Morris’s window was open, and himself buried under so many blankets that he did not hear Fessenden enter the room. He sprang up when gripped by the shoulder, however, and after a brief visit to the death-chamber returned and endeavored until morning to answer his pupil’s eager almost incoherent questions. He expounded every belief he had investigated. After Fessenden had concluded that he would prefer to think of his poor old friend in that Nirvana where there was no more work, he went out and spent the day in the woods by himself. This new idea of Death and its impenetrability to mortal light seemed to him magnificent; and Christina, hastily patching together a shroud out of sheets—old sheets at that—and Fritz and Dolf, not even assisted by the hired man—who was sent to chop wood as usual—hammering together a rude coffin, while a few neighbors stamped through the defiles to “help lay the old lady out,” filled his ardent young mind with revolt.
The burial-ground was ten miles distant, close by a church, a mountain store, a post-office, and three or four houses—a hamlet in a clearing through which a stage passed twice a week. Once a month the church was visited by an itinerant preacher. Mrs. Nettlebeck, to the satisfaction of her family, had accommodated her setting forth to the Methodist’s returning flight, and, as there was no time to lose, her remains, on the night following her death, were placed on the “jumper”—a low sledge—and driven through the snowdrifts of the forest by torchlight. Fritz drove; Christina stood beside him, arrayed in fragments of hastily contributed black; Fessenden and his faithful chum tramped in the rear; and Dolf and the hired man lighted the way with great pine torches. The jumper was on runners; the men and the boys wore snow-shoes, for the snow was often five or six feet deep; now and then the rude vehicle plunged into a drift and had to be dug out, while the coffin was deposited beyond the reach of the plunging horses. Once the coffin disappeared, and as no one could remember exactly where it had been placed, and the pitch-pine was smoking heavily, it was some time before the treacherous catafalque was discovered. After the box had been dug out and safely hearsed, Fessenden let fly his wrath.
“Why on earth can’t you bury the poor old lady in the forest?” he demanded. “You’re treating her horribly, in my opinion; and I’d like to know what better church-yard any one wants than the woods.”
“I guess this family’ll git Christian burial every time,” replied Fritz. “But I must say it’s mighty inconvenient dyin’ in the winter. Still, we can spare the time better than if we was sowin’ or harvestin’; there’s something in that. You can’t for to git everything right in this world.”
And the tramp went on through the forest, where the late moon rarely penetrated, and the wild torches peopled the caverns of the dark with the evil spirits which had haunted the forests of the old peasant’s childhood, and cast sinister shadows over the stark outline bumping close to the ground. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been a bit of a cynic in her way, for she had never been persuaded that the transit from her quaint comfortable village in the toy state of Hamburg to this souring struggle for existence in an aboriginal wilderness had exalted her second condition over her first; and Fessenden wondered if she were smiling grimly in her coffin at the hardships of her final journey.
They arrived at the settlement in the late sunrise, but although several neighbors had assembled to help them, neither pick nor spade made any impression on the frozen snow, many feet in depth, which covered the church-yard and its graves. The preacher managed to flounder through the drifts to his duty, and preached a long and dismal sermon on the platitudes of life and death, which further outraged Fessenden; and then Mrs. Nettlebeck was stowed away in a little room behind the pulpit to wait till the spring came and the “ice went out.”
VII
It was several days before Fessenden realized that he felt something more than natural grief at the death of Mrs. Nettlebeck. He knew that his father loved him, but Mr. Abbott’s visits were brief and far between, and his infrequent letters rarely covered a sheet of notepaper. Fessenden now had his ardent following among the boys of his region, but boys manifest their liking by loyalty, not by sentiment. Fritz and Dolf treated him with good-natured indifference; he would as soon have thought of kissing one of the scraggy winter maples as Christina, in spite of her cross indulgence, and Morris might have been a disembodied spirit. Mrs. Nettlebeck had been his one steady well of affection. She had petted and crooned over him since he had come to her, a baby in a chronic state of disapproval with his nurse; and the large measure of rejected love that was still in her she had lavished upon him daily. He had taken it as a matter of course, for he was lordly and masculine, and there was no sharp contrast of neglect and ill-treatment to fuse it into light. But now that the magic had gone abruptly from him, and there was nothing to take its place, he felt himself up against the barren rocks of life; for the first time the future seemed to hold vague and unknown terrors, the present to be less than the supremely satisfactory thing he had esteemed it. He went first for consolation to his canoe, whom perhaps he loved the more ardently as her responses held an exciting element of doubt. But Pocahontas, like the bears, seemed to “deaden” in winter, at all events to be coldly impersonal until she was skimming above the sunken ice before the first breeze of spring. So he left her to the chill repose of the boat-house, and poured out his lonely and frightened soul to his father. Mr. Abbott answered that he would go up to see him at once, and did manage to pay his son a flying visit in the course of a month. But by this time Fessenden was ashamed of his reckless exhibition of sentiment, and, like a true American, had jealously concealed his gushing fountains under a cool, alert, and practical exterior. When his father arrived his head was high, and his blue eyes keen and bright, his very muscles expressive of masculine impatience with the soft side of life. Mr. Abbott had brought him a fishing-rod, which appeared to afford immediate consolement; and then, somewhat to his father’s relief, he began to talk about American history.
“Mr. Morris wanted me to wait until I had read more of English and foreign history,” he said. “But I couldn’t, and I’ve been reading out of hours. We’ve a great country, haven’t we?”
“Great.”