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The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables

by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #344 · 452,880 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson


        
Release date: October 1, 1995 [eBook #344]
                Most recently updated: May 17, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/344

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MERRY MEN, AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES ***




The Merry Men
and
Other Tales and Fables

by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

tenth edition

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1904

Three of the following Tales have appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_;
one in _Longman’s_; one in Mr. Henry Norman’s Christmas Annual; and one
in the _Court and Society Review_. The Author desires to make proper
acknowledgements to the Publishers concerned.

Dedication


_My dear Lady Taylor_,

_To your name_, _if I wrote on brass_, _I could add nothing_; _it has
been already written higher than I could dream to reach_, _by a strong
and dear hand_; _and if I now dedicate to you these tales_, _it is not
as the writer who brings you his work_, _but as the friend who would
remind you of his affection_.

_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON_

Skerryvore, Bournemouth.


Contents

 THE MERRY MEN
 CHAPTER 1. EILEAN AROS
 CHAPTER 2. WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS
 CHAPTER 3. LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY
 CHAPTER 4. THE GALE
 CHAPTER 5. A MAN OUT OF THE SEA

 WILL O’ THE MILL
 CHAPTER 1. THE PLAIN AND THE STARS
 CHAPTER 2. THE PARSON’S MARJORY
 CHAPTER 3. DEATH

 MARKHEIM

 THRAWN JANET

 OLALLA

 THE TREASURE OF FRANCHARD
 CHAPTER 1. BY THE DYING MOUNTEBANK
 CHAPTER 2.  MORNING TALK
 CHAPTER 3. THE ADOPTION
 CHAPTER 4. THE EDUCATION OF A PHILOSOPHER
 CHAPTER 5. TREASURE TROVE
 CHAPTER 6. A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION, IN TWO PARTS
 CHAPTER 7. THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DESPREZ
 CHAPTER 8. THE WAGES OF PHILOSOPHY




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 peals 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[5] 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 hill sides,
there were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even
as far as Aros, fifteen miles away.

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 gulls 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 sift 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 inquiries. 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!




CHAPTER 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 sea-shells
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[15], 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?”

“Why should we need them at high noon?” she asked.

But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. “We’ll bruik[16] 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.

“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 bit 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 held 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, wanchancy life. Mony’s
the gliff I got mysel’ 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 wasnae very weel acquant wi’
the sea. But, troth, if it wasnae prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be
temp’it to think it wasnae 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 shure, whilk would be
what Dauvit was likely ettling at. But, man, they were sair wonders
that God showed to the _Christ-Anna_—wonders, do I ca’ them? Judgments,
rather: judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons o’ the deep. And
their souls—to think o’ that—their souls, man, maybe no prepared! The
sea—a muckle yett to hell!”

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 gray’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 wickedness 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, shure eneueh, an’ shure eneueh 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 lang 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
couldnae 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 wasnae 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 gurled 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 foucht like men dementit, and the niest 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. “Auld 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 suld 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 periods 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 ye see yon scart upo’ the water?” he inquired; “yon ane wast the
gray 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 heavily 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.” And 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 havenae 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.




CHAPTER III.
LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY.


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 upon air. Aros is a very rough islet, its surface
strewn with great rocks and shaggy with fernland 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 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 over-shadowed 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 figure-head 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 along-side 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 man 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 the 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 rocks 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
behind 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, and robbed a moment later of the sun. The knoll which I
had just surmounted overflanked a little 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 boathook, 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, polling
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 relies 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 may be 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—poor, greedy, and most likely lawless—filled me with
apprehensions for my uncle’s money, and even for the safety of his
daughter. I was still wondering how we were to get rid of them when I
came, all breathless, to the top of Aros. The whole world was shadowed
over; only in the extreme east, on a hill of the mainland, one last
gleam of sunshine lingered like a jewel; rain had begun to fall, not
heavily, but in great drops; the sea was rising with each moment, and
already a band of white encircled Aros and the nearer coasts of
Grisapol. The boat was still pulling seaward, but I now became aware of
what had been hidden from me lower down—a large, heavily sparred,
handsome schooner, lying to at the south end of Aros. Since I had not
seen her in the morning when I had looked around so closely at the
signs of the weather, and upon these lone waters where a sail was
rarely visible, it was clear she must have lain last night behind the
uninhabited Eilean Gour, and this proved conclusively that she was
manned by strangers to our coast, for that anchorage, though good
enough to look at, is little better than a trap for ships. With such
ignorant sailors upon so wild a coast, the coming gale was not unlikely
to bring death upon its wings.




CHAPTER IV.
THE GALE.


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 hadnae a chance but to rin
for Kyle Dona. The gate they’re gaun the noo, they couldnae 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 maunnae interfere; ye maunnae 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, Cherlie,” 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 realise 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 men 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 havenae 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, neednae 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 at 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 course; 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.

The 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
recognised us with a toss of one hand fleeringly 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 ship-wreck, 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 wool 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 cannae be; they droon withoot it. Ha’e,” 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.

“Ha’e, 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.




CHAPTER V.
A MAN OUT OF THE SEA.


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 midleg 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 cannae 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 wasnae sin, I dinnae 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 you sea; it’s an unchristian business at the best o’t;
an’ whiles when it gets up, an’ the wind skreights—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’ the
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,
Is more of might by far,
Than noise of many waters is,
As great sea billows are.


“Ay,” said my kinsinan, “at the hinder end, the Lord will triumph; I
dinnae misdoobt that. But here on earth, even silly men-folk daur Him
to His face. It is nae wise; I am nae 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 begun 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 rated last night along the coasts 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
recognised, my kinsman began swearing and praying in a mingled stream.
I looked at him; he had fallen on his knees, his face was agonised; 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 halfway 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, pausing 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. He made not so much as
a movement in reply. 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 like 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 clear 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 a 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
would, 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 seabirds hover fishing.




WILL O’ THE MILL.




CHAPTER I.
THE PLAIN AND THE STARS.


