Marton

“ Mrs Gabriel was much annoyed to find that Pratt was so notorious a character. She determined to clear herself of complicity in his sordid crimes, although no one ever suspected that she had any knowledge of the man's true character. She sent for Marton, and had a long talk with him about Pratt; incidentally a reference was made to Leo.
"I have asked you to see me, Mr Marton," she said, "because it was I who introduced Mr Pratt to Colester. I have known him ten years, and he always appeared to me to be a most respectable American."
"He is not an American at all," said Marton. ”

“ My light heart keeps me up; and old women live upon little. When the young gentleman has risked every thing to save you, you cannot disappoint him."
"No indeed, Marton," said the syndic; "but yet——"
"Never talk about yet," said Marton. "You have got to go, that is clear; and perhaps you may be able to make a treaty by which we shall be all [369] fed and comforted. Maître Guiton should have done it long ago; but he is a hard man, and would see us all die of famine, and himself too, before he would bate an inch of his pride."
"Hush, hush!" said Edward: "he is a good and noble man, Marton ”

“ Then you escaped easily. The wonder is he did not try and marry you! A rich widow is exactly the kind of victim he would like."
"I am not the sort of woman to be anyone's victim, Mr Marton."
Marton, looking at her stern, strong face, quite agreed, but he was too polite to give vent to his feelings. He merely inquired how Mrs Gabriel had become acquainted with this Prince of Swindlers. She had no hesitation in giving him full details.
"I met him at a Swiss hotel many years ago," she said. "He was then called Pratt, and he posed as a [173] rich American. ”

“ From Lewes he went up to London, and called at several shipping offices. As he came out of the Orient Line offices and walked along Fenchurch Street, he met an old schoolfellow named Harry Marton, whom he had lost sight of for some years.
Harry Marton had been his particular chum at school, and when he left he entered the stockbrokers' office of Marton and Shrew, his father being the senior partner. He tried to persuade Jack to join him there, but he declined, giving as his reason that he could not bear to be cooped up in the city. ”

“ As for Marton, the grace of Heaven had touched her, and she had become a nun in the convent at Muran. Two years afterwards, I received from her a letter full of unction, in which she adjured me, in the name of Our Saviour and of the Holy Virgin, never to present myself before her eyes. She added that she was bound by Christian charity to forgive me for the crime I had committed in seducing her, and she felt certain of the reward of the elect, and she assured me that she would ever pray earnestly for my conversion. ”

“ Most of the people have one illuminating their homes all the time, also their places of business, for it seems to be perpetual. When darkness is desired during the nights, a shield is put over the light.
Most of their yardage is sent in from Mars, yet a lot of their clothing comes in made up ready to wear. Here again we must give credit to the Martonians for the fine texture of cloth, exquisite designs and their remarkable styling, for the clothes are not a burden to the people who wear them. They are light but warm, cover well yet are not clumsy. ”

“ He steps softly; he treads like a cat. Behind a rock are grape-vines. He hears giggling and young girls are splashing together in the water; they are jumping in the lake, and these are water-sprites who avoid dwellers on the earth. He sees their clothes which lie on the bank and he picks out the one he wants. Marten slyly creeps up--no one sees him--as is Marten's fashion, until he can seize in his hand their clothes, for he is gifted with magic power.
With regard to these female water-sprites, when men take their clothes, then they will be able to subdue them. ”

“ Enormous numbers of animals are caught, chiefly in traps, to supply the demand of the fur trade, Siberia and North America being the principal localities from which they are obtained.
With the exception of the pekan (M. pennanti) , the martens are much alike in size, general colouring and cranial and dental characters. The following description by Dr Elliott Coues of the American marten (M. americana) will apply almost equally well to most of the others. ”

“ Marteen's story than his mind began supplying reasons for her departure--and the very first held him spellbound. Was it another move in her perpetual game? Was she on the track of someone's secret? Was her scheming mind now following some new clew that must lead to the discovery of a hidden or forgotten crime--the burial place of some well entombed family skeleton? He shivered.
Mrs. Marteen observed him narrowly.
"Mr. Gard is cold, Dorothy. Send for the tea, dear--or will you have something else? Really, you look like the patient who should seek climate and rest." ”

“ The frosty gale tossed Mr. Martell's white hair, while with his hat he worked, in pathetic earnestness, for the sake of his daughter; but in spite of all that he and the oarsman could do, the water gained on them, wetting their feet and creeping up their legs with the icy chili of death.
Every moment or two the man would pause in his work and send forth a cry of such terrible power and earnestness that it would seem some one must hear.
Again Alice Martell saw the distant lights of her own home, but she turned from them to those that gleamed from the nearer residence of Mrs. Marchmont. ”

“ He left her. The wooden incline sloped sharply upward. The fog momentarily seemed clearing. Martt saw above him the outlines of the houses, a broad platform connecting them. And stretched the length of the platform was the huge, recumbent figure of a man. He seemed about forty feet tall. He lay hunched, cramped for space, with one arm upflung to the roof of a house, and one leg dangling nearly to the water.
Martt reached the platform. He crept past the giant's legs. The waist, wrapped in a skin, was rising and falling with the giant's breathing. Martt's own breath was held. ”

“ Not she, but the girl with the red lips and the pale face and the hair that came out of a bottle had stripped Marty of his armor, and the truth of it was that Marty, yes, even Marty, was not really a knight but a very ordinary man.
Out of the orchard and the garden she went, once she had arrived at this stage, and tramped the countryside with her ears tuned to catch the alluring strains of the mechanical music of the Round-about. She had not only been making a fool of herself but had been made to look a fool, she thought. Her pain and suffering and disillusion had been wasted. ”

