Read Ebook: The Master; a Novel by Zangwill Israel

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Ebook has 3594 lines and 190541 words, and 72 pages

"I'm goin' to drownd myself," answered her mother, carefully smoothing out her right mitten.

"Nonsense, mother," broke in Matt. "You kin't go out--it's snowin'."

He brushed past the pair and placed himself with his back to the door, his heart beating painfully. His mother's mad threats were familiar enough, yet they never ceased to terrify. Some day she might really do something desperate. Who knew?

"I'm goin' to drownd myself," repeated Mrs. Strang, carefully winding the muffler round her head.

She made a step towards the door, sweeping the limp Harriet roughly behind her.

"You kin't get out," Matt said, firmly. "Why, you hevn't hed breakfast yet."

"What do I want o' breakfus? Your sister is breakfus 'nough for me. Clear out o' the way."

"Don't you let her go, Matt!" cried Harriet. "I'll quit instead."

"You!" exclaimed her mother, turning fiercely upon her, while her eyes spat fire. "You are young and wholesome--the world is afore you. You were not brought from a great town to be buried in a wilderness. Marry your Preeps an' your Micmacs, and nurse your pappooses. God has cursed me with froward children an' a cripple, an' a husband that goes gallivantin' onchristianly about the world with never a thought for his 'mortal soul, an' the Lord has doomed me to worship Him in the wrong church. Mother yourselves; I throw up the position."

"Is it my fault if father hesn't wrote you lately?" cried Harriet. "Is it my fault if there's no Baptist church to Cobequid village?"

"Shut your mouth, you brazen hussy! You've drove your mother to her death! Stand out o' my way, Matthew; don't you disobey my dyin' reques'."

"I sha'n't," said the boy, squaring his shoulders firmly against the door. "Where kin you drownd yourself? The pond's froze an' the tide's out."

He could think of no other argument for the moment, and he had an incongruous vision of her sliding down to the river on her stomach, as the boys often did, down the steep, reddish-brown slopes of greasy mud, or sinking into a squash-hole like an errant horse.

"Why, there's on'y mud-flats," he added.

"I'll wait on the mud-flats fur the merciful tide." She fastened her bonnet-strings firmly.

"The river is full of ice," he urged.

"There will be room fur me," she answered. Then, with a sudden exclamation of dismay, "My God! you've got no shoes and socks on! You'll ketch your death. Go up-stairs d'reckly."

"No," replied Matt, becoming conscious for the first time of a cold wave creeping up his spinal marrow. "I'll ketch my death, then," and he sneezed vehemently.

"Put on your shoes an' socks d'reckly, you wretched boy. You know what a bother I hed with you last time."

He shook his head, conscious of a trump card.

"D'ye hear me! Put on your shoes and socks!"

"Take off your bonnet an' sacque," retorted Matt, clinching his fists.

"Put on your shoes an' socks!" repeated his mother.

"Take off your bonnet an' sacque, an' I'll put on my shoes an' socks."

They stood glaring defiance at each other, like a pair of duellists, their breaths rising in the frosty air like the smoke of pistols--these two grotesque figures in the gray light of the bleak passage, the tall, fierce brunette, in her flowery bonnet and astrakhan sacque, and the small, shivering, sneezing boy, in his patched homespun coat, with his trailing braces and bare feet. They heard Harriet's teeth chatter in the silence.

"Go back to bed, you young varmint," said Matt, suddenly catching sight of Billy's white face and gray night-gown on the landing above. "You'll ketch your death."

There was a scurrying sound from above, a fleeting glimpse of other little night-gowned figures. Matt and his mother still confronted each other warily. And then the situation was broken up by the near approach of sleigh-bells. They stopped slowly, mingling their jangling with the creak of runners sliding over frosty snow, then the scrunch of heavy boots travelled across the clearing. Harriet flushed in modest alarm and fled up-stairs. Mrs. Strang hastily retreated into the kitchen, and for one brief moment Matt breathed freely, till, hearing the click of the door-latch, he scented gunpowder. He dashed towards the door and pressed the thumb-latch, but it was fastened from within.

"Harriet!" he gasped, "the gun! the gun!"

He beat at the door, his imagination seeing through it. His loaded gun was resting on the wooden hooks fastened to the beam in the ceiling. He heard his mother mount a chair; he tried to break open the door, but could not. The chances of getting round by the back way flashed into his mind, only to be dismissed as quickly. There was no time--in breathless agony he waited the report of the gun. Crash! A strange, unexpected sound smote his ears--he heard the thud of his mother's body striking the floor. She had stabbed herself, then, instead. Half mad with excitement and terror, he backed to the end of the passage, took a running leap, and dashed with his mightiest momentum against the frail battened door. Off flew the catch, open flew the door with Matt in pursuit, and it was all the boy could do to avoid tumbling over his mother, who sat on the floor among the ruins of a chair, rubbing her shins, her bonnet slightly disarranged, and the gun, still loaded, demurely on its perch. What had happened was obvious; some of the little Strang mice, taking advantage of the cat's absence at the "muddin' frolic," had had a frolic on their own account, turning the chair into a sled, and binding up its speedily-broken leg to deceive the maternal eye. It might have supported a sitter; under Mrs. Strang's feet it had collapsed ere her hand could grasp the gun.

"The pesky young varmints!" she exclaimed, full of this new grievance. "They might hev crippled me fur life. Always a-tearin' an' a-rampagin' an' a-ruinatin'. I kin't keep two sticks together. It's 'nough to make a body throw up the position."

The sound of the butt-end of a whip battering the front-door brought her to her feet with a bound. She began dusting herself hastily with her hand.

"Well, what're you gawkin' at?" she inquired. "Kin't you go an' unbar the door, 'stead o' standin' there like a stuck pig?"

Matt knew the symptoms of volcanic extinction; without further parley he ran to the door and took down the beechen bar. The visitor was "ole Hey," who drove the mail. The deacon came in, powdered as from his own grist-mill, and added the snow of his top-boots to the drift in the hall. There were leather-faced mittens on his hands, ear-laps on his cap, tied under the chin, a black muffler, hoary with frost from his breath, round his neck and mouth, and an outer coat of buffalo-skin swathing his body down to his ankles, so that all that was visible of him was a little inner circle of red face with frosted eyebrows.

Mrs. Strang stood ready in the hall with a genial smile, and Matt, his heart grown lighter, returned to the kitchen, extracted the family foot-gear from under the stove, where it had been placed to thaw, and putting on his own still-sodden top-boots, he set about shaving whittlings and collecting kindlings to build the fire.

"Here we are again, hey!" cried the deacon, as heartily as his perpetual, colossal quid would permit.

"Do tell! is it really you?" replied Mrs. Strang, with her pleasant smile.

"Hev you brought me a letter?" interrupted Mrs. Strang, anxiously.

"I guess--but you're goin' out airly?"

"I allowed I'd walk over to the village to see if it hed come."

"Oh, but it ain't the one you expec'."

"No?" she faltered.

"I guess not. Thet's why I brought it myself. I kinder scented it was suthin' special, and so I reckoned I'd save you the trouble of trudgin' to the post-office. Deacon Hailey ain't the man to spare himself trouble to obleege a fellow-critter. Do es you'd be done by, hey?" The deacon never lost an opportunity of pointing the moral of a position. Perhaps his sermonizing tendency was due to his habit of expounding the Sunday texts at a weekly meeting, or perhaps his weekly exposition was due to his sermonizing tendency.

"Thank you." Mrs. Strang extended her hand for the letter. He produced it slowly, apparently from up the sleeve of his top-most coat, a wet, forlorn-looking epistle, addressed in a sprawling hand. Mrs. Strang turned it about, puzzled.

"P'raps it's from Uncle Matt," ejaculated Matt, appearing suddenly at the kitchen door.

"You've got Uncle Matt on the brain," said Mrs. Strang. "It's a Halifax stamp." She could not understand it; her own family rarely wrote to her, and there was no hand of theirs in the address. Deacon Hailey lingered on, apparently prepared, in his consideration for others, to listen to the contents of his "fellow-critter's" letter.

"Ah, sonny," he said to Matt, "only jest turned out, and not slicked up yet. When I was your age I hed done my day's chores afore the day hed begun. No wonder the Province is so 'tarnally behindhand, hey?"

"Thet's so," Matt murmured. Pop! pop! pop! was all that he heard, so that ole Hey's moral exhortations left him neither a better nor a wiser boy.

Mrs. Strang still held the letter in her hand, apparently having become indifferent to it. Ole Hey did not know she was waiting for him to go, so that she might put on her spectacles and read it. She never wore her spectacles in public, any more than she wore her nightcap. Both seemed to her to belong to the privacies of the inner life, and glasses in particular made an old woman of one before one's time. If she had worn out her eyes with needle-work and tears, that was not her neighbors' business.

The deacon, with no sign of impatience, elaborately unbuttoned his outer buffalo-skin, then the overcoat beneath that, and the coat under that, and then, pulling up the edge of his cardigan that fitted tightly over his waistcoats, he toilsomely thrust his horny paw into his breeches-pocket and hauled out a fig of "black-jack." Then he slowly produced from the other pocket a small tool-chest in the guise of a pocket-knife, and proceeded to cut the tobacco with one of the instruments.

"Come here, sonny!" he cried.

"The deacon wants you," said Mrs. Strang.

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