CHAPTER IV

About three o’clock, as Rose stood by the canoe in a pretty hot sun, she saw Ned and Dick making ready for another trip to the brook.

“Pardy,” she said, “do let Jack go with them.”

“It won’t be half the fun without Jack,” urged Ned. Lyndsay hesitated. “Well, yes, Rose.”

She was away up the steps in a moment, and found Jack deep in an Arctic voyage.

“You are to go, Jack,” she cried.

“I don’t want to.”

“That’s a first-class fib.”

“Well, I don’t want to go.”

“Come, Jack; you hurt me; and I asked—”

“By George!” he cried, “I’ll go.”

“You must want to go.”

“I do.”

“Go and thank Pardy.”

Jack stood a moment, and then Rose kissed him.

“Drat you women!” said the youngster, and walked away and down to the canoes. He went straight to his father.

“I am very much obliged to you, sir.”

“All right, old man. Off with you.”

46“By George, Dick, but M. A. is a gentleman,” said Jack, as the canoe left the beach. “He might have rubbed it in, and he just didn’t.”

“How’s your nose, you small poet cuss?” said Dick. “I cut my knuckles on those sharp teeth of yours.”

“That’s what they’re for, Ruby”; and so they were away, singing as they went:
“The king shall enjoy his own again,”—

to the amusement of the two Indians.

“I should have sent the Gaspé men,” said Lyndsay to Rose, as he stood following the canoe with his eyes. “If anything happens, they would think first of the boys, and next of themselves. In Mr. Lo I have less faith.”

“But why?”

“Experience, prejudice, color—distrust. Once I was on Lake Superior, Rose, in a boat in a storm. Our two Indian guides simply lay down and wilted. We could get no help from either. And a curious thing happened that night. We landed on a beach at the river of the Evil Manitou. When the Indians learned that I meant to camp there, they tried to steal a canoe and run away, explaining that to sleep there would cause the death of some one of their people. I could not stand this, because we needed the third canoe. It ended by our keeping watch, revolver in hand, all night. When we reached Duluth, an old Indian—a Chippeway, of course—was waiting to tell one of my guides that his sister had died that morning.”

“What did he say to you, papa?”

“Only, ’Me telly you so.’”

47“And didn’t you feel very, very badly? You know, dear M. A., you are quite a bit superstitious yourself.”

“As to the first question, No. I was sorry, but—Get into the canoe—so—facing the bow. I sha’n’t see your face when you talk, and I can fib without those nice eyes of yours making righteous comments.”

“A tête-à-tête back to back might have its advantages,” she returned, laughing, “for a c?ur-à-c?ur at least, papa.”

“I trust that is in the dim distance, my child.”

“How serious you are, Pardy!”

He was troubled at times lest this best of his dear comrades should find another man whom she would love more than she loved the father-friend.

“And,” she went on, “would you have shot the Indian if he had taken or tried to take the boat, Pardy?”

“Oh, no! The revolver was not loaded. Our Anglo-Saxon fists would have answered, as we were four to two.”

“But aren’t these Indians Catholics?”

“If you mean that religion puts an end to these little or large superstitions, No. Kismet, the Fates, our Angle ancestors’ Wyrda—the goddess who decreed deaths in battle and spared the brave awhile—she became God for the Christian Angles: then the will of God, and now the law of God, and for some the laws of nature. It is only a transmutation of phrase. We remain fatalists, and change the label.”

“But it seems to me,” said Rose, “a long way from Wyrda, who was rather indecisive, I remember, to changeless law.”

48“Rose, you are dreadful! If ever I begin to talk loosely, down comes Anne or you with your confounded rigidity of statement. Don’t marry a fool, Rose, or he and you will have a dreadful time.”

“No, papa, never! Heaven forbid! But isn’t it helpful at least to know—”

“You can’t drag me any further into these deep waters to-day.
‘To-day we give to trifles,
And if to-morrow rifles
The honey thefts we won,
At least the pleasant hours
Head down among the flowers,
Swinging jolly in the sun—’

nobody can quite take away. I forget the rest of it.”

“I am happy enough, dear Marcus Aurelius, to dare to be grave. I have a pocketful of moods at your order.
‘Eat, drink, and be merry,
Dance, sing, and rejoice,
With claret and sherry,
Theorbo and voice.’

For we all shall be past it a hundred years hence.”

“I don’t know that, Rose. I like to think, with Anne, that in a world to come
‘The angel Laughter spreads her broadest wings.’

We may laugh at other things, but laugh we shall.”

