marsh lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of
shivering poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam
hanging in gray masses against the pale sky and blotting out the
Milky Way. In a moment the red glare from the headlight streamed
up the snow-covered track before the siding and glittered on the
wet, black rails. The burly man with the disheveled red beard
walked swiftly up the platform toward the approaching train,
uncovering his head as he went. The group of men behind him
hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up
to the express car just as the door was thrown open, the spare man
in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity.
The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a
young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.
"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily.
Philip Phelps, the banker, responded with dignity: "We have come
to take charge of the body. Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble
and can't be about."
"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger,
"and tell the operator to lend a hand."
The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the
snowy platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room
for it and then formed a close semicircle about it, looking
curiously at the palm leaf which lay across the black cover. No
one said anything. The baggage man stood by his truck, waiting
to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and the fireman
dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and long
oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of
the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked
about him helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of
that black, uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of
an individual to be addressed.
"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and
joined the group. "No, they have not come yet; the family is
scattered. The body will be taken directly to the house." He
stooped and took hold of one of the handles of the coffin.
"Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on
the horses," called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the
door of the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger:
"We didn't know whether there would be anyone with him or not,"
he explained. "It's a long walk, so you'd better go up in the
hack." He pointed to a single, battered conveyance, but the young
man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I think I will go up with
the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the undertaker,
"I'll ride with you."
They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the
starlight tip the long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in
the still village were shining from under the low, snow-burdened
roofs; and beyond, on every side, the plains reached out into
emptiness, peaceful and wide as the soft sky itself, and wrapped
in a tangible, white silence.
When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group
that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate.
The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks,
extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety
footbridge. The gate hung on one hinge and was opened wide with
difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something
black was tied to the knob of the front door.
The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the
hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was
wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded
into the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My
boy, my boy! And this is how you've come home to me!"
As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder
of unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and
angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and
caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come,
come, Mother; you mustn't go on like this!" Her tone changed to
one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The
parlor is ready, Mr. Phelps."
The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards,
while the undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They
bore it into a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and
disuse and furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp
ornamented with jingling glass prisms and before a "Rogers group"
of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax. Henry
Steavens stared about him with the sickening conviction that
there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had somehow
arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about over
the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark
of identification, for something that might once conceivably have
belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his
friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls
hanging above the piano that he felt willing to let any of these
people approach the coffin.
"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face,"
wailed the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens
looked fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and
swollen under its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He
flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked
again. There was a kind of power about her face--a kind of
brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and furrowed by
violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions that
grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long
nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep
lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met
across her forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far
apart--teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men were
obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water,
and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.
The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a
mourning comb in her hair which curiously lengthened her long
face sat stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their
large knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down,
solemnly awaiting the opening of the coffin. Near the door stood
a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid
bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle.
She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
; to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob.
Steavens walked over and stood beside her.
Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall
and frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair
and a dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered
uncertainly. He went slowly up to the coffin and stood, rolling
a blue cotton handkerchief between his hands, seeming so pained
and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that he had no
consciousness of anything else.
"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered
timidly, putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her
elbow. She turned with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with
such violence that he tottered a little. He did not even glance
toward the coffin, but continued to look at her with a dull,
frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the whip.
His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable
shame. When his wife rushed from the room her daughter strode
after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin,
bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,
leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves. The
old man stood trembling and looking down at his dead son's face.
The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid
stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the
wide forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there
was not that beautiful and chaste repose which we expect to find
in the faces of the dead. The brows were so drawn that there
were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin was
thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life
had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly
relax the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--
as though he were still guarding something precious and holy,
which might even yet be wrested from him.
The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He
turned to the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are
comin' back to set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank
'ee, Jim, thank 'ee." He brushed the hair back gently from his
son's forehead. "He was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy. He
was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of 'em all--only we didn't
none of us ever onderstand him." The tears trickled slowly down
his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
"Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed
from the top of the stairs. The old man started timorously:
"Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He turned away, hesitated stood for a
moment in miserable indecision; then he reached back and patted
the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the room.
"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems
as if his eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing
cuts very deep," remarked the lawyer.
Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the
mother had been in the room the young man had scarcely seen
anyone else; but now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim
Laird's florid face and bloodshot eyes, he knew that he had found
what he had been heartsick at not finding before--the feeling,
the understanding, that must exist in someone, even here.
The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and
blurred by dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face
was strained--that of a man who is controlling himself with
difficulty--and he kept plucking at his beard with a sort of
fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the window, watched him
turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling pendants with an
angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked behind him,
staring down into the master's face. He could not help wondering
what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel and
so sooty a lump of potter's clay.
From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-
room door opened the import of it was clear. The mother was
abusing the maid for having forgotten to make the dressing for
the chicken salad which had been prepared for the watchers.
Steavens had never heard anything in the least like it; it was
injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and masterly
in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of
disgust the lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door
into the kitchen.
"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back.
"The Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her
loyalty would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell
tales that would curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who
was standing in here a while ago, with her apron to her eyes.
The old woman is a fury; there never was anybody like her for
demonstrative piety and ingenious cruelty. She made Harvey's
life a hell for him when he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed
of it. I never could see how he kept himself so sweet."
"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but
until tonight I have never known how wonderful."
"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it
can come even from such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried,
with a sweeping gesture which seemed to indicate much more than
the four walls within which they stood.
"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room
is so close I am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured
Steavens, struggling with one of the windows. The sash was
stuck, however, and would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly
and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came over, loosened
the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the window up a
few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left
him with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get
away from this place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh,
he comprehended well enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile
that he had seen so often on his master's lips!
He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit
home, he brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive
bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing
something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped, full-blooded
little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her
attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by
the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had
asked him if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush
that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin,
his head thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him
earnestly, puzzled at the line of the chin,
and wondering why a
man should conceal a feature of such distinction under that
disfiguring shock of beard. Suddenly, as though he felt the
young sculptor's keen glance, he opened his eyes.
"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly.
"He was terribly shy as a boy."
"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined
Steavens. "Although he could be very fond of people, he always
gave one the impression of being detached. He disliked violent
emotion; he was reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--
except, of course, as regarded his work. He was surefooted
enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women even
more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was
determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed afraid to
investigate."
"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and
closed his eyes.
Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable
boyhood. All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of
the man whose tastes were refined beyond the limits of the
reasonable--whose mind was an exhaustless gallery of beautiful
impressions, and so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar
leaf flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held
there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his
fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its
holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to
its pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the
enchantress spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in
contact with, he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a
sort of ethereal signature; a scent, a sound, a color that was
his own.
Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's
life; neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow
which had fallen earlier and cut deeper than these could have
done--a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his
heart from his very boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare;
the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and
ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and
noble with traditions.
At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe
entered, announced that the watchers were arriving, and asked
them "to step into the dining room." As Steavens rose the lawyer
said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good experience for you,
doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've
had twenty years of them."
As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the
lawyer, sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin
resting on his hand.
The same misty group that had stood before the door of the
express car shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the
kerosene lamp they separated and became individuals. The
minister, a pale, feeble-looking man with white hair and blond
chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small side table and placed
his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down behind the stove
and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall, fishing
his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers,
Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,
where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and
its effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an
old man with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The
coal-and-lumber dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite
sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork.
Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to read. The talk
around him ranged through various topics of local interest while
the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members
of the family were in bed the Grand Army man hitched his
shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the
rounds of his chair.
"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak