He had nearly finished the sketch, which glowed with dainty vitality, though the figure came out too lady-like. Suddenly the sound of voices broke upon his ear. Priscilla and Cynthia were talking outside his door.
His critical situation recurred to him in a flash, his broken promise to the captain if he yielded to the pertinacious Priscilla. The artist’s imagination might enflame; the crude actuality chilled, curiosity alone persisting. And the latent Puritan leaped up at bay; far-away reminiscences of whispered references to the flesh and the devil resurged, with all that mystic flavor of chill, unspeakable godlessness that attaches to sins dimly apprehended in childhood. “Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” seen suddenly in red letters on one of the wall-texts, was like the voice of a minatory Providence. Poor Priscilla became an advancing serpent, dragging insidious coils.
He shut up his paint-box hastily, and scribbling beneath the sketch, “For Priscilla—with Matt’s thanks,” he puffed at the candles. Only one went out. Priscilla was still talking outside. His heart was thumping with excitement as he added in a corner: “I promised the captain. Good-bye.” Then, blowing out the other candle, he waited, striving to draw serener breath as Priscilla still dallied without.
Only a blurred glimmer showed through the isinglass of the stove door; the room was quite dark. He began to hope she would ascend with Cynthia, and leave the coast temporarily clear; but at last only Cynthia’s step receded, and he heard Priscilla turning the door-handle. It was an anxious moment. He heard her exclamation of surprise.
“Have you gone to bed?” she cried.
He held his breath as she grazed his sleeve in the darkness. Then he glided out, and slid boyishly down the banisters like a flash. There was a gay hubbub of voices in the saloon; he walked unquestioned into the street, then ran (as if pursued by a horde of Amazons) till he reached the docks, and saw the friendly vessel moored against the wharf.
Remorse for his balked romance set in severely as soon as the bustle of loading was over and the anchor weighed; Priscilla took on the halo of Byronism and the Arabian Nights which had steadily absented itself in practice. Often during that miserable voyage he called himself a fool and a milksop; for the passage was a nightmare of new duties, complicated by sea-sickness and the weakness of a half-starved constitution, and on that swinging schooner, with its foul-mouthed captain, the mean bedroom he had deserted showed like a stable paradise. But blustrous as the captain was by the side of the blubbering Bludgeon, he had his compensations, for he made the voyage before the few passengers had found their sea-legs. Arrived in Economy, Matt was again face to face with starvation. But here Fortune smiled—with a suspicion of humor in her smile; and having already climbed masts and ladders for his dinner, her protégé was easily tempted to seek it at the top of a steeple. The steeple, after tapering to a point two hundred feet high, was crowned by a ball, which for years had needed regilding. Unfortunately the architect had made the ball almost inaccessible, but Matt, being desperate, undertook the job. The breath of winter was already on the town; a week more and the whole steeple would be decorated for the season with snow, so Matt’s offer was accepted, and, his boots equipped with creepers, the young steeple-jack, begirt with ropes, made the ascent safely in the eye of the admiring populace, lowered the great ball and then himself, and being thereupon given board and lodging and materials, he gilded it in the privacy of his garret. Thus become a public hero, Matt easily got through the winter. He decorated the ceiling of the Freemasons’ Hall, and painted a portrait of the member of the House of Assembly, a burly farmer. This was his first professional experience of an actual sitter, and he found himself more hampered than helped by too close contact with reality. However, a touch of imagination does no harm to a portrait, and Matt had by this time acquired sufficient experience of humanity to lean to beauty’s side even apart from his youthful tendency to idealization, which made it impossible for him at this period to paint anything that was not superficially beautiful or picturesque. The member pronounced the portrait life-like, and gave Matt a bushel of home-grown potatoes over and above the stipulated price, which was board and lodging during the period of painting, and an order on a store for two dollars. With the order Matt purchased a pair of Congress or side-spring boots; the potatoes he swopped for a box of paper collars. From Economy he wrote home to his mother, and received an incoherent letter, in which she denounced the deacon by the aid of fulminant texts. Matt sighed impotently, pitying her from his deeper experience of life, but hoping she got on better with “Ole Hey” than she imagined. He had half a mind to look up his folks, especially poor Billy; but just then he got an order from the farmer-deputy’s brother, who wrote that he was so pleased with his brother’s portrait that he wished Matt to paint his sign-board. He added that, although he had not seen any specimen of Matt’s sign-writing, he felt confident the painter of that portrait would be a competent person. Matt accepted the new task with mixed feelings, and got so many other commissions from the shopkeepers (for every shop had its movable sign-board) that he soon saved fifty dollars, and seemed on the high sea to England and his uncle. He had fixed three hundred dollars as the minimum with which he might safely go to London to study art. The steerage passage would cost only twenty. Unfortunately he was persuaded to invest his savings in a partnership with a Yankee jewel-peddler, and to travel the country with him. The peddler did not swindle his partner, merely his clients; but Matt was so disgusted that he refused to remain in the business. Thereupon the peddler, freed from the obligations of partnership, treated him as an outsider, and refused to return his principal. Matt thought himself lucky to escape in the end with twenty-five dollars and a cleansed conscience. He went back to sign-painting, but, taking a hint from the Yankee, continued his travels, and became a peddler-painter. He hated the work, was out of sympathy with his prosaic sitters, wondering by virtue of what grace or loveliness they sought survival on canvas; but the road to Art, by way of his uncle in London, lay over their painted bodies, so he drudged along. And yet when the sitter was dissatisfied with the picture—it was generally the sitter’s friends who persuaded him that he was dissatisfied—and when Matt had to listen to the fatuous criticisms of farmers and store-keepers, the artist flared up, and more than once the hot-blooded boy sacrificed dollars to dignity. He was astonished to find that in many quarters his fame had preceded him, and more astonished to discover finally that the advance advertiser was his late partner. Whether the Yankee compounded thus for the use of Matt’s dollars Matt never knew, but in his kinder thought of the cute peddler the boy came to think himself the debtor. For the dollars mounted, one on the head of another, and the heap rose higher and higher, day by day and week by week, till at last the magic three hundred began to loom in the eye of hope. Three hundred dollars! saved by the sweat of the brow and semi-starvation, and sanctified by the blood and tears of youth; sweet to count over and to dream over, and to pile up like a tower to scale the skies.
And so the great day drew near when Matt Strang would sail across the Atlantic.
CHAPTER X
EXODUS
Billy Strang was dreaming happy dreams—dreams of action and adventure, in which he figured not as the morbid cripple, but as the straight-limbed hero. Matt was generally with him in these happy hunting-grounds of sleep—dear old Matt, who had become a creature of dream to his waking life. But absorbed as Billy was in this phantasmagoric happiness, he was still the sport of every unwonted sound from the real world. His tremulous nerves quivered at the first shock, ready to flash back to his brain the bleaker universe of aches and regrets and rancorous household quarrels.