The Mill here Will lived with his adopted parents stood in a falling
valley between pinewoods and great mountains. Above, hill after hill,
soared upwards until they soared out of the depth of the hardiest
timber, and stood naked against the sky. Some way up, a long grey
village lay like a seam or a ray of vapour on a wooded hillside; and
when the wind was favourable, the sound of the church bells would drop
down, thin and silvery, to Will. Below, the valley grew ever steeper
and steeper, and at the same time widened out on either hand; and from
an eminence beside the mill it was possible to see its whole length and
away beyond it over a wide plain, where the river turned and shone, and
moved on from city to city on its voyage towards the sea. It chanced
that over this valley there lay a pass into a neighbouring kingdom; so
that, quiet and rural as it was, the road that ran along beside the
river was a high thoroughfare between two splendid and powerful
societies. All through the summer, travelling-carriages came crawling
up, or went plunging briskly downwards past the mill; and as it
happened that the other side was very much easier of ascent, the path
was not much frequented, except by people going in one direction; and
of all the carriages that Will saw go by, five-sixths were plunging
briskly downwards and only one-sixth crawling up. Much more was this
the case with foot-passengers. All the light-footed tourists, all the
pedlars laden with strange wares, were tending downward like the river
that accompanied their path. Nor was this all; for when Will was yet a
child a disastrous war arose over a great part of the world. The
newspapers were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with
cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles around the
coil of battle terrified good people from their labours in the field.
Of all this, nothing was heard for a long time in the valley; but at
last one of the commanders pushed an army over the pass by forced
marches, and for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril, drum
and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill. All day the child
stood and watched them on their passage—the rhythmical stride, the
pale, unshaven faces tanned about the eyes, the discoloured regimentals
and the tattered flags, filled him with a sense of weariness, pity, and
wonder; and all night long, after he was in bed, he could hear the
cannon pounding and the feet trampling, and the great armament sweeping
onward and downward past the mill. No one in the valley ever heard the
fate of the expedition, for they lay out of the way of gossip in those
troublous times; but Will saw one thing plainly, that not a man
returned. Whither had they all gone? Whither went all the tourists and
pedlars with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with
servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing
downward and ever renewed from above? Even the wind blew oftener down
the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall. It
seemed like a great conspiracy of things animate and inanimate; they
all went downward, fleetly and gaily downward, and only he, it seemed,
remained behind, like a stock upon the wayside. It sometimes made him
glad when he noticed how the fishes kept their heads up stream. They,
at least, stood faithfully by him, while all else were posting downward
to the unknown world.

One evening he asked the miller where the river went.

“It goes down the valley,” answered he, “and turns a power of mills—six
score mills, they say, from here to Unterdeck—and is none the wearier
after all. And then it goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great
corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say)
where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walling up
and down before the door. And it goes under bridges with stone men upon
them, looking down and smiling so curious it the water, and living
folks leaning their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then
it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it
falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and tobacco
from the Indies. Ay, it has a long trot before it as it goes singing
over our weir, bless its heart!”

“And what is the sea?” asked Will.

“The sea!” cried the miller. “Lord help us all, it is the greatest
thing God made! That is where all the water in the world runs down into
a great salt lake. There it lies, as flat as my hand and as
innocent-like as a child; but they do say when the wind blows it gets
up into water-mountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down
great ships bigger than our mill, and makes such a roaring that you can
hear it miles away upon the land. There are great fish in it five times
bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old
as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on
her head.”

Will thought he had never heard anything like this, and he kept on
asking question after question about the world that lay away down the
river, with all its perils and marvels, until the old miller became
quite interested himself, and at last took him by the hand and led him
to the hilltop that overlooks the valley and the plain. The sun was
near setting, and hung low down in a cloudless sky. Everything was
defined and glorified in golden light. Will had never seen so great an
expanse of country in his life; he stood and gazed with all his eyes.
He could see the cities, and the woods and fields, and the bright
curves of the river, and far away to where the rim of the plain
trenched along the shining heavens. An over-mastering emotion seized
upon the boy, soul and body; his heart beat so thickly that he could
not breathe; the scene swam before his eyes; the sun seemed to wheel
round and round, and throw off, as it turned, strange shapes which
disappeared with the rapidity of thought, and were succeeded by others.
Will covered his face with his hands, and burst into a violent fit of
tears; and the poor miller, sadly disappointed and perplexed, saw
nothing better for it than to take him up in his arms and carry him
home in silence.

From that day forward Will was full of new hopes and longings.
Something kept tugging at his heart-strings; the running water carried
his desires along with it as he dreamed over its fleeting surface; the
wind, as it ran over innumerable tree-tops, hailed him with encouraging
words; branches beckoned downward; the open road, as it shouldered
round the angles and went turning and vanishing fast and faster down
the valley, tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles
on the eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat
lowlands, and watched the clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish
wind and trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger
by the wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled
downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that
went that way, were it cloud or carriage, bird or brown water in the
stream, he felt his heart flow out after it in an ecstasy of longing.

We are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the
sea, all that counter-marching of tribes and races that confounds old
history with its dust and rumour, sprang from nothing more abstruse
than the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural instinct for
cheap rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and
pitiful explanation. The tribes that came swarming out of the North and
East, if they were indeed pressed onward from behind by others, were
drawn at the same time by the magnetic influence of the South and West.
The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the eternal city
rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they
travelled towards wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set
on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of
humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failure,
the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus
into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on
their perilous march. There is one legend which profoundly represents
their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers encountered a
very old man shod with iron. The old man asked them whither they were
going; and they answered with one voice: “To the Eternal City!” He
looked upon them gravely. “I have sought it,” he said, “over the most
part of the world. Three such pairs as I now carry on my feet have I
worn out upon this pilgrimage, and now the fourth is growing slender
underneath my steps. And all this while I have not found the city.” And
he turned and went his own way alone, leaving them astonished.

And yet this would scarcely parallel the intensity of Will’s feeling
for the plain. If he could only go far enough out there, he felt as if
his eyesight would be purged and clarified, as if his hearing would
grow more delicate, and his very breath would come and go with luxury.
He was transplanted and withering where he was; he lay in a strange
country and was sick for home. Bit by bit, he pieced together broken
notions of the world below: of the river, ever moving and growing until
it sailed forth into the majestic ocean; of the cities, full of brisk
and beautiful people, playing fountains, bands of music and marble
palaces, and lighted up at night from end to end with artificial stars
of gold; of the great churches, wise universities, brave armies, and
untold money lying stored in vaults; of the high-flying vice that moved
in the sunshine, and the stealth and swiftness of midnight murder. I
have said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was like
some one lying in twilit, formless preexistence, and stretching out his
hands lovingly towards many-coloured, many-sounding life. It was no
wonder he was unhappy, he would go and tell the fish: they were made
for their life, wished for no more than worms and running water, and a
hole below a falling bank; but he was differently designed, full of
desires and aspirations, itching at the fingers, lusting with the eyes,
whom the whole variegated world could not satisfy with aspects. The
true life, the true bright sunshine, lay far out upon the plain. And O!
to see this sunlight once before he died! to move with a jocund spirit
in a golden land! to hear the trained singers and sweet church bells,
and see the holiday gardens! “And O fish!” he would cry, “if you would
only turn your noses down stream, you could swim so easily into the
fabled waters and see the vast ships passing over your head like
clouds, and hear the great water-hills making music over you all day
long!” But the fish kept looking patiently in their own direction,
until Will hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

Hitherto the traffic on the road had passed by Will, like something
seen in a picture: he had perhaps exchanged salutations with a tourist,
or caught sight of an old gentleman in a travelling cap at a carriage
window; but for the most part it had been a mere symbol, which he
contemplated from apart and with something of a superstitious feeling.
A time came at last when this was to be changed. The miller, who was a
greedy man in his way, and never forewent an opportunity of honest
profit, turned the mill-house into a little wayside inn, and, several
pieces of good fortune falling in opportunely, built stables and got
the position of post master on the road. It now became Will’s duty to
wait upon people, as they sat to break their fasts in the little arbour
at the top of the mill garden; and you may be sure that he kept his
ears open, and learned many new things about the outside world as he
brought the omelette or the wine. Nay, he would often get into
conversation with single guests, and by adroit questions and polite
attention, not only gratify his own curiosity, but win the goodwill of
the travellers. Many complimented the old couple on their serving-boy;
and a professor was eager to take him away with him, and have him
properly educated in the plain. The miller and his wife were mightily
astonished and even more pleased. They thought it a very good thing
that they should have opened their inn. “You see,” the old man would
remark, “he has a kind of talent for a publican; he never would have
made anything else!” And so life wagged on in the valley, with high
satisfaction to all concerned but Will. Every carriage that left the
inn-door seemed to take a part of him away with it; and when people
jestingly offered him a lift, he could with difficulty command his
emotion. Night after night he would dream that he was awakened by
flustered servants, and that a splendid equipage waited at the door to
carry him down into the plain; night after night; until the dream,
which had seemed all jollity to him at first, began to take on a colour
of gravity, and the nocturnal summons and waiting equipage occupied a
place in his mind as something to be both feared and hoped for.

One day, when Will was about sixteen, a fat young man arrived at sunset
to pass the night. He was a contented-looking fellow, with a jolly eye,
and carried a knapsack. While dinner was preparing, he sat in the
arbour to read a book; but as soon as he had begun to observe Will, the
book was laid aside; he was plainly one of those who prefer living
people to people made of ink and paper. Will, on his part, although he
had not been much interested in the stranger at first sight, soon began
to take a great deal of pleasure in his talk, which was full of good
nature and good sense, and at last conceived a great respect for his
character and wisdom. They sat far into the night; and about two in the
morning Will opened his heart to the young man, and told him how he
longed to leave the valley and what bright hopes he had connected with
the cities of the plain. The young man whistled, and then broke into a
smile.

“My young friend,” he remarked, “you are a very curious little fellow
to be sure, and wish a great many things which you will never get. Why,
you would feel quite ashamed if you knew how the little fellows in
these fairy cities of yours are all after the same sort of nonsense,
and keep breaking their hearts to get up into the mountains. And let me
tell you, those who go down into the plains are a very short while
there before they wish themselves heartily back again. The air is not
so light nor so pure; nor is the sun any brighter. As for the beautiful
men and women, you would see many of them in rags and many of them
deformed with horrible disorders; and a city is so hard a place for
people who are poor and sensitive that many choose to die by their own
hand.”

“You must think me very simple,” answered Will. “Although I have never
been out of this valley, believe me, I have used my eyes. I know how
one thing lives on another; for instance, how the fish hangs in the
eddy to catch his fellows; and the shepherd, who makes so pretty a
picture carrying home the lamb, is only carrying it home for dinner. I
do not expect to find all things right in your cities. That is not what
troubles me; it might have been that once upon a time; but although I
live here always, I have asked many questions and learned a great deal
in these last years, and certainly enough to cure me of my old fancies.
But you would not have me die like a dog and not see all that is to be
seen, and do all that a man can do, let it be good or evil? you would
not have me spend all my days between this road here and the river, and
not so much as make a motion to be up and live my life?—I would rather
die out of hand,” he cried, “than linger on as I am doing.”

“Thousands of people,” said the young man, “live and die like you, and
are none the less happy.”

“Ah!” said Will, “if there are thousands who would like, why should not
one of them have my place?”

It was quite dark; there was a hanging lamp in the arbour which lit up
the table and the faces of the speakers; and along the arch, the leaves
upon the trellis stood out illuminated against the night sky, a pattern
of transparent green upon a dusky purple. The fat young man rose, and,
taking Will by the arm, led him out under the open heavens.

“Did you ever look at the stars?” he asked, pointing upwards.

“Often and often,” answered Will.

“And do you know what they are?”

“I have fancied many things.”

“They are worlds like ours,” said the young man. “Some of them less;
many of them a million times greater; and some of the least sparkles
that you see are not only worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turning
about each other in the midst of space. We do not know what there may
be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our difficulties or the
cure of all our sufferings: and yet we can never reach them; not all
the skill of the craftiest of men can fit out a ship for the nearest of
these our neighbours, nor would the life of the most aged suffice for
such a journey. When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend is
dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are unweariedly
shining overhead. We may stand down here, a whole army of us together,
and shout until we break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We
may climb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer them. All we can
do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats; the
starshine lights upon our heads, and where mine is a little bald, I
dare say you can see it glisten in the darkness. The mountain and the
mouse. That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with Arcturus or
Aldebaran. Can you apply a parable?” he added, laying his hand upon
Will’s shoulder. “It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually
vastly more convincing.”

Will hung his head a little, and then raised it once more to heaven.
The stars seemed to expand and emit a sharper brilliancy; and as he
kept turning his eyes higher and higher, they seemed to increase in
multitude under his gaze.

“I see,” he said, turning to the young man. “We are in a rat-trap.”

“Something of that size. Did you ever see a squirrel turning in a cage?
and another squirrel sitting philosophically over his nuts? I needn’t
ask you which of them looked more of a fool.”




CHAPTER II.
THE PARSON’S MARJORY.


After some years the old people died, both in one winter, very
carefully tended by their adopted son, and very quietly mourned when
they were gone. People who had heard of his roving fancies supposed he
would hasten to sell the property, and go down the river to push his
fortunes. But there was never any sign of such in intention on the part
of Will. On the contrary, he had the inn set on a better footing, and
hired a couple of servants to assist him in carrying it on; and there
he settled down, a kind, talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet
three in his stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice.
He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it
was not much to be wondered at from the first, for he was always full
of notions, and kept calling the plainest common-sense in question; but
what most raised the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his
courtship with the parson’s Marjory.

The parson’s Marjory was a lass about nineteen, when Will would be
about thirty; well enough looking, and much better educated than any
other girl in that part of the country, as became her parentage. She
held her head very high, and had already refused several offers of
marriage with a grand air, which had got her hard names among the
neighbours. For all that she was a good girl, and one that would have
made any man well contented.

Will had never seen much of her; for although the church and parsonage
were only two miles from his own door, he was never known to go there
but on Sundays. It chanced, however, that the parsonage fell into
disrepair, and had to be dismantled; and the parson and his daughter
took lodgings for a month or so, on very much reduced terms, at Will’s
inn. Now, what with the inn, and the mill, and the old miller’s
savings, our friend was a man of substance; and besides that, he had a
name for good temper and shrewdness, which make a capital portion in
marriage; and so it was currently gossiped, among their ill-wishers,
that the parson and his daughter had not chosen their temporary lodging
with their eyes shut. Will was about the last man in the world to be
cajoled or frightened into marriage. You had only to look into his
eyes, limpid and still like pools of water, and yet with a sort of
clear light that seemed to come from within, and you would understand
at once that here was one who knew his own mind, and would stand to it
immovably. Marjory herself was no weakling by her looks, with strong,
steady eyes and a resolute and quiet bearing. It might be a question
whether she was not Will’s match in stedfastness, after all, or which
of them would rule the roost in marriage. But Marjory had never given
it a thought, and accompanied her father with the most unshaken
innocence and unconcern.

The season was still so early that Will’s customers were few and far
between; but the lilacs were already flowering, and the weather was so
mild that the party took dinner under the trellice, with the noise of
the river in their ears and the woods ringing about them with the songs
of birds. Will soon began to take a particular pleasure in these
dinners. The parson was rather a dull companion, with a habit of dozing
at table; but nothing rude or cruel ever fell from his lips. And as for
the parson’s daughter, she suited her surroundings with the best grace
imaginable; and whatever she said seemed so pat and pretty that Will
conceived a great idea of her talents. He could see her face, as she
leaned forward, against a background of rising pinewoods; her eyes
shone peaceably; the light lay around her hair like a kerchief;
something that was hardly a smile rippled her pale cheeks, and Will
could not contain himself from gazing on her in an agreeable dismay.
She looked, even in her quietest moments, so complete in herself, and
so quick with life down to her finger tips and the very skirts of her
dress, that the remainder of created things became no more than a blot
by comparison; and if Will glanced away from her to her surroundings,
the trees looked inanimate and senseless, the clouds hung in heaven
like dead things, and even the mountain tops were disenchanted. The
whole valley could not compare in looks with this one girl.

Will was always observant in the society of his fellow-creatures; but
his observation became almost painfully eager in the case of Marjory.
He listened to all she uttered, and read her eyes, at the same time,
for the unspoken commentary. Many kind, simple, and sincere speeches
found an echo in his heart. He became conscious of a soul beautifully
poised upon itself, nothing doubting, nothing desiring, clothed in
peace. It was not possible to separate her thoughts from her
appearance. The turn of her wrist, the still sound of her voice, the
light in her eyes, the lines of her body, fell in tune with her grave
and gentle words, like the accompaniment that sustains and harmonises
the voice of the singer. Her influence was one thing, not to be divided
or discussed, only to be felt with gratitude and joy. To Will, her
presence recalled something of his childhood, and the thought of her
took its place in his mind beside that of dawn, of running water, and
of the earliest violets and lilacs. It is the property of things seen
for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers
in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that
impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life
with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews
a man’s character from the fountain upwards.

One day after dinner Will took a stroll among the firs; a grave
beatitude possessed him from top to toe, and he kept smiling to himself
and the landscape as he went. The river ran between the stepping-stones
with a pretty wimple; a bird sang loudly in the wood; the hill-tops
looked immeasurably high, and as he glanced at them from time to time
seemed to contemplate his movements with a beneficent but awful
curiosity. His way took him to the eminence which overlooked the plain;
and there he sat down upon a stone, and fell into deep and pleasant
thought. The plain lay abroad with its cities and silver river;
everything was asleep, except a great eddy of birds which kept rising
and falling and going round and round in the blue air. He repeated
Marjory’s name aloud, and the sound of it gratified his ear. He shut
his eyes, and her image sprang up before him, quietly luminous and
attended with good thoughts. The river might run for ever; the birds
fly higher and higher till they touched the stars. He saw it was empty
bustle after all; for here, without stirring a feet, waiting patiently
in his own narrow valley, he also had attained the better sunlight.

The next day Will made a sort of declaration across the dinner-table,
while the parson was filling his pipe.

“Miss Marjory,” he said, “I never knew any one I liked so well as you.
I am mostly a cold, unkindly sort of man; not from want of heart, but
out of strangeness in my way of thinking; and people seem far away from
me. ’Tis as if there were a circle round me, which kept every one out
but you; I can hear the others talking and laughing; but you come quite
close. Maybe, this is disagreeable to you?” he asked.

Marjory made no answer.

“Speak up, girl,” said the parson.

“Nay, now,” returned Will, “I wouldn’t press her, parson. I feel
tongue-tied myself, who am not used to it; and she’s a woman, and
little more than a child, when all is said. But for my part, as far as
I can understand what people mean by it, I fancy I must be what they
call in love. I do not wish to be held as committing myself; for I may
be wrong; but that is how I believe things are with me. And if Miss
Marjory should feel any otherwise on her part, mayhap she would be so
kind as shake her head.”

Marjory was silent, and gave no sign that she had heard.

“How is that, parson?” asked Will.

“The girl must speak,” replied the parson, laying down his pipe.
“Here’s our neighbour who says he loves you, Madge. Do you love him, ay
or no?”

“I think I do,” said Marjory, faintly.

“Well then, that’s all that could be wished!” cried Will, heartily. And
he took her hand across the table, and held it a moment in both of his
with great satisfaction.

“You must marry,” observed the parson, replacing his pipe in his mouth.

“Is that the right thing to do, think you?” demanded Will.

“It is indispensable,” said the parson.

“Very well,” replied the wooer.

Two or three days passed away with great delight to Will, although a
bystander might scarce have found it out. He continued to take his
meals opposite Marjory, and to talk with her and gaze upon her in her
father’s presence; but he made no attempt to see her alone, nor in any
other way changed his conduct towards her from what it had been since
the beginning. Perhaps the girl was a little disappointed, and perhaps
not unjustly; and yet if it had been enough to be always in the
thoughts of another person, and so pervade and alter his whole life,
she might have been thoroughly contented. For she was never out of
Will’s mind for an instant. He sat over the stream, and watched the
dust of the eddy, and the poised fish, and straining weeds; he wandered
out alone into the purple even, with all the blackbirds piping round
him in the wood; he rose early in the morning, and saw the sky turn
from grey to gold, and the light leap upon the hill-tops; and all the
while he kept wondering if he had never seen such things before, or how
it was that they should look so different now. The sound of his own
mill-wheel, or of the wind among the trees, confounded and charmed his
heart. The most enchanting thoughts presented themselves unbidden in
his mind. He was so happy that he could not sleep at night, and so
restless, that he could hardly sit still out of her company. And yet it
seemed as if he avoided her rather than sought her out.

One day, as he was coming home from a ramble, Will found Marjory in the
garden picking flowers, and as he came up with her, slackened his pace
and continued walking by her side.

“You like flowers?” he said.

“Indeed I love them dearly,” she replied. “Do you?”

“Why, no,” said he, “not so much. They are a very small affair, when
all is done. I can fancy people caring for them greatly, but not doing
as you are just now.”

“How?” she asked, pausing and looking up at him.

“Plucking them,” said he. “They are a deal better off where they are,
and look a deal prettier, if you go to that.”

“I wish to have them for my own,” she answered, “to carry them near my
heart, and keep them in my room. They tempt me when they grow here;
they seem to say, ‘Come and do something with us;’ but once I have cut
them and put them by, the charm is laid, and I can look at them with
quite an easy heart.”

“You wish to possess them,” replied Will, “in order to think no more
about them. It’s a bit like killing the goose with the golden eggs.
It’s a bit like what I wished to do when I was a boy. Because I had a
fancy for looking out over the plain, I wished to go down there—where I
couldn’t look out over it any longer. Was not that fine reasoning?
Dear, dear, if they only thought of it, all the world would do like me;
and you would let your flowers alone, just as I stay up here in the
mountains.” Suddenly he broke off sharp. “By the Lord!” he cried. And
when she asked him what was wrong, he turned the question off and
walked away into the house with rather a humorous expression of face.

He was silent at table; and after the night hid fallen and the stars
had come out overhead, he walked up and down for hours in the courtyard
and garden with an uneven pace. There was still a light in the window
of Marjory’s room: one little oblong patch of orange in a world of dark
blue hills and silver starlight. Will’s mind ran a great deal on the
window; but his thoughts were not very lover-like. “There she is in her
room,” he thought, “and there are the stars overhead:—a blessing upon
both!” Both were good influences in his life; both soothed and braced
him in his profound contentment with the world. And what more should he
desire with either? The fat young man and his councils were so present
to his mind, that he threw back his head, and, putting his hands before
his mouth, shouted aloud to the populous heavens. Whether from the
position of his head or the sudden strain of the exertion, he seemed to
see a momentary shock among the stars, and a diffusion of frosty light
pass from one to another along the sky. At the same instant, a corner
of the blind was lifted and lowered again at once. He laughed a loud
ho-ho! “One and another!” thought Will. “The stars tremble, and the
blind goes up. Why, before Heaven, what a great magician I must be! Now
if I were only a fool, should not I be in a pretty way?” And he went
off to bed, chuckling to himself: “If I were only a fool!”

The next morning, pretty early, he saw her once more in the garden, and
sought her out.

“I have been thinking about getting married,” he began abruptly; “and
after having turned it all over, I have made up my mind it’s not
worthwhile.”

She turned upon him for a single moment; but his radiant, kindly
appearance would, under the circumstances, have disconcerted an angel,
and she looked down again upon the ground in silence. He could see her
tremble.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he went on, a little taken aback. “You ought
not. I have turned it all over, and upon my soul there’s nothing in it.
We should never be one whit nearer than we are just now, and, if I am a
wise man, nothing like so happy.”

“It is unnecessary to go round about with me,” she said. “I very well
remember that you refused to commit yourself; and now that I see you
were mistaken, and in reality have never cared for me, I can only feel
sad that I have been so far misled.”

“I ask your pardon,” said Will stoutly; “you do not understand my
meaning. As to whether I have ever loved you or not, I must leave that
to others. But for one thing, my feeling is not changed; and for
another, you may make it your boast that you have made my whole life
and character something different from what they were. I mean what I
say; no less. I do not think getting married is worth while. I would
rather you went on living with your father, so that I could walk over
and see you once, or maybe twice a week, as people go to church, and
then we should both be all the happier between whiles. That’s my
notion. But I’ll marry you if you will,” he added.

“Do you know that you are insulting me?” she broke out.

“Not I, Marjory,” said he; “if there is anything in a clear conscience,
not I. I offer all my heart’s best affection; you can take it or want
it, though I suspect it’s beyond either your power or mine to change
what has once been done, and set me fancy-free. I’ll marry you, if you
like; but I tell you again and again, it’s not worth while, and we had
best stay friends. Though I am a quiet man I have noticed a heap of
things in my life. Trust in me, and take things as I propose; or, if
you don’t like that, say the word, and I’ll marry you out of hand.”

There was a considerable pause, and Will, who began to feel uneasy,
began to grow angry in consequence.

“It seems you are too proud to say your mind,” he said. “Believe me
that’s a pity. A clean shrift makes simple living. Can a man be more
downright or honourable, to a woman than I have been? I have said my
say, and given you your choice. Do you want me to marry you? or will
you take my friendship, as I think best? or have you had enough of me
for good? Speak out for the dear God’s sake! You know your father told
you a girl should speak her mind in these affairs.”

She seemed to recover herself at that, turned without a word, walked
rapidly through the garden, and disappeared into the house, leaving
Will in some confusion as to the result. He walked up and down the
garden, whistling softly to himself. Sometimes he stopped and
contemplated the sky and hill-tops; sometimes he went down to the tail
of the weir and sat there, looking foolishly in the water. All this
dubiety and perturbation was so foreign to his nature and the life
which he had resolutely chosen for himself, that he began to regret
Marjory’s arrival. “After all,” he thought, “I was as happy as a man
need be. I could come down here and watch my fishes all day long if I
wanted: I was as settled and contented as my old mill.”

Marjory came down to dinner, looking very trim and quiet; and no sooner
were all three at table than she made her father a speech, with her
eyes fixed upon her plate, but showing no other sign of embarrassment
or distress.

“Father,” she began, “Mr. Will and I have been talking things over. We
see that we have each made a mistake about our feelings, and he has
agreed, at my request, to give up all idea of marriage, and be no more
than my very good friend, as in the past. You see, there is no shadow
of a quarrel, and indeed I hope we shall see a great deal of him in the
future, for his visits will always be welcome in our house. Of course,
father, you will know best, but perhaps we should do better to leave
Mr. Will’s house for the present. I believe, after what has passed, we
should hardly be agreeable inmates for some days.”

Will, who had commanded himself with difficulty from the first, broke
out upon this into an inarticulate noise, and raised one hand with an
appearance of real dismay, as if he were about to interfere and
contradict. But she checked him at once looking up at him with a swift
glance and an angry flush upon her cheek.

“You will perhaps have the good grace,” she said, “to let me explain
these matters for myself.”

Will was put entirely out of countenance by her expression and the ring
of her voice. He held his peace, concluding that there were some things
about this girl beyond his comprehension, in which he was exactly
right.

The poor parson was quite crestfallen. He tried to prove that this was
no more than a true lovers’ tiff, which would pass off before night;
and when he was dislodged from that position, he went on to argue that
where there was no quarrel there could be no call for a separation; for
the good man liked both his entertainment and his host. It was curious
to see how the girl managed them, saying little all the time, and that
very quietly, and yet twisting them round her finger and insensibly
leading them wherever she would by feminine tact and generalship. It
scarcely seemed to have been her doing—it seemed as if things had
merely so fallen out—that she and her father took their departure that
same afternoon in a farm-cart, and went farther down the valley, to
wait, until their own house was ready for them, in another hamlet. But
Will had been observing closely, and was well aware of her dexterity
and resolution. When he found himself alone he had a great many curious
matters to turn over in his mind. He was very sad and solitary, to
begin with. All the interest had gone out of his life, and he might
look up at the stars as long as he pleased, he somehow failed to find
support or consolation. And then he was in such a turmoil of spirit
about Marjory. He had been puzzled and irritated at her behaviour, and
yet he could not keep himself from admiring it. He thought he
recognised a fine, perverse angel in that still soul which he had never
hitherto suspected; and though he saw it was an influence that would
fit but ill with his own life of artificial calm, he could not keep
himself from ardently desiring to possess it. Like a man who has lived
among shadows and now meets the sun, he was both pained and delighted.

As the days went forward he passed from one extreme to another; now
pluming himself on the strength of his determination, now despising his
timid and silly caution. The former was, perhaps, the true thought of
his heart, and represented the regular tenor of the man’s reflections;
but the latter burst forth from time to time with an unruly violence,
and then he would forget all consideration, and go up and down his
house and garden or walk among the fir-woods like one who is beside
himself with remorse. To equable, steady-minded Will this state of
matters was intolerable; and he determined, at whatever cost, to bring
it to an end. So, one warm summer afternoon he put on his best clothes,
took a thorn switch in his hand, and set out down the valley by the
river. As soon as he had taken his determination, he had regained at a
bound his customary peace of heart, and he enjoyed the bright weather
and the variety of the scene without any admixture of alarm or
unpleasant eagerness. It was nearly the same to him how the matter
turned out. If she accepted him he would have to marry her this time,
which perhaps was, all for the best. If she refused him, he would have
done his utmost, and might follow his own way in the future with an
untroubled conscience. He hoped, on the whole, she would refuse him;
and then, again, as he saw the brown roof which sheltered her, peeping
through some willows at an angle of the stream, he was half inclined to
reverse the wish, and more than half ashamed of himself for this
infirmity of purpose.

Marjory seemed glad to see him, and gave him her hand without
affectation or delay.

“I have been thinking about this marriage,” he began.

“So have I,” she answered. “And I respect you more and more for a very
wise man. You understood me better than I understood myself; and I am
now quite certain that things are all for the best as they are.”

“At the same time—,” ventured Will.

“You must be tired,” she interrupted. “Take a seat and let me fetch you
a glass of wine. The afternoon is so warm; and I wish you not to be
displeased with your visit. You must come quite often; once a week, if
you can spare the time; I am always so glad to see my friends.”

“O, very well,” thought Will to himself. “It appears I was right after
all.” And he paid a very agreeable visit, walked home again in capital
spirits, and gave himself no further concern about the matter.

For nearly three years Will and Marjory continued on these terms,
seeing each other once or twice a week without any word of love between
them; and for all that time I believe Will was nearly as happy as a man
can be. He rather stinted himself the pleasure of seeing her; and he
would often walk half-way over to the parsonage, and then back again,
as if to whet his appetite. Indeed there was one corner of the road,
whence he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of the
valley between sloping firwoods, with a triangular snatch of plain by
way of background, which he greatly affected as a place to sit and
moralise in before returning homewards; and the peasants got so much
into the habit of finding him there in the twilight that they gave it
the name of “Will o’ the Mill’s Corner.”

At the end of the three years Marjory played him a sad trick by
suddenly marrying somebody else. Will kept his countenance bravely, and
merely remarked that, for as little as he knew of women, he had acted
very prudently in not marrying her himself three years before. She
plainly knew very little of her own mind, and, in spite of a deceptive
manner, was as fickle and flighty as the rest of them. He had to
congratulate himself on an escape, he said, and would take a higher
opinion of his own wisdom in consequence. But at heart, he was
reasonably displeased, moped a good deal for a month or two, and fell
away in flesh, to the astonishment of his serving-lads.

It was perhaps a year after this marriage that Will was awakened late
one night by the sound of a horse galloping on the road, followed by
precipitate knocking at the inn-door. He opened his window and saw a
farm servant, mounted and holding a led horse by the bridle, who told
him to make what haste he could and go along with him; for Marjory was
dying, and had sent urgently to fetch him to her bedside. Will was no
horseman, and made so little speed upon the way that the poor young
wife was very near her end before he arrived. But they had some
minutes’ talk in private, and he was present and wept very bitterly
while she breathed her last.




CHAPTER III.
DEATH


Year after year went away into nothing, with great explosions and
outcries in the cities on the plain: red revolt springing up and being
suppressed in blood, battle swaying hither and thither, patient
astronomers in observatory towers picking out and christening new
stars, plays being performed in lighted theatres, people being carried
into hospital on stretchers, and all the usual turmoil and agitation of
men’s lives in crowded centres. Up in Will’s valley only the winds and
seasons made an epoch; the fish hung in the swift stream, the birds
circled overhead, the pine-tops rustled underneath the stars, the tall
hills stood over all; and Will went to and fro, minding his wayside
inn, until the snow began to thicken on his head. His heart was young
and vigorous; and if his pulses kept a sober time, they still beat
strong and steady in his wrists. He carried a ruddy stain on either
cheek, like a ripe apple; he stooped a little, but his step was still
firm; and his sinewy hands were reached out to all men with a friendly
pressure. His face was covered with those wrinkles which are got in
open air, and which rightly looked at, are no more than a sort of
permanent sunburning; such wrinkles heighten the stupidity of stupid
faces; but to a person like Will, with his clear eyes and smiling
mouth, only give another charm by testifying to a simple and easy life.
His talk was full of wise sayings. He had a taste for other people; and
other people had a taste for him. When the valley was full of tourists
in the season, there were merry nights in Will’s arbour; and his views,
which seemed whimsical to his neighbours, were often enough admired by
learned people out of towns and colleges. Indeed, he had a very noble
old age, and grew daily better known; so that his fame was heard of in
the cities of the plain; and young men who had been summer travellers
spoke together in _cafés_ of Will o’ the Mill and his rough philosophy.
Many and many an invitation, you may be sure, he had; but nothing could
tempt him from his upland valley. He would shake his head and smile
over his tobacco-pipe with a deal of meaning. “You come too late,” he
would answer. “I am a dead man now: I have lived and died already.
Fifty years ago you would have brought my heart into my mouth; and now
you do not even tempt me. But that is the object of long living, that
man should cease to care about life.” And again: “There is only one
difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner,
the sweets come last.” Or once more: “When I was a boy, I was a bit
puzzled, and hardly knew whether it was myself or the world that was
curious and worth looking into. Now, I know it is myself, and stick to
that.”

He never showed any symptom of frailty, but kept stalwart and firm to
the last; but they say he grew less talkative towards the end, and
would listen to other people by the hour in an amused and sympathetic
silence. Only, when he did speak, it was more to the point and more
charged with old experience. He drank a bottle of wine gladly; above
all, at sunset on the hill-top or quite late at night under the stars
in the arbour. The sight of something attractive and unatttainable
seasoned his enjoyment, he would say; and he professed he had lived
long enough to admire a candle all the more when he could compare it
with a planet.

One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in bed in such
uneasiness of body and mind that he arose and dressed himself and went
out to meditate in the arbour. It was pitch dark, without a star; the
river was swollen, and the wet woods and meadows loaded the air with
perfume. It had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder
for the morrow. A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two!
Whether it was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of
fever in his old limbs, Will’s mind was besieged by tumultuous and
crying memories. His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the
death of his adopted parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of
those small circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet
the very gist of a man’s own life to himself—things seen, words heard,
looks misconstrued—arose from their forgotten corners and usurped his
attention. The dead themselves were with him, not merely taking part in
this thin show of memory that defiled before his brain, but revisiting
his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid dreams. The fat
young man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory came and
went with an apronful of flowers between the garden and the arbour; he
could hear the old parson knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant
nose. The tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed: he was sometimes
half-asleep and drowned in his recollections of the past; and sometimes
he was broad awake, wondering at himself. But about the middle of the
night he was startled by the voice of the dead miller calling to him
out of the house as he used to do on the arrival of custom. The
hallucination was so perfect that Will sprang from his seat and stood
listening for the summons to be repeated; and as he listened he became
conscious of another noise besides the brawling of the river and the
ringing in his feverish ears. It was like the stir of horses and the
creaking of harness, as though a carriage with an impatient team had
been brought up upon the road before the courtyard gate. At such an
hour, upon this rough and dangerous pass, the supposition was no better
than absurd; and Will dismissed it from his mind, and resumed his seat
upon the arbour chair; and sleep closed over him again like running
water. He was once again awakened by the dead miller’s call, thinner
and more spectral than before; and once again he heard the noise of an
equipage upon the road. And so thrice and four times, the same dream,
or the same fancy, presented itself to his senses: until at length,
smiling to himself as when one humours a nervous child, he proceeded
towards the gate to set his uncertainty at rest.