“Dear Aunt Anne! The angel of laughter! I think I can hear him.”

“Just to go back a moment, Rose. You can’t talk out these deeper things. I, at least, must use the pen 49if I am at all able to discuss them. There never was truth in text or brief sayings that for me could stand alone. Even a proverb needs limbs of comment to get about usefully among mankind. Books of mere maxims I detest. Don’t! I see you mean to reply. Good-by to common sense to-day.”

“Aunt Anne was talking last night,” said Rose, “about the value of nonsense. I think it was apropos of just the very worst conundrum you ever heard,—you know what a lot of them the boys have. This one I have made a solemn vow never to repeat. She was wondering why the novelists never make people talk refreshing nonsense the way all really reasonable folks do sometimes.”

“I wonder more, Rose, why they so rarely get really good talk into their conversations, talk such as we do hear, gay and grave by turns. Of course they say of their characters things clever enough.”

“That is terribly true,—one tires of the endless essays about their people. Why not let them say of one another what is to be said. Aunt Anne says she hates to have a critical providence forever hovering about a story.”

“A good deal of the personal talk in novels is needed to carry on the tale. Still, there ought to be room for doing this in a way to make the talk in itself amusing at times, and not merely coldly developmental of character.”

“Wait till I write my novel,” cried Rose. “Every one in it shall be clever,—English clever. It hurts my sense of the reality of the people in books to be told they are able, or this and that, and have sense 50of humor, and then not to find these qualities in what they say.”

“You may have too much of it,” he returned. “The mass of readers are unaccustomed to a selected world where to want to amuse and interest, and to be amused, is part, at least, of the social education. Your book would lack readers, just as George Meredith’s books do, where, surely, the people talk enough, both of brilliant wisdom and as shining wit.”

“But they keep me in a state of mental tension; I don’t like that.”

“No. I said there could be too much in a book, in a novel. These books keep one on a strain. That may suit some people, some moods, but it isn’t what I read novels for. Now, Cranford is my ideal.”

“I knew you would say Cranford, papa. But isn’t it a little too—too photographic? I met in the Tyrol, papa, a lady who knew many of the people in Cranford. Did you know it was called Knutsford?”

“Ah, Canute’s ford.”

“Yes. She told me such an odd thing about Knutsford. When a bride is on her way to the church the bridesmaids scatter sand before her, and this is because when Canute crossed the ford he was seated on the bank, and getting the sand out of his shoe,—and just then a bride came over the stepping-stones; the king cast the sand after her, and said, ‘May your offspring be as many as the sands in my shoe.’ Now, isn’t that a pretty story?”

“A very pretty story. I shall write it on the blank page of my Cranford.”

“Hullo, Tom; are those bear-tracks?”

51They were close now to a sandy beach.

“Yes, and fresh, too.”

“If Jack saw this he would go wild,” said Rose. “And the little marks?”

“Them’s cubs. They’ve been roun’ here a sight.”

As they went on, the hills became higher and more steep. At their bases lay the wreckage of countless years, the work of ice and heat and storms piled high along the shores. It was covered with dense greenery of beech and birch and poplar. Out of this, in darker masses, broad columns of tamarack, pine, and spruce seemed to be climbing the long upper slopes of the hills which, still higher, lifted gray granite summits, free of growths.

“How fast do we go?” said Rose.

“It is good poling on this stream to make three miles an hour. On the St. Anne there is one ten-mile stretch which takes all day. Watch the movement of using the poles. See how graceful it is,—the strong push, the change of hands, the recovery. Ah!—” Suddenly the bowman let go his pole, which Tom seized as it came to the stern.

“Now, that’s a good thing to see, Rose. He caught it in the rocks, and let it go. If he held it, it would break, or he go over, and possibly upset us,—no trifle in these wild waters. It requires instant decision.”

“I see. Aren’t these the clearings?”

“Yes.”

And now, on the farther side, the hills fell away, and the stream grew broad and less swift. A wide alluvial space, dotted with elms, lay to the left, with here and there the half-hidden smoke of a log-house.

52“Beyond this is a hopeless wilderness, my dear; and to-morrow, Sunday, we shall go up and look at it. And you shall draw a little, if you are wicked enough, and I will make some word sketches.” They were now poling along close to the farther shore.

“Who is that fishing across the river?”

“It must be the island camp men.”

Rose set her opera-glass and looked. In a moment she put it down, conscious that the man in the boat was doing as to her precisely the thing she had done. She had a queer feeling that she did not like it; why, she would have been puzzled to say.

