened the room even before the thicker horror of blackness fell when she was gone. The three children pressed together, their heartbeats alone audible in the awful stillness. They were too bewildered and terrified to exchange even a whisper. An impalpable oppression brooded over the icy room, and a dull torpor possessed their brain, so that they made no effort to understand. They only felt that something unreal was happening, something preternaturally solemn. After a dream-likeinterval of darkness, the mysterious rustling was repeated without, a thin line of light crept again under the door, and their mother’s face reappeared, gleaming lurid in the circle of the candle-rays. The two girls loomed in her wake, a big and a little, both wrapped up for a journey, but shivering and yawning and rubbing their eyes, still glued together by sleep. The younger boys, who had remained numb, guiltily gave the last hasty touches to their costume under the irate gaze of their mother. But Billy’s face had grown convulsed.
His mother advanced towards him, dazzling his eyes with the candle and her face, and bending down so that her eyes lay almost on his.
“Don’t you dare to have a fit now,” she hissed, her features almost as agitated as his own, “or I’ll cut your throat like I’ve cut his.”
The intensity of her will mastered him, oversweeping even the added horror of her words, and combined with the return of the light to ward off the threatened paroxysm. He dragged on his top-coat. Only a few minutes had elapsed since he had sat up in bed, yet it seemed hours. The mother stealthily led the way through the hushed house, down the creaking stairs, blowing out the light in the hall. When she opened the outer door the cold air smote their faces like a whip. As she was cautiously closing the door a dark thing ran out through the aperture.
“There goes his soul!” she whispered, in grim exultation.
But it was only Sprat.
The creature, now old and infirm, quietly took his familiar place in the rear of the procession, which now set forth over the frozen moonlit snow under the solemn stars in the direction of Cobequid Village. The farm-hands, asleep in the attic built over the kitchen, in an “ell,” or annex, to the main house, heard nothing. Ruth, sleeping the sleep of virginal health and innocence in her dainty chamber, was deep in kindly dreams. The woman led the way noiselessly but rapidly, so that the little children had to run to keep pace with her, and Billy dragged himself along by clinging to her skirt, dreading to be left behind in the great lonely night. The road led downhilltowards a little valley, in which stood the deacon’s grist-mill, hidden by trees, but, as they drew near it, showing dark against the white hill that rose again beyond it. They descended towards it through a cutting in the hill lined with overhanging snow-drifts, curled like crystallized waves. Everything seemed dead; the mill-pond was frozen and snow-covered; frozen bundles of green hides stood in piles against the front of the mill; there were icicles round the edges of the sullen cascade that fell over the dam. The mill-stream was a sheet of ice, spotted ermine-wise with black dots, where air-holes showed the gloomy water below. The procession crossed the little wooden bridge, bordered by bare willows, whose branches glittered with frost, and then the snow-path rose again. Every sound was heard intensely in the keen air—the rumbling of the little water-fall, the gurgling of the stream under the ice, the frost fusillade of the zigzag pole fences snapping along the route, the crunch of crisp snow under their feet. They mounted the hill, and reached the broad, flat fields that stretched on white and bare to Cobequid. The last inch of Deacon Hailey’s possessions was left behind. Then the leader of the procession slackened her pace, and lifted up her voice in raucous thanksgiving: