The lone furrow

Foreword

The Lady-who-knows was telling me of the four great men who had trailed their signatures up and down this continent in huge enduring letters of steel and masonry and mental monuments; and, after a time, I asked: " But who is the one great man — four are confusing? "

She smiled whimsically, and smoothed the folds of her plain dress thoughtfully for a minute. Then she asked, "Are you fond of child stories? "

"Yes," I answered; "but what has that to do with the great point at issue? "

With a prelude of the whimsical smile she related this little narrative:

" Once upon a time I was visiting in the home of one of these ' Big Four ' men. Another visitor was there with a little baby. I think she did not know a great deal about babies.

" One night I was wakened by the plaintive wailing of the little one whom I knew had been left to be cared for by the nurse. After a time— it must have been nearly an hour — the shrill little voice was stilled, and I was just dropping off to sleep when sister Barbara came to my room, touched me on the arm, and beckoned me with forefinger, and in silence, to rise and follow her.

" Very gently she opened the door a little; and, peeping vii

Foreword through the crack, I saw, prowling up and down the dim-lighted corridor, a huge white bear.

" Presently the bear became metamorphosed, by the nearer view, into our host, the one corner of the * Big Four,' clad in his white nightshirt, in his arms the little baby sucking in happy content from a feeding bottle of warm milk.

" As we watched — I think there was a tear of appreciation blurring my sight — the little one fell asleep ; then it was given back to the nurse, the white bear, grumbling as bears do, lumbered back to his den, and Barbara, saying : * Wasn't it beautiful ! I wonder where in the world he got that milk heated — he must have gone all the way down to the kitchen for it,' slipped through the door of her room, and I fell asleep, glad that I had seen the generally hidden gentleness of a great man."

" It was beautiful," I said to the Lady-who-knows. " I have written a book with a baby and a strong man in it, and I am going to dedicate it to the man of huge affairs who had pity in his heart for a babe, and the wisdom to alleviate the little one's needs."

You don't know his name, so you can't get his permission," the Lady-who-knows objected.

" I will just dedicate it to the ' Great White Bear,' " I answered insistently, then nobody will know, only you and I, and he can't object."

viii

Chapter I

HIS chronicle of the simple life at Lilac Hedge would be like ofEering in barter a web of homespun if it were not for the story of a woman's pathetic wait which runs through it like a thread of burnt gold, and the mystery that shrouded Minister Neil Munro's life.

For years the house had held its brick-red cheek defiantly to the village street, with just a curious old picket fence separating the two.

When the Memsahib planted the spindly withes of lilac, they seemed so hopelessly attenuated for a possible barrier that I viewed her efforts with silent ridicule; but now the hedge rests its elbows on the picket fence in summer holding aloft a purple curtain behind which we rehearse our simple drama of life, shielded from the critical audience of the village.

Our tent is pitched in the land beautiful — a sentient beauty that is not alone optical; a kindly fate is the real architect of our happy environment. The purple-red blossom clusters of the hedge, like feathered plumes, nod contentedly to the graystone church that cuts its sharp gable up to the place of stars just across the earth road w^e call a

I street. Sometimes the church is just a blur against the Rembrandt background of darkened night ; and sometimes, in the enlarging moonlight, it looms cathedral-like. One night out of seven its stained-glass window shows a sacred group bathed in a flood of yellow light; star-led, sturdy shepherds gaze upon the infant Christ that nestles in the Madonna's arms. Just glass, blue and red, and figures born of faltering art, and yet it stood a beacon light to a storm-tossed soul striving in the waters of bitterness, wandering blindly through the Valley of Achor.

From within the thick stone walls a many-throated organ, leisurely, sonorous, making little of our pin pricks, thrusts its rich melody across our hedge, and then we forget.

On our right hand dwells " Grandma Murdoch " Grandma " in the consanguinity of our friendship, and the altitude of years that pyramid upward from the young life of our children to Grandma's three-score. In her eyes we stand deified as the authors of the little ones she adores; a curious reflex claim we have upon her fostering regard. The children go to her lawn and prattle like the fussy second hand on a dignified clock; and Grandma figuratively strikes the hour — a rich word of wisdom or of approval now and then.

Some curious leagues of unexplored mental territory lie between us elders, for we seldom take the long journey of its traversing, to come together in one another's holding. Once in a great while one of the children may fall ill ; then indeed Grandma comes the many leagues of a dozen yards to ask how the little one is faring, bearing gifts of flowers, or a jelly, or a cooling black-currant drink.

On our left dwell people lovable in their content of dis- 2 tant friendship. And just beyond them lives the Agnostic, ever ready to wander erratically up the walk to our lawn, possessed of an insatiate desire to solve the Why and How and When, and rearrange the This and That of the universe.

This monochromatic life, frictionless, smooth gliding, should have endured like a well-placed glacier; but it is in just such placid fields that meteoric rocks fall; and one day in June the beginning of a Something began.

In the deceitfully quiet prelude of it, I had my trout rod in hand, waiting for Laddie, who, down by the stable, was ruthlessly upturning to the disquieting light, pink-red spirals of coral that were earthworms.

I heard a quick, nervous step on the board sidewalk which I knew heralded the approach of Teacher Ruth Harkett. She flustered through the hedge opening, clattering the gate with nervous indecision ; on the smooth, quaint, ivory- toned face, crested by bronze-gray hair, was acute distress.

Something had gone wrong in the church, I noted mentally. It was not the hour for Doo^-doo's music; neither was it the set time for French; and as the little woman took interest in nothing but the church, outside of these things, I knew the wrinkled brow was caused by the huge graystone structure across the way.

Such trouble! " she panted.

"Is it the organ again?" I asked.

No, not the organ."

She did not confide in me; and I felt that it was something not for the crude handicraft of man, so I said, "The Memsahib is about somewhere."

Teacher slipped through the door like a frightened mouse, all in nervous haste; and, just as Laddie and I passed to the sidewalk, she and the Memsahib came out, the latter's face mirroring the visitor's anxiety, as she said: Don't stay too late, please; v^e may need you."

Laddie and I swung down the country road, two children— I youthed to blitheness by the rejuvenating tingle of the quivering rod in my fingers. The air was an atmospheric blanket of vaporous warmth. I cried aloud in joy when a raindrop spatted against my nose.

" The trout will be crazy to feed," I said to Laddie.

" I bet we'll catch a whole lot of fish, Father," he answered.

We had just topped the long hill that curved away to a gentle valley that cradled in its lap a brook loitering like a laggard schoolboy after a mad scrambling race to escape from the clutch of some Genii hidden in the pine wood that was an emerald wedge driven between the hills away to our right.

We ran down the clay road, too careless to quarrel with claiming gravity. The loose-jointed wooden bridge drooped its shoulders as if its thirty years of bearing countless loads of golden grain had broken its spirit; but its rail, purple-gray, shone like a necklace of pearls in the ripple of amethyst waters beneath. Little singing brook voices came up through the chinks of the planks as we clattered across in restless haste; and where we climbed the rail fence to a meadow that nursed millions of sapphire violets, was a jarring note of man's inhumanity to man ; it read :

FISHING STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Donald MacKay.

With the point of my rod I tickled Donald MacKay in the ribs; rubbed its brass nose across his notice in derision. Little we stood in awe of the MacKay. Was he not our postmaster, and a Tory, with the opposite party, the Liberals, in power? Donald, holding his office by toleration, might quarrel with no man. His writing on the wall was a dead letter — killed by the insistence of the village nomads that they would cast a fly wherever the speckled beauties swam.

Then I headed for the Skipper's pool and flicked its purple breast with flies of alluring garb ; my Brown Hackle, my Silver Doctor — all of the lying decoys I tried in vain.

•Suddenly I saw a look of anxiety on Laddie's face; but before I could ask the reason I was answered from behind my back.

Aye, friend, an' hoo do ye like my fishin'? " It was MacKay's voice.

" I don't think much of it," I answered, somewhat ungraciously; "I've lost two flies and a good cast on a root in the stream, and haven't had a rise."

" I'm feared the brook's fished oot. I think I'll just tak' doon yon notice; it's too much o' an attraction tae fishermen."

" I was going to ask you for leave, MacKay, as soon as I got home," I said apologetically. I thought perhaps rd enrich my request with a couple of trout for your supper, then."

"Ah, ye needn't trouble. I dinna mind your fishing — Fve told you that before. But I mortal dislike the way Willie Angus has o' doin\ He gets the loan of my rod to fish my own preserves, and half the time he doesn't bring it back at all — I have tae send for it. Til just hae a pipe an' go back,"

We lighted up together, while Laddie, encouraged by the Scot's peaceful tone, threaded one of the live coral things to the curve of his hook.

Ha'e they any news o' the Minister?" MacKay asked, running a stalk of dry grass through the stem of his pipe.

What minister do you mean, MacKay?"

" I didna know there was more than one in the village," he answered.

I understood. MacKay meant the guardian of the Scotch Kirk ; the Methodist parson, and the Baptist, and all the others were, according to the Calvinist, just not ministers at all.

" What's wrong with him ? " I asked.

" He's away — did you no' hear it? He disappeared yesterday — ^vanished, like the spirits o' Tam O'Shanter."

Now I understood why Teacher had come for the Memsahib with a world of trouble in her sweet, patient face.

" Perhaps he's just gone for a visit," I hazarded. Not at all. He just left the poor lady, his wee wifie, expectin' him home tae breakfast, an' she's waitin' yet. They saw him at the station, some say. It's altogether most extraordinare. I'm thinkin' he was daffy of late."

" He worked too hard," I said ; " the church at Kintyre was too much. Two sermons in the kirk, and a drive of eight miles to Kintyre, with another sermon, all in one day, was too much for any man."

He was a weakling. Fm no sure but there might be something back o' it all — something to smudge the good name o' the Kirk."

He was too enthusiastic," I contended — too conscientious. He was giving his life for a lot of pagans!" MacKay's insinuation angered me; for more than once, wearied beyond count by the seeming hopelessness of his fight for tangible progression, the Minister had sat in my study where there was the open grate, the kindness of pictures, and the smell of books, and under this influence had allowed his soul to leak out a little; therefore I knew that what MacKay said, or hinted at, was a lie.

"Aye, he was a busy body; but IVe seen many a clatterin' horse that wouldna' get over the ground fast. He was revolutionary, if you ken what I mean."

"I don't."

Well, he was new-fangled ; he was like a pea on a hot griddle. I'm thinkin' he took more stock in the organ an' the singin' than he did in profound theology. I dinna care to see a minister o' the Gospel wearin' a mustache — it's no pleasant to my ears to. hear the word o' God whistlin' thro' hair. An' speakin' o' whistlin', once I walked home from prayer meetin' with him, an' he just kept up a snivel of whistle as though we'd been at a nigger show. I didn't like it over-well — it was no respectful to the solemnity of the occasion."

MacKay was cut short in his harangue by a yell from 7

Laddie. I saw the boy spring to his feet; and something of strength was bending his short birch rod almost double, and the line was cutting through the water with a hissing swish.

"God, man! he haes him — he's hooked the Skipper!" yelled MacKay, scrambling up. " Play him a little, Mannie — ^play him! Gie him the butt!" the Scot commanded, forgetting the nature of the boy's tackle.

" Stick to him, Laddie ! " I admonished.

My fingers tingled to handle the birch rod, but sport forbade. Laddie had hooked the Skipper — into the hands of babes he had been delivered — and all we could do was advise.

" He'll break the line ! Ease him doon. Laddie, ease him doon. Dinna haul on him ! "

MacKay's serenity was deeply ruffled — he was interested. He raced up and down the bank of the pool like a water spaniel ; he jumped into the air.

