Too proud to beg or to go back to the paint-shop or to write to his mother, his only possessions his clothes and a box of cheap water-colors he carried with his slim library in his jacket pockets, he searched the streets for an odd job, or stood about the wharves amid the stevedores and negroes to earn a copper by unasked assistance in rolling casks into warehouses, till at last, when the cathedral lawn was carpeted with autumn leaves, the streets became his only lodging. Hungry and homeless, he was beginning to regret his hut in the woods, and to meditate a retreat from civilization, for in the frosty nights that shadowed the genial autumn days this unsheltered life was not pleasant, when, by one of those strokes of fortune which fall to the most unfortunate, he found a night-refuge. A fellow-lodger of his at the Hotel of the Beautiful Star, a glass-blower out of work with whom he had once halved his evening bread, fell into employment, and gratefully offered him the nocturnal hospitality of the factory. Here, voluptuously couched on warm white sand, piles and barrels of which lay all about, the boy forgot the gnawing emptiness of his stomach and the forlornness of his situation in the endless fascination of the weird effects of light and shade. It was a vast place, dim despite its gas-jets, mysterious with shadowy black corners. The red flannel shirts of the men struck a flamboyant note of color in the duskiness; the stokers were outlined in red before the roaring furnaces, the blowers were bathed in a dazzling white glow from the glass at the end of their blow-pipes, so that their brawny bare arms and the sweat on their brows stood out luridly. With every movement, with every flickering and waning light, there was a changing play of color. Matt would lie awake in his corner, taking mental notes, or recording the action of muscles by the pencilled silhouette of some picturesque figure rolling the pliant glass. Great painters, he thought, in his boyish ignorance, worked from imagination on a basis of memory; but he was not strong enough yet to dispense with observation, though observation always brought despair of his power to catch the ever-shifting subtleties of living nature. In the enthralment of these studies, and in his sensuous delight in the Dantesque effects, Matt often omitted to sleep altogether. And sometimes, on that background of ruddy gloom, other visions opened out to the boy dreaming on his bed of sinuous sand; the real merged into the imaginative, and this again into the fantasies of delicious drowsihead. The walls fell away, the factory blossomed into exotic realms of romance; peerless houris, ripe in womanhood, passed over moon-silvered waters in gliding caïques; prisoned princesses, pining for love, showed dark starry eyes behind the lattice-work of verandas; pensive maidens, divinely beautiful, wandered at twilight under crescent moons rising faint and ghostly behind groves of cedars.
London, too, figured in the pageantry of his dreams, glittering like a city of the Arabian Nights, ablaze with palaces, athrob with music; and perched on the top of the tallest cupola, on the loftiest hill, stood his uncle Matthew, holding his paint-brush like a sceptre, king of the realm of Art. Hark! was that not the king’s trumpeters calling, calling him to the great city, calling him to climb up and take his place beside the sovereign? Oh, the call to his youth, the clarion call, summoning him forth to toils and triumphs in some enchanted land! Oh, the seething of the young blood that thronged the halls of dream with loveliness, and set seductive faces at the casements of sleep, and sanctified his waking reveries with prescient glimpses of a sweet spirit-woman waiting in some veiled recess of space and time to partake and inspire his consecration to Art! The narrow teachings of his childhood—the conception of a vale of tears and temptation—shrivelled away like clouds melting into the illimitable blue, merging in a vast sense of the miracle of a beautiful world, a world of infinitely notable form and color. And this expansion of his horizon accomplished itself almost imperceptibly because the oppression of that ancient low-hanging heaven overbrooding earth, of that sombre heaven lying over Cobequid Village like a pall, was not upon him, and he was free to move and breathe in an independence that made existence ecstasy, even at its harshest. So that, though he walked in hunger and cold, he walked under triumphal arches of rainbows.
CHAPTER IX
ARTIST AND PURITAN
But the dauntless, practical youth lay beneath the dreamer, even as the Puritan lay beneath the artist. Matt could not consent to live on his host, the glass-blower, who shared his lunch with him—in the middle of the night—and he was almost reduced to applying again at the paint-shop, when the captain of a schooner gave him a chance to work his way to Economy, on the basin of Minas, twenty-five miles below Cobequid Village. Matt had to make up his mind in a hurry, for this was the last ship bound north before the bay was frozen for the winter, and ships bound south for the States seemed always to have a plethora of crew. The mental conflict added to the pains of the situation; to go north again was to confess defeat. But was it not a severer defeat to lessen a poor man’s lunch, even although he accepted only a minimum on the pretext of not being hungry? This reflection decided him; though he had no prospects in Economy, and nothing to gain but a few days’ food and shelter, he agreed informally to ship and to help load the schooner at nightfall. He would have preferred to go on board at once, were it only to dine off a ship’s biscuit; but no one suspected his straits, and so he had an afternoon of sauntering.
On the hilly outskirts of the city he was stopped by a stylish young lady, so dazzling in dress and beauty that for a moment he did not recognize Priscilla. A fashionable crinoline, and a full-sleeved astrakhan sacque, together with an afghan muffler round her throat, had given the slim chambermaid an imposing portliness. An astrakhan toque, with a waving red feather, was set daintily on her head, and below the sacque her gown showed magnificent with bows and airy flounces. Evidently her afternoon out.
“Good land!” she cried. “What have you been up to?”
“Nothing. I’m in a hurry,” he said, flushing shamefacedly as he passed hastily on.
But Priscilla caught him by the hem of his jacket.
“Don’t look so skairt! Why haven’t you been to see me all this time?”
“Too busy,” he murmured.