The House of Armour

A crowd of boys on a street corner, rapturously engaged in watching one of their number, who was rubbing green powder on the back of the unconscious Mrs. Macartney, as she stood waiting for a horse car, attracted Dr. Camperdown’s attention.

“You rascals!” he called to them, and suppressing a smile as they scampered away, he took off his hat to the lady and drove on. Past the City Hall he went, and steep Jacob Street, once the terminus of the ancient palisade wall that enclosed the early settlement of Halifax, and beyond which it was not safe for a white man to go unless he were willing to be scalped by the ever-watchful Indians, and entered into the dingy part of the street, where traffic to and from the railroad station is loudest and noisiest.

Below him was the dockyard with its arsenals, magazines, parade ground, and houses for officials, and its few remaining trophies of the war of 1812. He looked grimly toward it; called up some of his father’s stories of the day so many years ago, that the lads of the town ran to see the “Shannon” and the “Chesapeake” coming up the harbor with their decks stained with blood; and then smiled as he reflected on the ardent diatribes against war that he had heard from Stargarde and Vivienne.

Polypharmacy deliberately drew his hoofs in and out of the snow and mud in the street, and soon had his master to the suburb of Richmond and the contraction of the harbor, where the lovely, sudden, and beautiful view of the basin burst upon him.

Calm and quiet, surrounded by bold hills and dusky forests, it lay. Drawn half-way across it, as if giant hands had begun to stretch it there, and then had ceased, growing weary of their task, was a covering of white ice; where the ice ended abruptly the water was dark and tranquil. Five miles from him, at the head of the basin, nestled the little village of Bedford; and on the west shore his eyes sought and rested on lonely Prince’s Lodge, a melancholy souvenir, with its ruined gardens and lawns, of a once gay place of sojourn of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent.

His survey of the basin over, Camperdown brought back his gaze to his immediate surroundings. Just across from him, by the broken piers of a former bridge over the Narrows, were ships laid up for the winter.

“Potato ships probably,” he ejaculated. “Get on, Polypharmacy; here’s a train coming.”

Polypharmacy crept on slowly, though his master had drawn him up between the railway track and a high, snowy bank with overhanging trees, up which he would find it impossible to go, no matter how frightened he would be. But Polypharmacy did not mind a train. When it came shrieking around the curve beside him, he merely flicked the ear next it in temporary annoyance, and proceeded philosophically on his way.

“Why, there’s Stargarde!” exclaimed Camperdown, surveying a figure some distance ahead of him on the narrow road. “On some Quixotic errand, of course,” frowning and hurrying after her.

Polypharmacy had shed his fine peal of bells with the sleigh, and Stargarde not hearing the carriage wheels in the soft mud, started slightly on hearing her name pronounced.

Such a rosy, laughing face she turned to him! But his annoyance did not pass away. “What foolishness is this? where are you going?”

“To see a sick friend near the three-mile house. And you?”

“Young man fell off a barn while shingling it; brain fever, and I’m attending him.”

“That’s my friend,” said Stargarde.

“Then we’ll go together,” putting out a hand to assist her into the carriage.

“I think I would rather walk, Brian.”

“I don’t see why you should go rambling all over the country alone,” he said, all his dissatisfaction coming out in one burst of irritability. “It’s abominable. Where is your dog?”

“I didn’t think I was coming out and Vivienne took him to the park.”

“Will you come with me?” he asked in patient exasperation.

“Yes,” and she stepped into the buggy.

He was in a wretched humor; but she was in one so gay, so light-hearted, that she gradually charmed him out of it.

Then, having yielded, he fell into an opposite humor, for he had long ago given up as impracticable the transparent fiction that he had ceased to love her with his former devotion.

“I am glad that we have arrived,” said Stargarde laughing and blushing, as Polypharmacy of his own accord stopped short on the snowy, country road before a dull red farmhouse flanked by a yellow barn.

Camperdown, splashing through snow and water in his big, rubber boots, opened a long gate and looked at Polypharmacy, who accepted the mute invitation to come in and be tied to a “hitching post.”

Stargarde walked up the little path which in summer time was bordered by flowers, and tapped softly at the door. A neighbor opened it and bestowed on her sundry confidences in half-tones with regard to the sick man, whose mother, she said was “clean distracted.”

They sat for some time in the old-fashioned kitchen of the house, by an open fireplace in which sticks of wood burned and sputtered in a subdued way, till the farmer’s wife came in from the sickroom, tears running down her cheeks. The doctor was going to stay a little while to observe her son’s symptoms, she said, and she begged that Miss Turner would wait for him as the roads were too bad for her to walk home.

The neighbor rose, and busied herself in drawing a many-legged table from the corner of the room, spreading a white cloth on it, and putting deftly in their places a number of blue, willow-patterned dishes. When everything was in order on the table, she approached the fireplace, and swinging toward her the crane suspended over the blaze, poured boiling water from a teakettle hanging to it into a brown teapot that she placed in a corner of the brick hearth.

Refusing all entreaties to stay and partake of the meal, by saying that she must return to her family, she took leave of Stargarde, of the farmer’s wife, and of the farmer himself, who at that moment came in.

The long twilight began to close, and still Camperdown lingered. The mother had been with him some time in the sick-room. Stargarde sat quietly consoling the farmer as she had consoled his wife.

“My son, my son, my only son,” were all the words the old man could utter till Dr. Camperdown stood quietly beside him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. White, your son is going to get well, with God’s blessing.”

The old man started up, wrung his hand, ejaculated, “God bless you, sir!” and hurried from the room.

“They won’t leave him,” said Camperdown looking away from Stargarde who was wiping sympathetic tears from her eyes. “Mrs. White says for us to take some tea before we go. They’ll be offended if we don’t.”

He lifted the enormous brown teapot to a stand on the table, and while waiting for Stargarde to sit down, walked noiselessly about the room scanning with curious eye the high cupboards, the ancient latches on the doors, the brass candlesticks on the mantel shelf, and the long oven set in the wall and arched over with brickwork.

Finally he came to a standstill at the table, and surveyed the various dishes that the farmer’s wife in her gratitude had offered to them.

“Potted head, that she has made herself,” he said; “rolls also. Her own brown bread, such as bakers do not dream of; beans grown by themselves; pork from a porker off the farm; preserve of berries from her own little garden; eggs from her biddies; cream from her cows; doughnuts frizzled in the lard of her own swine. Come, Stargarde, will you say grace and pour the tea?”

“Yes, Brian,” taking the chair that he placed for her, and examining approvingly and with feminine minuteness of observation the spotless cleanliness of the little table.

“You have picked up wonderfully,” said Camperdown a few minutes later, moving the lamp in order that he might have a better view of her features. “I was worried about you two weeks ago.”

“I am in excellent health now, thanks to your doses,” said Stargarde with a laughing grimace that revealed to him the two rows of teeth that Zilla in her vile slang called “white nuns.”

“Your tea is ready,” she went on, holding out one of the big, blue teacups that he had sent to her to be refilled for the third time.

He had fallen into a sudden reverie, and seeing that he sat with eyes bent abstractedly on his knife and fork, Stargarde got up and took the cup around the table to him.

When she set it down he glanced up quickly, and was about to ask her pardon, but stopped short, the words arrested on his lips by the expression of her face as she stood looking down at him. At last it was a pleasure to her to minister to him, at last his “bird of free and careless wing” had been caught.

He grew pale, drew his breath hard and fast and laid his hand masterfully over hers.

She started, and drew her fingers from him. Then with her throat suffused with color, and streaks of red across her white cheeks, she walked to the window and gazed out at a drizzling rain that had begun to fall.

Camperdown raised the cup to his lips once or twice without tasting the tea, then set it down, and with a last glance at the straight, lissome back of the disconsolate figure by the window, returned to his patient.

Stargarde glanced over her shoulder in a startled manner when the door closed behind him. “I must get away; I cannot go back with him. Mrs. White,” to the farmer’s wife, who came gliding like a happy ghost to her side, “I cannot wait any longer for the doctor; don’t tell him I’ve gone.”

The woman, hardly conscious of what she was doing in her rapturous state of mind at the prospect of her son’s recovery, wrapped Stargarde’s cloak about her.

“Tell him that I don’t mind the rain and the darkness,” said Stargarde hurriedly. “I need the walk; I will come again to-morrow to see you. I am praying for your boy; good-night,” and with feverish haste she slipped away.

Over the wet and sloppy road she went, sometimes breaking into a run, then walking so slowly that she scarcely seemed to be moving, her tortured face bent on her breast, or lifted inquiringly to the dripping sky above her. The road was almost deserted, but once or twice she shrunk aside to allow belated Negroes to pass her, who were urging on their horses in the direction of their homes in Hammonds Plains.

She did not choose the way by which they had gone to the farmhouse, but turned into the long stretch of road leading past the cotton factory, and skirting the wide common where military parades are held.

It was a highway cheerful enough on a bright day, but unspeakably lonely and dreary on a dark night, when sky and earth were alike mournful. Soon she sank down on a stone by the roadside, and burst into a flood of passionate tears. “I cannot—I will not—it is not right! O God, show me my duty.” Then kneeling on the ground with her head against the stone, she prayed long and fervently.

It was some time before the struggle was over, the battle fought, but at last she arose, self under foot, as it usually was in her conflicts. She tried to shake the water from her garments, then patiently plodded on in the direction of the town, the electric lamps shining like signal lights before her.

A splashing sound behind made her pause suddenly and look back. There were the two lights of the carriage, Polypharmacy looming between them like a mountain of a horse. Her heart beat violently. How acutely her lover had guessed that she would take this road to the town. A wild first impulse to hide from him made her slip into the shadow of a building that she was passing.

He was driving slowly, and at every few paces was putting out his head and narrowly inspecting the road. “Stargarde, Stargarde,” she heard him say softly when he was at a little distance from her.

Something impelled her to go to him despite herself. “Here I am, Brian,” she said with a final convulsive sob, and wearily dragging her limbs over the miry way.

He dropped the reins, put out both hands and assisted her in beside him. “Poor child, you are very wet,” he said in his ordinary tone of voice; “you should not have run away from me.” Then seeing that she turned her face to the cloth-covered side of the buggy, he forebore further question or remark, and they drove in silence across the Common and down through the town to the Pavilion.

There he sprang out and assisted her to alight, then followed her to her room where she sat down beside a bright fire and shivered slightly.

“You will at once change your wet things,” he said.

She blushed deeply, but neither spoke nor looked at him till his hand was laid on the door. Then she turned her deep, blue eyes toward him. “Good Brian, dear patient Brian.”

He drew a little nearer to her as if fascinated.

“So long you have had to wait,” she said with an adorable smile. “Now–”

“You confess that you love me,” he said quietly.

“Yes, with my whole heart and soul.”

“You made a brave fight, Stargarde.”

“Oh, I did not know what it was,” she said ardently. “I knew love was not selfish, yet I thought it would crowd my people out of my affections to love you. Then I did not want to give up my will. I thought I had chosen my life-work.”

“And what do you think now?” he asked, folding his arms and coming a little nearer to her.

“The love that I feel for you,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands over her beautiful breast, “it makes me love humanity not less but more, a thousand times more. Every man is dearer to me for your dear sake, every woman because she is part of man–”

As she spoke she lifted her face to a photograph of the gemlike Garvagh Madonna that hung on the wall above her. The large hat, slipping from her golden head, showed numberless little rings of hair curled tightly by the damp air of the evening. Her parted lips, her rapt expression, instead of drawing her lover nearer, made him suddenly retreat with a gesture of inexpressible pain.

Her features at once lost their unearthly expression. “Brian,” she said, holding out her hands to him, “Brian, my dear boy–”

And still he hesitated. “What is wrong with you?” she asked in most womanly anxiety.

“You are so much above me,” vehemently and brokenly, “I am not fit for you. You are like something holy. I dare not touch you.”

“You will get over that,” she said, shaking her head and smiling happily; “and I wish I were half as good as you fancy me. Come, dear lad, I will make the first advance. Here is a betrothal kiss for you; and then you must go home.”

She got up, and for the first time the dimpled cheek was laid willingly against his, her arm slipped around his neck, and like a man in a trance of painful ecstasy he pressed his lips to the beloved head laid upon his breast, and heard her sweet lips murmur a tender prayer for a blessing on their united lives.

Then with a passionate embrace and a heartfelt cry of “Unworthy, unworthy,” he hurried in his tumultuous fashion from the room.

CHAPTER XXXI

MACDALY’S LECTURE

Various apocryphal stories are told of Brian Camperdown’s doings on the night that Stargarde Turner promised to be his wife. It is said that his blood being in too much of a tumult to allow him to enter his house and go to sleep, he started on a joyful and eccentric pilgrimage around the peninsula on which the city of Halifax is built.

Not satisfied with tramping over the dark and muddy roads of the Park, and the quiet streets of the city, he is said to have proceeded along the shores of Bedford Basin, and on the spot where more than a hundred years ago dead French soldiers, unhappy members of the expedition of 1746, were discovered sitting under the trees, their useless muskets by their sides—he, by a fitful gleam of moonlight, carved his own and Stargarde’s initials on the smooth-coated bark of a maple.

A story also exists of his having been seen eight miles farther on, and of his startling a watcher by a sick-bed by a glimpse of his ecstatic face looking through the cottage window; but this one is uncertain, and has never been corroborated.

Certain it is, however, that at daylight he returned home neither footsore nor weary and still in his state of exaltation. He let himself in by means of a latch-key, made an elaborate and prolonged toilet, then restlessly haunted the lower rooms of the house, waiting for some one to wake up to whom he could impart his joyful intelligence.

Old Hannah was the first person to come downstairs. To her, blear-eyed and affectionate, he, with an agonized twisting of lips, in order that he might not shout his news to the entire household, announced the fact that he was shortly to be married.

His ancient nurse staggered back as if she had received a blow, and fell in a rickety heap of bones on the hall floor. He lifted her up, administered restoratives, and presently had the mortification of seeing her burst into tears and stumble down to the basement.

“And she professes to adore Stargarde,” he muttered, backing in discomfiture into the dining room to avoid the two smart maids, who were tripping down the staircase in snowy caps and aprons.

Warned by his experience with Hannah, he said nothing to Mrs. Trotley and Zilla beyond a polite “Good-morning,” till they were well on with their breakfast. Then, with a diminished spirit, he cautiously informed them of the approaching change in his condition.

Zilla had been talking volubly, but at his words she snapped off a sentence on her lips, let fall her porridge spoon, and gave him a look that made him quail.

Mrs. Trotley was more to be pitied than Zilla. At the close of a long and unhappy life the lines had fallen to her in pleasant places, and these pleasant places she naturally supposed she must forsake should her patron marry. Yet she had command enough over herself to endeavor to hide her feelings. Camperdown’s keen eyes, however, pierced through her disguise, and even while she was uttering her congratulations to him, and wishing that Stargarde might enjoy every happiness, he saw the two salt tears come rolling slowly down her cheeks.

She knew that he saw them, and was overcome by confusion. “We have been very happy together,” she murmured apologetically.

Zilla made no pretense at self-control. Pushing herself violently away from the table she ran upstairs, where Camperdown knew she would cry till she made herself ill.

“What a monster I am!” he soliloquized, excusing himself from the table and hastily making his way out of the house. “Only the author of all these troubles can heal them.”

He walked rapidly toward the Pavilion, stopping once on his way there to order a gift of fruit and flowers to be sent immediately to Mrs. Trotley and Zilla.

Stargarde was at breakfast, and laying a bunch of roses, flowers that she passionately loved, beside her, he drew up a chair and with a dismal face begged for a cup of chocolate.

“I have to give you up,” he said, swallowing the scalding liquor with alarming taste and rolling his twinkling eyes at her.

“Have you?” tranquilly.

“Yes; my family doesn’t approve,” and he related his domestic troubles to her.

“Dear things, how they love you!” and she gazed caressingly at him.

“I wonder what would make me give you up?” he muttered.

“I will go and see Mrs. Trotley and Zilla and poor old Hannah,” she said thoughtfully.

“You don’t wish them to leave my house, do you?”

“Oh, no, no; I am accustomed to a large family. We shall all live happily together.”

“Are you ever going to stop eating bread and butter?” he asked impatiently. “That is your fifth slice.”

“Why should I?” with a mischievous dimple showing itself in her cheek.

“This is malice aforethought,” he said firmly, sitting down beside her, and withdrawing a morsel of bread from her hands. “Now,” holding her wrists, “give me a kiss, sweet, passionate soul in a passionless body.”

