 |
"'Tis a ring."
"A ring!" Peggy challenged. "You'd not care, Dickie Blue, an 'twas a ring t' betroth me!"
Dickie Blue was sure that his surmise had gone cunningly to its mark. Pride flashed to the rescue of his self-esteem. His face flared. He rose in wrath.
"Betrothed, is you?" he flung out. "I'll weather it, maid! Ha! I'll weather it!"
"Weather it!" cried poor Peggy, in a flame of indignation.
"I'm not hurt!"
"Sit you down!"
"I'll not sit down. I'm goin'."
"Sit you down, oaf that you is!" Peggy Lacey commanded. "I'll read my letter an' open my packet an' return. Don't ye budge! Don't ye dare!"
Peggy Lacey swept out of the kitchen. Her head was high. There was no compassion in her heart. Nor was she restrained by any lingering fear of the consequences of that wicked deceit to the immediate practice of which she had committed herself. And as for Dickie Blue, he sat stock-still where she had bade him remain, his eyes wide with the surprise of the domination. He did not budge. He did not dare.
* * * * *
Precisely what Peggy Lacey did in the seclusion of her chamber it would be indelicate to disclose. Moreover, I am not minutely aware of all the intricacies of the employment of those mysterious means by which she accomplished the charming effect that she did in some intuitive way presently accomplish; and at any rate I decline the task of description. I confess, however, that the little packet contained a modest modicum of the necessary materials, whatever they were; and I have no hesitation in praising the generous interest, the discretion and exuberant experience of the gay widow of the late Cap'n Saul Nash o' the Royal Bloodhound, whose letter, dealing with the most satisfactory methods of application, as related to the materials aforesaid, whatever they were, and whose wisdom included a happy warning or two—I have no hesitation in admitting that the letter was completely sufficient to enlighten the ignorance of pretty Peggy Lacey, and to steel her resolution and to guide her unreluctant hand in its deceitful work. When at last she stood back from the mirror to survey and appraise the result, she dimpled with delight. It was ravishing, no doubt about that! It supplied the only lack of which the disclosure of sly old Skipper John had informed her. And she tossed her dark head in a proper saucy fashion, and she touched a strand of hair to deliberate disarray, and smoothed her apron; and then she tripped into the kitchen to exercise the wiles of the little siren that she had become.
"I've cast my everlastin' soul into the balance," poor Peggy accused herself, "an' I don't care a whit!"
All this while Dickie Blue had occupied himself with more reasonable reflection than he was accustomed to entertain. Doubt alarmed him. Betrothed, was she? Well, she might be betrothed an she wanted to! Who cared? Still an' all—well, she was young t' be wed, wasn't she? An' she had no discretion in choice. Poor wee thing, she had given herself t' some wastrel, no doubt! Charlie Rush! Ecod! Huh! 'Twas a poor match for a dear maid like she t' make. An' Dickie Blue would miss her sadly when she was wed away from his care an' affection. Affection? Ay; he was wonderful fond o' the pallid wee thing. 'Twas a pity she had no color—no blushes t' match an' assist the roguish loveliness o' the big eyes that was forever near trappin' the heart of a man. Dang it, she was fair anyhow! What was rosy cheeks, after all. They faded like roses. Ah, she was a wonderful dear wee thing! 'Twas a melancholy pity that she was t' be wed so young. Not yet seventeen! Mm-m—'twas far too young. Dang it, Charlie Rush would be home afore long with the means in his pocket for a weddin'! Dang it, they'd be wed when he come! An' then pretty Peggy Lacey would no longer be——
When Peggy Lacey tripped into the kitchen, Dickie Blue was melancholy with the fear that she was more dear than he had known.
"Peggy!" he gasped.
Then he succumbed utterly. She was radiant. Roses? They bloomed in her round cheeks! Dear Lord, what full-blown flowers they were! Dickie Blue went daft with love of Peggy Lacey. No caution now! A flame of love and devotion! Splendor clothed the boy.
"What ails you?" said Peggy defiantly. "You is starin' at me most rudely."
Dickie Blue's mounting love thrilled and troubled him with a protective concern.
"You isn't ill, is you?" he demanded.
"Ill!" she scoffed. "I never felt better in all my life. An' why d'ye ask me that?"
"You're flushed."
"I'm sorry," she replied demurely, "that you've a distaste for the color in my cheeks. I wish I might be able t' rub it off t' suit ye."
He smiled.
"I never seed ye so rosy afore," said he. "You're jus' bloomin' like a flower, Peggy."
"Ah, well," the mendacious little creature replied, with an indifferent shrug of her soft shoulders, "mostly I'm not rosy at all, but there's days when I is. I'm sorry you're offended by rosy cheeks like mine. I'll try not t' have it happen again when you're about."
"I'm not offended, Peggy."
There was that in Dickie Blue's voice to make Peggy Lacey's heart flutter.
"No?" says she.
"Far from it."
"I—I'm s'prised!"
"You—you is jus' beautiful the night, Peggy!"
"The night?"
"An' always was an' always will be!"
"I can't believe ye think it."
Dickie Blue went close to Peggy then. "Peggy," said he, "was there a ring in the wee box I fetched you the night?"
"No, sir."
"Is you betrothed, Peggy?"
Peggy dropped her head to hide the tears. She was more afraid than ever. Yet she must listen, she knew, and reply with courage and truth.
"I—I'm not," she faltered.
"God be thanked!" said Dickie Blue. "Ah, Peggy, Peggy," he whispered, "I loves you!"
"You mustn't say it, Dickie!"
"I can't help myself."
All at once Peggy Lacey's conscience submerged her spirit in a flood of reproaches. There was no maid more false in all the world, she knew, than her own wicked self.
"Dickie," she began, "I—I——"
"Has you no word o' love for me, Peggy? I—I jus' crave it, Peggy, with all my heart. Yes, I do!"
"Stay jus' where you is!" Peggy sobbed. "Don't you budge a inch, Dickie! I'll be back in a minute."
With that she fled. She vanished, indeed, in full flight, into that chamber whence she had issued radiantly rosy a few moments before, once more abandoning Dickie Blue to an interval of salutary reflection. To intrude in pursuit, of course—for the whole troop of us to intrude, curious and gaping, upon those swift measures which Peggy Lacey was impetuously executing in relief of the shafts of her accusing conscience—would be a breach of manners too gross even to contemplate; but something may be inferred from a significant confusion of sounds which the closed door failed altogether to conceal. There was clink of pitcher and basin; there was a great splash of water, as of water being poured with no caution to confine it to the receptacle provided to receive it; there was the thump of a pitcher on the floor; and there was more splashing, then a violent agitation, and the trickle and drip of water, and a second and a third violent agitation of the liquid contents of what appeared to be a porcelain bowl—the whole indicating that the occupant of the chamber was washing her face in haste with a contrite determination to make a thorough success of the ablution. And there was silence, broken by gasps and stifled sobs—doubtless a vigorous rubbing was in course; and then the door was flung open from within, and Peggy Lacey dashed resolutely in the direction of the kitchen.
A moment later Peggy Lacey confronted Dickie Blue. She was reckless; she was defiant. She was tense; she was piercing.
"Look at me!" she commanded.
Dickie Blue was mild and smiling. "I'm lookin'," said he. "I can look no other where."
"Is you lookin' close?"
"Ay. My look's hungry for the sight o' your dear face. I'm blind with admiration. I wants t' gaze forever."
"Where's my roses now?"
"They've fled. What matter?"
"Ay—fled! An' where?"
"They've retreated whence they came so prettily. 'Tis a lure o' that sweet color t' come an' go."
Peggy gasped.
"Whence they came!" she faltered. "Ah, where did they come from, Dickie? Don't ye know?"
"A while gone you was flushed with a pretty modesty," Dickie replied, smiling indulgent explanation, "an' now you is pale with a sad fright at my rough love-makin'."
"I'm not frightened at all. Look at my nose!"
"'Tis the sauciest little knob in the world!"
"Look with care. Count 'em!"
"Count what?"
"There's three freckles on it."
"Ay?"
"An' a half."
"Is it so?"
"There, now! I've told you the truth. I'm pallid. I'm freckled. What d'ye think o' me now?"
"I loves you."
"You don't love me at all. You're quite mistaken. You don't know what you're sayin'."
Dickie was bewildered.
"What's all this pother, Peggy?" he pleaded. "I don't know what you're drivin' at, at all."
"I'm pallid again, isn't I?"
"What matter?" said Dickie. "Ah, Peggy, dear," he protested softly, as he advanced, glowing, upon the trembling little maid before him, "all I knows is that I loves you! Will you wed me?"
Peggy Lacey yielded to his embrace. She subsided there in peace. It was safe harbor, she knew; and she longed never to leave its endearing shelter.
"Yes, sir," she whispered.
At that moment Dickie Blue was the happiest man in the world. And he ought to have been, too! Dang me if he shouldn't! And as for Peggy Lacey, she was the happiest maid in the world, which is somewhat surprising, I confess—never so happy as when, before she sought sleep to escape the sweet agony of her joy, she flung the widow Nash's wicked little box of rouge into the driving darkness and heard it splash in the harbor below her chamber window.
* * * * *
III
THE ART OF TERRY LUTE
* * * * *
III
THE ART OF TERRY LUTE
When the Stand By went down in a northeasterly gale off Dusty Reef of the False Frenchman, the last example of the art of Terry Lute of Out-of-the-Way Tickle perished with her. It was a great picture. This is an amazing thing to say. It doubtless challenges a superior incredulity. Yet the last example of the art of Terry Lute was a very great picture. Incredible? Not at all. It is merely astonishing. Other masters, and of all sorts, have emerged from obscure places. It is not the less likely that Terry Lute was a master because he originated at Out-of-the-Way Tickle of the Newfoundland north coast. Rather more so, perhaps. At any rate, Terry Lute was a master.
James Cobden saw the picture. He, too, was astounded. But—"It is the work of a master," said he, instantly.
Of course the picture is gone; there is no other: Cobden's word for its quality must be taken. But why not? Cobden's judgments are not generally gainsaid; they prove themselves, and stand. And it is not anywhere contended that Cobden is given to the encouragement of anaemic aspiration. Cobden's errors, if any, have been of severity. It is maintained by those who do not love him that he has laughed many a promising youngster into a sour obscurity. And this may be true. A niggard in respect to praise, a skeptic in respect to promise, he is well known. But what he has commended has never failed of a good measure of critical recognition in the end. And he has uncovered no mares'-nests.
All this, however,—the matter of Cobden's authority,—is here a waste discussion. If Cobden's judgments are in the main detestable, the tale has no point for folk of the taste to hold against them; if they are true and agreeable, it must then be believed upon his word that when the Stand By went down off Dusty Reef of the False Frenchman a great picture perished with her—a great picture done in crayon on manila paper in Tom Lute's kitchen at Out-of-the-Way Tickle. Cobden is committed to this. And whether a masterpiece or not, and aside from the eminent critical opinion of it, the tale of Terry Lute's last example will at least prove the once engaging quality of Terry Lute's art.
* * * * *
Cobden first saw the picture in the cabin of the Stand By, being then bound from Twillingate Harbor to Out-of-the-Way, when in the exercise of an amiable hospitality Skipper Tom took him below to stow him away. Cobden had come sketching. He had gone north, having read some moving and tragical tale of those parts, to look upon a grim sea and a harsh coast. He had found both, and had been inspired to convey a consciousness of both to a gentler world, touched with his own philosophy, in Cobden's way. But here already, gravely confronting him, was a masterpiece greater than he had visioned. It was framed broadly in raw pine, covered with window-glass, and nailed to the bulkhead; but it was nevertheless there, declaring its own dignity, a work of sure, clean genius.
Cobden started. He was astounded, fairly dazed, he puts it, by the display of crude power. He went close, stared into the appalling depths of wind, mist, and the sea, backed off, cocked his astonished head, ran a lean hand in bewilderment through his gray curls, and then flashed about on Skipper Tom.
"Who did that?" he demanded.
"That?" the skipper chuckled. "Oh," he drawled, "jus' my young feller." He was apologetic; but he was yet, to be sure, cherishing a bashful pride.
"How young?" Cobden snapped.
"'Long about fourteen when he done that."
"A child!" Cobden gasped.
"Well, no, sir," the skipper declared, somewhat puzzled by Cobden's agitation; "he was fourteen, an' a lusty lad for his years."
Cobden turned again to the picture; he stood in a frowning study of it.
"What's up?" the skipper mildly asked.
"What's up, eh?" says Cobden, grimly. "That's a great picture, by heaven!" he cried. "That's what's up."
Skipper Tom laughed.
"She isn't so bad, is she?" he admitted, with interest. "She sort o' scares me by times. But she were meant t' do that. An' dang if I isn't fond of her, anyhow!"
"Show me another," says Cobden.
Skipper Tom sharply withdrew his interest from the picture.
"Isn't another," said he, curtly. "That was the last he done."
"Dead!" Cobden exclaimed, aghast.
"Dead?" the skipper marveled. "Sure, no. He've gone an' growed up." He was then bewildered by Cobden's relief.
Cobden faced the skipper squarely. He surveyed the genial fellow with curious interest.
"Skipper Tom," said he, then, slowly, "you have a wonderful son." He paused. "A—wonderful—son," he repeated. He smiled; the inscrutable wonder of the thing had all at once gently amused him—the wonder that a genius of rarely exampled quality should have entered the world in the neighborhood of Out-of-the-Way Tickle, there abandoned to chance discovery of the most precarious sort. And there was no doubt about the quality of the genius. The picture proclaimed it; and the picture was not promise, but a finished work, in itself an achievement, most marvelously accomplished, moreover, without the aid of any tradition.
Terry Lute's art was triumphant. Even the skeptical Cobden, who had damned so much in his day, could not question the lad's mastery. It did not occur to him to question it.
Skipper Tom blinked at the painter's wistful gravity. "What's the row?" he stammered.
Cobden laughed heartily.
"It is hard to speak in a measured way of all this," he went on, all at once grave again. "After all, perhaps, one guesses; and even the most cautious guesses go awry. I must not say too much. It is not the time, at any rate, to say much. Afterward, when I have spoken with this—this young master, then, perhaps. But I may surely say that the fame of Terry Lute will soon be very great." His voice rose; he spoke with intense emphasis. "It will continue, it will grow. Terry Lute's name will live"—he hesitated—"for generations." He paused now, still looking into the skipper's inquiring eyes, his own smiling wistfully. Dreams were already forming. "Skipper Tom," he added, turning away, "you have a wonderful son."
"Ay," said the skipper, brows drawn; "an' I knows it well enough." He added absently, with deep feeling, "He've been—jus' fair wonderful."
"He shall learn what I can teach him."
"In the way o' sketchin' off, sir?" There was quick alarm in this.
Cobden struck a little attitude. It seemed to him now to be a moment. He was profoundly moved. "Terry Lute," he replied, "shall be—a master!"
"Mr. Cobden, sir," Skipper Tom protested, his face in an anxious twist, "I'll thank you t' leave un alone."
"I'll make a man of him!" cried Cobden, grieved.
Skipper Tom smiled grimly. It was now his turn to venture a curious survey. He ran his eye over the painter's slight body with twinkling amusement. "Will you, now?" he mused. "Oh, well, now," he drawled, "I'd not trouble t' do it an I was you. You're not knowin', anyhow, that he've not made a man of hisself. 'Tis five year' since he done that there damned sketch." Then uneasily, and with a touch of sullen resentment: "I 'low you'd best leave un alone, sir. He've had trouble enough as it is."
"So?" Cobden flashed. "Already? That's good."
"It haven't done no harm," the skipper deliberated; "but—well, God knows I'd not like t' see another young one cast away in a mess like that."
Cobden was vaguely concerned. He did not, however, at the moment inquire. It crossed his mind, in a mere flash, that Skipper Tom had spoken with a deal of feeling. What could this trouble have been? Cobden forgot, then, that there had been any trouble at all.
"Well, well," Skipper Tom declared more heartily, "trouble's the foe o' folly."
Cobden laughed pleasantly and turned once more to the picture. He was presently absorbed in a critical ecstasy. Skipper Tom, too, was by this time staring out upon the pictured sea, as though it lay in fearsome truth before him. He was frowning heavily.
* * * * *
It was the picture of a breaker, a savage thing. In the foreground, lifted somewhat from the turmoil, was a black rock. It was a precarious foothold, a place to shrink from in terror. The sea reached for it; the greater waves boiled over and sucked it bare. It was wet, slimy, overhanging death. Beyond the brink was a swirl of broken water—a spent breaker, crashing in, streaked with irresistible current and flecked with hissing fragments.
Adjectives which connote noise are unavoidable. Cobden has said that the picture expressed a sounding confusion. It was true. "You could hear that water," says he, tritely. There was the illusion of noise—of the thud and swish of breaking water and of the gallop of the wind. So complete was the illusion, and so did the spirit of the scene transport the beholder, that Cobden once lifted his voice above the pictured tumult. Terry Lute's art was indeed triumphant!
A foreground, then, of slimy rock, an appalling nearness and an inspiration of terror in the swirling breaker below. But not yet the point of dreadful interest. That lay a little beyond. It was a black ledge and a wave. The ledge still dripped the froth of a deluge which had broken and swept on, and there was now poised above it, black, frothy-crested, mightily descending, another wave of the vast and inimical restlessness of the sea beyond.
There was a cliff in the mist above; it was a mere suggestion, a gray patch, but yet a towering wall, implacably there, its presence disclosed by a shadow where the mist had thinned. Fog had broken over the cliff and was streaming down with the wind. Obscurity was imminent; but light yet came from the west, escaping low and clean. And there was a weltering expanse of sea beyond the immediate turmoil; and far off, a streak of white, was the offshore ice.
It was not a picture done in gigantic terms. It was not a climax. Greater winds have blown; greater seas have come tumbling in on the black rocks of Out-of-the-Way. The point is this, Cobden says, that the wind was rising, the sea working up, the ice running in, the fog spreading, thickening, obscuring the way to harbor. The imagination of the beholder was subtly stimulated to conceive the ultimate worst of that which might impend, which is the climax of fear.
Cobden turned to Skipper Tom.
"What does Terry Lute call it?" he asked.
"Nothin'."
"H-m-m!" Cobden deliberated. "It must bear a name. A great picture done by a great hand. It must bear a name."
"Terry calls it jus' 'My Picture.'"
"Let it be called 'The Fang,'" said Cobden.
"A very good name, ecod!" cried Skipper Tom. "'Tis a picture meant t' scare the beholder."
* * * * *
Terry Lute was not quite shamelessly given to the practice of "wieldin' a pencil" until he discovered that he could make folk laugh. After that he was an abandoned soul, with a naughty strut on the roads. For folk laughed with flattering amazement, and they clapped Terry Lute on his broad little back, and much to his delight they called him a limb o' the devil, and they spread his fame and his sketches from Out-of-the-Way and Twillingate Long Point to Cape Norman and the harbors of the Labrador. Caricatures, of course, engaged him—the parson, the schoolmaster, Bloody Bill Bull, and the crusty old shopkeeper. And had a man an enemy, Terry Lute, at the price of a clap on the back and an admiring wink, would provide him with a sketch which was like an arrow in his hand. The wink of admiration must be above suspicion, however, else Terry's cleverness might take another direction.
By these saucy sketches, Terry Lute was at one period involved in gravest trouble; the schoolmaster, good doctor of the wayward, thrashed him for a rogue; and from a prophetic pulpit the parson, anxious shepherd, came as near to promising him a part in perdition as honest conviction could bring him to speak. Terry Lute was startled. In the weakness of contrition he was moved to promise that he would draw their faces no more, and thereafter he confined his shafts of humor to their backs; but as most men are vulnerable to ridicule from behind, and as the schoolmaster had bandy legs and the parson meek feet and pious shoulders, Terry Lute's pencil was more diligently, and far more successfully, employed than ever. The illicit exercise, the slyer art, and the larger triumph, filled him with chuckles and winks.
"Ecod!" he laughed to his own soul; "you is a sure-enough, clever little marvel, Terry Lute, me b'y!"
What gave Terry Lute's art a profound turn was the sheer indolence of his temperamental breed. He had no liking at all for labor; spreading fish on the flakes, keeping the head of his father's punt up to the sea on the grounds, splitting a turn of birch and drawing a bucket of water from the well by the Needle, discouraged the joy of life. He scolded, he begged, he protested that he was ailing, and so behaved in the cleverest fashion; but nothing availed him until after hours of toil he achieved a woeful picture of a little lad at work on the flake at the close of day. It was Terry Lute himself, no doubt of it at all, but a sad, worn child, with a lame back, eyes of woe, gigantic tears—a tender young spirit oppressed, and, that there might be no mistake about the delicacy of his general health, an angel waiting overhead.
"Thomas," wept Terry Lute's mother, "the wee lad's doomed."
"Hut!" Skipper Tom blurted.
"Shame t' you!" cried Terry's mother, bursting into a new flood of tears.
After that, for a season, Terry Lute ran foot-loose and joyous over the mossy hills of Out-of-the-Way.
"Clever b'y, Terry Lute!" thinks he, without a qualm.
It chanced by and by that Parson Down preached with peculiar power at the winter revival; and upon this preaching old Bill Bull, the atheist of Out-of-the-Way, attended with scoffing regularity, sitting in the seat of the scorner. It was observed presently—no eyes so keen for such weather as the eyes of Out-of-the-Way—that Bill Bull was coming under conviction of his conscience; and when this great news got abroad, Terry Lute, too, attended upon Parson Down's preaching with regularity, due wholly, however, to his interest in watching the tortured countenance of poor Bill Bull. It was his purpose when first he began to draw to caricature the vanquished wretch. In the end he attempted a moving portrayal of "The Atheist's Stricken State," a large conception.
It was a sacred project; it was pursued in religious humility, in a spirit proper to the subject in hand. And there was much opportunity for study. Bill Bull did not easily yield; night after night he continued to shift from heroic resistance to terror and back to heroic resistance again. All this time Terry Lute sat watching. He gave no heed whatsoever to the words of Parson Down, with which, indeed, he had no concern. He heard nothing; he kept watch—close watch to remember. He opened his heart to the terror of poor Bill Bull; he sought to feel, though the effort was not conscious, what the atheist endured in the presence of the wrath to come. He watched; he memorized every phrase of the torture, as it expressed itself in the changing lines of Bill Bull's countenance, that he might himself express it.
Afterward, in the kitchen, he drew pictures. He drew many; he succeeded in none. He worked in a fever, he destroyed in despair, he began anew with his teeth clenched. And then all at once, a windy night, he gave it all up and came wistfully to sit by the kitchen fire.
"Is you quit?" his mother inquired.
"Ay, Mother."
"H-m-m!" says Skipper Tom, puzzled. "I never knowed you t' quit for the night afore I made you."
Terry Lute shot his father a reproachful glance.
"I must take heed t' my soul," said he, darkly, "lest I be damned for my sins."
Next night Terry Lute knelt at the penitent bench with old Bill Bull. It will be recalled now that he had heard never a word of Parson Down's denunciations and appeals, that he had been otherwise and deeply engaged. His response had been altogether a reflection of Bill Bull's feeling, which he had observed, received, and memorized, and so possessed in the end that he had been overmastered by it, though he was ignorant of what had inspired it. And this, Cobden says, is a sufficient indication of that mastery of subject, of understanding and sympathy, which young Terry Lute later developed and commanded as a great master should, at least to the completion of his picture, in the last example of his work, "The Fang."
At any rate, it must be added that after his conversion Terry Lute was a very good boy for a time.
* * * * *
Terry Lute was in his fourteenth year when he worked on "The Fang." Skipper Tom did not observe the damnable disintegration that occurred, nor was Terry Lute himself at all aware of it. But the process went on, and the issue, a sudden disclosure when it came, was inevitable in the case of Terry Lute. When the northeasterly gales came down with fog, Terry Lute sat on the slimy, wave-lapped ledge overhanging the swirl of water, and watched the spent breaker, streaked with current and flecked with fragments; and he watched, too, the cowering ledge beyond, and the great wave from the sea's restlessness as it thundered into froth and swept on, and the cliff in the mist, and the approach of the offshore ice, and the woeful departure of the last light of day. But he took no pencil to the ledge; he memorized in his way. He kept watch; he brooded.
In this way he came to know in deeper truth the menace of the sea; not to perceive and grasp it fleetingly, not to hold it for the uses of the moment, but surely to possess it in his understanding.
His purpose, avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly into peril of his soul.
"I 'low," says he between his teeth to Skipper Tom, "that she'll scare the wits out o' you, father."
Skipper Tom laughed.
"She'll have trouble," he scoffed, "when the sea herself has failed."
"You jus' wait easy," Terry grimly promised him, "till I gets her off the stocks."
At first Terry Lute tentatively sketched. Bits of the whole were accomplished,—flecks of foam and the lines of a current,—and torn up. This was laborious. Here was toil, indeed, and Terry Lute bitterly complained of it. 'Twas bother; 'twas labor; there wasn't no sense to it. Terry Lute's temper went overboard. He sighed and shifted, pouted and whimpered while he worked; but he kept on, with courage equal to his impulse, toiling every evening of that summer until his impatient mother shooed him off to more laborious toil upon the task in his nightmares. The whole arrangement was not attempted for the first time until midsummer. It proceeded, it halted, it vanished. Seventeen efforts were destroyed, ruthlessly thrust into the kitchen stove with no other comment than a sigh, a sniff of disgust, and a shuddering little whimper.
It was a windy night in the early fall of the year, blowing high and wet, when Terry Lute dropped his crayon with the air of not wanting to take it up again.
He sighed, he yawned.
"I got her done," says he, "confound her!" He yawned again.
"Too much labor, lad," Skipper Tom complained.
"Pshaw!" says Terry, indignantly. "I didn't labor on her."
Skipper Tom stared aghast in the presence of this monstrously futile prevarication.
"Ecod!" he gasped.
"Why, father," says Terry, airily, "I jus'—sketched her. Do she scare you?"
From Terry Lute's picture Skipper Tom's glance ran to Terry Lute's anxious eyes.
"She do," said he, gravely; "but I'm fair unable t' fathom"—pulling his beard in bewilderment—"the use of it all."
Terry Lute grinned.
* * * * *
It did not appear until the fall gales were blowing in earnest that "The Fang" had made a coward of Terry Lute. There was a gray sea that day, and day was on the wing. There was reeling, noisy water roundabout, turning black in the failing light, and a roaring lee shore; and a gale in the making and a saucy wind were already jumping down from the northeast with a trail of disquieting fog. Terry Lute's spirit failed; he besought, he wept, to be taken ashore. "Oh, I'm woeful scared o' the sea!" he complained. Skipper Tom brought him in from the sea, a whimpering coward, cowering degraded and shamefaced in the stern-sheets of the punt. There were no reproaches. Skipper Tom pulled grimly into harbor. His world had been shaken to ruins; he was grave without hope, as many a man before him has fallen upon the disclosure of inadequacy in his own son.
It was late that night when Skipper Tom and the discredited boy were left alone by the kitchen fire. The gale was down then, a wet wind blowing wildly in from the sea. Tom Lute's cottage shook in its passing fingers, which seemed somehow not to linger long enough to clutch it well, but to grasp in driven haste and sweep on. The boy sat snuggled to the fire for its consolation; he was covered with shame, oppressed, sore, and hopeless. He was disgraced: he was outcast, and now forever, from a world of manly endeavor wherein good courage did the work of the day that every man must do. Skipper Tom, in his slow survey of this aching and pitiful degradation, had an overwhelming sense of fatherhood. He must be wise, he thought; he must be wise and very wary that fatherly helpfulness might work a cure.
The boy had failed, and his failure had not been a thing of unfortuitous chance, not an incident of catastrophe, but a significant expression of character. Terry Lute was a coward, deep down, through and through: he had not lapsed in a panic; he had disclosed an abiding fear of the sea. He was not a coward by any act; no mere wanton folly had disgraced him, but the fallen nature of his own heart. He had failed; but he was only a lad, after all, and he must be helped to overcome. And there he sat, snuggled close to the fire, sobbing now, his face in his hands. Terry Lute knew—that which Skipper Tom did not yet know—that he had nurtured fear of the sea for the scandalous delight of imposing it upon others in the exercise of a devilish impulse and facility.
And he was all the more ashamed. He had been overtaken in iniquity; he was foredone.
"Terry, lad," said Skipper Tom, gently, "you've done ill the day."
"Ay, sir."
"I 'low," Skipper Tom apologized, "that you isn't very well."
"I'm not ailin', sir," Terry whimpered.
"An I was you," Skipper Tom admonished, "I'd not spend time in weepin'."
"I'm woebegone, sir."
"You're a coward, God help you!" Skipper Tom groaned.
"Ay, sir."
Skipper Tom put a hand on the boy's knee. His voice was very gentle.
"There's no place in the world for a man that's afeard o' the sea," he said. "There's no work in the world for a coward t' do. What's fetched you to a pass like this, lad?"
"Broodin', sir."
"Broodin', Terry? What's that?"
"Jus' broodin'."
"Not that damned picture, Terry?"
"Ay, sir."
"How can that be, lad?" It was all incomprehensible to Skipper Tom. "'Tis but an unreal thing."
Terry looked up.
"'Tis real!" he blazed.
"'Tis but a thing o' fancy."
"Ay, fancy! A thing o' fancy! 'Tis fancy that makes it real."
"An' you—a coward?"
Terry sighed.
"Ay, sir," said he, ashamed.
"Terry Lute," said Skipper Tom, gravely, now perceiving, "is you been fosterin' any fear o' the sea?"
"Ay, sir."
Skipper Tom's eye flashed in horrified understanding. He rose in contempt and wrath.
"Practicin' fear o' the sea?" he demanded.
"Ay, sir."
"T' sketch a picture?"
Terry began to sob.
"There wasn't no other way," he wailed.
"God forgive you, wicked lad!"
"I'll overcome, sir."
"Ah, Terry, poor lad," cried Skipper Tom, anguished, "you've no place no more in a decent world."
"I'll overcome."
"'Tis past the time."
Terry Lute caught his father about the neck.
"I'll overcome, father," he sobbed. "I'll overcome."
And Tom Lute took the lad in his arms, as though he were just a little fellow.
* * * * *
And, well, in great faith and affection they made an end of it all that night—a chuckling end, accomplished in the kitchen stove, of everything that Terry Lute had done, saving only "The Fang," which must be kept ever-present, said Skipper Tom, to warn the soul of Terry Lute from the reefs of evil practices. And after that, and through the years since then, Terry Lute labored to fashion a man of himself after the standards of his world. Trouble? Ay, trouble—trouble enough at first, day by day, in fear, to confront the fabulous perils of his imagination. Trouble enough thereafter encountering the sea's real assault, to subdue the reasonable terrors of those parts. Trouble enough, too, by and by, to devise perils beyond the common, to find a madcap way, to disclose a chance worth daring for the sheer exercise of courage. But from all these perils, of the real and the fanciful, of the commonplace path and the way of reckless ingenuity, Terry Lute emerged at last with the reputation of having airily outdared every devil of the waters of Out-of-the-Way.
When James Cobden came wandering by, Terry Lute was a great, grave boy, upstanding, sure-eyed, unafraid, lean with the labor he had done upon his own soul.
* * * * *
When the Stand By, in from Twillingate Harbor, dropped anchor at Out-of-the-Way Tickle, James Cobden had for three days lived intimately with "The Fang." He was hardly to be moved from its company. He had sought cause of offense; he had found no reasonable grounds. Wonder had grown within him. Perhaps from this young work he had visioned the highest fruition of the years. The first warm flush of approbation, at any rate, had changed to the beginnings of reverence. That Terry Lute was a master—a master of magnitude, already, and of a promise so large that in generations the world had not known the like of it—James Cobden was gravely persuaded. And this meant much to James Cobden, clear, aspiring soul, a man in pure love with his art. And there was more: grown old now, a little, he dreamed new dreams of fatherly affection, indulged in a studio which had grown lonely of late; and he promised himself, beyond this, the fine delight of cherishing a young genius, himself the prophet of that power, with whose great fame his own name might bear company into the future. And Terry Lute, met in the flesh, turned out to be a man—even such a man, in his sure, wistful strength, as Cobden could respect.
There came presently the close of a day on the cliffs of Out-of-the-Way, a blue wind blowing over the sunlit moss, when Cobden, in fear of the issue, which must be challenged at last, turned from his work to the slope behind, where Terry Lute sat watching.
"Come!" said Cobden, smiling, "have a try."
Terry Lute shrank amused from the extended color-box and brushes.
"Ah, no, sir," said he, blushing. "I used t', though, when I were a child."
Cobden blinked.
"Eh?" he ejaculated.
"I isn't done nothin' at it since."
"'I put away childish things,'" flashed inevitably into Cobden's mind. He was somewhat alarmed. "Why not since then?" he asked.
"'Tis not a man's work, sir."
"Again, why not?"
"'Tis a sort o'—silly thing—t' do."
"Good God!" Cobden thought, appalled. "The lad has strangled his gift!"
Terry Lute laughed then.
"I'm sorry, sir," he said quickly, with a wistful smile, seeking forgiveness; "but I been watchin' you workin' away there like mad with all them little brushes. An' you looked so sort o' funny, sir, that I jus' couldn't help—laughin'." Again he threw back his head, and once more, beyond his will, and innocent of offense and blame, he laughed a great, free laugh.
It almost killed James Cobden.
* * * * *
IV
THE DOCTOR OF AFTERNOON ARM
* * * * *
IV
THE DOCTOR OF AFTERNOON ARM
It was March weather. There was sunshine and thaw. Anxious Bight was caught over with rotten ice from Ragged Run Harbor to the heads of Afternoon Arm. A rumor of seals on the Arctic drift ice off shore had come in from the Spotted Horses. It inspired instant haste in all the cottages of Ragged Run—an eager, stumbling haste. In Bad-Weather Tom West's kitchen, somewhat after ten o'clock in the morning, in the midst of this hilarious scramble to be off to the floe, there was a flash and spit of fire, and the clap of an explosion, and the clatter of a sealing-gun on the bare floor; and in the breathless, dead little interval between the appalling detonation and a man's groan of dismay followed by a woman's choke and scream of terror, Dolly West, Bad-Weather Tom's small maid, stood swaying, wreathed in gray smoke, her little hands pressed tight to her eyes.
She was—or rather had been—a pretty little creature. There had been yellow curls—in the Newfoundland way—and rosy cheeks and grave blue eyes; but now of all this shy, fair loveliness——
"You've killed her!"
"No—no!"
Dolly dropped her hands. She reached out, then, for something to grasp. And she plainted: "I ithn't dead, mother. I juth—I juth can't thee." She extended her hands. They were discolored, and there was a slow, red drip. "They're all wet!" she complained.
By this time the mother had the little girl gathered close in her arms. She moaned: "The doctor!"
Terry West caught up his cap and mittens and sprang to the door.
"Not by the Bight!" Bad-Weather shouted.
"No, sir."
Dolly West whimpered: "It thmart-th, mother!"
"By Mad Harry an' Thank-the-Lord!"
"Ay, sir."
Dolly screamed—now: "It hurt-th! Oh, oh, it hurt-th!"
"An' haste, lad!"
"Ay, sir."
There was no doctor in Ragged Run Harbor; there was a doctor at Afternoon Arm, however—across Anxious Bight. Terry West avoided the rotten ice of the Bight and took the 'longshore trail by way of Mad Harry and Thank-the-Lord. At noon he was past Mad Harry, his little legs wearing well and his breath coming easily through his expanded nostrils. He had not paused; and at four o'clock—still on a dogtrot—he had hauled down the chimney smoke of Thank-the-Lord and was bearing up for Afternoon Arm.
* * * * *
Early dusk caught him shortcutting the doubtful ice of Thank-the-Lord Cove; and half an hour later, midway of the passage to Afternoon Arm, with two miles left to accomplish—dusk falling thick and cold, then, a frosty wind blowing—Creep Head of the Arm looming black and solid—he dropped through the ice and vanished.
Returning from a professional call at Tumble Tickle in clean, sunlit weather, with nothing more tedious than eighteen miles of wilderness trail and rough floe ice behind him, Doctor Rolfe was chagrined to discover himself fagged out. He had come heartily down the trail from Tumble Tickle, but on the ice in the shank of the day—there had been eleven miles of the floe—he had lagged and complained under what was indubitably the weight of his sixty-three years. He was slightly perturbed. He had been fagged out before, to be sure. A man cannot practice medicine out of a Newfoundland outport harbor for thirty-seven years and not know what it means to stomach a physical exhaustion. It was not that. What perturbed Doctor Rolfe was the singular coincidence of a touch of melancholy with the ominous complaint of his lean old legs.
And presently there was a more disquieting revelation. In the drear, frosty dusk, when he rounded Creep Head, opened the lights of Afternoon Arm, and caught the warm, yellow gleam of the lamp in the surgery window, his expectation ran all at once to his supper and his bed. He was hungry—that was true. Sleepy? No; he was not sleepy. Yet he wanted to go to bed. Why? He wanted to go to bed in the way that old men want to go to bed—less to sleep than just to sigh and stretch out and rest. And this anxious wish for bed—just to stretch out and rest—held its definite implication. It was more than symptomatic—it was shocking.
"That's age!"
It was.
"Hereafter, as an old man should," Doctor Rolfe resolved, "I go with caution and I take my ease."
* * * * *
And it was in this determination that Doctor Rolfe opened the surgery door and came gratefully into the warmth and light and familiar odors of the little room. Caution was the wisdom and privilege of age, wasn't it? he reflected after supper in the glow of the surgery fire. There was no shame in it, was there? Did duty require of a man that he should practice medicine out of Afternoon Arm for thirty-seven years—in all sorts of weather and along a hundred and thirty miles of the worst coast in the world—and go recklessly into a future of increasing inadequacy? It did not! He had stood his watch. What did he owe life? Nothing—nothing! He had paid in full. Well, then, what did life owe him? It owed him something, didn't it? Didn't life owe him at least an old age of reasonable ease and self-respecting independence? It did!
By this time the more he reflected, warming his lean, aching shanks the while, the more he dwelt upon the bitter incidents of that one hundred and thirty miles of harsh coast, through the thirty-seven years he had managed to survive the winds and seas and frosts of it; and the more he dwelt upon his straitened circumstances and increasing age the more petulant he grew.
It was in such moods as this that Doctor Rolfe was accustomed to recall the professional services he had rendered and to dispatch bills therefor; and now he fumbled through the litter of his old desk for pen and ink, drew a dusty, yellowing sheaf of statements of accounts from a dusty pigeonhole, and set himself to work, fuming and grumbling all the while. "I'll tilt the fee!" he determined. This was to be the new policy—to "tilt the fee," to demand payment, to go with caution; in this way to provide for an old age of reasonable ease and self-respecting independence. And Doctor Rolfe began to make out statements of accounts due for services rendered.
* * * * *
From this labor and petulant reflection Doctor Rolfe was withdrawn by a tap on the surgery door. He called "Come in!" with no heart for the event. It was no night to be abroad on the ice. Yet the tap could mean but one thing—somebody was in trouble; and as he called "Come in!" and looked up from the statement of account, and while he waited for the door to open, his pen poised and his face in a pucker of trouble, he considered the night and wondered what strength was left in his lean old legs.
A youngster—he had been dripping wet and was now sparkling all over with frost and ice—intruded.
"Thank-the-Lord Cove?"
"No, sir."
"Mad Harry?"
"Ragged Run, sir."
"Bad-Weather West's lad?"
"Yes, sir."
"Been in the water?"
The boy grinned. He was ashamed of himself. "Yes, sir. I falled through the ice, sir."
"Come across the Bight?"
The boy stared. "No, sir. A cat couldn't cross the Bight the night, sir. 'Tis all rotten. I come alongshore by Mad Harry an' Thank-the-Lord. I dropped through all of a sudden, sir, in Thank-the-Lord Cove."
"Who's sick?"
"Pop's gun went off, sir."
Doctor Rolfe rose. "'Pop's gun went off!' Who was in the way?"
"Dolly, sir."
"And Dolly in the way! And Dolly——"
"She've gone blind, sir. An' her cheek, sir—an' one ear, sir——"
"What's the night?"
"Blowin' up, sir. There's a scud. An' the moon——"
"You didn't cross the Bight? Why not?"
"'Tis rotten from shore t' shore. I'd not try the Bight, sir, the night."
"No?"
"No, sir." The boy was very grave.
"Mm-m."
All this while Doctor Rolfe had been moving about the surgery in sure haste—packing a waterproof case with little instruments and vials and what not. And now he got quickly into his boots and jacket, pulled down his coonskin cap, pulled up his sealskin gloves, handed Bad-Weather West's boy over to his housekeeper for supper and bed (he was a bachelor man), and closed the surgery door upon himself.
* * * * *
Doctor Rolfe took to the harbor ice and drove head down into the gale. There were ten miles to go. It was to be a night's work. He settled himself doggedly. It was heroic. In the circumstances, however, this aspect of the night's work was not stimulating to a tired old man. It was a mile and a half to Creek Head, where Afternoon Tickle led a narrow way from the shelter of Afternoon Arm to Anxious Bight and the open sea; and from the lee of Creep Head—a straightaway across Anxious Bight—it was nine miles to Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run Harbor. And Doctor Rolfe had rested but three hours. And he was old.
Impatient to revive the accustomed comfort and glow of strength he began to run. When he came to Creep Head and there paused to survey Anxious Bight in a flash of the moon, he was tingling and warm and limber and eager. Yet he was dismayed by the prospect. No man could cross from Creep Head to Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run Harbor in the dark. Doctor Rolfe considered the light. Communicating masses of ragged cloud were driving low across Anxious Bight. Offshore there was a sluggish bank of black cloud. The moon was risen and full. It was obscured. The intervals of light were less than the intervals of shadow. Sometimes a wide, impenetrable cloud, its edges alight, darkened the moon altogether. Still, there was light enough. All that was definitely ominous was the bank of black cloud lying sluggishly offshore. The longer Doctor Rolfe contemplated its potentiality for catastrophe the more he feared it.
"If I were to be overtaken by snow!"
* * * * *
It was blowing high. There was the bite and shiver of frost in the wind. Half a gale ran in from the open sea. Midway of Anxious Bight it would be a saucy, hampering, stinging head wind. And beyond Creep Head the ice was in doubtful condition. A man might conjecture; that was all. It was mid-spring. Freezing weather had of late alternated with periods of thaw and rain. There had been windy days. Anxious Bight had even once been clear of ice. A westerly wind had broken the ice and swept it out beyond the heads. In a gale from the northeast, however, these fragments had returned with accumulations of Arctic pans and hummocks from the Labrador current; and a frosty night had caught them together and sealed them to the cliffs of the coast. It was a most delicate attachment—one pan to the other and the whole to the rocks. It had yielded somewhat—it must have gone rotten—in the weather of that day. What the frost had accomplished since dusk could be determined only upon trial.
"Soft as cheese!" Doctor Rolfe concluded. "Rubber ice and air holes!"
There was another way to Ragged Run—the way by which Terry West had come. It skirted the shore of Anxious Bight—Mad Harry and Thank-the-Lord and Little Harbor Deep—and something more than multiplied the distance by one and a half. Doctor Rolfe was completely aware of the difficulties of Anxious Bight—the way from Afternoon Arm to Ragged Run; the treacherous reaches of young ice, bending under the weight of a man; the veiled black water; the labor, the crevices, the snow crust of the Arctic pans and hummocks; and the broken field and wash of the sea beyond the lesser island of the Spotted Horses. And he knew, too, the issue of the disappearance of the moon, the desperate plight into which the sluggish bank of black cloud might plunge a man. As a matter of unromantic fact he desired greatly to decline a passage of Anxious Bight that night.
Instead he moved out and shaped a course for the black bulk of the Spotted Horses. This was in the direction of Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run, and the open sea.
He sighed. "If I had a son——" he reflected.
* * * * *
Well, now, Doctor Rolfe was a Newfoundlander. He was used to traveling all sorts of ice in all sorts of weather. The returning fragments of the ice of Anxious Bight had been close packed for two miles beyond the narrows of Afternoon Arm by the northeast gale which had driven them back from the open. This was rough ice. In the press of the wind the drifting floe had buckled. It had been a big gale. Under the whip of it the ice had come down with a rush. And when it encountered the coast the first great pans had been thrust out of the sea by the weight of the floe behind. A slow pressure had even driven them up the cliffs of Creep Head and heaped them in a tumble below. It was thus a folded, crumpled floe, a vast field of broken bergs and pans at angles.
No Newfoundlander would adventure on the ice without a gaff. A gaff is a lithe, ironshod pole, eight or ten feet in length. Doctor Rolfe was as cunning and sure with a gaff as any old hand of the sealing fleet. He employed it now to advantage. It was a vaulting pole. He walked less than he leaped. This was no work for the half light of an obscured moon. Sometimes he halted for light; but delay annoyed him. A pause of ten minutes—he squatted for rest meantime—threw him into a state of incautious irritability. At this rate it would be past dawn before he made the cottages of Ragged Run Harbor.
Impatient of precaution, he presently chanced a leap. It was error. As the meager light disclosed the path a chasm of fifteen feet intervened between the edge of the upturned pan upon which he stood and a flat-topped hummock of Arctic ice to which he was bound. There was footing for the tip of his gaff midway below. He felt for this footing to entertain himself while the moon delayed. It was there. He was tempted. The chasm was critically deep for the length of the gaff. Worse than that, the hummock was higher than the pan. Doctor Rolfe peered across. It was not much higher. It would merely be necessary to lift stoutly at the climax of the leap. And there was need of haste—a little maid in hard case at Ragged Run and a rising cloud threatening black weather.
A slow cloud covered the moon. It was aggravating. There would be no light for a long time. A man must take a chance——. And all at once the old man gave way to impatience; he gripped his gaff with angry determination and projected himself toward the hummock of Arctic ice. A flash later he had regretted the hazard. He perceived that he had misjudged the height of the hummock. Had the gaff been a foot longer he would have cleared the chasm. It occurred to him that he would break his back and merit the fate of his callow mistake. Then his toes caught the edge of the flat-topped hummock. His boots were of soft seal leather. He gripped the ice. And now he hung suspended and inert. The slender gaff bent under the prolonged strain of his weight and shook in response to a shiver of his arms. Courage failed a little. Doctor Rolfe was an old man. And he was tired. And he felt unequal——
* * * * *
Dolly West's mother—with Dolly in her arms, resting against her soft, ample bosom—sat by the kitchen fire. It was long after dark. The wind was up; the cottage shook in the squalls. She had long ago washed Dolly's eyes and temporarily stanched the terrifying flow of blood; and now she waited, rocking gently and sometimes crooning a plaintive song of the coast to the restless child.
Tom West came in.
"Hush!"
"Is she sleepin' still?"
"Off an' on. She's in a deal o' pain. She cries out, poor lamb!" Dolly stirred and whimpered. "Any sign of un, Tom?"
"Tis not time."
"He might——"
"'Twill be hours afore he comes. I'm jus' wonderin'——"
"Hush!" Dolly moaned. "Ay, Tom?"
"Terry's but a wee feller. I'm wonderin' if he——"
The woman was confident. "He'll make it," she whispered.
"Ay; but if he's delayed——"
"He was there afore dusk. An' the doctor got underway across the Bight——"
"He'll not come by the Bight!"
"He'll come by the Bight. I knows that man. He'll come by the Bight—an' he'll——"
"If he comes by the Bight he'll never get here at all. The Bight's breakin' up. There's rotten ice beyond the Spotted Horses. An' Tickle-my-Ribs is——"
"He'll come. He'll be here afore——"
"There's a gale o' snow comin' down. 'Twill cloud the moon. A man would lose hisself——"
"He'll come."
Bad-Weather Tom West went out again—to plod once more down the narrows to the base of Blow-me-Down Dick and search the vague light of the coast for the first sight of Doctor Rolfe. It was not time; he knew that. There would be hours of waiting. It would be dawn before a man could come by Thank-the-Lord and Mad Harry, if he left Afternoon Arm even so early as dusk. And as for crossing the Bight—no man could cross the Bight. It was blowing up too—clouds rising and a threat of snow abroad. Bad-weather Tom glanced apprehensively toward the northeast. It would snow before dawn. The moon was doomed. A dark night would fall. And the Bight—Doctor Rolfe would never attempt to cross the Bight——
* * * * *
Hanging between the hummock and the pan, the gaff shivering under his weight, Doctor Rolfe slowly subsided toward the hummock. A toe slipped. He paused. It was a grim business. The other foot held. The leg, too, was equal to the strain. He wriggled his toe back to its grip on the edge of the ice. It was an improved foothold. He turned then and began to lift and thrust himself backward. A last thrust on the gaff set him on his haunches on the Arctic hummock, and he thanked Providence and went on. And on—and on! There was a deal of slippery crawling to do, of slow, ticklish climbing. Doctor Rolfe rounded bergs, scaled perilous inclines, leaped crevices.
It was cold as death now. Was it ten below? The gale bit like twenty below.
When the big northeast wind drove the ice back into Anxious Bight and heaped it inshore, the pressure had decreased as the mass of the floe diminished in the direction of the sea. The outermost areas had not felt the impact. They had not folded—had not "raftered." When the wind failed they had subsided toward the open. As they say on the coast, the ice had "gone abroad." It was distributed. And after that the sea had fallen flat; and a vicious frost had caught the floe—widespread now—and frozen it fast. It was six miles from the edge of the raftered ice to the first island of the Spotted Horses. The flat pans were solid enough, safe and easy going; but this new, connecting ice—the lanes and reaches of it——
Doctor Rolfe's succinct characterization of the condition of Anxious Bight was also keen: "Soft as cheese!"
All that day the sun had fallen hot on the young ice in which the scattered pans of the floe were frozen. Some of the wider patches of green ice had been weakened to the breaking point. Here and there they must have been eaten clear through. Doctor Rolfe contemplated an advance with distaste. And by and by the first brief barrier of new ice confronted him. He must cross it. A black film—the color of water in that light—bridged the way from one pan to another. He would not touch it. He leaped it easily. A few fathoms forward a second space halted him. Must he put foot on it? With a running start he could——Well, he chose not to touch the second space, but to leap it.
Soon a third interval stopped him. No man could leap it. He cast about for another way. There was none. He must run across. He scowled. Disinclination increased. He snarled: "Green ice!" He crossed then like a cat—on tiptoe and swiftly; and he came to the other side with his heart in a flutter. "Whew!"
The ice had yielded without breaking. It had creaked, perhaps; nothing worse. It was what is called "rubber ice." There was more of it; there were miles of it. The nearer the open sea the more widespread was the floe. Beyond—hauling down the Spotted Horses, which lay in the open—the proportion of new ice would be vastly greater. At a trot for the time over the pans, which were flat, and in delicate, mincing little spurts across the bending ice, Doctor Rolfe proceeded. In a confidence that was somewhat flushed—he had rested—he went forward.
And presently, midway of a lane of green ice, he heard a gurgle as the ice bent under his weight. Water washed his boots. He had been on the lookout for holes. This hole he heard—the spurt and gurgle of it. He had not seen it. Safe across, Doctor Rolfe grinned. It was a reaction of relief. "Whew! Whew!" he whistled.
* * * * *
By and by he caught ear of the sea breaking under the wind beyond the Little Spotted Horse. He was nearing the limits of the ice. In full moonlight the whitecaps flashed news of a tumultuous open. A rumble and splash of breakers came down with the gale from the point of the island. It indicated that the sea was working in the passage between the Spotted Horses and Blow-me-down Dick of the Ragged Run coast. The waves would run under the ice, would lift it and break it. In this way the sea would eat its way through the passage. It would destroy the young ice. It would break the pans to pieces and rub them to slush.
Doctor Rolfe must make the Little Spotted Horse and cross the passage between the island and the Ragged Run coast. Whatever the issue of haste, he must carry on and make the best of a bad job. Otherwise he would come to Tickle-my-Ribs, between the Little Spotted Horse and Blow-me-Down Dick of Ragged Run, and be marooned from the main shore. And there was another reason: it was immediate and desperately urgent. As the sea was biting off the ice in Tickle-my-Ribs, so, too, it was encroaching upon the body of the ice in Anxious Bight. Anxious Bight was breaking up. Acres of ice were wrenched from the field at a time and then broken up by the sea. What was the direction of this swift melting? It might take any direction. And a survey of the sky troubled Doctor Rolfe. All this while the light had diminished. It was failing still. It was failing faster. There was less of the moon. By and by it would be wholly obscured.
A man would surely lose his life on the ice in thick weather—on one or other of the reaches of new ice. And thereabouts the areas of young ice were wider. To tiptoe across the yielding film of these dimly visible stretches was instantly and dreadfully dangerous. It was horrifying. A man took his life in his hand every time he left a pan. Doctor Rolfe was not insensitive. He began to sweat—not with labor but with fear. When the ice bent under him he gasped and held his breath; and he came each time to the solid refuge of a pan with his teeth set, his face contorted, his hands clenched—a shiver in the small of his back.
To achieve safety once, however, was not to win a final relief; it was merely to confront, in the same circumstances, a precisely similar peril. Doctor Rolfe was not physically exhausted; every muscle that he had was warm and alert. Yet he was weak; a repetition of suspense had unnerved him. A full hour of this, and sometimes he chattered and shook in a nervous chill. In the meantime he had approached the rocks of the Little Spotted Horse.
In the lee of the Little Spotted Horse the ice had gathered as in a back current. It was close packed alongshore to the point of the island. Between this solidly frozen press of pans and the dissolving field in Anxious Bight there had been a lane of ruffled open water before the frost fell. It measured perhaps fifty yards. It was now black and still, sheeted with new ice which had been delayed in forming by the ripple of that exposed situation. Doctor Rolfe had encountered nothing as doubtful. He paused on the brink. A long, thin line of solid pan ice, ghostly white in the dusk beyond, was attached to the rocks of the Little Spotted Horse. It led all the way to Tickle-my-Ribs. Doctor Rolfe must make that line of solid ice. He must cross the wide lane of black, delicately frozen new ice that lay between and barred his way.
