“I knew you weren’t a rogue,” cried Madame, in thoughtless triumph. The sentiment reminding her of the interrogative eyebrows, she added, hastily, “Of course, you won’t tell my husband. Not that he would mind, of course, for I am helping you to leave the country. But oh, how I wish you had come to me instead of to Herbert! The dear boy has such hard work and so few pleasures, and his allowance is so small that his father was naturally annoyed to think of your making the poor boy stint himself. Of course, I made it up to Herbert unbeknown to his father, who would only return him a little of the money you had borrowed. Promise me you will not apply to Herbert again. You know it is so expensive living in Paris!”
“I promise,” Matt murmured, hardly conscious of what Madame was saying, his soul already in Nova Scotia, and dissolved in tenderness and gratitude. The prospect of leaving London was as delightful as the prospect of coming to it had been not fifteen months ago.
Ere he bade her farewell Madame made him promise to come and see her when he was back in London again, hoped the voyage would do him good, and scolded him for never having shown her his pictures.
“I am sure you will be a great artist,” she said, smiling winsomely. “You have the artistic hand. God bless you.”
The young man listened unmoved; he was hoping the ice would bear till he arrived in Cobequid Village.
And so, with all his worldly goods, including the unsaleable “Angelus,” packed in the smallest of satchels, Matt Strang sailed back across the Atlantic, the blood clogged in his veins, an unregarded unit of the countless myriads that London has allured and scorched.
CHAPTER X
MATT RECEIVES SUNDRY HOSPITALITIES
But the prodigal son was not fated to see any of his relatives immediately upon his return to his native land except his mother, and this was scarcely his mother, this pale creature with eyes vacant of all save tears, who babbled to him, with heart-rending verbal repetitions, of Revelation and the Beast, not even mistaking him for his dead father. She had survived her life.
From Halifax Matt did not proceed forthwith to Cobequid Village, joining, instead, a crew of mackerel-fishers, in the hope of earning enough to repay Madame Strang immediately; for his soul, reinvigorated by the sea-breezes of the voyage and the skies of his childhood, had returned to its healthy repugnance to debt, and was ashamed of its lapse.
It was a mixed company that he sailed away with—the bulk decent Nova Scotians, of old fisher stock, but some rougher and more casual, and a few—though these were harmless enough—despised “Portigees.” The fishing was not devoid of danger. The men had to row out from the schooner in twos or threes to tend the nets spread on the mackerel banks, and sometimes a fog would come on and ingulf the ship, and the fishers with their mocking freight would row for hours and hours, and at times for days and days, on the ghostly sea in search of their floating home. And sometimes they, too, would be swallowed up in the mystery of sea and fog, and wives and mothers, running anxiously to the wharf to meet them, would learn that an older fisher had netted his prey.