“Who are they? Oh, yes, I remember; you spoke of them before.”

“One is Mr. Oliver Ellett. I think he must be Oliver Ellett’s son. We were at Harvard. The other is a Mr. Carington.”

“He’s an old hand up here. Fished here a heap these years. Casts an awful nice line. Seed him yesterday. Shot a seal last week, they was a-tellin’ me.”

“I should hate a man that could shoot a seal,” said Rose. “They look so human, and, then, they can be taught to talk. He can’t be a nice man.”

“Them seals spiles the fishin’, Miss Rose. They ain’t got no business to spile the fishin’. As for them seals a-talkin’, that’s a pretty large story, miss; whatever, I don’t go to doubt you heerd ’em.”

“But it is true.”

“I’d like to converse with one,” said Tom, in his most liberal voice. “He’d git my opinion.”

And now the canoe was ashore, and Rose and her father set out through the woods, and by and by 53came upon a rude clearing and a rough-looking log-cabin, surrounded with fire-scarred and decaying stumps. The huge wood-pile, as high as the eaves, struck Rose.

“How that makes one think of the terrible cold and the loneliness of winter here,—no books, no company; what can they do?”

“It recalls to me,” said Lyndsay, “the curious use of the word ‘stove’ in Labrador, where, even more than here, it is important. You ask how many people there are, say, at Mingan? The reply is sure to be, ‘Oh, there are twenty-seven stoves.’ But how many people? ‘I don’t know; there are twenty-seven stoves.’”

At the open door Lyndsay knocked, and in a moment came through the gloom within a tall, sallow woman. A soiled and much-mended brown gingham gown hung down from broad but lean shoulders over hips as lean and large. As she came to the door, she hastily buttoned her dress awry across the fleshless meagerness of her figure.

“How do you do, Mrs. Colkett?” said Lyndsay.

“Now, ain’t it Mr. Lyndsay? I’m that wore out I didn’t know you. Set down”; and she wiped a chair and a rickety stool with the skirt of her gown. “I didn’t know you, sir, till you came to speak. Was you wantin’ Joe?”

“No; we came over because Dorothy Maybrook left word your boy was sick. This is my daughter Rose. We brought some lemons and other trifles. The little man might like them.”

As she turned, Rose took note of the unkempt hair, the slight stoop of the woman’s unusually tall figure, 54and the shoeless, uncovered, and distorted feet. Not less the desolate, comfortless cabin caught her eye,—the rude wooden furniture, and the bed, whence came the hoarse breathing of the sick child. To her surprise, Mrs. Colkett said:

“Dory Maybrook’s always a-fussin’ over other folks’ concerns, ’stead of mindin’ her own affairs.”

Lyndsay, who was standing beside Rose, looked up at the woman.

“I think,” he said, “Dorothy is incapable of wanting to be other than kind.”

“S’pose so. She might of let on she was goin’ a-beggin’.”

“Oh, it was not that,” cried Rose, bewildered by the woman’s mode of receiving a kindness.

“Dare say: maybe not. All the same, me and Joe ain’t never asked no favors. Set down, miss.”

“No, thank you,” returned Rose, and began to empty her basket of fruit and other luxuries.

“We came over,” said Lyndsay, “because my wife thought you might need help.”

“It ain’t no use. It wasn’t never no use. That boy’s a-goin’ like the rest.”

“I trust not so bad as that.”

“Yes; he’s a-goin’ like them others.”

“You have lost other children?” said Rose, gently, looking up as she cleared the basket.

“Yes; two, and he’s the last. They hadn’t no great time while they was alive, and now they’re lyin’ out in the wood, and no more mark over ’em than if they was dead dogs. There won’t no one care.”

55“Yes, I shall care; I do care, Mrs. Colkett. Oh, isn’t it hard to say why such things do happen?”

“Happen!” said the woman. “Dorothy, she says God took them children. I’d like to know why? Preachin’ ’s easy business. God! What do I know about God, except that he’s done nothin’ for me? And I’m to be thankful,—what for?” As she spoke a hoarse sound came from the bed. “For that poor little man a-croakin’ there, I suppose!”

As Rose was about to reply, her father touched her arm, and, understanding that argument was thus hinted to be unwise, she said:

“Let me see the little fellow?”

“You may, if you’ve a mind. ’Tain’t no good. When it isn’t any good, it isn’t any good, and that’s all there is to it.”

Rose went up to the bed. A sickening odor filled the close air. She saw beneath her a stout little boy of ten, hot and dusky red with fever, his lips purple, two small hands tightly locked, with the thumbs in the palms, the head, soaked with the death-sweat, rolling rhythmically from side to side. The woman followed her.