He waited for the moon. When the light broke—a thin, transient gleam—he started. A few fathoms forth the ice began to yield. A moment later he stopped short and recoiled. There was a hole—gaping wide and almost under his feet. He stopped. The water overflowed and the ice cracked. He must not stand still. To avoid a second hole he twisted violently to the right and almost plunged into a third opening. It seemed the ice was rotten from shore to shore. And it was a long way across. Doctor Rolfe danced a zigzag toward the pan ice under the cliffs, spurting forward and retreating and swerving. He did not pause; had he paused he would have dropped through. When he was within two fathoms of the pan ice a foot broke through and tripped him flat on his face. With his weight thus distributed he was momentarily held up. Water squirted and gurgled out of the break—an inch of water, forming a pool. Doctor Rolfe lay still and expectant in this pool.
* * * * *
Dolly West's mother still sat by the kitchen fire. It was long past midnight now.
Once more Bad-Weather Tom tiptoed in from the frosty night. "Is she sleepin' still?" he whispered.
"Hush! She've jus' toppled off again. She's havin' a deal o' pain, Tom. An' she've been bleedin' again."
"Put her down on the bed, dear."
The woman shook her head. "I'm afeared 'twould start the wounds, Tom. Any sign of un yet, Tom?"
"Not yet."
"He'll come soon."
"No; 'tis not near time. 'Twill be dawn afore he——"
"Soon, Tom."
"He'll be delayed by snow. The moon's near gone. 'Twill be black dark in half an hour. I felt a flake o' snow as I come in. An' he'll maybe wait at Mad Harry——"
"He's comin' by the Bight, Tom."
Dolly stirred, cried out, awakened with a start, and lifted her bandaged head a little. She did not open her eyes. "Is that you, doctor, sir?"
"Hush!" the mother whispered. "'Tis not the doctor yet."
"When——"
"He's comin'."
"I'll take a look," said Tom. He went out again and stumbled down the path to Blow-me-Down Dick by Tickle-my-Ribs.
Doctor Rolfe lay still and expectant in the pool of water near the pan ice and rocks of the Little Spotted Horse. He waited. Nothing happened. Presently he ventured delicately to take off a mitten, to extend his hand, to sink his fingernails in the ice and try to draw himself forward. It was a failure. His fingernails were too short. He could merely scratch the ice. He reflected that if he did not concentrate his weight—that if he kept it distributed—he would not break through. And once more he tried to make use of his fingernails. It turned out that the nails of the other hand were longer. Doctor Rolfe managed to gain half an inch before they slipped. They slipped again—and again and again. It was hopeless. Doctor Rolfe lay still, pondering.
Presently he shot his gaff toward the pan ice, to be rid of the incumbrance of it, and lifted himself on his palms and toes. By this the distribution of his weight was not greatly disturbed. It was not concentrated upon one point. It was divided by four and laid upon four points. And there were no fearsome consequences. It was a hopeful experiment.
Doctor Rolfe stepped by inches on his hands toward the pan ice—dragging his toes. In this way he came to the line of solid ice under the cliffs of the Little Spotted Horse and had a clear path forward. Whereupon he picked up his gaff, and set out for the point of the Little Spotted Horse and the passage of Tickle-my-Ribs. He was heartened.
Tickle-my-Ribs was heaving. The sea had by this time eaten its way clear through the passage from the open to the first reaches of Anxious Bight and far and wide beyond. The channel was half a mile long; in width a quarter of a mile at the narrowest. Doctor Rolfe's path was determined. It must lead from the point of the island to the base of Blow-me-Down Dick and the adjoining fixed and solid ice of the narrows to Ragged Run Harbor. Ice choked the channel. It was continuously running in from the open. It was a thin sheet of fragments. There was only an occasional considerable pan. A high sea ran outside. Waves from the open slipped under this field of little pieces and lifted it in running swells. No single block of ice was at rest.
* * * * *
Precisely as a country doctor might petulantly regard a stretch of hub-deep crossroad, Doctor Rolfe, the outport physician, complained of the passage of Tickle-my-Ribs. Not many of the little pans would bear his weight. They would sustain it momentarily. Then they would tip or sink. There would be foothold through the instant required to choose another foothold and leap toward it. Always the leap would have to be taken from sinking ground. When he came, by good chance, to a pan that would bear him up for a moment, Doctor Rolfe would have instantly to discover another heavy block to which to shape his agitated course. There would be no rest, no certainty beyond the impending moment. But, leaping thus, alert and agile and daring, a man might——
Might? Mm-m, a man might! And he might not! There were contingencies: A man might leap short and find black water where he had depended upon a footing of ice; a man might land on the edge of a pan and fall slowly back for sheer lack of power to obtain a balance; a man might misjudge the strength of a pan to bear him up; a man might find no ice near enough for the next immediately imperative leap; a man might be unable either to go forward or retreat. And there was the light to consider. A man might be caught in the dark. He would be in hopeless case if caught in the dark.
Light was imperative. Doctor Rolfe glanced aloft. "Whew!" he whistled.
The moon and the ominous bank of black cloud were very close. There was snow in the air. A thickening flurry ran past.
* * * * *
Bad-Weather Tom West was not on the lookout when Doctor Rolfe opened the kitchen door at Ragged Run Harbor and strode in with the air of a man who had survived difficulties and was proud of it. Bad-weather Tom West was sitting by the fire, his face in his hands; and the mother of Dolly West—with Dolly still restlessly asleep in her arms—was rocking, rocking, as before.
And Doctor Rolfe set to work—in a way so gentle, with a voice so persuasive, with a hand so tender and sure, with a skill and wisdom so keen, that little Dolly West, who was brave enough in any case, as you know, yielded the additional patience and courage which the simple means at hand for her relief required; and Doctor Rolfe laved Dolly West's blue eyes until she could see again, and sewed up her wounds that night so that no scar remained; and in the broad light of the next day picked out grains of powder until not a single grain was left to disfigure the child.
* * * * *
Three months after that it again occurred to Doctor Rolfe, of Afternoon Arm, that the practice of medicine was amply provided with hardship and shockingly empty of pecuniary reward. Since the night of the passage of Anxious Bight he had not found time to send out any statements of accounts. It occurred to him that he had then determined, after a reasonable and sufficient consideration of the whole matter, to "tilt the fee." Very well; he would "tilt the fee." He would provide for himself an old age of reasonable ease and self-respecting independence.
Thereupon Doctor Rolfe prepared a statement of account for Bad-Weather West, of Ragged Run Harbor, and after he had written the amount of the bill—"$4"—he thoughtfully crossed it out and wrote "$1.75."
* * * * *
V
A CROESUS OF GINGERBREAD COVE
* * * * *
V
A CROESUS OF GINGERBREAD COVE
My name's Race. I've traded these here Newfoundland north-coast outports for salt-fish for half a lifetime. Boy and youth afore that I served Pinch-a-Penny Peter in his shop at Gingerbread Cove. I was born in the Cove. I knowed all the tricks of Pinch-a-Penny's trade. And I tells you it was Pinch-a-Penny Peter's conscience that made Pinch-a-Penny rich. That's queer two ways: you wouldn't expect a north-coast trader to have a conscience; and you wouldn't expect a north-coast trader with a conscience to be rich. But conscience is much like the wind: it blows every which way; and if a man does but trim his sails to suit, he can bowl along in any direction without much wear and tear of the spirit. Pinch-a-Penny bowled along, paddle-punt fisherman to Gingerbread merchant. He went where he was bound for, wing-and-wing to the breeze behind, and got there with his peace of mind showing never a sign of the weather. In my day the old codger had an easy conscience and twenty thousand dollars.
Long Tom Lane, of Gingerbread Cove, vowed in his prime that he'd sure have to even scores with Pinch-a-Penny Peter afore he could pass to his last harbor with any satisfaction.
"With me, Tom?" says Pinch-a-Penny. "That's a saucy notion for a hook-an'-line man."
"Ten more years o' life," says Tom, "an' I'll square scores."
"Afore you evens scores with me, Tom," says Peter, "you'll have t' have what I wants an' can't get."
"There's times," says Tom, "when a man stands in sore need o' what he never thought he'd want."
"When you haves what I needs," says Peter, "I'll pay what you asks."
"If 'tis for sale," says Tom.
"Money talks," says Peter.
"Ah, well," says Tom, "maybe it don't speak my language."
Pinch-a-Penny Peter's conscience was just as busy as any other man's conscience. And it liked its job. It troubled Pinch-a-Penny. It didn't trouble un to be honest; it troubled un to be rich. And it give un no rest. When trade was dull—no fish coming into Pinch-a-Penny's storehouses and no goods going out of Pinch-a-Penny's shop—Pinch-a-Penny's conscience made un grumble and groan like the damned. I never seed a man so tortured by conscience afore nor since. And to ease his conscience Pinch-a-Penny would go over his ledgers by night; and he'd jot down a gallon of molasses here, and a pound of tea there, until he had made a good day's trade of a bad one. 'Twas simple enough, too; for Pinch-a-Penny never gived out no accounts to amount to nothing, but just struck his balances to please his greed at the end of the season, and told his dealers how much they owed him or how little he owed them.
In dull times Pinch-a-Penny's conscience irked him into overhauling his ledgers. 'Twas otherwise in seasons of plenty. But Pinch-a-Penny's conscience kept pricking away just the same—aggravating him into getting richer and richer. No rest for Pinch-a-Penny! He had to have all the money he could take by hook and crook or suffer the tortures of an evil conscience. Just like any other man, Pinch-a-penny must ease that conscience or lose sleep o' nights. And so in seasons of plenty up went the price of tea at Pinch-a-Penny's shop. And up went the price of pork. And up went the price of flour. All sky-high, ecod! Never was such harsh times, says Peter; why, my dear man, up St. John's way, says he, you couldn't touch tea nor pork nor flour with a ten-foot sealing-gaff; and no telling what the world was coming to, with prices soaring like a gull in a gale and all the St. John's merchants chary of credit!
"Damme!" said Pinch-a-Penny; "'tis awful times for us poor traders. No tellin' who'll weather this here panic. I'd not be surprised if we got a war out of it."
Well, now, on the Newfoundland north-coast in them days 'twasn't much like the big world beyond. Folk didn't cruise about. They was too busy. And they wasn't used to it, anyhow. Gingerbread Cove folk wasn't born at Gingerbread Cove, raised at Rickity Tickle, married at Seldom-Come-By, aged at Skeleton Harbor, and buried at Run-by-Guess; they were born and buried at Gingerbread Cove. So what the fathers thought at Gingerbread Cove the sons thought; and what the sons knowed had been knowed by the old men for a good many years. Nobody was used to changes. They was shy of changes. New ways was fearsome. And so the price of flour was a mystery. It is, anyhow—wherever you finds it. It always has been. And why it should go up and down at Gingerbread Cove was beyond any man of Gingerbread Cove to fathom. When Pinch-a-Penny said the price of flour was up—well, then, she was up; and that's all there was about it. Nobody knowed no better. And Pinch-a-Penny had the flour.
