Chapter X: Exodus

Billy Strang was 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-like interval 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 downhill towards 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:

“‘When Israel, of the Lord beloved,
Out from the land of bondage came,
Her fathers’ God before her moved,
An awful guide in smoke and flame.’

“Now, then, sing up, children!” she cried.

Bewildered and still half asleep, they obeyed--in bleating, quavering tones that came through chattering teeth to an accompaniment of cloudy breath.

The woman and her children passed on into the night, singing. Amid the stretches of sky and space they seemed a group of black insects crawling across a great white plain.

* * * * *

Abner Preep, coming down before dawn, found a bunch of children on the great kitchen settee, asleep in their clothes. The mother sat on the floor before the open stove, smiling happily and muttering to herself. They had quietly taken possession of the old familiar room and stirred up the slumbering fire.

For the first few seconds Abner wondered if he was dreaming, for the next if he were mad. But another look at the crouching woman convinced him that it was not he that was mad; while a phrase from her babbling lips sent something of the truth home to his beating heart. He roused Harriet and broke the news as gently as time permitted. The brave girl bade him drive at once to Deacon Hailey’s while she kept guard over her mother. Abner thereupon mounted his horse bare-back, to save time, and galloped to the farm.

To his relief he found the deacon little injured. The neglect of his beard had been “Ole Hey’s” salvation. It had sprouted thick and tangled about his throat, and the mad woman, armed with a blunt knife, had only inflicted a flesh-wound, leaving the trachea unsevered. The sleeping man, suddenly awakening to the strange spectacle of his wife in out-door attire brandishing a knife, had fainted from horror and loss of blood. But presently recovering consciousness, he had clamored for Ruth, and with her help bound up the wound, already half stanched by the clogging beard.

The matter was kept in the family, but the deacon swore he would have no more to do with the woman or her unmannerly brood beyond paying the minimum for her incarceration where she could do no more mischief; and so Abner took her forthwith by sleigh and train to the capital, and placed her in a private asylum.

In this manner Mrs. Strang went back to Halifax.

* * * * *

When Matt heard the awful tidings his air-castles crashed and fell as at the crack of doom. Abner Preep was the messenger of evil, for Matt’s painting tour had brought him near Halifax, and Abner thought it best to look up his boyish enemy ere he went back home.

Beneath all the tumult of consternation in Matt’s breast there throbbed an undertone of remorse--a vague feeling that this would never have happened had he been on the spot. His boyish wilfulness had received its death-blow.

“But it served him right,” he cried, with irresistible bitterness, when he heard the deacon had not only washed his hands of the family, but was now vindictively pressing Abner for the arrears of the mortgage interest which had been allowed to lapse while Abner was building up his position. Abner had always understood that Mrs. Strang had exacted the freedom of her property. But there was nothing in black and white.

“There’s no gettin’ out of it,” said Abner, gloomily. “But your poor father must hev made an everlastin’ mess of it, fur how there comes to be so much to pay arter all these years fur a few acres of ground an’ a wretched shanty, durned if I can make out.”

“He cheated father, you may depend,” said Matt, hotly.

“I wouldn’t go as fur nor thet,” said Abner. “It ain’t right to call a man a thief without proof. Anyway, I’ve got to stump up. I shouldn’t ha’ minded it in an ornery way, though I _hev_ got two babies, bless their souls. But it comes hard jest now, with five extra mouths to feed.”

“Oh, but you are not going to feed them!”

“Who, then?”

“Me, of course.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, Matt!” said Abner. “You’ve got to go to London an’ larn paintin’. Harriet’s told me all ’bout you, an’ she’s got some o’ your picters, an’ they’re rael beautiful. There’s one in our bedroom. Besides, they’re all growed up now a’most, an’ they’ll soon be feedin’ theirselves. An’ then, you see, the house itself is your sister’s, not mine.”

“It’s mighty good of you,” said Matt, hoarsely, “but it isn’t fair.”

“No more it was o’ me fightin’ you thet thar time,” said Abner, smiling. “This evens things up.”

There was a great lump in Matt’s throat so that he could not speak. He held out his hand mutely, and Abner took it, and they gripped each other so heartily that the tears started to the eyes of both.

“Then thet’s settled,” said Abner, with husky cheeriness.

“No, that’s only to beg your pardon,” said Matt, recovering his voice. “I’ve been a skunk to you, that’s a fact. But I’m not going to behave badly again. I’m just raking in the dollars now hand over fist, and learning painting all the time into the bargain. I don’t want a bit to go to London, and I’ve put by two hundred and eighty dollars that aren’t the least use to me, and that ’ll just come in handy to pay the old scoundrel. And I can easily send you five dollars a week till I earn more. Billy alone ’ll cost you near that, I guess, and it’s my fault he can’t earn anything hardly.”

In the end the imperious Matt had his way, and, while the boy went on to see his mother, Abner returned home with the situation considerably lightened, the bearer of money for Deacon Hailey, and loving messages for all Matt’s brothers and sisters, even Harriet being now restored to grace.

Matt found his mother in a small padded room in a house that stood on the hill overlooking the harbor. She was gazing yearningly seaward, and tears trickled down her doleful cheeks. Matt stood silently near the door, surveying her askance with aching heart. Abner had told him that her life with Deacon Hailey had grown a blank to her, and he wondered if she would recognize him; in the last two years he had shot up from a hobbledehoy into a tall, stalwart youth.

When she turned her head at last and espied him she leaped up with a wild cry of joy, and folded him in her arms.

“Davie!” she cried, rapturously. “My own Davie! At last! I didn’t see your ship come in.”

A nervous thrill ran down Matt’s spine as he submitted to her embrace. The separate tragedies of his parents’ lives seemed poignantly knit together in this supreme moment.

“They’re so strict with me here, Davie,” she said. “Take me away from my folks, anywhere, where we can be happy and free. I don’t care what they say any more--I am so tired of all this humdrum life.”

Matt pacified her as best he could, and, promising to arrange it all soon, left her, his heart nigh breaking. He walked about the bustling streets like one in a dream, resenting the sunshine, and wondering why all these people should be so happy. Again that ancient image of his father’s dead face was tossed up on the waves of memory, to keep company henceforth with the death-in-life of his mother’s face. The breakdown of his ambition seemed a petty thing beside these vaster ironies of human destiny.