" Lord! for a landin' net — for a scoop! " he ejaculated. " Let him bide now, Laddie, let him bide — dinna yank on him."

Deep down under a big root the Skipper was sulking. Rest yoursel', Laddie — dinna get excited, boy." And the giver of this advice of calmness was prancing up and down like a war horse. Then off came the MacKay's coat ; he rolled up his sleeves and threw himself on his stomach, saying: "Hold my legs, man! I'm goin' to run a hand far doon to see if I can gill him wi' my fingers — it's fair enough. Dinna tickle him. Laddie; just soothe him, like."

" Be careful, man," I said, for MacKay, stretching down 8 along the line till his chin was in the water, was hard to hold on the slippery bank.

I think Laddie must have tickled " the Skipper, for he came from his purple lair with a rush. I hardly know just how it happened, but the MacKay's legs slipped from my grasp, and in he went.

Perhaps it was the appearance of the red-headed Scot in his pool that disgusted the Skipper; at any rate he whirled and came down stream, the line singing with his speed.

*^To the bar — give him a lead down to the shallows. Laddie ! " I yelled, excitement blinding my eyes to the predicament of the MacKay; in fact, the Scot had practically disappeared from off the face of the earth. But now, even as I clutched at the boy's arm, leading him down bank, the birch rod quivered and bowed with a new pressure, the line held rigid, the running water throw^ing a gray feather of spray from its quivering cord.

Before he could check again, Laddie had him in the shallow waters of the gravel bar below, where he was quite helpless.

I confess that in my excitement I rushed to the salvage of the trout, leaving the MacKay to his own devices. In among the slippery stones I floundered, and, thrusting my thumb in the speckled monarch's gills, lifted him from the waters.

" Ha'e you got him, man ? " I heard ; and there was the dripping red head of the Scot showing above the bank of the pool.

"Are you all right, MacKay?''

" I had na thought of a bath to-day," said MacKay, 3 9 clambering out. But I'm not mindin' it a bit, seein' as weVe landed, between us, yon trout."

He had the fish in his grasp now, caressing him like a loved child.

Three poun', if he's an ounce," MacKay judged, making a scales of his hands. I'm powerful wet, though," and he whipped off his breeks and wTung them out.

It's an odd turn this, MacKay," I said; "every manjack in the village has been after the Skipper for three years, and now Laddie catches him with a schoolboy's tackle."

" Aye ; Fate often throws the best cut to fools or children. I hooked the Skipper once mysel', but he took my cast, broke it as though it was a thread — I'll swear this is the hook in his maw now."

True enough, the old warrior of the pool wore three fly-hooks in his upper lip, as a Rameses might have sported scarabae, and his sides were scarred from combat with bulls of his own kind. He was the finest brook trout I had ever seen; but, also, there was the bitter thought that I, scientific angler, had failed in the taking of this prize, and that ten-year-old Laddie had put shame upon me.

Then we wrapped the king trout in a royal robe, purple and fine linen, the clear cool grass of the meadow, entombed him in my creel, and with pride in our hearts we swung back to the village.

Just as we came to the roadway, MacKay wrote on the prohibitory notice, with a pencil :

The Skipper was caught this date, 27th of June, 1906,''

''I'm thinkin' that'll do more for keepin' the meadow from bein* tramped to death than the notice itself,'^ he said.

As the Memsahib came to the wicket in the hedge I, blinded by the triumph of having been in at the death, said : Laddie caught the Skipper; look — isn't he a beauty! "

" Hush — sh ! " she whispered, and motioned w^ith her hand toward my study.

MacKay must have seen the movement, for without a word he departed.

**YouVe heard about the Minister?" the Memsahib asked,

I nodded.

*' I've brought the poor wifie home."

The Memsahib put her hand on my arm, and with pleading in her gray eyes continued: You won't mind? She would have gone mad all alone there in the house."

That way was the coming of Jean Munro; as she said herself, in a woman's faith, just for a few days until her husband returned.

The Memsahib explained that there was nothing for me to do in the matter, as the Reeve of the village and the deacons of the Kirk had taken active measures for his finding; just that the wife was to be with us as in a haven of consolation and cheer.

" She has got to be with friends; she's not fit to be left alone," the Memsahib said. The full significance of her words was lost upon me at the time, as I remembered, when I came to know of Jean's baby — a babe that was to prove stronger than men and women.

That afternoon lona was divided, agitated by the two new, great interests — the disappearance of Minister, and the

1 1 taking of the Skipper. The feeling of accepted calamity in regard to Minister Munro's disappearance had obtained rapidly now; Minister had been gone but two days — might he not be away just for a rest? But then Jean must know something of bad import over his going, for it was her apprehension that permeated our nerves.

I thought of the weird address the Minister had given his congregation the very last Sabbath preceding his disappearance. He had been like one possessed of a haunting memory of some black chapter in the past. It appealed to me as if he were speaking out of his memory — at times his declamatory vehemence had caused me to study his face for signs of mental disorder. He reviled the drink demon as though it were an embodied ogre standing in front of him. In fact, I saw MacKay and some of the stanch Presbyterians, sitting in front pews, squirming under his castigation.

Full of this remembrance I went to the Memsahib and spoke of it. It was a new light. Munro perhaps had become deranged through overwork, and might have committed suicide. But she would not believe it likely that Minister had done such a wicked thing, holding that he was perhaps ill somewhere, and that w^e should hear from him in a day or so.

The children crept about the house silently, like mice, instinctively knowing that Dread had stolen in with the shadows of evening, and would perch upon the pillow of some sleeper in our household. When the subtle change from gray to shadow had ceased, and it was dark, they came to say good night.

Always this was an observance of unbridled liberty. I, 12 the stern parent of the daj^time, becoming a stalking horse for the unloading of remnants of frivolity. My ears nature had set on at an angle that they might be the more easily pinched or pulled, and the top of my pate, the smooth patch, inviting childish criticism; the good-night kiss itself, sometimes seven-limbed like Kali, or a prefunctory dab at my mustache, followed by a grimace of distaste.

But this night subdued tenderness suggested that they had aged to sympathetic w^isdom. All but Laddie, v^ho, being a boy, w^hispered in my ear: " Wasn't he a w^hopper, Father?"

There it was again — Skipper claiming interest. But I noticed that Laddie kissed the pale cheek of our guest as tenderly as did his sisters.

The Memsahib came down from putting the children to bed, and we went out to the lawn, where the sky was brought close by myriad stars. The Memsahib and Jean sat apart from me, and I knew their hands were clasped.

Perhaps these things had made me selfish. There was a suggested change that hardened me. My side of the hedge had held all this that was a catering to satisfaction, to happiness; driving my pen had been suiScient to me. That each dwelling, up and down the street, held its own tragedy of drink, or of poverty, or of death, or of worse, was to me nebulous knowledge, concrete to those with whom it had to dOe Even the church across the way, majestic, dominant, meant but a place of irregular entry, except to the Memsahib and the children; now it had leaped the hedge^ — its heart throbbed on my lawn.

Soon I heard the nervous step of Teacher Ruth ; it irritated me.

She turned in at the gate.

"There's no word of Minister yet, God guard him!" she whispered to me; and then went over to the two who were sitting in silence, waiting. And there I am sure she told an optimistic lie of charitableness — a weak invention, a tale of hope; thinking to help Jean to a little sleep that night.

My mental disquietude was strangely at variance with the silence of the evening. The air was like an irritating void, receptive, vibratory to the least friction of noise. Down where the pond cradled in the valley's lap, the piping voices of young frogs rose upon the stillness and floated up to us — tiny trebles of complaint they seemed.