Pinch-a-Penny had the pork, too. And he had the sweetness and the tea. And he had the shoes and the clothes and the patent medicines. And he had the twine and the salt. And he had all the cash there was at Gingerbread Cove. And he had the schooner that fetched in the supplies and carried away the fish to the St. John's markets. He was the only trader at Gingerbread Cove; his storehouses and shop was fair jammed with the things the folk of Gingerbread Cove couldn't do without and wasn't able to get nowhere else. So, all in all, Pinch-a-Penny Peter could make trouble for the folk that made trouble for he. And the folk grumbled. By times, ecod, they grumbled like the devil of a fine Sunday morning! But 'twas all they had the courage to do. And Pinch-a-Penny let un grumble away. The best cure for grumbling, says he, was to give it free course. If a man could speak out in meeting, says he, he'd work no mischief in secret.
"Sea-lawyers, eh?" says Peter. "Huh! What you fellers want, anyhow? Huh? You got everything now that any man could expect. Isn't you housed? Isn't you fed? Isn't you clothed? Isn't you got a parson and a schoolmaster? Damme, I believes you wants a doctor settled in the harbor! A doctor! An' 'tisn't two years since I got you your schoolmaster! Queer times we're havin' in the outports these days, with every harbor on the coast wantin' a doctor within hail. You're well enough done by at Gingerbread Cove. None better nowhere. An' why? Does you ever think o' that? Why? Because I got my trade here. An' think o' me! Damme, if ar a one o' you had my brain-labor t' do, you'd soon find out what harsh labor was like. What with bad debts an' roguery an' failed seasons an' creditors t' St. John's I'm hard put to it t' keep my seven senses. An' small thanks I gets—me that keeps this harbor alive, in famine an' plenty. 'Tis the business I haves that keeps you. You make trouble for my business, ecod, an' you'll come t' starvation! Now, you mark me!"
There would be a scattered time when Pinch-a-Penny would yield an inch. Oh, ay! I've knowed Pinch-a-Penny to drop the price of stick-candy when he had put the price of flour too high for anybody's comfort.
* * * * *
Well, now, Long Tom Lane, of Gingerbread Cove, had a conscience, too. But 'twas a common conscience. Most men haves un. And they're irksome enough for some. 'Twas not like Pinch-a-Penny Peter's conscience. Nothing useful ever come of it. 'Twas like yours and mine. It troubled Tom Lane to be honest and it kept him poor. All Tom Lane's conscience ever aggravated him to do was just to live along in a religious sort of fashion and rear his family and be decently stowed away in the graveyard when his time was up if the sea didn't cotch un first. But 'twas a busy conscience for all that—and as sharp as a fish-prong. No rest for Tom Lane if he didn't fatten his wife and crew of little lads and maids! No peace of mind for Tom if he didn't labor! And so Tom labored and labored and labored. Dawn to dusk his punt was on the grounds off Lack-a-Day Head, taking fish from the sea to be salted and dried and passed into Pinch-a-Penny's storehouses.
* * * * *
When Tom Lane was along about fourteen years old his father died. 'Twas of a Sunday afternoon that we stowed un away. I mind the time: spring weather and a fair day, with the sun low, and the birds twittering in the alders just afore turning in.
Pinch-a-Penny Peter cotched up with young Tom on the road home from the little graveyard on Sunset Hill.
"Well, lad," says he, "the old skipper's gone."
"Ay, sir, he's dead an' buried."
"A fine man," says Pinch-a-Penny. "None finer."
With that young Tom broke out crying. "He were a kind father t' we," says he. "An' now he's dead!"
"You lacked nothin' in your father's lifetime," says Peter.
"An' now he's dead!"
"Well, well, you've no call t' be afeared o' goin' hungry on that account," says Peter, laying an arm over the lad's shoulder. "No, nor none o' the little crew over t' your house. Take up the fishin' where your father left it off, lad," says he, "an' you'll find small difference. I'll cross out your father's name on the books an' put down your own in its stead."
"I'm fair obliged," says Tom. "That's kind, sir."
"Nothin' like kindness t' ease sorrow," says Pinch-a-Penny. "Your father died in debt, lad."
"Ay, sir?"
"Deep."
"How much, sir?"
"I'm not able t' tell offhand," says Peter. "'Twas deep enough. But never you care. You'll be able t' square it in course o' time. You're young an' hearty. An' I'll not be harsh. Damme, I'm no skinflint!"
"That's kind, sir."
"You—you—will square it?"
"I don't know, sir."
"What?" cries Peter. "What! You're not knowin', eh? That's saucy talk. You had them there supplies?"
"I 'low, sir."
"An' you guzzled your share, I'll be bound!"
"Yes, sir."
"An' your mother had her share?"
"Yes, sir."
"An' you're not knowin' whether you'll pay or not! Ecod! What is you? A scoundrel? A dead beat? A rascal? A thief? A jail-bird?"
"No, sir."
"'Tis for the likes o' you that jails was made."
"Oh, no, sir!"
"Doesn't you go t' church? Is that what they learns you there? I'm thinkin' the parson doesn't earn what I pays un. Isn't you got no conscience?"
'Twas too much for young Tom. You sees, Tom Lane had a conscience—a conscience as fresh and as young as his years. And Tom had loved his father well. And Tom honored his father's name. And so when he had brooded over Pinch-a-Penny's words for a spell—and when he had maybe laid awake in the night thinking of his father's goodness—he went over to Pinch-a-Penny's office and allowed he'd pay his father's debt. Pinch-a-Penny give un a clap on the back, and says: "You is an honest lad, Tom Lane! I knowed you was. I'm proud t' have your name on my books!"—and that heartened Tom to continue. And after that Tom kept hacking away on his father's debt. In good years Pinch-a-Penny would say: "She's comin' down, Tom. I'll just apply the surplus." And in bad he'd say: "You isn't quite cotched up with your own self this season, b'y. A little less pork this season, Tom, an' you'll square this here little balance afore next. I wisht this whole harbor was as honest as you. No trouble, then," says he, "t' do business in a business-like way."
When Tom got over the hill—fifty and more—his father's debt, with interest, according to Pinch-a-Penny's figures, which Tom had no learning to dispute, was more than it ever had been; and his own was as much as he ever could hope to pay. And by that time Pinch-a-Penny Peter was rich, and Long Tom Lane was gone sour.
* * * * *
In the fall of the year when Tom Lane was fifty-three he went up to St. John's in Pinch-a-Penny Peter's supply-schooner. Nobody knowed why. And Tom made a mystery of it. But go he would. And when the schooner got back 'twas said that Tom Lane had vanished in the city for a day. Why? Nobody knowed. Where? Nobody could find out. Tom wouldn't tell, nor could the gossips gain a word from his wife. And, after that, Tom was a changed man; he mooned a deal, and he would talk no more of the future, but dwelt upon the shortness of a man's days and the quantity of his sin, and labored like mad, and read the Scriptures by candlelight, and sot more store by going to church and prayer-meeting than ever afore. Labor? Ecod, how that poor man labored through the winter! While there was light! And until he fair dropped in his tracks of sheer weariness! 'Twas back in the forest—hauling fire-wood with the dogs and storing it away back of his little cottage under Lend-a-Hand Hill.
"Dear man!" says Peter; "you've firewood for half a dozen winters."
"They'll need it," says Tom.
"Ay," says Peter; "but will you lie idle next winter?"
"Next winter?" says Tom. And he laughed. "Oh, next winter," says he, "I'll have another occupation."
"Movin' away, Tom?"
"Well," says Tom, "I is an' I isn't."
There come a day in March weather of that year when seals was thick on the floe off Gingerbread Cove. You could see un with the naked eye from Lack-a-Day Head. A hundred thousand black specks swarming over the ice three miles and more to sea! "Swiles! Swiles!" And Gingerbread Cove went mad for slaughter. 'Twas a fair time for off-shore sealing, too—a blue, still day, with the look and feel of settled weather. The ice had come in from the current with a northeasterly gale, a wonderful mixture of Arctic bergs and Labrador pans, all blinding white in the spring sun; and 'twas a field so vast, and jammed so tight against the coast, that there wasn't much more than a lane or two and a Dutchman's breeches of open water within sight from the heads. Nobody looked for a gale of off-shore wind to blow that ice afore dawn of the next day.
"A fine, soft time, lads!" says Pinch-a-Penny. "I 'low I'll go out with the Gingerbread crew."
"Skipper Peter," says Tom Lane, "you're too old a man t' be on the ice."
"Ay," says Peter, "but I wants t' bludgeon another swile afore I dies."
"But you creaks, man!"
"Ah, well," says Peter, "I'll show the lads I'm able t' haul a swile ashore."
"Small hope for such as you on a movin' floe!"
"Last time, Tom," says Peter.
"Last time, true enough," says Tom, "if that ice starts t' sea with a breeze o' wind behind."
"Oh, well, Tom," says Peter, "I'll take my chances. If the wind comes up I'll be as spry as I'm able."
It come on to blow in the afternoon. But 'twas short warning of off-shore weather. A puff of gray wind come down; a saucier gust went by; and then a swirl of galish wind jumped over the pans. At the first sign of wind, Pinch-a-Penny Peter took for home, loping over the ice as fast as his lungs and old legs would take un when pushed, and nobody worried about he any more. He was in such mad haste that the lads laughed behind un as he passed. Most of the Gingerbread crew followed, dragging their swiles; and them that started early come safe to harbor with the fat. But there's nothing will master a man's caution like the lust of slaughter: give a Newfoundlander a club, and show un a swile-pack, and he'll venture far from safety. 'Twas not until a flurry of snow come along of a sudden that the last of the crew dropped what they was at and begun to jump for shore like a pack of jack-rabbits.
With snow in the wind, 'twas every man for himself. And that means no mercy and less help.
