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From The merry men and other tales and fables:
Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1912),
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON's
THE MERRY MEN
CHAPTER I.
EILEAN AROS
IT was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.
I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July day.
The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen--all overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peak of Ben Kyaw. The Mountain of the Mist, they say the words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was mossy(*) to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape upon the mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hillsides there were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros, fifteen miles away.
(*) Boggy
The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It twisted so as nearly to double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the moss came nearly to the knee. There was no cultivation anywhere, and not one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course there were--three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the guns were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of the land, on a day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring like a battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the breakers that we call the Merry Men.
Aros itself--Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it means the House of God--Aros itself was not properly a piece of the Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south-west corner of the land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest. When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a good one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over a bay, with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.
On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that hears that cauldron boiling.
Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea, for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water--a Roost we call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea swirling and combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and now and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the Roost were talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above all in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place. You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end there comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have got the name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name from their movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than I can tell.
The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the reefs, and weathered the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south coast of Aros, in Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these dangers, in the place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome the works now going forward to set lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of our iron-bound, inhospitable islands.
The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from my uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I cannot tell, but they were thus translated: "Ah, the sweet singing out of the sea." Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters. It was here that a certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some claim to be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to make so rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his monkish underlings who had a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and beautiful name, the House of God.
Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland, one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, her colours flying even as she sank. There was some likelihood in this tale; for another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty miles from Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with more detail and gravity than its companion stories, and there was one particularity which went far to convince me of its truth: the name, that is, of the ship was still remembered, and sounded, in my ears, Spanishly. The Espirito Santo they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns, laden with treasure and grandees of Spain, and fierce soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to all eternity, done with her wars and voyages, in Sandag Bay, upon the west of Aros. No more salvos of ordnance for that tall ship, the "Holy Spirit," no more fair winds or happy ventures; only to rot there deep in the sea-tangle and hear the shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran high about the island. It was a strange thought to me first and last, and only grew stranger as I learned the more of Spain, from which she had set sail with so proud a company, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that sent her on that voyage.
And now I must tell you, as I walked from Grisapol that day, the Espirito Santo was very much in my reflections. I had been favourably remarked by our then Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous writer, Dr. Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some papers of an ancient date to rearrange and sfft of what was worthless; and in one of these, to my great wonder, I found a note of this very ship, the Espirito Santo, with her captain's name, and how she carried a great part of the Spaniard's treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross of Grisapol; but in what particular spot, the wild tribes of that place and period would give no information to the king's enquiries. Putting one thing with another, and taking our island tradition together with this note of old King Jamie's perquisitions after wealth, it had come strongly on my mind that the spot for which he sought in vain could be no other than the small bay of Sandag on my uncle's land; and being a fellow of a mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to weigh that good ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, and doubloons, and bring back our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten dignity and wealth.
This was a design of which I soon had reason to repent. My mind was sharply turned on different reflections; and since I became the witness of a strange judgment of God's, the thought of dead men's treasures has been intolerable to my conscience. But even at that time I must acquit myself of sordid greed; for if I desired riches, it was not for their own sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart--my uncle's daughter, Mary Ellen. She had been educated well, and had been a time to school upon the mainland; which, poor girl, she would have been happier without. For Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the servant, and her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in Scotland, plainly bred up in a country place among Cameronians, long a skipper sailing out of the Clyde about the islands, and now, with infinite discontent, managing his sheep and a little 'long shore fishing for the necessary bread. If it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but a month or two, you may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same desert all the year round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the Merry Men singing and dancing in the Roost!
II
WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS
IT WAS half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and haggard, and I thought he avoided my eye. The coble had been repaired, with two new thwarts and several patches of some rare and beautiful foreign wood, the name of it unknown to me.
"Why, Rorie," said I, as we began the return voyage, "this is fine wood. How came you by that?"
"It will be hard to cheesel," Rorie opined reluctantly; and just then, dropping the oars, he made another of those dives into the stern which I had remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.
"What is wrong?" I asked, a good deal startled.
"It will be a great feesh," said the old man, returning to his oars; and nothing more could I get out of him, but strange glances and an ominous nodding of the head. In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The water was still and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay, exceeding deep. For some time I could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if something dark--a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow--followed studiously in the track of the moving coble. And then I remembered one of Rorie's superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in some great, exterminating feud among the clans, a fish, the like of it unknown in all our waters, followed for some years the passage of the ferry-boat, until no man dared to make the crossing.
"He will be waiting for the right man," said Rorie.
Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of Aros. Outside and inside there were many changes. The garden was fenced with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in the kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from the window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was swinging from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of linen and silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain old kitchen that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the stools, and the closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun shone into, and the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the mantelshelf and the three-cornered spittoons, filled with seashells instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment--poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first moment, in my heart.
"Mary, girl," said I, "this is the place I had learned to call my home, and I do not know it."
"It is my home by nature, not by the learning," she replied; "the place I was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I would have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into the sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on them now."
Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was even graver than of custom.
"Ay," said I, "I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when my father died I took his goods without remorse."
"Your father died a clean strae death, as the folk say," said Mary.
"True," I returned; "and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she called?"
"They ca'd her the Christ-Anna," said a voice behind me; and, turning round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.
He was a sour, small bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes; fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He never laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like the Cameronians he had been brought up among; and indeed, in many ways, used to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times before the Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits when he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would look back with envy, and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.
As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or the bones of the dead.
"Ay," he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, "the Christ-Anna. It's an awfu' name."
I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of health; for I feared he had perhaps been ill.
"I'm in the body," he replied, ungraciously enough; "aye in the body and the sins of the body, like yoursel'. Denner," he said abruptly to Mary, and then ran on, to me: "They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten, are they no? Yon's a bonny knock,(*) but it'll no gang; and the napery's by ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; it's for the like o' them folk sells the peace of God that passeth understanding; it's for the like o' them, an' maybe no' even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to His face and burn in muckle hell; and it's for that reason the Scripture ca's them, as I read the passage, the accursed thing. Mary, ye girzie," he interrupted himself to cry with some asperity, "what for hae ye no' put out the twa candlesticks?"
(*) Clock
"Why should we need them at high noon?" she asked.
But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. "We'll bruik(*) them while we may," he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought silver were added to the table equipage, already so unsuited to that rough sea-side farm.
(*) Enjoy
"She cam' ashore Februar' 10, about ten at nicht," he went on to me. "There was nae wind, and a sair run o' sea; and she was in the sook o' the Roost, as I jaloose. We had seen her a' day, Rorie and me, beating to the wind. She wasnae a handy craft, I'm thinking, that Christ-Anna; for she would neither steer nor stey wi' them. A sair day they had of it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it perishin' cauld--ower cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a nip o' wind, and awa' again, to pit the emp'y hope into them. Eh, man! but they had a sair day for the last o't. He would have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore upon the back o' that."
"And were all lost?" I cried. "God help them!"
"Wheesht!" he said sternly. "Nane shall pray for the deid on my hearth-stane."
I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and he seemed to accept my disclaimer with unusual facility, and ran on once more upon what had evidently become a favourite subject.
"We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an' me, and a' thae braws in the inside of her. There's a kittle bit, ye see, about Sandag; whiles the sook rins strong for the Merry Men; an' whiles again, when the tide's makin' hard an' ye can hear the Roost blawin' at the far-end of Aros, there comes a back-spang of current straucht into Sandag Bay. Weel, there's the thing that got the grip on the Christ-Anna. She but to have come in ram-stam an' stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften under, and the back-side of her is clear at hie-water o' neaps. But, man! the dunt that she cam doon wi' when she struck! Lord save us a'! but it's an unco life to be a sailor--a cauld, wan-chancy life. Mony's the gliff I got myself in the great deep; and why the Lord should hae made yon unco water is mair than ever I could win to understand. He made the vales and the pastures, the bonny green yaird, the halesome, canty land--
And now they shout and sing to Thee,
For Thou hast made them glad,
as the Psalms say in the metrical version. No that I would preen my faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. 'Who go to sea in ships,' they hae't again--
And in
Great waters trading be,
Within the deep these men God's works
And His great wonders see.
Weel, it's easy sayin' sae. Maybe Dauvit wasna very weel
acquant wi' the sea. But, troth, if it wasna prentit in the
Bible, I wad whiles be temp'it to think it wasna the Lord,
but the muckle, black deil that made the sea. There's
naething good comes oot o't but the fish; an' the spentacle
o' God riding on the tempest, to be shüre, whilk
would be what Dauvit was likely ettling at. But, man, they
were sair wonders that God showed to the
Christ-Anna-- I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice
was unnaturally moved and his manner unwontedly
demonstrative. He leaned forward at these last words, for
example, and touched me on the knee with his spread fingers,
looking up into my face with a certain pallor, and I could
see that his eyes shone with a deep-seated fire, and that
the lines about his mouth were drawn and tremulous.
Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning
of our meal, did not detach him from his train of thought
beyond a moment. He condescended, indeed, to ask me some
questions as to my success at college, but I thought it was
with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which
was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of
his preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would
"remember in mercy fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful
creatures here by their lee-lane beside the great and dowie
waters."
Soon there came an interchange of speeches
between him and Rorie.
"Was it there?" asked my uncle.