“ The great desire of Martyn’s heart was to excel at college, and to be foremost in his class, and this ambition occupied his mind so entirely, that he lived without God, and as if the world had been created for his honor, instead of the Maker’s. ”

“ Seemingly every kind of northern animal of which Ned had ever heard had immediately preceded them through the glade.
“Where there's timber, there's marten,” Doomsdorf explained. “Marten, I suppose you know, are the most valuable furs we take, outside of silver and blue fox—and one of the easiest taken. The marten's such a ruthless hunter that he doesn't look what he's running into. You won't find them far on the open barrens, but they are in hundreds in the long, narrow timber belt between Twelve-Mile cabin, to-night's stop, and Forks cabin that you'll hit to-morrow night. ”

“ Martyn was much dejected, in contemplating the vast multitude of idolaters amongst whom he was now placed.
“Every thing presented the appearance of wretchedness. I thought of my future labours among them with some despondency; yet I am willing, I trust, through grace, to pass my days among them, if by any means these poor people may be brought to God. The sight of men, women, and children, all idolaters, makes me shudder, as if in the dominions of the prince of darkness. I fancy the frown of God is visible;—there is something peculiarly awful in the stillness that prevails. ”

“ If it was the night-watchman, he had [Pg 209] perhaps a word about the wind being in the northwest, “blowing up to a storm,” or about the marten that ate the last batch of squabs. The marten lived in the attic under the roof beams, where it had its young in peace. It was not disturbed, though it made an occasional raid on the hen roost or the pigeon coop; but that was to be guarded against. To make up for it, it ate the rats that infested the old houses, and for this service it was let alone. ”

“ The martens generally are said to be very susceptible to human influence when taken young, and are very lively in a state of domestication. They are among the most graceful of animals, and in place of the disagreeable scent which renders many of their tribe offensive, this creature possesses an odor which is quite agreeable, and for this reason is often called the sweet marten in contradistinction to the foul marten or pole cat of Britain, which is like unto our skunk in the disgusting stench which it exhales. ”

“ In the meantime, everything is being done that is humanly possible to find Mrs. Marteen. There's only one other way, and that, for the present, won't do--it's newspaper publicity, photographic reproductions and a reward. I think she is somewhere under an assumed name. But there are two lodestones that will draw her if she is able to move. One is the house of Victor Mahr, and the other her own home. There is love and hate to count on, and sooner or later one will draw her within reach. ”

“ Power’s mind ran back to the night, just twenty years before, when he sat at a table in another hotel and found Nancy Marten gazing at him. Skies and times may change, but not manners. He had met mother and daughter under precisely similar conditions, save that he was alone now, and a complete stranger to the girl. Marten was so taken up with his friends that he gave no attention to others in the room. ”

“ Marten's style was more like random blows from a sledge-hammer, half of them wide of the mark. It was not very edifying, or even instructive. Keith was the same. Why was everybody so violent, so extreme in their views?
Marten repeated:
"Sanidin?"
"It might be sanidin in places," replied Denis. "I do know a little something about crystals, Marten. I have read Ruskin's ETHICS OF THE DUST."
"Ruskin. Good god! He's not a man; he's an emetic. But you never answered my first question. You always hit upon sanidin. Why?" ”

“ He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about his parents—except that they were alive and in the tropics—was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. ”

“ What thing should I see?"
"Who knows, Martin? But the sea aren't the land, and here on these wild wastes o' waters there's chancy things beyond any man's wisdom as any mariner'll—ha, what's yon?" says he under his breath and whipping round, knife in hand. "'Twas like a shoeless foot, Mart'n ... creeping murder ... 'Tis there again!" Speaking, he tore open the door and I saw his knife flash as he sprang into the darkness beyond; as for me I quaffed my ale. Presently back he comes, claps to the door (mighty careful) and sinking upon the upturned cask, mops at his brow. ”

“ The marten is perhaps the most popular of all the fur-bearing animals belonging to our new possessions. An inhabitant of the whole wooded region of the northern part of the continent, he finds a favorite home in the forests of the Yukon, where he needs his beautiful fur, which is not much inferior to that of his near relative, the far-famed Russian sable. In the trade of the Hudson’s Bay Company the marten occupies the largest place, his skins for a single district amounting to more than fifty thousand annually, and being sometimes sold as sable. ”

“ Behind me came Martemian—pistol in hand—a grim, purple-scarred man, who had no mercy and no music in him. Between the two, I made my choice. If I could have killed them then—and I would have done it if I could—Martemian would have been the first.
We rode thus—passing, once or twice, a peasant pilgrim travelling slowly and patiently toward the shrine of Saint Sergius, a brown-skinned, lean moujik with a sheepskin caftan, and legs swathed in folds of cloth, and shoes of lime-tree bark; a man whose life was only labour and starvation and prayer. ”

“ Martin dividing his cloak with the beggar second only, in Mediæval art, to the Gospel records of the Lord’s own acts of tender grace and Divine self-emptying. As we trace, step by step, the unceasing service of Henry Martyn to men for love of his Master, we shall find a succession of modern parallels to the act of St. Martin, who, when a lad of eighteen with his regiment at Amiens, himself moneyless, answered the appeal of a beggar, shivering at the city gates in a cruel winter, by drawing his dagger, dividing his military cloak, and giving half of it to the naked man. ”

“ I love the good, kind earth, Mart'n, wi' its green grass and flowers a' peep, 'tis a fair resting-place for a man when all's done and said, but yonder, pal—ah, there's glory for ye! Many's the time I've watched it, dawn and sunset, and, minding all the goodly ships and the jolly lads as are a-sleeping down below, at such times, Mart'n, it do seem to me as if all the good and glory of 'em came aloft for eyes to see awhile—howbeit, 'tis a noble winding-sheet, pal, from everlasting to everlasting, amen! ”