By this time the ice had begun to feel the wind. 'Twas restless. And a bad promise: the pans crunched and creaked as they settled more at ease. The ice was going abroad. As the farther fields drifted off to sea, the floe fell loose inshore. Lanes and pools opened up. The cake-ice tipped and went awash under the weight of a man. Rough going, ecod! There was no telling when open water would cut a man off where he stood. And the wind was whipping off-shore, and the snow was like dust in a man's eyes and mouth, and the landmarks of Gingerbread Cove was nothing but shadows in a mist of snow to windward. Nobody knowed where Pinch-a-Penny Peter was. Nobody thought about him. And wherever poor old Pinch-a-Penny was—whether safe ashore or creaking shoreward against the wind on his last legs—he must do for himself. 'Twas no time to succor rich or poor. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
Bound out, in the morning, Long Tom Lane had fetched his rodney through the lanes. By luck and good conduct he had managed to get the wee boat a fairish way out. He had beached her, there on the floe—a big pan, close by a hummock which he marked with care. And 'twas for Tom Lane's little rodney that the seven last men of Gingerbread Cove was jumping. With her afloat—and the pack loosening in-shore under the wind—they could make harbor well enough afore the gale worked up the water in the lee of the Gingerbread hills. But she was a mean, small boat. There was room for six, with safety—but room for no more; no room for seven. 'Twas a nasty mess, to be sure. You couldn't expect nothing else. But there wasn't no panic. Gingerbread men was accustomed to tight places. And they took this one easy. Them that got there first launched the boat and stepped in. No fight; no fuss.
It just happened to be Eleazer Butt that was left. 'Twas Eleazer's ill-luck. And Eleazer was up in years, and had fell behind coming over the ice.
"No room for me?" says he.
'Twas sure death to be left on the ice. The wind begun to taste of frost. And 'twas jumping up. 'Twould carry the floe far and scatter it broadcast.
"See for yourself, lad," says Tom.
"Pshaw!" says Eleazer. "That's too bad!"
"You isn't no sorrier than me, b'y."
Eleazer tweaked his beard. "Dang it!" says he. "I wisht there was room. I'm hungry for my supper."
"Let un in," says one of the lads. "'Tis even chances she'll float it out."
"Well," says Eleazer, "I doesn't want t' make no trouble——"
"Come aboard," says Tom. "An' make haste."
"If she makes bad weather," says Eleazer, "I'll get out."
They pushed off from the pan. 'Twas falling dusk, by this time. The wind blowed black. The frost begun to bite. Snow came thick—just as if, ecod, somebody up aloft was shaking the clouds, like bags, in the gale! And the rodney was deep and ticklish; had the ice not kept the water flat in the lanes and pools, either Eleazer would have had to get out, as he promised, or she would have swamped like a cup. As it was, handled like dynamite, she done well enough; and she might have made harbor within the hour had she not been hailed by Pinch-a-Penny Peter from a small pan of ice midway between.
And there the old codger was squatting, his old face pinched and woebegone, his bag o' bones wrapped up in his coonskin coat, his pan near flush with the sea, with little black waves already beginning to wash over it.
A sad sight, believe me! Poor old Pinch-a-Penny, bound out to sea without hope on a wee pan of ice!
"Got any room for me?" says he.
They ranged alongside. "Mercy o' God!" says Tom; "she's too deep as it is."
"Ay," says Peter; "you isn't got room for no more. She'd sink if I put foot in her."
"Us'll come back," says Tom.
"No use, Tom," says Peter. "You knows that well enough. 'Tis no place out here for a Gingerbread punt. Afore you could get t' shore an' back night will be down an' this here gale will be a blizzard. You'd never be able t' find me."
"I 'low not," says Tom.
"Oh, no," says Peter. "No use, b'y."
"Damme, Skipper Peter," says Tom, "I'm sorry!"
"Ay," says Peter; "'tis a sad death for an ol' man—squattin' out here all alone on the ice an' shiverin' with the cold until he shakes his poor damned soul out."
"Not damned!" cries Tom. "Oh, don't say it!"
"Ah, well!" says Peter; "sittin' here all alone, I been thinkin'."
"'Tisn't by any man's wish that you're here, poor man!" says Tom.
"Oh, no," says Peter. "No blame t' nobody. My time's come. That's all. But I wisht I had a seat in your rodney, Tom."
And then Tom chuckled.
"What you laughin' at?" says Peter.
"I got a comical idea," says Tom.
"Laughin' at me, Tom?"
"Oh, I'm jus' laughin'."
"'Tis neither time nor place, Tom," says Peter, "t' laugh at an old man."
Tom roared. Ay, he slapped his knee, and he throwed back his head, and he roared. 'Twas enough almost to swamp the boat.
"For shame!" says Peter. And more than Pinch-a-Penny thought so.
"Skipper Peter," says Tom, "you're rich, isn't you?"
"I got money," says Peter.
"Sittin' out here, all alone," says Tom, "you been thinkin' a deal, you says?"
"Well," says Peter, "I'll not deny that I been havin' a little spurt o' sober thought."
"You been thinkin' that money wasn't much, after all?"
"Ay."
"An' that all your money in a lump wouldn't buy you passage ashore?"
"Oh, some few small thoughts on that order," says Peter. "'Tis perfectly natural."
"Money talks," says Tom.
"Tauntin' me again, Tom?"
"No, I isn't," says Tom. "I means it. Money talks. What'll you give for my seat in the boat?"
"'Tis not for sale, Tom."
The lads begun to grumble. It seemed just as if Long Tom Lane was making game of an old man in trouble. 'Twas either that or lunacy. And there was no time for nonsense off the Gingerbread coast in a spring gale of wind.
"Hist!" Tom whispered to the lads. "I knows what I'm doin'."
"A mad thing, Tom!"
"Oh, no!" says Tom. "'Tis the cleverest thing ever I thought of. Well," says he to Peter, "how much?"
"No man sells his life."
"Life or no life, my place in this boat is for sale," says Tom. "Money talks. Come, now. Speak up. Us can't linger here with night comin' down."
"What's the price, Tom?"
"How much you got, Peter?"
"Ah, well, I can afford a stiffish price, Tom. Anything you say in reason will suit me. You name the price, Tom. I'll pay."
"Ay, ye crab!" says Tom. "I'm namin' prices now. Look out, Peter! You're seventy-three. I'm fifty-three. Will you grant that I'd live t' be as old as you?"
"I'll grant it, Tom."
"I'm not sayin' I would," says Tom. "You mark that."
"Ah, well, I'll grant it, anyhow."
"I been an industrious man all my life, Skipper Peter. None knows it better than you. Will you grant that I'd earn a hundred and fifty dollars a year if I lived?"
"Ay, Tom."
Down come a gust of wind. "Have done!" says one of the lads. "Here's the gale come down with the dark. Us'll all be cast away."
"Rodney's mine, isn't she?" says Tom.
Well, she was. Nobody could say nothing to that. And nobody did.
"That's three thousand dollars, Peter," says Tom. "Three—thousand—dollars!"
"Ay," says Peter, "she calculates that way. But you've forgot t' deduct your livin' from the total. Not that I minds," says he. "'Tis just a business detail."
"Damme," says Tom. "I'll not be harsh!"
"Another thing, Tom," says Peter. "You're askin' me t' pay for twenty years o' life when I can use but a few. God knows how many!"
"I got you where I wants you," says Tom, "but I isn't got the heart t' grind you. Will you pay two thousand dollars for my seat in the boat?"
"If you is fool enough t' take it, Tom."
"There's something t' boot," says Tom. "I wants t' die out o' debt."
"You does, Tom."
"An' my father's bill is squared?"
"Ay."
"'Tis a bargain!" says Tom. "God witness!"
"Lads," says Pinch-a-Penny to the others in the rodney, "I calls you t' witness that I didn't ask Tom Lane for his seat in the boat. I isn't no coward. I've asked no man t' give up his life for me. This here bargain is a straight business deal. Business is business. 'Tis not my proposition. An' I calls you t' witness that I'm willin' t' pay what he asks. He've something for sale. I wants it. I've the money t' buy it. The price is his. I'll pay it." Then he turned to Tom. "You wants this money paid t' your wife, Tom?"
"Ay," says Tom, "t' Mary. She'll know why."
"Very good," says Pinch-a-Penny. "You've my word that I'll do it.... Wind's jumpin' up, Tom."
"I wants your oath. The wind will bide for that. Hold up your right hand."
Pinch-a-Penny shivered in a blast of the gale. "I swears," says he.
"Lads," says Tom, "you'll shame this man to his grave if he fails t' pay!"
"Gettin' dark, Tom," says Peter.
"Ay," says Tom; "'tis growin' wonderful cold an' dark out here. I knows it well. Put me ashore on the ice, lads."
They landed Tom, then, on a near-by pan. He would have it so.
"Leave me have my way!" says he. "I've done a good stroke o' business."
Presently they took old Pinch-a-Penny aboard in Tom's stead; and just for a minute they hung off Tom's pan to say good-by.
"I sends my love t' Mary an' the children," says he. "You'll not fail t' remember. She'll know why I done this thing. Tell her 'twas a grand chance an' I took it."
"Ay, Tom."
"Fetch in here close," says Tom. "I want's t' talk t' the ol' skinflint you got aboard there. I'll have my say, ecod, at last! Ye crab!" says he, shaking his fist in Pinch-a-Penny's face, when the rodney got alongside. "Ye robber! Ye pinch-a-penny! Ye liar! Ye thief! I done ye! Hear me? I done ye! I vowed I'd even scores with ye afore I died. An' I've done it—I've done it! What did ye buy? Twenty years o' my life! What will ye pay for? Twenty years o' my life!" And he laughed. And then he cut a caper, and come close to the edge of the pan, and shook his fist in Pinch-a-Penny's face again. "Know what I done in St. John's last fall?" says he. "I seen a doctor, ye crab! Know what he told me? No, ye don't! Twenty years o' my life this here ol' skinflint will pay for!" he crowed. "Two thousand dollars he'll put in the hands o' my poor wife!"
Well, well! The rodney was moving away. And a swirl of snow shrouded poor Tom Lane. But they heard un laugh once more.
"My heart is givin' 'way, anyhow!" he yelled. "I didn't have three months t' live!"
* * * * *
Old Pinch-a-Penny Peter done what he said he would do. He laid the money in poor Mary Lane's hands. But a queer thing happened next day. Up went the price of pork at Pinch-a-Penny's shop! And up went the price of tea and molasses! And up went the price of flour!
* * * * *
VI
A MADONNA OF TINKLE TICKLE
* * * * *
VI
A MADONNA OF TINKLE TICKLE
It was at Soap-an'-Water Harbor, with the trader Quick as Wink in from the sudsy seas of those parts, that Tumm, the old clerk, told the singular tale of the Madonna of Tinkle Tickle.
"I'm no hand for sixpenny novels," says he, with a wry glance at the skipper's dog-eared romance. "Nursemaids an' noblemen? I'm chary. I've no love, anyhow, for the things o' mere fancy. But I'm a great reader," he protested, with quick warmth, "o' the tales that are lived under the two eyes in my head. I'm forever in my lib'ry, too. Jus' now," he added, his eye on a dismayed little man from Chain Harbor, "I'm readin' the book o' the cook. An' I'm lookin' for a sad endin', ecod, if he keeps on scorchin' the water!"
The squat little Newfoundland schooner was snug in the lee of False Frenchman and down for the night. A wet time abroad: a black wind in the rigging, and the swish and patter of rain on the deck. But the forecastle bogey was roaring, and the forecastle lamp was bright; and the crew—at ease and dry—sprawled content in the forecastle glow. |
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