The woman and her children passed on into the night, singing. Amid the stretches of sky and space they seemed a group of black insects crawling across a great white plain.
Abner Preep, coming down before dawn, found a bunch of children on the great kitchen settee, asleep in their clothes. The mother sat on the floor before the open stove, smiling happily and muttering to herself. They had quietly taken possession of the old familiar room and stirred up the slumbering fire.
For the first few seconds Abner wondered if he was dreaming, for the next if he were mad. But another look at the crouching woman convinced him that it was not he that was mad; while a phrase from her babbling lips sent something of the truth home to his beating heart. He roused Harriet and broke the news as gently as time permitted. The brave girl bade him drive at once to Deacon Hailey’s while she kept guard over her mother. Abner thereupon mounted his horse bare-back, to save time, and galloped to the farm.
To his relief he found the deacon little injured. The neglect of his beard had been “Ole Hey’s” salvation. It had sprouted thick and tangled about his throat, and the mad woman, armed with a blunt knife, had only inflicted a flesh-wound, leaving the trachea unsevered. The sleeping man, suddenly awakening to the strange spectacle of his wife in out-door attire brandishing a knife, had fainted from horror and loss of blood. But presently recovering consciousness, he had clamored for Ruth, and with her help bound up the wound, already half stanched by the clogging beard.
The matter was kept in the family, but the deacon swore he would have no more to do with the woman or her unmannerly brood beyond paying the minimum for her incarceration where she could do no more mischief; and so Abner took her forthwith by sleigh and train to the capital, and placed her in a private asylum.
In this manner Mrs. Strang went back to Halifax.
When Matt heard the awful tidings his air-castles crashed and fell as at the crack of doom. Abner Preep was the messenger of evil, for Matt’s painting tour had brought him near Halifax, and Abner thought it best to look up his boyish enemy ere he went back home.
Beneath all the tumult of consternation in Matt’s breast there throbbed an undertone of remorse—a vague feeling that this would never have happened had he been on the spot. His boyish wilfulness had received its death-blow.
“But it served him right,” he cried, with irresistible bitterness, when he heard the deacon had not only washed his hands of the family, but was now vindictively pressing Abner for the arrears of the mortgage interest which had been allowed to lapse while Abner was building up his position. Abner had always understood that Mrs. Strang had exacted the freedom of her property. But there was nothing in black and white.
“There’s no gettin’ out of it,” said Abner, gloomily. “But your poor father must hev made an everlastin’ mess of it, fur how there comes to be so much to pay arter all these years fur a few acres of ground an’ a wretched shanty, durned if I can make out.”