"Ou, ay!" said Rorie.
I observed that they both spoke in a manner
of aside, and with some show of embarrassment, and that Mary
herself appeared to colour, and looked down on her plate.
Partly to show my knowledge, and so relieve the party from
an awkward strain, partly because I was curious, I pursued
the subject.
"You mean the fish?" I asked.
"Whatten fish?" cried my uncle. "Fish, quo'
he! Fish! Your een are fu' o' fatness, man; your heid
dozened wi' carnal leir. Fish! it's a bogle!"
He spoke with great vehemence, as though
angry; and perhaps I was not very willing to be put down so
shortly, for young men are disputatious. At least I remember
I retorted hotly, crying out upon childish superstitions.
"And ye come frae the College!" sneered Uncle
Gordon. "Gude kens what they learn folk there; it's no'
muckle service onyway. Do ye think, man, that there's
naething in a' yon saut wilderness o' a world oot wast
there, wi' the sea-grasses growin', an' the sea-beasts
fechtin', an' the sun glintin' down into it, day by day? Na;
the sea's like the land, but fearsomer. If there's folk
ashore, there's folk in the sea-deid they may be, but
they're folk whatever; and as for deils, there's nane that's
like the sea deils. There's no sae muckle harm in the land
deils, when a's said and done. Lang syne, when I was a
callant in the south country, I mind there was an auld, bald
bogle in the Peewie Moss. I got a glisk o' him mysel',
sittin' on his hunkers in a hag, as grey's a tombstane. An',
troth, he was a fearsome-like taed. But he steered naebody.
Nae doobt, if ane that was a reprobate, ane the Lord hated,
had gane by there wi' his sin still upon his stamach, nae
doobt the creature would hae lowped upo' the likes o' him.
But there's deils in the deep sea would yoke on a
communicant! Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon wi' the puir lads
in the Christ-Anna, ye would ken by now the mercy o'
the seas. If ye had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would
hate the thocht of it as I do. If ye had but used the een
God gave ye, ye would hae learned the wickness o' that
fause, saut, cauld, bullering creature, and of a' that's in
it by the Lord's permission: labsters an' partans, an'
sic-like, howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing
whales; an' fish--the hale clan o' them--cauld-wamed,
blind-eed uncanny ferlies. O, sirs," he cried, "the
horror--the horror o' the sea!"
We were all somewhat staggered by this
outburst; and the speaker himself, after that last hoarse
apostrophe, appeared to sink gloomily into his own thoughts.
But Rorie, who was greedy of superstitious lore, recalled
him to the subject by a question.
"You will not ever have seen a teevil of the
sea?" he asked.
"No clearly," replied the other. "I misdoobt
if a mere man could see ane clearly and conteenue in the
body. I hae sailed wi' a lad--they ca'd him Sandy Gabart; he
saw ane, shüre eneuch, an' shüre eneuch it was the
end of him. We were seeven days oot frae the Clyde--a sair
wark we had had--gaun north wi' seeds an' braws an' things
for the Macleod. We had got in ower near under the
Cutchull'ns, an' had just gane about by Soa, an' were off on
a long tack, we thocht would maybe hauld as far's Copnahow.
I mind the nicht weel; a mune smoored wi' mist; a fine gaun
breeze upon the water, but no steedy; an'--what nane o' us
likit to hear--anither wund gurlin' owerheid, amang thae
fearsome, auld stane craigs o' the Cutchull'ns. Weel, Sandy
was forrit wi' the jib sheet; we couldna see him for the
mains'l, that had just begude to draw, when a' at ance he
gied a skirl. I luffed for my life, for I thocht we were
ower near Soa; but na, it wasna that, it was puir Sandy
Gabart's deid skreigh, or near hand, for he was deid in half
an hour. A't he could tell was that a sea deil, or sea
bogle, or sea spenster, or sic-like, had clum up by the
bowsprit, an' gi'en him ae cauld, uncanny look. An', or the
life was oot o' Sandy's body, we kent weel what the thing
betokened, and why the wund girled in the taps o' the
Cutchull'ns; for doon it cam'--a wund do I ca' it! it was
the wund o' the Lord's anger--an a' that nicht we focht like
men dementit, and the neist that we kenned we were ashore in
Loch Uskevagh, an' the cocks were crawin' in Benbecula."
"It will have been a merman," Rorie said.
"A merman!" screamed my uncle with
immeasurable scorn. "Aauld wives' clavers! There's nae sic
things as mermen."
"But what was the creature like?" I asked.
"What like was it? Gude forbid that we sul
ken what like it was! It had a kind of a heid upon it--man
could say nae mair."
Then Rorie, smarting under the affront, told
several tales of mermen, mermaids, and sea-horses that had
come ashore upon the islands and attacked the crews of boats
upon the sea; and my uncle, in spite of his incredulity,
listened with uneasy interest.
"Aweel, aweel," he said, "it may be sae; I
may be wrang; but I find nae word o' mermen in the
Scriptures."
"And you will find nae word of Aros Roost,
maybe," objected Rorie, and his argument appeared to carry
weight.
When dinner was over, my uncle carried me
forth with him to a bank behind the house. It was a very hot
and quiet afternoon; scarce a ripple anywhere upon the sea,
nor any voice but the familiar voice of sheep and gulls; and
perhaps in consequence of this repose in nature, my kinsman
showed himself more rational and tranquil than before. He
spoke evenly and almost cheerfully of my career, with every
now and then a reference to the lost ship or the treasures
it had brought to Aros. For my part, I listened to him in a
sort of trance, gazing with all my heart on that remembered
scene, and drinking gladly the sea-air and the smoke of
peats that had been lit by Mary.
Perhaps an hour had passed when my uncle, who
had all the while been covertly gazing on the surface of the
little bay, rose to his feet and bade me follow his example.
Now I should say that the great run of tide at the
south-west end of Aros exercises a perturbing influence
round all the coast. In Sandag Bay, to the south, a strong
current runs at certain points of the flood and ebb
respectively; but in this northern bay--Aros Bay, as it is
called where the house stands and on which my uncle was now
gazing, the only sign of disturbance is towards the end of
the ebb, and even then it is too slight to be remarkable.
When there is any swell, nothing can be seen at all; but
when it is calm, as it often is, there appear certain
strange, undecipherable marks--sea-runes, as we may name
them--on the glassy surface of the bay. The like is common
in a thousand places on the coast; and many a boy must have
amused himself as I did, seeking to read in them some
reference to himself or those he loved. It was to these
marks that my uncle now directed my attention, struggling,
as he did so, with an evident reluctance.
"Do you see yon scart upo' the water?" he
inquired; "yon ane wast the grey stane? Ay? Weel, it'll no'
be like a letter, wull it?"
"Certainly it is," I replied. "I have often
remarked it. It is like a C."
He heaved a sigh as if heartily disappointed
with my answer, and then added below his breath: "Ay, for
the Christ-Anna."
"I used to suppose, sir, it was for myself,"
said I; "for my name is Charles."
"And so ye saw't afore?" he ran on, not
heeding my remark. "Weel, weel, but that's unco strange.
Maybe, it's been there waitin', as a man wad say, through a'
the weary ages. Man, but that's awfu'." And then, breaking
off: "Ye'll no see anither, will ye?" he asked.
"Yes," said I. "I see another very plainly,
near the Ross side, where the road comes down--an M."
"An M," he repeated very low; and then, again
after another pause: "An' what wad ye make o' that?" he
inquired.
"I had always thought it to mean Mary, sir,"
I answered, growing somewhat red, convinced as I was in my
own mind that I was on the threshold of a decisive
explanation.
But we were each following his own train of
thought to the exclusion of the other's. My uncle once more
paid no attention to my words; only hung his head and held
his peace; and I might have been led to fancy that he had
not heard me, if his next speech had not contained a kind of
echo from my own.
"I would say naething o' thae clavers to
Mary," he observed, and began to walk forward.
There is a belt of turf along the side of
Aros Bay where walking is easy; and it was along this that I
silently followed my silent kinsman. I was perhaps a little
disappointed at having lost so good an opportunity to
declare my love; but I was at the same time far more deeply
exercised at the change that had befallen my uncle. He was
never an ordinary, never, in the strict sense, an amiable
man; but there was nothing in even the worst that I had
known of him before, to prepare me for so strange a
transformation. It was impossible to close the eyes against
one fact; that he had, as the saying goes, something on his
mind; and as I mentally ran over the different words which
might be represented by the letter M--misery, mercy,
marriage, money, and the like--I was arrested with a sort of
start by the word murder. I was still considering the ugly
sound and fatal meaning of the word, when the direction of
our walk brought us to a point from which a view was to be
had to either side, back towards Aros Bay and homestead, and
forward on the ocean, dotted to the north with isles, and
lying to the southward blue and open to the sky. There my
guide came to a halt, and stood staring for awhile on that
expanse. Then he turned to me and laid a hand on my arm.
"Ye think there's naething there?" he said,
pointing with his pipe; and then cried out aloud, with a
kind of exultation: "I'll tell ye, man! The deid are down
there--thick like rattons!"
He turned at once, and, without another word,
we retraced our steps to the house of Aros.
I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was
not till after supper, and then but for a short while, that
I could have a word with her. I lost no time beating about
the bush, but spoke out plainly what was on my mind.
"Mary," I said, "I have not come to Aros
without a hope. If that should prove well founded, we may
all leave and go somewhere else, secure of daily bread and
comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that,
which it would seem extravagant in me to promise. But
there's a hope that lies nearer to my heart than money." At
that I paused. "You can guess fine what that is, Mary," I
said. She looked away from me in silence, and that was small
encouragement, but I was not to be put off. "All my days I
have thought the world of you," I continued; "the time goes
on and I think always the more of you; I could not think to
be happy or hearty in my life without you: you are the apple
of my eye." Still she looked away, and said never a word;
but I thought I saw that her hands shook. "Mary," I cried in
fear, "do ye no like me?"
"O, Charlie man," she said, "is this a time
to speak of it? Let me be a while; let me be the way I am;
it'll not be you that loses by the waiting!"
I made out by her voice that she was nearly
weeping, and this put me out of any thought but to compose
her. "Mary Ellen," I said, "say no more; I did not come to
trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your time too; and
you have told me all I wanted. Only just this one thing
more: what ails you?"
She owned it was her father, but would enter
into no particulars, only shook her head, and said he was
not well and not like himself, and it was a great pity. She
knew nothing of the wreck. "I havena been near it," said
she. "What for would I go near it, Charlie lad? The poor
souls are gone to their account long syne; and I would just
have wished they had ta'en their gear with them--poor
souls!"
This was scarcely any great encouragement for
me to tell her of the Espirito Santo; yet I did so,
and at the very first word she cried out in surprise. "There
was a man at Grisapol," she said, "in the month of May--a
little, yellow, black-avised body, they tell me, with gold
rings upon his fingers, and a beard; and he was speiring
high and low for that same ship."
It was towards the end of April that I had
been given these papers to sort out by Dr. Robertson: and it
came suddenly back upon my mind that they were thus prepared
for a Spanish historian, or a man calling himself such, who
had come with high recommendations to the Principal, on a
mission of inquiry as to the dispersion of the great Armada.
Putting one thing with another, I fancied that the visitor
"with the gold rings upon his fingers" might be the same
with Dr. Robertson's historian from Madrid. If that were so,
he would be more likely after treasure for himself than
information for a learned society. I made up my mind, I
should lose no time over my undertaking; and if the ship lay
sunk in Sandag Bay, as perhaps both he and I supposed, it
should not be for the advantage of this ringed adventurer,
but for Mary and myself, and for the good, old, honest,
kindly family of the Darnaways.
III I WAS early afoot next
morning; and as soon as I had a bite to eat, set forth upon
a tour of exploration. Something in my heart distinctly told
me that I should find the ship of the Armada; and although I
did not give way entirely to such hopeful thoughts, I was
still very light in spirits and walked on air. Aros is a
very rough inlet, its surface strewn with great rocks and
shaggy with fern and heather; and my way lay almost north
and south across the highest knoll; and though the whole
distance was inside of two miles, it took more time and
exertion than four upon a level road. Upon the summit, I
paused. Although not very high--not three hundred feet, as I
think--it yet outtops all the neighbouring lowlands of the
Ross, and commands a great view of sea and islands. The sun,
which had been up for some time, was already hot upon my
neck; the air was listless and thundery, although purely
clear; away over the north-west, where the isles lie
thickliest congregated, some half a dozen small and ragged
clouds hung together in a covey; and the head of Ben Kyaw
wore, not merely a few streamers, but a solid hood of
vapour. There was a threat in the weather. The sea, it is
true, was smooth like glass: even the Roost was but a seam
on that wide mirror, and the Merry Men no more than caps of
foam; but to my eye and ear, so long familiar with these
places, the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a sound of it,
like a long sigh, mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet as
it was, the Roost itself appeared to be revolving mischief.
For I ought to say that all we dwellers in these parts
attributed, if not prescience, at least a quality of
warning, to that strange and dangerous creature of the
tides.
I hurried on, then, with the greater speed,
and had soon descended the slope of Aros to the part that we
call Sandag Bay. It is a pretty large piece of water
compared with the size of the isle; well sheltered from all
but the prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low
sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several
fathoms deep along a ledge of rocks. It is upon that side
that, at a certain time each flood, the current mentioned by
my uncle sets so strong into the bay; a little later, when
the Roost begins to work higher, an undertow runs still more
strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action of
this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep.
Nothing is to be seen out of Sandag Bay but one small
segment of the horizon and, in heavy weather, the breakers
flying high over a deep sea reef.
From half-way down the hill I had perceived
the wreck of February last, a brig of considerable tonnage,
lying, with her back broken, high and dry on the east corner
of the sands; and I was making directly towards it, and
already almost on the margin of the turf, when my eyes were
suddenly arrested by a spot, cleared of fern and heather,
and marked by one of those long, low, and almost
human-looking mounds that we see so commonly in graveyards.
I stopped like a man shot. Nothing had been said to me of
any dead man or interment on the island; Rorie, Mary, and my
uncle had all equally held their peace; of her at least, I
was certain that she must be ignorant; and yet here, before
my eyes, was proof indubitable of the fact. Here was a
grave; and I had to ask myself, with a chill, what manner of
man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the signal of the
Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place? My mind
supplied no answer but what I feared to entertain.
Shipwrecked, at least, he must have been; perhaps, like the
old Armada mariners, from some far and rich land over-sea;
or perhaps one of my own race, perishing within eyesight of
the smoke of home. I stood awhile uncovered by his side, and
I could have desired that it had lain in our religion to put
up some prayer for that unhappy stranger, or, in the old
classic way, outwardly to honour his misfortune. I knew,
although his bones lay there, a part of Aros, till the
trumpet sounded, his imperishable soul was forth and far
away, among the raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or the
pangs of hell; and yet my mind misgave me even with a fear,
that perhaps he was near me where I stood, guarding his
sepulchre, and lingering on the scene of his unhappy fate.
Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat
overshadowed that I turned away from the grave to the hardly
less melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her stem was above
the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a little
abaft the foremast--though indeed she had none, both masts
having broken short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the
beach was very sharp and sudden, and the bows lay many feet
below the stern, the fracture gaped widely open, and you
could see right through her poor hull upon the farther side.
Her name was much defaced, and I could not make out clearly
whether she was called Christiania, after the
Norwegian city, or Christiana, after the good woman,
Christian's wife, in that old book the "Pilgrim's Progress."
By her build she was a foreign ship, but I was not certain
of her nationality. She had been painted green, but the
colour was faded and weathered, and the paint peeling off in
strips. The wreck of the mainmast lay alongside, half-buried
in sand. She was a forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not
look without emotion at the bits of rope that still hung
about her, so often handled of yore by shouting seamen; or
the little scuttle where they had passed up and down to
their affairs; or that poor noseless angel of a figurehead
that had dipped into so many running billows.
I do not know whether it came most from the
ship or from the grave, but I fell into some melancholy
scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one hand against
the battered timbers. The homelessness of men, and even of
inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came
strongly in upon my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful
misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid act; and I
began to think of my then quest as of something sacrilegious
in its nature. But when I remembered Mary I took heart
again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent
marriage, nor would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his
full approval. It behoved me, then, to be up and doing for
my wife; and I thought with a laugh how long it was since
that great sea-castle, the Espirito Santo, had left
her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it would be to
consider rights so long extinguished and misfortunes so long
forgotten in the process of time.
I had my theory of where to seek for her
remains. The set of the current and the soundings both
pointed to the east side of the bay under the ledge of
rocks. If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after
these centuries, any portion of her held together, it was
there that I should find it. The water deepens, as I have
said, with great rapidity, and even close alongside the
rocks several fathoms may be found. As I walked upon the
edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of the
bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps;
the bay seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as
one sees them in a lapidary's shop; there was naught to show
that it was water but an internal trembling, a hovering
within of sun-glints and netted shadows, and now and then a
faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge. The shadows of
the rocks lay out for some distance at their feet, so that
my own shadow, moving, pausing, and stooping on the top of
that, reached sometimes half across the bay. It was above
all in this belt of shadows that I hunted for the
Espirito Santo; since it was there the undertow ran
strongest, whether in or out. Cool as the whole water seemed
this broiling day, it looked, in that part, yet cooler, and
had a mysterious invitation for the eyes. Peer as I pleased,
however, I could see nothing but a few fishes or a bush of
sea-tangle, and here and there a lump of rock that had
fallen from above and now lay separate on the sandy floor.
Twice did I pass from one end to the other of the rocks, and
in the whole distance I could see nothing of the wreck, nor
any place but one where it was possible for it to be. This
was a large terrace in five fathoms of water, raised off the
surface of the sand to a considerable height, and looking
from above like a mere outgrowth of the rocks on which I
walked. It was one mass of great sea-tangles like a grove,
which prevented me judging of its nature, but in shape and
size it bore some likeness to a vessel's hull. At least it
was my best chance. If the Espirito Santo lay not
there under the tangles, it lay nowhere at all in Sandag
Bay; and I prepared to put the question to the proof, once
and for all, and either go back to Aros a rich main or cured
for ever of my dreams of wealth.
I stripped to the skin, and stood on the
extreme margin with my hands clasped, irresolute. The bay at
that time was utterly quiet; there was no sound but from a
school of porpoises somewhere out of sight behind the point;
yet a certain fear withheld me on the threshold of my
venture. Sad sea-feelings, scraps of my uncle's
superstitions, thoughts of the dead, of the grave, of the
old broken ships, drifted through my mind. But the strong
sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I stooped
forward and plunged into the sea.
It was all that I could do to catch a trail
of the sea-tangle that grew so thickly on the terrace; but
once so far anchored I secured myself by grasping a whole
armful of these thick and slimy stalks, and, planting my
feet against the edge, I looked around me. On all sides the
clear sand stretched forth unbroken; it came to the foot of
the rocks, scoured into the likeness of an alley in a garden
by the action of the tides; and before me, for as far as I
could see, nothing was visible but the same many-folded sand
upon the sun-bright bottom of the bay. Yet the terrace to
which I was then holding was as thick with strong
sea-growths as a tuft of heather, and the cliff from which
it bulged hung draped below the water line with brown
lianas. In this complexity of forms, all swaying together in
the current, things were hard to be distinguished; and I was
still uncertain whether my feet were pressed upon the
natural rock or upon the timbers of the Armada
treasure-ship, when the whole tuft of tangle came away in my
hand, and in an instant I was on the surface, and the shores
of the bay and the bright water swam before my eyes in a
glory of crimson.
I clambered back upon the rocks, and threw
the plant of tangle at my feet. Something at the same moment
rang sharply, like a falling coin. I stooped, and there,
sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron
shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me
to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a
desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the thought
of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an
actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor's hands, his
sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot
that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the
swerving decks--the whole human fact of him, as a creature
like myself, with hair and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me
in that sunny, solitary place, not like a spectre, but like
some friend whom I had basely injured. Was the great
treasure-ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain
and treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a
garden for the seaweed, her cabin a breeding-place for fish,
soundless but for the dredging water, motionless but for the
waving of the tangle upon her battlements--that old,
populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag Bay? Or,
as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster
of the foreign brig--was this shoe-buckle bought but the
other day and worn by a man of my own period in the world's
history, hearing the same news from day to day, thinking the
same thoughts, praying, perhaps, in the same temple with
myself? However it was, I was assailed with dreary thoughts;
my uncle's words, "the dead are down there," echoed in my
ears; and though I determined to dive once more, it was with
a strong repugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of
the rocks.
A great change passed at that moment over the
appearance of the bay. It was no more that clear, visible
interior, like a house roofed with glass, where the green,
submarine sunshine slept so stilly. A breeze, I suppose, had
flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and blackness
filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds of
shadow tossed confusedly together. Even the terrace below
obscurely rocked and quivered. It seemed a graver thing to
venture on this place of ambushes; and when I leaped into
the sea a second time it was with a quaking in my soul.
I secured myself as at first, and groped
among the waving tangle. All that met my touch was cold and
soft and gluey. The thicket was alive with crabs and
lobsters, trundling to and fro lopsidedly, and I had to
harden my heart against the horror of their carrion
neighbourhood. On all sides I could feel the grain and the
clefts of hard, living stone; no planks, no iron, not a sign
of any wreck; the Espirito Santo was not there. I
remember I had almost a sense of relief in my
disappointment, and I was about ready to leave go, when
something happened that sent me to the surface with my heart
in my mouth. I had already stayed somewhat late over my
explorations; the current was freshening with the change of
the tide, and Sandag Bay was no longer a safe place for a
single swimmer. Well, just at the last moment there came a
sudden flush of current, dredging through the tangles like a
wave. I lost one hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and,
instinctively grasping for a fresh support, my fingers
closed on something hard and cold. I think I knew at that
moment what it was. At least I instantly left hold of the
tangle, leaped for the surface, and clambered out next
moment on the friendly rock with the bone of a man's leg in
my grasp.
Mankind is a material creature, slow to think
and dull to perceive connections. The grave, the wreck of
the brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle were surely plain
advertisements. A child might have read their dismal story,
and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of
mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon
my spirit. I laid the bone beside the buckle, picked up my
clothes, and ran as I was along the rocks towards the human
shore. I could not be far enough from the spot; no fortune
was vast enough to tempt me back again. The bones of the
drowned dead should henceforth roll undisturbed by me,
whether on tangle or minted gold. But as soon as I trod the
good earth again, and had covered my nakedness against the
sun, I knelt down over against the ruins of the brig, and
out of the fulness of my heart prayed long and passionately
for all poor souls upon the sea. A generous prayer is never
presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the
petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious
visitation. The horror, at least, was lifted from my mind; I
could look with calm of spirit on that great bright
creature, God's ocean; and as I set off homeward up the
rough sides of Aros, nothing remained of my concern beyond a
deep determination to meddle no more with the spoils of
wrecked vessels or the treasures of the dead.
I was already some way up the hill before I
paused to breathe and look about me. The sight that met my
eyes was doubly strange.
For, first, the storm that I had foreseen was
now advancing with almost tropical rapidity. The whole
surface of the sea had been dulled from its conspicuous
brightness to an ugly hue of corrugated lead; already in the
distance the white waves, the "skipper's daughters," had
begun to flee before a breeze that was still insensible on
Aros; and already along the curve of Sandag Bay there was a
splashing run of sea that I could hear from where I stood.
The change upon the sky was even more remarkable. There had
begun to arise out of the south-west a huge and solid
continent of scowling cloud; here and there, through rents
in its contexture, the sun still poured a sheaf of spreading
rays; and here and there, from all its edges, vast inky
streamers lay forth along the yet unclouded sky. The menace
was express and imminent. Even as I gazed, the sun was
blotted out. At any moment the tempest might fall upon Aros
in its might.
The suddenness of this change of weather so
fixed my eyes on heaven that it was some seconds before they
alighted on the bay, mapped out below my feet, amphitheatre
of lower hillocks sloping towards the sea, and beyond that
the yellow arc of beach and the whole extent of Sandag Bay.
It was a scene on which I had often looked down, but where I
had never before beheld a human figure. I had but just
turned my back upon it and left it empty, and my wonder may
be fancied when I saw a boat and several men in that
deserted spot. The boat was lying by the rocks. A pair of
fellows, bareheaded, with their sleeves rolled up, and one
with a boat-hook, kept her with difficulty to her moorings,
for the current was growing brisker every moment. A little
way off upon the ledge two men in black clothes, whom I
judged to be superior in rank, laid their heads together
over some task which at first I did not understand, but a
second after I had made it out--they were taking bearings
with the compass; and just then I saw one of them unroll a
sheet of paper and lay his finger down, as though
identifying features in a map. Meanwhile a third was walking
to and fro, poking among the rocks and peering over the edge
into the water. While I was still watching them with the
stupefaction of surprise, my mind hardly yet able to work on
what my eyes reported, this third person suddenly stooped
and summoned his companions with a cry so loud that it
reached my ears upon the hill. The others ran to him, even
dropping the compass in their hurry, and I could see the
bone and the shoe-buckle going from hand to hand, causing
the most unusual gesticulations of surprise and interest.
Just then I could hear the seamen crying from the boat, and
saw them point westward to that cloud continent which was
ever the more rapidly unfurling its blackness over heaven.
The others seemed to consult; but the danger was too
pressing to be braved, and they bundled into the boat,
carrying my relics with them, and set forth out of the bay
with all speed of oars.
I made no more ado about the matter, but
turned and ran for the house. Whoever these men were, it was
fit my uncle should be instantly informed. It was not then
altogether too late in the day for a descent of the
Jacobites; and maybe Prince Charlie, whom I knew my uncle to
detest, was one of the three superiors whom I had seen upon
the rock. Yet as I ran, leaping from rock to rock, and
turned the matter loosely in my mind, this theory grew ever
the longer the less welcome to my reason. The compass, the
map, the interest awakened by the buckle, and the conduct of
that one among the strangers who had looked so often below
him in the water, all seemed to point to a different
explanation of their presence on that outlying, obscure
islet of the western sea. The Madrid historian, the search
instituted by Dr. Robertson, the bearded stranger with the
rings, my own fruitless search that very morning in the deep
water of Sandag Bay, ran together, piece by piece, in my
memory, and I made sure that these strangers must be
Spaniards in quest of ancient treasure and the lost ship of
the Armada. But the people living in outlying islands, such
as Aros, are answerable for their own security; there is
none near by to protect or even to help them; and the
presence in such a spot of a crew of foreign
adventurers IV I FOUND my uncle at the
gable end, watching the signs of the weather, with a pipe in
his fingers.
"Uncle," said I, "there were men ashore at
Sandag Bay----"
I had no time to go further; indeed, I not
only forgot my words, but even my weariness, so strange was
the effect on Uncle Gordon. He dropped his pipe and fell
back against the end of the house with his jaw fallen, his
eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. We must
have looked at one another silently for a quarter of a
minute, before he made answer in this extraordinary fashion:
"Had he a hair kep on?"
I knew as well as if I had been there that
the man who now lay buried at Sandag had worn a hairy cap,
and that he had come ashore alive. For the first and only
time I lost toleration for the man who was my benefactor and
the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.
"These were living men," said I, "perhaps
Jacobites, perhaps the French, perhaps pirates, perhaps
adventurers come here to seek the Spanish treasure ship;
but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your
daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man,
the dead sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this
morning by his grave; he will not wake before the trump of
doom."
My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I
spoke; then he fixed his eyes for a little on the ground,
and pulled his fingers foolishly; but it was plain that he
was past the power of speech.
"Come," said I. "You must think for others.
You must come up the hill with me and see this ship."
He obeyed without a word or a look, following
slowly after my impatient strides. The spring seemed to have
gone out of his body, and he scrambled heavily up and down
the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was wont, from one to
another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to make
better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and
like one in bodily pain: "Ay, ay, man, I'm coming." Long
before we had reached the top I had no other thought for him
but pity. If the crime had been monstrous, the punishment
was in proportion.
At last we emerged above the sky-line of the
hill, and could see around us. All was black and stormy to
the eye; the last gleam of sun had vanished; a wind had
sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to the
point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was
the interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I
had stood there last; already it had begun to break over
some of the outward reefs, and already it moaned aloud in
the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first, in vain for the
schooner.
"There she is." I said at last. But her new
position, and the course she was now lying, puzzled me.
"They cannot mean to beat to sea," I cried.
"That's what they mean," said my uncle, with
something like joy; and just then the schooner went about
and stood upon another tack, which put the question beyond
the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a gale on hand,
had thought first of sea-room. With the wind that
threatened, in these reef-sown waters and contending against
so violent a stream of tide, their course was certain death.
"Good God!" said I, "they are all lost."
"Ay," returned my uncle, "a'--a' lost. They
hadna a chance but to rin for Kyle Dona. The gate they're
gaun the noo, they couldna win through an the muckle deil
were there to pilot them. Eh, man," he continued, touching
me on the sleeve, "it's a braw nicht for a shipwreck! Twa in
ae twalmonth! Eh, but the Merry Men'll dance bonny!"
I looked at him, and it was then that I began
to fancy him no longer in his right mind. He was peering up
to me, as if for sympathy, a timid joy in his eyes. All that
had passed between us was already forgotten in the prospect
of this fresh disaster.
"If it were not too late," I cried with
indignation, "I would take the coble and go out to warn
them."
"Na, na," he protested, "ye maunna interfere;
ye maunna meddle wi' the like o' that. It's His,"--doffing
his bonnet--"His wull. And, eh, man! but it's a braw nicht
for't!"
Something like fear began to creep into my
soul; and, reminding him that I had not yet dined, I
proposed we should return to the house. But no; nothing
would tear him from his place of outlook.
"I maun see the hail thing, man Charlie," he
explained; and then as the schooner went about a second
time, "Eh, but they han'le her bonny!" he cried. "The
Christ-Anna was naething to this."
Already the men on board the schooner must
have begun to realize some part, but not yet the twentieth,
of the dangers that environed their doomed ship. At every
lull of the capricious wind they must have seen how fast the
current swept them back. Each tack was made shorter, as they
saw how little it prevailed. Every moment the rising swell
began to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever
and again a breaker would fall in sounding ruin under the
very bows of her, and the brown reef and streaming tangle
appear in the hollow of the wave. I tell you, they had to
stand to their tackle: there was no idle man aboard that
ship, God knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so
horrible to any human-hearted man that my misguided uncle
now pored and gloated like a connoisseur. As I turned to go
down the hill, he was lying on his belly on the summit, with
his hands stretched forth and clutching in the heather. He
seemed rejuvenated, mind and body.
When I got back to the house already dismally
affected, I was still more sadly downcast at the sight of
Mary. She had her sleeves rolled up over her strong arms,
and was quietly making bread. I got a bannock from the
dresser and sat down to eat it in silence.
"Are ye wearied, lad?" she asked after a
while.
"I am not so much wearied, Mary," I replied,
getting on my feet, "as I am weary of delay, and perhaps of
Aros too. You know me well enough to judge me fairly, say
what I like. Well, Mary, you may be sure of this: you had
better be anywhere but here."
"I'll be sure of one thing," she returned:
"I'll be where my duty is."
"You forget, you have a duty to yourself," I
said.
"Ay, man," she replied, pounding at the
dough; "will you have found that in the Bible, now?"
"Mary," I said solemnly, "you must not laugh
at me just now. God knows I am in no heart for laughing. If
we could get your father with us, it would be best; but with
him or without him, I want you far away from here, my girl;
for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your father's
too, I want you far--far away from here. I came with other
thoughts; I came here as a man comes home; now it is all
changed, and I have no desire nor hope but to flee--for
that's the word--flee, like a bird out of the fowler's
snare, from this accursed island."
She had stopped her work by this time.
"And do you think, now," said she, "do you
think, now, I have neither eyes nor ears? Do ye think I
havena broken my heart to have these braws (as he calls
them, God forgive him!) thrown into the sea? Do ye think I
have lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you
saw in an hour or two? No," she said, "I know there's wrong
in it; what wrong, I neither know nor want to know. There
was never an ill thing made better by meddling, that I could
hear of. But, my lad, you must never ask me to leave my
father. While the breath is in his body, I'll be with him.
And he's not long for here, either: that I can tell you,
Charlie--he's not long for here. The mark is on his brow;
and better so--maybe better so."
I was a while silent, not knowing what to
say; and when I roused my head at last to speak, she got
before me.
"Charlie," she said, "what's right for me
needna be right for you. There's sin upon this house and
trouble; you are a stranger; take your things upon your back
and go your ways to better places and to better folk, and if
you were ever minded to come back, though it were twenty
years syne, you would find me aye waiting."
"Mary Ellen," I said, "I asked you to be my
wife, and you said as good as yes. That's done for good.
Wherever you are, I am; as I shall answer to my God."
As I said the words the wind suddenly burst
out raving, and then seemed to stand still and shudder round
the house of Aros. It was the first squall, or prologue, of
the coming tempest, and as we started and looked about us,
we found that a gloom, like the approach of evening, had
settled round the house.
"God pity all poor folks at sea!" she said.
"We'll see no more of my father till the morrow's morning."
And then she told me, as we sat by the fire
and hearkened to the rising gusts, of how this change had
fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he had been dark and
fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, or, as Mary
said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out
for hours together on the Head, if it were night, or on the
top of Aros by day, watching the tumult of the sea, and
sweeping the horizon for a sail. After February the tenth,
when the wealth-bringing wreck was cast ashore at Sandag, he
had been at first unnaturally gay, and his excitement had
never fallen in degree, but only changed in kind from dark
to darker. He neglected his work, and kept Rorie idle. They
two would speak together by the hour at the gable end, in
guarded tones and with an air of secrecy, and almost of
guilt; and if she questioned either, as at first she
sometimes did, her inquiries were put aside with confusion.
Since Rorie had first remarked the fish that hung about the
ferry, his master had never set foot but once upon the
mainland of the Ross. That once--it was in the height of the
springs--he had passed dryshod while the tide was out; but,
having lingered overlong on the far side, found himself cut
off from Aros by the returning waters. It was with a shriek
of agony that he had leaped across the gut, and he had
reached home thereafter in a fever-fit of fear. A fear of
the sea, a constant haunting thought of the sea, appeared in
his talk and devotions, and even in his looks when he was
silent.
Rorie alone came in to supper; but a little
later my uncle appeared, took a bottle under his arm, put
some bread in his pocket, and set forth again to his
outlook, followed this time by Rorie. I heard that the
schooner was losing ground, but the crew were still fighting
every inch with hopeless ingenuity and courage; and the news
filled my mind with blackness.
A little after sundown the full fury of the
gale broke forth, such a gale as I have never seen in
summer, nor, seeing how swiftly it had come, even in winter.
Mary and I sat in silence, the house quaking overhead, the
tempest howling without, the fire between us sputtering with
raindrops. Our thoughts were far away with the poor fellows
on the schooner, or my not less unhappy uncle, houseless on
the promontory; and yet ever and again we were startled back
to ourselves, when the wind would rise and strike the gable
like a solid body, or suddenly fall and draw away, so that
the fire leaped into flame and our hearts bounded in our
sides. Now the storm in its might would seize and shake the
four corners of the roof, roaring like Leviathan in anger.
Anon, in a lull, cold eddies of tempest moved shudderingly
in the room, lifting the hair upon our heads and passing
between us as we sat. And again the wind would break forth
in a chorus of melancholy sounds, hooting low in the
chimney, wailing with flutelike softness round the house.
It was perhaps eight o'clock when Rorie came
in and pulled me mysteriously to the door. My uncle, it
appeared, had frightened even his constant comrade; and
Rorie, uneasy at his extravagance, prayed me to come out and
share the watch. I hastened to do as I was asked; the more
readily as, what with fear and horror, and the electrical
tension of the night, I was myself restless and disposed for
action. I told Mary to be under no alarm, for I should be a
safeguard on her father; and wrapping myself warmly in a
plaid, I followed Rorie into the open air.
That night, though we were so little past
midsummer, was as dark as January. Intervals of a groping
twilight alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it
was impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the
flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a
man's nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like
one huge sail; and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros,
we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping in the distance.
Over all the lowlands of the Ross the wind must have blown
as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows the uproar
that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of
mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round
the isle of Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering
thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches. Now louder in one
place, now lower in another, like the combinations of
orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly
varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I
could hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the
intermittent roaring of the Merry Men. At that hour, there
flashed into my mind the reason of the name that they were
called. For the noise of them seemed almost mirthful, as it
out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not
mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and
it seemed even human. As when savage men have drunk away
their reason, and, discarding speech, bawl together in their
madness by the hour; so, to my ears, these deadly breakers
shouted by Aros in the night.
Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind,
Rorie and I won every yard of ground with conscious effort.
We slipped on the wet sod, we fell together sprawling on the
rocks. Bruised, drenched, beaten, and breathless, it must
have taken us near half an hour to get from the house down
to the Head that overlooks the Roost. There, it seemed, was
my uncle's favourite observatory. Right in the face of it,
where the cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump of earth,
like a parapet, makes a place of shelter from the common
winds, where a man may sit in quiet and see the tide and the
mad billows contending at his feet. As he might look down
from the window of a house upon some street disturbance, so,
from this post, he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry
Men. On such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of
blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where the waves
joust together with the noise of an explosion, and the foam
towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye. Never before
had I seen the Merry Men thus violent. The fury, height, and
transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be seen and not
recounted. High over our heads on the cliff rose their white
columns in the darkness; and the same instant, like
phantoms, they were gone. Sometimes three at a time would
thus aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust took them, and the
spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave. And yet the
spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than impressive
by its force. Thought was beaten down by the confounding
uproar; a gleeful vacancy possessed the brains of men, a
state akin to madness; and I found myself at times following
the dance of the Merry Men as it were a tune upon a jigging
instrument.
I first caught sight of my uncle when we were
still some yards away in one of the flying glimpses of
twilight that chequered the pitch darkness of the night. He
was standing up behind the parapet, his head thrown back and
the bottle to his mouth. As he put it down, he saw and
recognized us with a toss of one hand fleetingly above his
head.
"Has he been drinking?" shouted I to Rorie.
"He will aye be drunk when the wind blaws,"
returned Rorie in the same high key, and it was all that I
could do to hear him.
"Then--was he so--in February?" I inquired.
Rorie's "Ay" was a cause of joy to me. The
murder, then, had not sprung in cold blood from calculation;
it was an act of madness no more to be condemned than to be
pardoned. My uncle was a dangerous madman, if you will, but
he was not cruel and base as I had feared. Yet what a scene
for a carouse, what an incredible vice, was this that the
poor man had chosen! I have always thought drunkenness a
wild and almost fearful pleasure, rather demoniacal than
human; but drunkenness, out here in the roaring blackness,
on the edge of a cliff above that hell of waters, the man's
head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on the edge
of death, his ear watching for the signs of shipwreck,
surely that, if it were credible in any one, was morally
impossible in a man like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a
damnatory creed and haunted by the darkest superstitions.
Yet so it was; and, as we reached the bight of shelter and
could breathe again, I saw the man's eyes shining in the
night with an unholy glimmer.
"Eh, Charlie, man, it's grand!" he cried.
"See to them!" he continued, dragging me to the edge of the
abyss from whence arose that deafening clamour and those
clouds of spray; "see to them dancin', man! Is that no
wicked?"
He pronounced the word with gusto, and I
thought it suited with the scene.
"They're yowlin' for thon schooner," he went
on, his thin, insane voice clearly audible in the shelter of
the bank, "an' she's comin' aye nearer, aye nearer, aye
nearer an' nearer an' nearer; an' they ken't, the folk kens
it, they ken weel it's by wi' them. Charlie lad, they're a'
drunk in yon schooner, a' dozened wi' drink. They were a'
drunk in the Christ-Anna, at the hinder end. There's
nane could droon at sea wantin' the brandy. Hoot awa, what
do you ken?" with a sudden blast of anger. "I tell ye, it
canna be; they daurna droon withoot it. Hae," holding out
the bottle, "tak' a sowp."
I was about to refuse, but Rorie touched me
as if in warning; and indeed I had already thought better of
the movement. I took the bottle, therefore, and not only
drank freely myself, but contrived to spill even more as I
was doing so. It was pure spirit, and almost strangled me to
swallow. My kinsman did not observe the loss, but, once more
throwing back his head, drained the remainder to the dregs.
Then, with a loud laugh, he cast the bottle forth among the
Merry Men, who seemed to leap up, shouting to receive it.
"Hae, bairns!" he cried, "there's your
han'sel. Ye'll get bonnier nor that, or morning."
Suddenly, out in the black night before us,
and not two hundred yards away, we heard, at a moment when
the wind was silent, the clear note of a human voice.
Instantly the wind swept howling down upon the Head, and the
Roost bellowed, and churned, and danced with a new fury. But
we had heard the sound, and we knew, with agony, that this
was the doomed ship now close on ruin, and that what we had
heard was the voice of her master issuing his last command.
Crouching together on the edge, we waited, straining every
sense, for the inevitable end. It was long, however, and to
us it seemed like ages, ere the schooner suddenly appeared
for one brief instant, relieved against a tower of
glimmering foam. I still see her reefed mainsail flapping
loose, as the boom fell heavily across the deck; I still see
the black outline of the hull, and still think I can
distinguish the figure of a man stretched upon the tiller.
Yet the whole sight we had of her passed swifter than
lightning; the very wave that disclosed her fell burying her
for ever; the mingled cry of many voices at the point of
death rose and was quenched in the roaring of the Merry Men.
And with that the tragedy was at an end. The strong ship,
with all her gear, and the lamp perhaps still burning in the
cabin, the lives of so many men, precious surely to others,
dear, at least, as heaven to themselves, had all, in that
one moment, gone down into the surging waters. They were
gone like a dream. And the wind still ran and shouted, and
the senseless waters in the Roost still leaped and tumbled
as before.
How long we lay there together, we three,
speechless and motionless, is more than I can tell, but it
must have been for long. At length, one by one, and almost
mechanically, we crawled back into the shelter of the bank.
As I lay against the parapet, wholly wretched and not
entirely master of my mind, I could hear my kinsman
maundering to himself in an altered and melancholy mood. Now
he would repeat to himself with maudlin iteration, "Sic a
fecht as they had--sic a sair fecht as they had, puir lads,
puir lads!" and anon he would bewail that "a' the gear was
as gude's tint," because the ship had gone down among the
Merry Men instead of stranding on the shore; and throughout,
the name--the Christ-Anna--would come and go in his
divagations, pronounced with shuddering awe. The storm all
this time was rapidly abating. In half an hour the wind had
fallen to a breeze, and the change was accompanied or caused
by a heavy, cold, and plumping rain. I must then have fallen
asleep, and when I came to myself, drenched, stiff, and
unrefreshed, day had already broken, grey, wet,
discomfortable day; the wind blew in faint and shifting
capfuls, the tide was out, the Roost was at its lowest, and
only the strong beating surf round all the coasts of Aros
remained to witness of the furies of the night.
V RORIE set out for the house in
search of warmth and breakfast; but my uncle was bent upon
examining the shores of Aros, and I felt it a part of duty
to accompany him throughout. He was now docile and quiet,
but tremulous and weak in mind and body; and it was with the
eagerness of a child that he pursued his exploration. He
climbed far down upon the rocks; on the beaches he pursued
the retreating breakers. The merest broken plank or rag of
cordage was a treasure in his eyes to be secured at the
peril of his life. To see him, with weak and stumbling
footsteps, expose himself to the pursuit of the surf, or the
snares and pitfalls of the weedy rock, kept me in a
perpetual terror. My arm was ready to support him, my hand
clutched him by the skirt, I helped him to draw his pitiful
discoveries beyond the reach of the returning wave; a nurse
accompanying a child of seven would have had no different
experience.
Yet, weakened as he was by the reaction from
his madness of the night before, the passions that
smouldered in his nature were those of a strong man. His
terror of the sea, although conquered for the moment, was
still undiminished; had the sea been a lake of living
flames, he could not have shrunk more panically from its
touch; and once, when his foot slipped and he plunged to the
mid-leg into a pool of water, the shriek that came up out of
his soul was like the cry of death. He sat still for a
while, panting like a dog, after that; but his desire for
the spoils of shipwreck triumphed once more over his fears;
once more he tottered among the curded foam; once more he
crawled upon the rocks among the bursting bubbles; once more
his whole heart seemed to be set on driftwood, fit, if it
was fit for anything, to throw upon the fire. Pleased as he
was with what he found, he still incessantly grumbled at his
ill-fortune.
"Aros," he said, "is no' a place for wrecks
ava'--no' ava. A' the years I've dwalt here, this ane maks
the second; and the best o' the gear clean tint!"
"Uncle," said I, for we were now on a stretch
of open sand, where there was nothing to divert his mind, "I
saw you last night, as I never thought to see you--you were
drunk."
"Na, na," he said, "no' as bad as that. I had
been drinking, though. And to tell ye the God's truth, it's
a thing I canna mend. There's nae soberer man than me in my
ordnar; but when I hear the wind blaw in my lug, it's my
belief that I gang gyte."
"You are a religious man," I replied, "and
this is sin."
"Ou," he returned, "if it wasna sin, I dinna
ken that I would care for't. Ye see, man, it's defiance.
There's a sair spang o' the auld sin o' the warld in yon
sea; it's an unchristian business at the best o't; an'
whiles when it gets up, an' the wind skreighs--the wind an'
her are a kind of sib, I'm thinkin'--an' thae Merry Men, the
daft callants, blawin' and lauchin', and puir souls in the
deid thraws warstlin' and leelang nicht wi' their bit
ships--weel, it comes ower me like a glamour. I'm a deil, I
ken't. But I think naething o' the puir sailor lads; I'm wi'
the sea, I'm just like ane o' her ain Merry Men."
I thought I should touch him in a joint of
his harness. I turned me towards the sea; the surf was
running gaily, wave after wave, with their manes blowing
behind them, riding one after another up the beach,
towering, curving, falling one upon another on the trampled
sand. Without, the salt air, the scared gulls, the
widespread army of the sea-chargers, neighing to each other,
as they gathered together to the assault of Aros; and close
before us, that line on the flat sands, that, with all their
number and their fury, they might never pass.
"Thus far shalt thou go," said I, "and no
farther." And then I quoted as solemnly as I was able a
verse that I had often before fitted to the chorus of the
breakers:
But Yet the Lord, that is on high, "Ay," said my kinsman, "at the hinder end,
the Lord will triumph; I dinna misdoobt that. But here on
earth, even silly men-folk daur Him to His face. It is no'
wise; I am no' sayin' that it's wise; but it's the pride of
the eye, and it's the lust o' life, an' it's the wale o'
pleesures."
I said no more, for we had now begun to cross
a neck of land that lay between us and Sandag; and I
withheld my last appeal to the man's better reason till we
should stand upon the spot associated with his crime. Nor
did he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a
firmer step. The call that I had made upon his mind acted
like a stimulant, and I could see that he had forgotten his
search for worthless jetsam, in a profound, gloomy, and yet
stirring train of thought. In three or four minutes we had
topped the brae and began to go down upon Sandag. The wreck
had been roughly handled by the sea; the stem had been spun
round and dragged a little lower down; and perhaps the stern
had been forced a little higher, for the two parts now lay
entirely separate on the beach. When we came to the grave I
stopped, uncovered my head in the thick rain, and, looking
my kinsman in the face, addressed him.
"A man," said I, "was in God's providence
suffered to escape from mortal dangers; he was poor, he was
naked, he was wet, he was weary, he was a stranger; he had
every claim upon the bowels of your compassion; it may be
that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, and kind;
it may be he was a man laden with iniquities to whom death
was the beginning of torment. I ask you in the sight of
Heaven: Gordon Darnaway, where is the man for whom Christ
died?"
He started visibly at the last words; but
there came no answer, and his face expressed no feeling but
a vague alarm.
"You were my father's brother," I continued;
"you have taught me to count your house as if it were my
father's house; and we are both sinful men walking before
the Lord among the sins and dangers of this life. It is by
our evil that God leads us into good; we sin, I dare not say
by His temptation, but I must say with His consent; and to
any but the brutish man his sins are the beginning of
wisdom. God has warned you by this crime; He warns you still
by the bloody grave between our feet; and if there shall
follow no repentance, no improvement, no return to Him, what
can we look for but the following of some memorable
judgment?"
Even as I spoke the words, the eyes of my
uncle wandered from my face. A change fell upon his looks
that cannot be described; his features seemed to dwindle in
size, the colour faded from his cheeks, one hand rose
waveringly and pointed over my shoulder into the distance,
and the oft-repeated name fell once more from his lips: "The
Christ-Anna!"
I turned; and if I was not appalled to the
same degree, as I return thanks to Heaven that I had not the
cause, I was still startled by the sight that met my eyes.
The form of a man stood upright on the cabin-hutch of the
wrecked ship; his back was towards us; he appeared to be
scanning the offing with shaded eyes, and his figure was
relieved to its full height, which was plainly very great,
against the sea and sky. I have said a thousand times that I
am not superstitious; but at that moment, with my mind
running upon death and sin, the unexplained appearance of a
stranger on that sea-girt, solitary island filled me with a
surprise that bordered close on terror. It seemed scarce
possible that any human soul should have come ashore alive
in such a sea as had raged last night along the coast of
Aros; and the only vessel within miles had gone down before
our eyes among the Merry Men. I was assailed with doubts
that made suspense unbearable, and, to put the matter to the
touch at once, stepped forward and hailed the figure like a
ship.
He turned about, and I thought he started to
behold us. At this my courage instantly revived, and I
called and signed to him to draw near, and he, on his part,
dropped immediately to the sands, and began slowly to
approach, with many stops and hesitations. At each repeated
mark of the man's uneasiness I grew the more confident
myself; and I advanced another step, encouraging him as I
did so with my head and hand. It was plain the castaway had
heard indifferent accounts of our island hospitality; and
indeed, about this time, the people farther north had a
sorry reputation.
"Why," I said, "the man is black!"
And just at that moment, in a voice that I
could scarce have recognized, my kinsman began swearing and
praying in a mingled stream. I looked at him; he had fallen
on his knees, his face was agonized; at each step of the
castaway's the pitch of his voice rose, the volubility of
his utterance and the fervour of his language redoubled. I
call it prayer, for it was addressed to God; but surely no
such ranting incongruities were ever before addressed to the
Creator by a creature: surely if prayer can be a sin, this
mad harangue was sinful. I ran to my kinsman, I seized him
by the shoulders, I dragged him to his feet.
"Silence, man," said I, "respect your God in
words, if not in action. Here, on the very scene of your
transgressions, He sends you an occasion of atonement.
Forward and embrace it: welcome like a father yon creature
who comes trembling to your mercy."
With that, I tried to force him towards the
black; but he felled me to the ground, burst from my grasp,
leaving the shoulder of his jacket, and fled up the hillside
towards the top of Aros like a deer. I staggered to my feet
again, bruised and somewhat stunned; the negro had paused in
surprise, perhaps in terror, some half-way between me and
the wreck; my uncle was already far away, bounding from rock
to rock; and I thus found myself torn for a time between two
duties. But I judged, and I pray Heaven that I judged
rightly, in favour of the poor wretch upon the sands; his
misfortune was at least not plainly of his own creation; it
was one, besides, that I could certainly relieve; and I had
begun by that time to regard my uncle as an incurable and
dismal lunatic. I advanced accordingly towards the black,
who now awaited my approach with folded arms, like one
prepared for either destiny. As I came nearer, he reached
forth his hand with a great gesture, such as I had seen from
the pulpit, and spoke to me in something of a pulpit voice,
but not a word was comprehensible. I tried him first in
English, then in Gaelic, both in vain; so that it was clear
we must rely upon the tongue of looks and gestures.
Thereupon I signed to him to follow me, which he did readily
and with a grave obeisance like a fallen king; all the while
there had come no shade of alteration in his face, neither
of anxiety while he was still waiting, nor of relief now
that he was reassured; if he were a slave, as I supposed, I
could not but judge he must have fallen from some high place
in his own country, and, fallen as he was, I could not but
admire his bearing. As we passed the grave, I paused and
raised my hands and eyes to heaven in token of respect and
sorrow for the dead; and he, as if in answer, bowed low and
spread his hands abroad; it was a strange motion, but done
like a thing of common custom; and I supposed it was
ceremonial in the land from which he came. At the same time
he pointed to my uncle, whom we could just see perched upon
a knoll, and touched his head to indicate that he was mad.
We took the long way round the shore, for I
feared to excite my uncle if we struck across the island;
and as we walked, I had time enough to mature the little
dramatic exhibition by which I hoped to satisfy my doubts.
Accordingly, paused on a rock, I proceeded to imitate before
the negro the action of the man whom I had seen the day
before taking bearings with the compass at Sandag. He
understood me at once, and, taking the imitation out of my
hands, showed me where the boat was, pointed out seaward as
if to indicate the position of the schooner, and then down
along the edge of the rock with the words "Espirito
Santo," strangely pronounced, but clear enough for
recognition. I had thus been right in my conjecture; the
pretended historical inquiry had been but a cloak for
treasure-hunting; the man who had played on Dr. Robertson
was the same as the foreigner who visited Grisapol in
spring, and now, with many others, lay dead under the Roost
of Aros: there had their greed brought them, there should
their bones be tossed for evermore. In the meantime the
black continued his imitation of the scene, now looking up
skyward as though watching the approach of the storm; now,
in the character of a seaman, waving the rest to come
aboard; now as an officer, running along the rock and
entering the boat; and anon bending over imaginary oars with
the air of a hurried boatman; but all with the same
solemnity of manner, so that I was never even moved to
smile. Lastly, he indicated to me, by a pantomime not to be
described in words, how he himself had gone up to examine
the stranded wreck, and, to his grief and indignation, had
been deserted by his comrades; and thereupon folded his arms
once more, and stooped his head, like one accepting fate.
The mystery of his presence being thus solved
for me, I explained to him by means of a sketch the fate of
the vessel and of all aboard her. He showed no surprise nor
sorrow, and, with a sudden lifting of his open hand, seemed
to dismiss his former friends or masters (whichever they had
been) into God's pleasure. Respect came upon me and grew
stronger, the more I observed him; I saw he had a powerful
mind and a sober and severe character, such as I loved to
commune with; and before we reached the house of Aros I had
almost forgotten, and wholly forgiven him, his uncanny
colour.
To Mary I told all that had passed without
suppression, though I own my heart failed me; but I did
wrong to doubt her sense of justice.
"You did the right," she said. "God's will be
done." And she set out meat for us at once.
As soon as I was satisfied, I bade Rorie keep
an eye upon the castaway, who was still eating, and set
forth again myself to find my uncle. I had not gone far
before I saw him sitting in the same place, upon the very
topmost knoll, and seemingly in the same attitude as when I
had last observed him. From that point, as I have said, the
most of Aros and the neighbouring Ross would be spread below
him like a map; and it was plain that he kept a bright
look-out in all directions, for my head had scarcely risen
above the summit of the first ascent before he had leaped to
his feet and turned as if to face me. I hailed him at once,
as well as I was able, in the same tones and words as I had
often used before, when I had come to summon him to dinner.
I passed on a little farther, and again tried parley, with
the same result. But when I began a second time to advance,
his insane fears blazed up again, and still in dead silence,
but with incredible speed, he began to flee from before me
along the rocky summit of the hill. An hour before he had
been dead weary, and I had been comparatively active. But
now his strength was recruited by the fervour of insanity,
and it would have been vain for me to dream of pursuit. Nay,
the very attempt, I thought, might have inflamed his
terrors, and thus increased the miseries of our position.
And I had nothing left but to turn homeward and make my sad
report to Mary.
She heard it, as she had heard the first,
with a concerned composure, and, bidding me lie down and
take that rest of which I stood so much in need, set forth
herself in quest of her misguided father. At that age it
would have been a strange thing that put me from either meat
or sleep; I slept long and deep; and it was already long
past noon before I awoke and came downstairs into the
kitchen. Mary, Rorie, and the black castaway were seated
about the fire in silence; and I could see that Mary had
been weeping. There was cause enough, as I soon learned, for
tears. First she, and then Rorie, had been forth to seek my
uncle; each in turn had found him perched upon the hill-top,
and from each in turn he had silently and swiftly fled.
Rorie had tried to chase him, but in vain; madness lent a
new vigour to his bounds; he sprang from rock to rock over
the widest gullies; he scoured like the wind along the
hill-tops; he doubled and twisted Re a hare before the dogs;
and Rorie at length gave in; and the last that he saw, my
uncle was seated as before upon the crest of Aros. Even
during the hottest excitement of the chase, even when the
fleet-footed servant had come, for a moment, very near to
capture him, the poor lunatic had uttered not a sound. He
fled, and he was silent, like a beast; and this silence had
terrified his pursuer.
There was something heart-breaking in the
situation. How to capture the madman, how to feed him in the
meanwhile, and what to do with him when he was captured,
were the three difficulties that we had to solve.
"The black," said I, "is the cause of this
attack. It may even be his presence in the house that keeps
my uncle on the hill. We have done the fair thing; he has
been fed and warmed under this roof; now I propose that
Rorie put him across the bay in the coble, and take him
through the Ross as far as Grisapol."
In this proposal Mary heartily concurred; and
bidding the black follow us, we all three descended to the
pier. Certainly, Heaven's will was declared against Gordon
Darnaway; a thing had happened, never paralleled before in
Aros: during the storm, the coble had broken loose, and,
striking on the rough splinters of the pier, now lay in four
feet of water with one side stove in. Three days of work at
least would be required to make her float. But I was not to
be beaten. I led the whole party round to where the gut was
narrowest, swam to the other side, and called to the black
to follow me. He signed, with the same clearness and quiet
as before, that he knew not the art; and there was truth
apparent in his signals, it would have occurred to none of
us to doubt his truth; and that hope being over, we must all
go back even as we came to the house of Aros, the negro
walking in our midst without embarrassment.
All we could do that day was to make one more
attempt to communicate with the unhappy madman. Again he was
visible on his perch; again he fled in silence. But food and
a great cloak were at least left for his comfort; the rain,
besides, had cleared away, and the night promised to be even
warm. We might compose ourselves, we thought, until the
morrow; rest was the chief requisite, that we might be
strengthened for unusual exertions; and as none cared to
talk, we separated at an early hour.
I lay long awake, planning a campaign for the
morrow. I was to place the black on the side of Sandag,
whence he should head my uncle towards the house; Rorie in
the west, I on the east, were to complete the cordon, as
best we might. It seemed to me, the more I recalled the
configuration of the island, that it should be possible,
though hard, to force him down upon the low ground along
Aros Bay; and once there, even with the strength of his
madness, ultimate escape was hardly to be feared. It was on
his terror of the black that I relied; for I made sure,
however he might run, it would not be in the direction of
the man whom he supposed to have returned from the dead, and
thus one point of the compass at least would be secure.
When at length I fell asleep, it was to be
awakened shortly after by a dream of wrecks, black men, and
submarine adventure; and I found myself so shaken and
fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped out
before the house. Within, Rorie and the black were asleep
together in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful night of
stars, with here and there a cloud still hanging, last
stragglers of the tempest. It was near the top of the flood,
and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless quiet of the
night. Never, not even in the height of the tempest, had I
heard their song with greater awe. Now, when the winds were
gathered home, when the deep was dandling itself back into
its summer slumber, and when the stars rained their gentle
light over land and sea, the voice of these tide-breakers
was still raised for havoc. They seemed, indeed, to be part
of the world's evil and the tragic side of life. Nor were
their meaningless vociferations the only sounds that broke
the silence of the night. For I could hear, now shrill and
thrilling and now almost drowned, the note of a human voice
that accompanied the uproar of the Roost. I knew it for my
kinsman's; and a great fear fell upon me of God's judgments,
and the evil in the world. I went back again into the
darkness of the house as into a place of shelter, and lay
long upon my bed, pondering these mysteries.
It was late when I again woke, and I leaped
into my clothes and hurried to the kitchen. No one was
there; Rorie and the black had both stealthily departed long
before; and my heart stood still at the discovery. I could
rely on Rorie's heart, but I placed no trust in his
discretion. If he had thus set out without a word, he was
plainly bent upon some service to my uncle. But what service
could he hope to render even alone, far less in the company
of the man in whom my uncle found his fears incarnated? Even
if I were not already too late to prevent some deadly
mischief, it was plain I must delay no longer. With the
thought I was out of the house; and often as I have run on
the rough sides of Aros, I never ran as I did that fatal
morning. I do not believe I put twelve minutes to the whole
ascent.
My uncle was gone from his perch. The basket
had indeed been torn open and the meat scattered on the
turf; but, as we found afterwards, no mouthful had been
tasted; and there was not another trace of human existence
in that wide field of view. Day had already filled the clear
heavens; the sun already lighted in a rosy bloom upon the
crest of Ben Kyaw; but all below me the rude knolls of Aros
and the shield of sea lay steeped in the clear darkling
twilight of the dawn.
"Rorie!" I cried; and again "Rorie!" My voice
died in the silence, but there came no answer back. If there
were indeed an enterprise afoot to catch my uncle, it was
plainly not in fleetness of foot, but in dexterity of
stalking, that the hunters placed their trust. I ran on
farther, keeping the higher spurs, and looking right and
left, nor did I pause again till I was on the mount above
Sandag. I could see the wreck, the uncovered belt of sand,
the waves idly beating, the long ledge of rocks, and on
either hand the tumbled knolls, boulders, and gullies of the
island. But still no human thing.
At a stride the sunshine fell on Aros, and
the shadows and colours leaped into being. Not half a moment
later, below me to the west, sheep began to scatter as in a
panic. There came a cry. I saw my uncle running. I saw the
black jump up in hot pursuit; and before I had time to
understand, Rorie also had appeared, calling directions in
Gaelic as to a dog herding sheep.
I took to my heels to interfere, and perhaps
I had done better to have waited where I was, for I was the
means of cutting off the madman's last escape. There was
nothing before him from that moment but the grave, the
wreck, and the sea in Sandag Bay. And yet Heaven knows that
what I did was for the best.
My Uncle Gordon saw in what direction,
horrible to him, the chase was driving him. He doubled,
darting to the right and left; but high as the fever ran in
his veins, the black was still the swifter. Turn where he
could, he was still forestalled, still driven toward the
scene of his crime. Suddenly he began to shriek aloud, so
that the coast re-echoed; and now both I and Rorie were
calling on the black to stop. But all was vain, for it was
written otherwise. The pursuer still ran, the chase still
sped before him screaming; they avoided the grave, and
skimmed close past the timbers of the wreck; in a breath
they had cleared the sand; and still my kinsman did not
pause, but dashed straight into the surf; and the black, now
almost within reach, still followed swiftly behind him.
Rorie and I both stopped, for the thing was now beyond the
hands of men, and these were the decrees of God that came to
pass before our eyes. There was never a sharper ending. On
that steep beach they were beyond their depth at a bound;
neither could swim; the black rose once for a moment with a
throttling cry; but the current had them, racing seaward;
and if ever they came up again, which God alone can tell, it
would be ten minutes after, at the far end of Aros Roost,
where the sea-birds hover fishing.
(End.)
LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY
THE GALE
A MAN OUT OF THE SEA
Is more of might by far,
Than noise of many waters is,
Or great sea-billows are.