Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husband’s jacket.
“An’ father kinder stooped to pick me up,” adds Matt.
“You’re a nice Moloch to trust with one’s children!” she exclaims in terrible accents.
David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat drying under it.
“An’ when you kin’t manage to drownd ’em you try to kill ’em with rheumatics, and then I hev all the responsibility. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both o’ you.”
Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces—their shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strang’s voice brings up the rear, and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his oath-repeater—for he never swears before mother and the children except when he is not angry—suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship at St. John’s by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes down to the sea in a ship, and does more business—of a mysterious sort—in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he kisses his bairns and his wife—all amorousness and amiability again—and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so—into the great Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas, all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings; passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny, sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt—no vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green, sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his mother’s face furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep; he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of Harriet’s face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billy’s case Death were no such grisly mystery.
Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy last year’s accident had taken the zest out of Matt’s enjoyment of the ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece—a machine of his own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But this year the glow of the skater’s blood became the heat of remorse when he saw or remembered Billy’s wistful eyes; he gave up skating and contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school at Cobequid Village.
In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the forelock) his father’s death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent (with an emphasis on the “r”) of the “pear’ls of the watter,” and calling for their night’s letters held converse with the postmistress on “the watter and its pear’ls,” and expectorated copiously, presumably in lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in their buffalo robes and “boots”; and it lent an added solemnity to the appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing, balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strang’s from popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow. She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of the “pear’ls of the land,” and walking home from the singing-class the sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of drink, and commiseration for “Ole Hey,” and all the adjacent villages went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum) remarked in his nasal address, “universally respected.” And everybody, including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome graveyard—some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh—a far-stretching, black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences, past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes of the pines.
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.