Chapter III: The Thoughts of Youth

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:

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child,
Pity my simplicity,
And suffer me to come to Thee.”

The children took up the burden, sifting themselves instinctively into trebles and seconds in a harmony loud enough to rouse the hibernating bear. Billy’s face returned to its normal pallor, and Matt’s to its abstraction.

In the school-room--a bare, plastered room, cold and uninviting, with a crowd of boys and girls at its notched pine desks--he continued pensive. There was nothing to distract his abstraction, for even Ruth Hailey was away. The geography lesson roused him to a temporary attention. London flitted across his dreams--the Halifax of England, that mighty city in which pictures were saleable for actual coin, and a mighty picture-maker, the Matt Strang of England, was paid for play as if for work. But the reading-book, with its _menu_ of solid stories and essays, peppered with religious texts, restored him to his reveries. McTavit, who was shaping quills with his knife, called upon him to commence the chapter; but he stared at the little pedagogue blankly, unaware of the call. He was noting dreamily how his jagged teeth showed beneath the thin, snuffy upper lip, and the trick the mouth had of remaining wide open after it had ceased talking. He tried to analyze why McTavit was not smiling. Months ago, seeking to make his figures smile, the boy had discovered the rident effect of a wide mouth, and now he essayed to analyze the subtle muscular movements that separate the sublime from the ridiculous. Suddenly the haunting thought recurred to him with a new application. Even McTavit’s freckled face would one day be frozen--those twitching eyelids still, the thin wide lips shut forever. How long more would he stride about his motley school-room, scattering blows and information? Would he come to a stop in the school-room as the clock sometimes did, grown suddenly silent, its oil congealed by the intense cold? Or would Death find him in bed, ready stretched? And the restless boys and girls around him--good God!--they, too, would one day be very peaceful--mere blocks--Carroty Kitty, who was pinching Amy Warren’s arm, and Peter Besant, who was throwing those pellets of bread, and even Simon the Sneak’s wagging tongue would be still as a plummet. They would all grow rigid alike, not all at once, nor in one way, but some very soon, perhaps, and others when they were grown tall, and yet others when they were bent and grizzled; some on sea and some on land, some in this part of the map and some in that, some peacefully, some in pain; petrified one by one, ruthlessly, remorselessly, impartially; till at last all the busy hubbub was hushed, and of all that lively crew of youngsters not one was left to feel the sun and the rain. The pity of it thrilled him; even McTavit’s freckled face grew softer through the veil of mist. Then, as his vision cleared, he saw the face was really darker: strange emotions seemed to agitate it.

“So ye’re obstinate, are ye?” it screamed, with startling suddenness. At the same instant something shining flew through the air, and, whizzing past Matt’s ear, sent back a little thud from behind. Matt turned his head in astonishment, and saw a penknife quivering in the wall. He turned back in fresh surprise, and saw that McTavit’s face had changed, lobster-like, from black to red, as its owner realized how near had been Matt’s (and his own) escape.

“Eh, awake at last, sleepy-head,” he blustered. “There’s na gettin’ your attention. Well, what are ye starin’ at? Are ye na goin’ to fetch me my knife?”

“I’m not a dog,” answered Matt, sullenly.

“Then dinna bark! Ye think because ye’ve lost your father ye’re preevileged--to lose your manners,” he added, with an epigrammatic afterthought that mollified him more than an apology. “I’m verra obleeged to you,” he concluded, with elaborate emphasis, as Simon the Sneak handed him the knife.

“Now, then, sleepy-head,” he said again, “p’r’aps ye’ll read your paragraph--that’s richt, Simon; show him the place.”

McTavit hailed from Cape Breton Isle, and was popularly supposed to soliloquize in Gaelic. This hurt him when he proposed to the postmistress, who had been to boarding-school in Truro. She declared she would not have a man who did not speak good English.

“I do speak guid English,” he protested, passionately. “Mebbe not in the school-room, when I’m talkin’ only to my pupils, and it dinna matter, but in private and in society I’m most parteecular.”

McTavit was still a bachelor, and still spoke guid English. When the reading-lesson had come to an end, Matt was left again to his own thoughts, for while poor McTavit gave the juniors an exercise in grammar which they alleviated by gum-chewing, Matt and a few other pupils were allotted the tranquillizing task of multiplying in copy-books £3949 17_s._ 11¾_d._ by 7958. The sums were so colossal that Matt wondered whether they existed in the world; and if so, how many pictures it would be necessary to make to obtain them. An awful silence brooded over the room, for when written exercises were on, the pupils took care to do their talking silently, lest they should be suspected of copying, this being what they were doing. There was a little museum case behind McTavit’s desk, containing stuffed skunks and other animals and local minerals lovingly collected by him--stilbite and heulandite and quartz and amethyst and spar and bits of jasper and curiously clouded agate, picked up near Cape Blomidon amid the débris of crumbling cliffs. At such times McTavit would stand absorbed in the contemplation of his treasures, his rod carelessly tucked under his arm, as one “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” Then the tension of silence became positively painful, for the school-room had long since discovered that the museum case was a reflector, and McTavit, though he prided himself on the secret of his Argus eye, never caught any but novices not yet initiated into the traditions. Imagine, therefore, the shock both to him and the room, when to-day the acute stillness was broken by a loud cry of “Bang! bang! bang!” An irresistible guffaw swept over the school, and under cover of the laughter the cute and ready collogued as to “answers.”

“Silence!” thundered McTavit. “Who was that?”

In the even more poignant silence of reaction a small still voice was heard.

“Please, sir, it was me,” said Matt, remorsefully.

“Oh, it was you, was it? Then here’s bang! bang! bang! for ye.” And as he spoke the angry little man accentuated each “bang” with a vicious thwack. Then his eye caught sight of Matt’s copy-book. In lieu of ranged columns of figures was a rough pen-and-ink sketch of a line of great war-ships overhung by smoke-clouds, and apparently converging all their batteries against one little ship, on whose deck a stalwart man stood solitary, wrapped in a flag.

McTavit choked with added rage.

“D-defacin’ your books agen. What--what d’ye call that?” he spluttered.

“Blockade,” said Matt, sulkily.

“Blockhead!” echoed McTavit, and was so pleased with the universal guffaw (whereof the cute and ready took advantage to compare notes as before) that he contented himself with the one slash that was necessary to drive the jest home. But it was one slash too much. Matt’s vocal cannonade had been purely involuntary, but he was willing to suffer for his over-vivid imagination. The last insult, however--subtly felt as an injury to his dead father, too--set his blood on fire. He suddenly remembered that this blockhead was, at any rate, the “head” of a family; that he could no longer afford to be degraded before the little ones, who were looking on with pain and awe. He rose and walked towards the door.

“Where are ye goin’?” cried McTavit.

“To find Captain Kidd’s treasure. I’ve learned all I want to know,” said Matt.

“Ye’d better come back.”

Matt turned, walked back to his seat, possessed himself of his half-empty copy-book, and walked to the door.

“Good-bye, you fellers,” he said, cheerfully, as he passed out. The girls he ignored.

McTavit gave chase with raised rod, regardless of the pandemonium that rose up in his wake. Matt was walking slowly across the field, with Sprat leaping up to lick his face. The dog had rejoined him. McTavit went back, his rod hanging down behind.

Matt walked on sadly, his blood cooled by the sharp air. Another link with the past was broken forever. He looked back at the simple wooden school-house, with the ensign of smoke fluttering above its pitched roof; kinder memories of McTavit surged at his heart--his little jests at the expense of the boys, his occasional reminiscences of his native Cape Breton and of St. John, New Brunswick, with its mighty cathedral, the _Life of Napoleon_ he had lent him last year, his prowess with line and hook the summer he boarded with the Strangs in lieu of school-fees, and then--with a sudden flash--came the crowning recollection of his talent for cutting turreted castles, and tigers, and anything you pleased, out of the close-grained biscuits and the chunks of buckwheat-cake the children brought for lunch. Matt’s thoughts went back to the beginnings of his school career, when McTavit had spurred him on to master the alphabet by transforming his buckwheat-cake into any animal from ass to zebra. He remembered the joy with which he had ordered and eaten his first elephant. Pausing a moment to cut a stick and drive Sprat off with it, he walked back into the wondering school-room.

“Please, sir, I’m sorry I went away so rudely,” he said, “and I’ve cut you a new birch rod.”

McTavit was touched.

“Thank you,” he said, simply, as he took it. “What’s the matter?” he roared, seeing Simon the Sneak’s hand go up.

“Please, sir, hedn’t you better try if he hesn’t split it and put a hair in?”

“Grand idea!” yelled McTavit, grimly. “How’s that?”

And the new birch rod made its trial slash at the raised hand.