“Has he had any one to see him?” said Lyndsay.

“Yes. We had a doctor from down river. He came twice. He wasn’t no use. He took ’most all the money we had left.”

“We shall be glad to help you.”

“Much obliged, sir. It’s only to bury him now. There’s one mercy anyways,—it don’t cost much for funerals up here. It’s just get a preacher and dig a hole and my man to make a box. Thank you, all the same.”

56Here was poverty so brutal in its results that even the pretense of sentiment was absent. Rose was troubled. Before her was death, and it was new to her. She turned to her father. “Oh, can’t something be done?”

He tried a moment with unprofessional awkwardness to find the pulse. There was none he could feel. “What did the doctor say? What is the matter with the boy, Mrs. Colkett?”

“He left some medicine stuff; but laws! the child couldn’t take it. The doctor he says it’s diphthery, or something like that. I don’t rightly know. It don’t matter none.”

All this was said in a slow monotone, as if, Rose thought,—almost as if the woman, the mother, had been an uninterested spectator. After a pause she added, in the same slow voice:

“If he’s goin’ he’ll go, and that’s all there is of it.”

At the word diphtheria, Lyndsay recoiled, pushing Rose back from the bed. “Harry!” he exclaimed. “It was that! Go out, Rose! Go at once!”

“Lord, is it ketchin’?” said the woman, shrinking back from the bed. “That fool never said so. If I’m to git it, I guess the mischief’s done. If Joe he gits it, Hiram’ll have to make the box.”

“Come away, Rose.”

The girl was divided between horror and pity. At the door she turned.

“I am not afraid. Let me stay, father,—I must stay!”

“No; it is useless, and might be worse than useless.” As she obeyed him, a short, squat figure of a 57man coming into the doorway darkened the dimly lit room. He moved aside as Rose went out into the sun. Lyndsay went by him also, and the man, turning back, said, “It’s about all over, I guess. We’ve got more’n we can handle, sir. Seems there’s no end of troubles.”

“Come this way,” returned Lyndsay. “And you, Rose, wait by the fence.”

He saw but too clearly that the stout, ruddy little man had been taking whisky. Joe Colkett followed him.

“Good Lord, my man, that child is dying,—will be dead, I am sure, before night; and here you are in liquor just when that poor woman most wants help.”

“I ain’t that drunk I can’t do chores. Fact is, Mr. Lyndsay, I went down to ask Dory Maybrook jus’ to lend me a little money. That doctor he took most all my wood wage.”[2]

2. Money earned by lumbering in the winter woods.

“Well?”

“She wouldn’t do it.”

“Well?”

“She said she’d come up and help, an’ if my old woman wanted any she might have it. That ain’t no way to treat a man.”

“No,” said Lyndsay, with such emphasis as satisfied his own conscience, and also the duller sense of the lumberman. “No,—that is not the way to treat a man. Listen to me, Joe: Don’t drink any more.”

“I ain’t any,” said Joe.

“Really?”

58“Not a drop. It was just a bit I had left.”

“Come to me when it is all over, and I will pay the doctor’s bill, and you can help clear off the brush back of my cabin.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You don’t drink often, I think. Why should you now? Was it trouble—about your child?”

“He wasn’t my child.”

“What!” exclaimed Lyndsay, puzzled; “how is that?”

“My wife was a widder, you see, and them was all her first man’s; I never had no child. ’T ain’t like it was my own child. He was awful spiled, that boy. I licked him two weeks this Sunday comin’ for makin’ fire by the wood-pile. Gosh, what a row Susie did make!”

“My God!” exclaimed Lyndsay.

The man understood him well enough.

“Oh, I don’t go to say I didn’t like him none. Lord, I’d done most anything to git that boy well. I wanted that money to help put him underground. It don’t cost much buryin’ up here, but it ain’t to be done for nothin’, and you’ve got to look ahead. There’s the minister’s got to be fetched, and—and—”

Here the man sat down on a stump, and putting a palm on each temple and an elbow on each knee, looked silently down at his mother earth.

Respect for the moods of men is one of the delicacies of the best manners. Lyndsay was still a minute. Then he put a hand on Joe’s shoulder.

“How else can we help you?”

59“It’s my woman I’m a-thinkin’ of.” He spoke without looking up. “This thing’s the last and the wust,—it’s goin’ to down her awful. And there ain’t nothin’ I can do,—nothin’!” Here he passed his sleeve across his eyes, and then glanced at the unaccustomed moisture, and had a dulled remembrance of having cried long years before; he failed to recall why or just when.

“You’re a-thinkin’ I’m a mean man to be a-drinkin’ and that child a-dyin’ in yon; and that woman! That’s where it gits a man. I ain’t been a bad man to her; I’ve took care of them children right along, Mr. Lyndsay, and I never beat her none, and I don’t mind me I ever used no bad words to her, not when I was wore out, and—and—hadn’t a shillin’, and was busted up with blackleg.[3] I don’t git it clear, sir; I don’t care most none for that child, but she might kill me if it would git it well. I don’t see nothin’ to do but drink, and that’s the fact.”

3. The scurvy of the lumberman,—more rare nowadays.

Lyndsay stood silent in thought. He had seen enough of life not to wonder that drink could be distinctly regarded as, under stress of circumstances, an available resource. He had also seen men or women capable of a single affection, and of only one. What there was to know of this man’s relations to his wife and her offspring had been uncovered with frank brutality. He had said there was nothing for him except to drink.

“But if you love your wife, my man, you want to help her, and if you drink you are useless,—and, in fact, you add to her troubles.”

60“It ain’t that, sir. Fact is, she don’t care a’most none for me,—and there’s the truth. You wouldn’t think, sir, what a pretty woman she was. She took me to get them children a home and feed. Dory, she knows. I ain’t given to tellin’ it round, but you’re different. Somehow it helps a man to say things out.”

Here was the strange hurt of a limited tenderness, with all this rudeness of self-disclosure, and, too, some of the stupid, careless immodesty of drink.

“I take it kindly,” said Lyndsay, “that you have told me the whole of your troubles. Come over and see me. I left some tobacco on the table for you.”

“Much obliged, sir,” and, rising, Joe took Mr. Lyndsay’s offered hand. “I’ll come,” he said, and walked back toward the cabin, while Lyndsay, beckoning to Rose, turned into the ox-road which led to the shore.

For a while they were silent. Then he said, “This child is dying of a fever; no word of the diphtheria to your mother or even to Anne.”

“One can escape mama easily, but Aunt Anne is a relentless questioner.”

“I will speak to her.”

“That would be better, I think. How horrible it all was! And that woman! Do you think she really did not care?”

“No, no, dear. Imagine a life of constant poverty, utter want of means,—to-day’s wages meaning to-morrow’s bread; a cruel soil; a mortgaged farm at that; then one child after another dying; the helplessness of want of money; the utter lack of all resources; 61the lonely, meager life. This woman has the moral disease of one long, unchanging monotony of despair.”

“I see—I see—you know more, and that makes you forgive more.”

“Some one has said, Rose, that to be able to explain all is to be able to forgive all, and that only One can truly explain all.”

“It seems to me, Pardy, that poverty has more temptations in it than wealth, and more explanations of sin, too. Isn’t the man a brute, Pardy? He had been drinking, and to drink at such a time!”

“No; he is coarse, but not a bad fellow. You or I would have much we could turn to if trouble came upon us. This man has nothing. It does not surprise me that he drank. It is not his habit. But let us drop it all now. I am sorry I took you.” He was not unwise enough to speak of the anguish of dread which had possessed him as he stood by the bedside, and now made haste to add, “And yet the lesson was a good one. You won’t want to fish, I fear?” He had in some ways appreciative touch of his kind, and knew the daughter well.

“No, no; not to-day. Let us go home.”

“As you please, dear”; and they slid away swiftly down the gleaming water as the evening shadows crept across the stream.

After awhile Rose said, looking up, “You must have seen, oh, so many people die, Pardy.”

“Yes; Death was for four years a constant comrade. I had always a firm belief I would not be killed. Some men were always predicting their 62own deaths; others carefully avoided the question. I know one very gallant fellow who was always a gay comrade in camp, and almost abnormally merry in battle unless the fight took place on a day of the month which was an odd number. Then he was sure to think he would be killed. Men in war are like gamblers, and have queer notions as to luck. You knew that child was dying?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know it?”

“I cannot tell. What troubled me, Pardy, was—I think what troubled me—was the loneliness of death; that little fellow going away and away, all by himself.”

“Yes, dear.
‘Once, once only, love must drop the hand of love!’”

“But what a horrible woman! I can’t help thinking that.”

“Was she? Perhaps; I don’t know.” His charity was older than hers.

“Did you notice, Rose, her sad fatalism: if the child was to die, it would die?”

“Yes; it was a strange illustration of our talk.”