Matt’s tears blistered the final sheet of this discouraging document. His roseate visions of the future faded to cold gray, his heart ached with a sudden sense of the emptiness of existence. But when he had come to the last word his hand clinched the letter fiercely. A great glow of resolution pervaded his being, like the heat that returns after a cold douche. “I will be a painter. I will, I will, I will!” he hissed. And he tore up the embryo of the dime novel and wrote again to his uncle:
MY DEAR UNCLE,--How good you are to write to me and tell me everything I want to know. Don’t be afraid that I will starve in London, dear uncle. I could always earn my living there in the fields and paint late at night, but I won’t come till I have enough money for lessons and models and a studio, though I think I could draw horses without hiring them. I have always been very good at animals. Besides, what do they do when they want bears, as the geography book says there aren’t any bears in England? I could live in the attic, and knock a hole in the roof. My mother doesn’t need anything from me, thank God, as she is married again and bears the blow well, and my sister Harriet is married too, so you see it will be easy for me to save up money. As soon as my apprenticeship is over I shall go on to the States, where the greatest fools make heaps of money, and so in a few years, please God, I shall be able to come over like you did, and be a great artist like you. Good-bye, dear uncle, God bless you.
P.S.--When I come over I will change my name if you like, so as not to clash with yours. I know you would not like it if people thought you had done my pictures.
P.P.S.--Besides, my real name now might be Matthew Hailey, as mother has changed hers to that.
When Matt’s apprenticeship was at an end, the first item of his programme broke down, for he lacked the money to carry him to the States, so he had to stay on at Cattermole’s farm at a petty wage, though a larger than Mrs. Cattermole was aware of, till he had scraped a little together. And then an accident occurred that bade fair to dispose of all the other items. He was at work in the saw-mill, when his leg got jammed between the log he was operating upon and the carriage that was bearing it towards the gang of up-and-down saws. There would not be room for his body to pass between the gang of saws and the framework that held them. It was an awful instant. He cried out, but his voice was lost in the roar of the water and the clatter of the machinery. Round went the water-wheel, the carriage glided along, offering inch after inch of the log to the cruel teeth, and Matt was drawn steadily with it towards the fatal point. With an inspiration he drew out the stout string he always carried in his pocket, and, making a noose, threw it towards a lever. It caught, and Matt was saved, for he had only to pull this lever to close the gate in the flume and shut out the water. When the machinery stopped the racket ceased, too, and Matt’s voice could be heard, and Cattermole rushed in from the adjoining furniture manufactory, and, knocking away the dogs at the end of the log, lifted it and released the prisoner, and then made him kneel down and offer a prayer for his salvation. Matt’s awakening sense of logic dimly insinuated that this was thanking Providence for having failed to mutilate him, but the atmosphere of Puritan acceptance in which he moved and had his being asphyxiated the nascent scepticism.