“Don’t speak in that way,” she said, kissing him. “It sounds as if I had no feeling.”

“Well, you haven’t. You say ‘dear Brian,’” mimicking her, “and then it is ‘dear granny,’ and ‘dear Bobby,’ and ‘dear everybody.’”

She laughed merrily. “Would you have me striding to and fro and glaring at you, and looking daggers over my shoulder as you do?”

“No; but you might be a little more demonstrative. Women don’t know how to love. You’re nothing but a proper old maid. The time was when I would have cut my throat for a kiss. Lord, what agony!”

She looked at him sweetly, and as he would not release her hands gently laid her cheek against his face.

“You are a beauty and I am a beast,” he said abruptly; “aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Why should I be afraid of you, Brian? You don’t love me for what you are pleased to call my beauty, nor do I love you for what you are pleased to call your lack of it. There is something beyond that.”

“Yes, yes, my angel; I do thank the Lord that I have found one woman that can look into my soul.”

“In sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, in life and in death we are for each other now,” she said. “How lovingly you would cherish me were I suddenly to become old and ugly and unattractive. Brian, last night at the three-mile house when you looked up at me at the table–”

“Yes, darling.”

“I had been thinking about your patient; then the thought suddenly came to me, ‘Suppose this man too, should become ill—should die?’ My heart seemed to stand still. I thought I should suffocate. Oh, Brian, take good care of yourself. I fear that I could not say, ‘the Lord’s will be done,’ if anything should happen to you,” and burying her face in his shoulder she began sobbing violently.

“Come now, this is idolatry,” he said, looking down at her with a radiant face; “rank idolatry, and you will be punished for it according to your own pleasant theory. I wanted you to be demonstrative, sweetheart; but not along this line. When will you marry me?”

“Whenever you think best, Brian. I have given up worrying about this place. The Lord will provide some other person to take care of the people. We are none of us indispensable to him.”

“No,” he said gravely. “When will you marry me?”

“In three months, Brian.”

“In six weeks, beauty; and when shall I see you again?”

“To-morrow afternoon.”

“This evening, my charmer.”

“Brian,” she said, clinging lovingly to his arm, “I suppose nothing would induce you to live in the Pavilion.”

He made a wry face. “I’ll come if my wife refuses to live in any other place.”

“Your wife will do as you wish,” said Stargarde.

“You sweet creature, and blessed man that I am!” and with a final embrace he left her.

Stargarde spent as usual a busy day, and at six o’clock sat down to a brief and lively repast that Vivienne and Judy came in to share with her. After the tea things had been put away, she invited them to go with her to a large room used for general assembly purposes by the tenants of the Pavilion and called the kitchen.

The two girls gladly accompanied her, for the cheering and consoling of the different members of Stargarde’s enormous family had become their chief occupation. They walked along to the large apartment, glancing across as they did so to the bathroom, washhouses, and co-operative baking establishment, in the courtyard, with the working of which they had become quite familiar.

“Isn’t this jolly!” exclaimed Judy when the kitchen door was pushed open.

At one side of the extensive and irregularly shaped room, heaped-up logs blazed in a vast cavern of a fireplace. No other light was needed. The floor was a painted one, and the furniture consisted of a number of plain wooden rocking-chairs for children and grown people, a few small tables, and a piano situated in a dusky corner.

At this piano a red-coated soldier was seated, singing amorously, “I’m so ’appy; so terrible ’appy,” to a maiden hovering sentimentally over him. Some children sprawling on the floor were tossing jackstones, and two gray-haired men at a table were intent on draughts.

An old woman, known as “granny,” sat knitting by the fire. There was alway a granny in the Pavilion, for when one died Stargarde immediately got another, saying that the spectacle of an aged person among young ones, beloved and waited on by all, was one of the most humanizing experiments she had ever tried.

She gave a kind “good-evening” to the people in the room and then approached the old woman. “How are you, dear granny?”

The venerable knitter was in a bad frame of mind, and at first would vouchsafe no answer, but pretended to be greatly occupied with picking up a dropped stitch. In response to another appeal she said irritably that she was “cruel poorly,” and there was “death in the wind.”