Suddenly the strum of a banjo picked by irresolute fingers pushed waveringly down the street and over the hedge. Then a sweet tenor voice — so sweet, so familiar, that I knew Jean would shiver in misery— mingled with the drone of the banjo. It was Jean's brother, Robert Craig, who sang " Home they brought her warrior dead." And what was the strange fatality that wedded his sweet tenor to the words that were like the drip of blood from the fingers of Mamselle Guillotine!

Home they brought her warrior dead; She nor swooned nor uttered cry; All her maidens, watching, said, * She must weep or she will die. ' ' *

How clearly the knife thrust through the night air from the open window of the tavern, just beyond Grandma's house — but a stone's throw from where we sat.

When the singer's voice hushed at the end of the second verse I almost welcomed the mad carnage of rabble voices that follow^ed.

The Lacrosse boys!" Teacher said, in deprecation; they beat the team from Kintyre to-day, and are having a little supper/'

I knev^ what that meant — Fm afraid Jean did. Robert's exquisite voice was a curse to him. Always in the village it brought him within the lure of his inherited bondmaster — drink. Like an echo of my thoughts came the united bellow of many, inharmoniously declaring that: There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night ! "

Their laughter mocked the silent misery that was over our little group. Somebody had mercifully closed the window; perhaps the revelers had gone from that room, for presently the hilarious noises ceased, and I could hear the three women talking intermittently in low tones. Tacitly we all had determined to sit late into the night; I think we all dreaded the wakeful pillow — I, even, feeling too morbid for my work in the study.

It must have been close to midnight when I heard the irregular tramp of erratic feet on the sidewalk. The darkness held indistinctly the forms of two men coming our way, with some jangling element of discord in their speech.

The treacherous light of the open doorway betrayed me, silhouetting my form against its bright background, and I saw through the gate cleft in the hedge, the leering face of Robert, as he called mockingly: " Hello, Professor Maunchausen ! You ought to be in bed— hie ! 's no good burning midnight oil, you know! "

I darted to the gate, through it, and whispered : Your

IS sister is in here, Robert — for God^s sake go home, boy; Jean's in sore trouble ! "

My appeal shamed the boy — sobered him.

" Sorry, Doctor — awf'ly sorry ! " he said, repentantly, " Poor Jean! Munro's a sweep ! "

" Hush-h-h ! " I admonished. " Go, Robert ; come and see your sister to-morrow — do, please do."

The boy seemed to understand, for he said : " I wanted to see Jean bad to-night — I wanted to tell her something 'bout that sweep. I'll come to-morrow. Good night. Doc."

I walked home with Teacher and we talked about this dominant, simple going away of one man that seemed destined to enshadow our lives. It was really the absence of known reason for Minister's going, the paucity of clew that, to my mind, made it difficult to trace him, or to console Jean. "What do they say?" I asked.

" Horrible insinuations chiefly — they drag in Malcolm Bain's name."

" Malcolm Bain ! Good heavens ! "

She nodded. " You see. Dr. Cameron, their hinting at a thing like that proves that they don't know the real reason, whatever it is. Perhaps it's just the mysterious ways of Providence," she continued with pious introspection. " It may be that Minister was called upon to sacrifice himself to wake up the sleepers — to rouse fresh interest in church matters."

Here was a curious example of centralized thought. To the little woman, her mind running in somewhat narrowed grooves, it was more of a structural edifice, the shrine, God's tabernacle wherein his worshipers foregathered, that appealed to her as a saving power, rather than the intense

i6 earnestness of an individual like Neil Munro. Her tones suggested that she would almost view with equanimity his immolation if it tended to a betterment of church influence. I don't understand/' I declared.

Well, Minister was never the same after his years of labor in the Indian field. I knew him before he went there. At that time he was a theologian, and, think as we may, it's theology, ponderous theology that holds the Presbyterians together. Dullness may try them a bit, but they're a patient stock, and dullness is never dangerous. If they have nothing to quarrel about they can't split up into factions, and they're prone to take sides. There never was a less gifted man than George Douglas, and he shepherded this flock for fifteen years, with never a lost sheep."