visitors, as much as do the people at the parsonage, and often with them there come homespun good-will gifts.
These early guests were nameless, and left their gift upon the door-mat, where father found it. A pair of redheads, duck and drake by chance, such as the gunners at this season harvest from the still-water inside the lighthouse at the bayhead.
Any one interested in following backward the tracks these callers left would have found that they began at the edge of the bare, drifted sand beach and followed the wavering fence of the shore road until the outline of that also disappearing, the footprints crossed the upland fields to the lower end of the village street, where many of the houses, old, sedate, and self-sufficient in their ancestry, were prouder in their garb of mossy shingles than the Bluff cottages in all their bravery of new paint, and porches supported by stone pillars.
Entering by the yard of one of the humbler of these houses, through the back garden, the footsteps meandered toward the side porch that served both as well-house and wood-shed; there the owners of the feet left a similar burden of ducks on the well-worn oak door-sill instead of on the door-mat, for that was thriftily housed within. To leave it out all night would be to incur the criticism of the Misses Falcon, dealers in village patronage and censors in chief, next door, a most disastrous thing for the single dweller in the house, whose livelihood depended upon the public, as announced by a quaint glass sign, lettered in black, that filled the right-hand lower corner of the foreroom window. C. Hallet. Tailoring, Nursing, and Accommodating, done with Neatness and Despatch. The last of the three accomplishments meaning that in the between seasons of her more serious work, Charity Hallet would accommodate her neighbours in any way, from putting up jellies and jams for the slothful to turning carpets, or setting a house solemnly to rights for a funeral.
After leaving the yard, also by the back gate, that no telltale prints might mar the plumpness of the front walk, or jar the white rime that made mammoth cakes of the box bushes on either side the door, the footprints took a short cut to the hill road and paused at our steps, evidently with some scuffing and stamping, and none of the precautions used in approaching the other door.
Here the two sets of footprints, those of dog and man, alone told of who had come and gone, and yet we knew as plainly as if the social cardboard had been left. The overlapping, shifty human footprints, suggesting a limp or halting gait, were those of a rubber-booted man. The round pad-marks of a four-foot, with a dragging trail, spoke of a dog either old or weak in his hind quarters.
As I, answering father’s call, scanned the tracks, our eyes met and we said, as with one voice, “The Markis and the Major,” whereby hangs a pleasant winter’s tale. A comedy that was turned from tragedy merely by the blowing of the bitter northeast wind among the sedge grass. A simple enough story, like many another gleaned from between the leaves that lie along the village fences or the lanes and byways of the lonelier hill country.
Down in a little hut, by the bay-side, lived the village ne’er-do-weel; this was a year ago. He was not an old man in action, but at times he looked more than his fifty odd years, for life had dealt grudgingly with his primitive tastes, and besides being well weathered by an outdoor life, both eyes and gait had the droop of the man of middle age who, lacking good food, has made up for it by bad drink. Yet, in spite of a general air of shiftlessness, there was that about him still that told that he had once not only been nearly handsome, but had been possessed of a certain wild gypsy fascination coupled with a knack with the violin that had turned the heads, as well as the feet, of at least two of the village lassies of his day who, though rigidly brought up, had eyes and ears for something beyond the eternal sowings, hoeings, reapings, and sleepings of farm life. Even in his boyhood he was looked upon as a detrimental, until, partly on the principle of “Give a dog a bad name and he will earn it,” he absolutely earned one by default, so to speak, for the things that he left undone, rather than deeds committed.
He was side-branched from thrifty country stock; his father, a proxy farmer and the captain of a coastwise lumber schooner, had on a northbound trip married a comely Canadian-French woman, half-breed it was whispered, who was possessed of the desire for liberty and the outdoor life, far beyond her desire to observe the village p’s and q’s. This new strain in the cool New England blood caused neighbourly bickerings, bred mischief, and had finally made the only child of the marriage a strolling vagabond, who instinctively shunned the inside of a schoolhouse, as a rat does a trap. So that after his mother died when he was sixteen, all his after days he had lived in the open by rod and gun, fish-net and clam fork, berry picking, or playing his fiddle at village picnics and other festivals.
It was at one of these festivities that he first met Charity Hallet, called in those days Cheery from her disposition that fairly bubbled over with happiness. A fiery sort of wooing followed; that is, fiery and unusual for a staid New England town, where sitting evening after evening by the best room lamp or “buggy dashing” through the wild lanes of a moonlight night or of a Sunday afternoon were considered the only legitimate means of expression. Alack! this man possessed neither horse nor buggy, or the means of hiring one, and the door of the Hallets’ best room was closed to him, as well as every other door of the house. What would you have? Swift dances snatched when some one else relieved the fiddler; meetings by stealth in the woods, intricate journeys through the winding marsh watercourses where, hidden by tall reeds, a duck boat slipped in and out, holding a half-anxious, half-happy girl, while a tall, bronzed youth either poled the craft along or sometimes pushed it as he strode beside it waist deep in water, his eyes fixed upon the merry ones beside him.
Of course discovery came at last, and Charity’s father sent her to spend a winter with an aunt in another State and “finish” school there.
Meanwhile for half a dozen years the youth followed the sea and on his return found Charity an orphan in possession of the house and a snug income, and though she was still unmarried, a vein of prudence or a change of heart, just as one happens to view it, had at least diluted her romance.
“Get some employment with a name to it; I couldn’t stand an idle man hanging about,” she had said when man and dog (there had always been and always would be a dog following at this man’s heels) for the first time entered the Hallet front door and prepared, without ceremony, to resume the boy and girl footing as a matter of course.
The man, of primitive instincts and no responsibility, had looked at her dumbly for a minute, and then the light of her meaning breaking upon him he jumped to his feet and bringing his heels sharply together, said, “I thought you were fond o’ me, Cheery, and that women sort o’ liked somebody they were fond of hanging around ’em,” and without further ado he called the dog, and closing door and gate carefully behind him, turned from the village street to the shore road with easy, swinging gait; but from that day his fiddle never played for the village dancers.
The thrifty half of Charity Hallet congratulated the half that was longing to open door and heart to man, dog, and violin in the face of prudence and the village, upon its escape. But sometimes prudence and the wind race together, for the next year the most trusted man in the township, under cover of decorous business, made way with all of Charity’s little property, except the house; and the glass sign, once used by a great aunt, was rescued from the attic rafters, placed in the foreroom window; and at twenty-five Charity, who had been sought far and near, and had been wholly independent in action, began the uphill road of being a self-supporting old maid.
The man’s feet never again turned toward her front gate, though the dog’s did, and many a bone and bit did he get there, for the dog who grew old, evidently bequeathed knowledge of Charity’s hospitality to his puppy successor, and so the years went. If mysterious heaps of clams, big lobsters from the deep fishing, delicate scallops or seasonable game appeared in the morning under the well house, no word was spoken.
Five, fifteen, twenty years went by, and the very face of the country itself had changed and Cheery Hallet had almost forgotten how to smile. The man’s natural hunting grounds being largely reclaimed from wildness, the game becoming scarcer and the laws of season and selling close drawn, like many an Indian brother of old, too unskilled to work, too old to learn, he found himself absolutely facing extinction, while in these years the drink habit had gradually crept upon and gripped him.