CHAPTER XVI.

GYPSIES’ FIRE.

Like a flash the situation dawned on Mauney. It dawned so flashingly that he tried to hide from it all afternoon. Her impetuous nature! His own tardiness and his own misinterpreted duty to Maxwell Lee. While he had maintained loyalty to Lee, this woman, this Freda, whose very likeness had been burned into his soul, had been slipping from his fingers. And now, torn between self-blame and an effort to excuse her most recent fault, he began to recognize just how ultimate and hopeless the whole matter was.

He met Mr. Fitch, of Lantern Marsh, on the street and accepted a ride to the farm with him. Perhaps he would never have thought of going home had Fitch not suggested it. There was nothing at Lantern Marsh to go for, either. But he craved solitude, and at least his old home would afford him that. The old swamp would somehow understand him, he felt. There would be a queer kind of sympathy in that old swamp.

When he reached home he found a visitor, one he had almost forgotten and one whom he was not overjoyed at meeting in his present chaotic mood. David McBratney had been in Merlton for eight years and was only now, after so long an absence, refreshing his acquaintance with the people of his youth. It was fortunate, according to Dave, that Mauney had just happened in when he was there. But Mauney felt that the most unfortunate fact in the world was that he should have to converse politely with any one to-night. They were all just ready to sit down at the supper table—William with his shirt sleeves rolled up on his sun-burned arms, Evelyn placing her two red-faced little boys on stools, and McBratney being shown a place beside Mauney on the opposite side. When they were seated, William, carving knife in one hand and a long, serving fork in the other, looked up lazily from the crisply-browned roast on the platter toward his wife and made an awkward, snuffling sound. Mrs. Bard caught the hint.

“Mr. McBratney,” she announced, “will ask the blessing. Bow your heads, you kids!”

“Bless, O Lord, we beseech Thee, this food, forgive our sins, and guide us ever in the light of thy countenance. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

An amused smile flickered over William’s face as he winked unnoticed to Evelyn, his wife. Then, plunging his fork into the juicy meat, he proceeded to slice it.

“Dave,” he asked. “How’s your appetite?”

“Pretty good, Bill,” responded McBratney. “It’s a long time since I had a meal off o’ this old table, isn’t it?”

Evelyn Bard, opposite her husband, was busy spreading butter on thick slices of bread for her boys. They stared in silence at the visitor, interrupting their occupation only long enough to accept the buttered bread and to begin chewing it.

McBratney had lost nothing of his swarthy complexion. His dark eyes were just as sharp, but more serious, than formerly. He wore a threadbare, yet neat, grey suit and a plain, blue four-in-hand necktie. Broad of shoulder, he lounged against the edge of the table, gazing half-meditatively at the children.

“Well, Dave,” remarked William, as they all fell to eating, “you hain’t never been back since you went away have you?”

“This is the first time, Bill. I got kind of lonesome to see the old folks; so I thought I’d come down for a few days. My mother tells me that dad has never been satisfied since he sold the farm. She says he drives down here about once a week, just to see how things are going.”

“Yep,” nodded William, “at _least_ once a week, don’t he, Evelyn?”

She nodded. “The poor old chap can’t stay away,” she explained. “He never should have sold out, I always think. When a man gets attached to a place it’s foolish to leave, at his age, anyway.”

William was chewing his food thoughtfully, with an expression of narrow-eyed meditation.

“Dave,” he ventured, at length. “I always thought your old man never forgave you for leavin’ home. Course, I never said a word to him, understand. It takes all kinds of people to make up the world, and I’m not sayin’ you didn’t do the right thing, neither. Maybe some people might say you was wrong, but I got enough to do without tendin’ to other people’s business.” William’s eye quickly took in McBratney’s business suit, while a look of curiosity came over his face. “Of course,” he said, in a tone that challenged explanation, “I always had an idea as you had gone into preachin’.”

“I studied at it awhile,” McBratney admitted, good-naturedly, “and then I suddenly quit it.”

“What made you quit it, Dave?” persisted William. “Was it costin’ too much?”

“No, it don’t cost too much, but I couldn’t see much head nor tail to it,” confessed McBratney. “I went on with it till they started talking about the Trinity, and—”

“Trinity, eh, Dave?”

“Yes, and a lot of other theories that don’t count. When they began splitting hairs about baptism and sacraments, I said to myself, ‘This isn’t pitching hay!’”

“That’s a fact, too, Dave,” nodded William, sagely.

“’Twasn’t what _I_ was cut out for anyway,” said McBratney. “I couldn’t see how baptism nor sacraments, nor any such like, was going to save the world. I saw people every day in Merlton, who were so deep in sin that they were pretty near hopeless, and, although I don’t know much, I reckoned that these fine points of doctrine were all twaddle.”

“That’s what I always thought, Dave. You didn’t make no mistake there, I tell yuh.”

“No, Bill,” he replied. “All I knew was that something big and strong had taken hold of me. I knew that I had the love of God in my heart and that every ounce of muscle in my body was going to be used up helping some of these poor beggars on to their feet.”

“That’s right, Dave—that’s the only religion there is,” commented William. “You didn’t make no mistake there.”

“And so I just pitched those Hebrew books about as far as I could heave, and settled down into steady work at the settlement.”

“Good for you, Dave. What kind of settlement do you mean?”

“A settlement, Bill, is a kind of organization supported by various people for reclaiming bums and no-goods,” said McBratney. “We take in the riff-raff, without a word, give ’em clothes and grub, and get ’em work to do. We start them off in life again and give them a second chance to go straight. Our idea is to reclaim damaged goods, Bill, we try to—”

“Um-hum!” interjected William, “I can see the sense in that, Dave. What’s your work?”

“I’m on the employment department. I keep a list of jobs, and fit these bums into them. After they get started I go around and see how they’re doing. If they’re falling down on the job I brace them up a little or change their job for them.”

“Do you get much salary, Dave?”

“No. It isn’t the money I’m after, Bill. What I like about it is the game. Some of these bums have to be handled pretty carefully, and that’s my work. I never was afraid of anybody, and I’ve got to meet the man yet that can handle me.”

McBratney’s eyes sparkled with keen pleasure, and he squared his shoulders unconsciously as he spoke. Fighting the worst in men was his occupation. It was an energetic business of consecrated brawn. It was muscular Christianity of the most earnest and pugnacious type. Mauney felt that here beside him at the table sat a kind of modern crusader. One _had_ to be good if McBratney was about, or otherwise be able to defeat him in a pugilistic contest.

For two or three hours Mauney found no alternative, but to sit and talk with him. At any other time the occupation would have been bearable or even pleasant, for he discovered many admirable, and almost lovable, qualities—if one could dare to feel so tenderly toward a modern Sir Galahad. But Mauney was too full of his own troubles to-night to be otherwise than indifferent to McBratney. His heart seemed to be breaking beneath these troubles. He wanted to leave his brother and the others, and walk alone by himself by that old swamp in front of the house. McBratney had changed, William and Evelyn had changed, he himself was changing in some indefinite way, while all the universe seemed in flux. What existed without change?

Some one came walking up the lane and opened the kitchen door. It was the Englishman who rented the old McBratney farm. His face was mildly excited.

“Did you see the fire?” he asked.

“Where, Joe?” asked William, uneasily.

He stepped back on the verandah and looked towards the road, and Mauney saw a dull, red reflection on his face. In a moment they were all walking toward the road. By some means a fire had started among the dried grasses of the swamp, and was spreading rapidly, with nervous little flashes of flame shooting up through heavy, grey clouds of smoke. There was no wind to fan the fire, but the light grass carried it swiftly along in a curve like an enlarging wave.

“It’s going to get into them cedars, too,” said William.

“Well, let ’em go,” said McBratney. “The barn’s safe as long as there’s no wind. There’s nothing you can do, anyway.”

“I wonder how it got started?” queried William. “I seen some gypsies in that end o’ the field over there last night. Maybe they left some live coals.”

“That may be,” admitted Joe, the Englishman. “But I’ve heard as how a bog like this here sometimes generates its own fire by spontaneous combustion, I have.”

Their faces were all well lit up now by the reflection. Mauney glanced at the house. Its red bricks were illuminated by a ghastly, unnatural glow, while the window-panes began flashing spasmodically, one after the other, as if some one inside the house were going with a light from room to room. The fire ran swiftly toward the edge of the swamp, and the cedar boughs burst quickly into flame as if they were composed of explosive substance. Among a dozen trees the flame spread savagely until the appearance was that of huge, black torches, perched together to give a warning to the sky.

Held by the fascination which fire always possesses, they stood for two hours watching its ravages. From shore to shore the crimson, liquid wave crossed and rebounded until at last the cedars and hemlocks were all ablaze, forming a wide and brilliant fringe for a central, smoke-obscured space. It was not like the same place. It was not like the Lantern Marsh. Later, when the yellow flames had all gone out and the rising moon showed only the constant clouds of smudgy smoke rising and disappearing, Mauney sat alone on the front steps of the farmhouse, watching it with mute fascination. At last his marsh was completely defeated, ruined and blotted out. But a whimsical comfort possessed him. It was not defeated. Winter and then spring—and the unfailing reservoirs of the deep earth would pour water into the scorched basin again. Grass and trees would eventually grow up where now there was only ashes, to proclaim that life had gained the victory over death—that there was no death, but only life.

THIS BOOK IS A PRODUCTION OF THE RYERSON PRESS TORONTO, CANADA