From the arbour to the gate was no great distance, and yet it took Will
some time; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the court,
and crossed his path at every step. For, first, he was suddenly
surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if his
garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot,
damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath. Now the
heliotrope had been Marjory’s favourite flower, and since her death not
one of them had ever been planted in Will’s ground.

“I must be going crazy,” he thought. “Poor Marjory and her
heliotropes!”

And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once been
hers. If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified;
for there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as
of yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the
night when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity. The
illusion only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned,
rubbing his eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black
night behind it. While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have
stood there quite a long time, there came a renewal of the noises on
the road: and he turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing
to meet him across the court. There was something like the outline of a
great carriage discernible on the road behind the stranger, and, above
that, a few black pine-tops, like so many plumes.

“Master Will?” asked the new-comer, in brief military fashion.

“That same, sir,” answered Will. “Can I do anything to serve you?”

“I have heard you much spoken of, Master Will,” returned the other;
“much spoken of, and well. And though I have both hands full of
business, I wish to drink a bottle of wine with you in your arbour.
Before I go, I shall introduce myself.”

Will led the way to the trellis, and got a lamp lighted and a bottle
uncorked. He was not altogether unused to such complimentary
interviews, and hoped little enough from this one, being schooled by
many disappointments. A sort of cloud had settled on his wits and
prevented him from remembering the strangeness of the hour. He moved
like a person in his sleep; and it seemed as if the lamp caught fire
and the bottle came uncorked with the facility of thought. Still, he
had some curiosity about the appearance of his visitor, and tried in
vain to turn the light into his face; either he handled the lamp
clumsily, or there was a dimness over his eyes; but he could make out
little more than a shadow at table with him. He stared and stared at
this shadow, as he wiped out the glasses, and began to feel cold and
strange about the heart. The silence weighed upon him, for he could
hear nothing now, not even the river, but the drumming of his own
arteries in his ears.

“Here’s to you,” said the stranger, roughly.

“Here is my service, sir,” replied Will, sipping his wine, which
somehow tasted oddly.

“I understand you are a very positive fellow,” pursued the stranger.

Will made answer with a smile of some satisfaction and a little nod.

“So am I,” continued the other; “and it is the delight of my heart to
tramp on people’s corns. I will have nobody positive but myself; not
one. I have crossed the whims, in my time, of kings and generals and
great artists. And what would you say,” he went on, “if I had come up
here on purpose to cross yours?”

Will had it on his tongue to make a sharp rejoinder; but the politeness
of an old innkeeper prevailed; and he held his peace and made answer
with a civil gesture of the hand.

“I have,” said the stranger. “And if I did not hold you in a particular
esteem, I should make no words about the matter. It appears you pride
yourself on staying where you are. You mean to stick by your inn. Now I
mean you shall come for a turn with me in my barouche; and before this
bottle’s empty, so you shall.”

“That would be an odd thing, to be sure,” replied Will, with a chuckle.
“Why, sir, I have grown here like an old oak-tree; the Devil himself
could hardly root me up: and for all I perceive you are a very
entertaining old gentleman, I would wager you another bottle you lose
your pains with me.”

The dimness of Will’s eyesight had been increasing all this while; but
he was somehow conscious of a sharp and chilling scrutiny which
irritated and yet overmastered him.

“You need not think,” he broke out suddenly, in an explosive, febrile
manner that startled and alarmed himself, “that I am a stay-at-home,
because I fear anything under God. God knows I am tired enough of it
all; and when the time comes for a longer journey than ever you dream
of, I reckon I shall find myself prepared.”

The stranger emptied his glass and pushed it away from him. He looked
down for a little, and then, leaning over the table, tapped Will three
times upon the forearm with a single finger. “The time has come!” he
said solemnly.

An ugly thrill spread from the spot he touched. The tones of his voice
were dull and startling, and echoed strangely in Will’s heart.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with some discomposure. “What do you
mean?”

“Look at me, and you will find your eyesight swim. Raise your hand; it
is dead-heavy. This is your last bottle of wine, Master Will, and your
last night upon the earth.”

“You are a doctor?” quavered Will.

“The best that ever was,” replied the other; “for I cure both mind and
body with the same prescription. I take away all pain and I forgive all
sins; and where my patients have gone wrong in life, I smooth out all
complications and set them free again upon their feet.”

“I have no need of you,” said Will.

“A time comes for all men, Master Will,” replied the doctor, “when the
helm is taken out of their hands. For you, because you were prudent and
quiet, it has been long of coming, and you have had long to discipline
yourself for its reception. You have seen what is to be seen about your
mill; you have sat close all your days like a hare in its form; but now
that is at an end; and,” added the doctor, getting on his feet, “you
must arise and come with me.”

“You are a strange physician,” said Will, looking steadfastly upon his
guest.

“I am a natural law,” he replied, “and people call me Death.”

“Why did you not tell me so at first?” cried Will. “I have been waiting
for you these many years. Give me your hand, and welcome.”

“Lean upon my arm,” said the stranger, “for already your strength
abates. Lean on me as heavily as you need; for though I am old, I am
very strong. It is but three steps to my carriage, and there all your
trouble ends. Why, Will,” he added, “I have been yearning for you as if
you were my own son; and of all the men that ever I came for in my long
days, I have come for you most gladly. I am caustic, and sometimes
offend people at first sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such
as you.”

“Since Marjory was taken,” returned Will, “I declare before God you
were the only friend I had to look for.” So the pair went arm-in-arm
across the courtyard.

One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses
pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night
there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards
the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o’
the Mill had gone at last upon his travels.




MARKHEIM


“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some
customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior
knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that
the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he
continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes
had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the
shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the
flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he resumed,
“when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and
make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that;
you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my
books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I
remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and
ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the
eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then,
changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of
irony, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into
the possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s
cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe,
looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with
every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of
infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

“This time,” said he, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but
to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to
the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock
Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my
errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a
lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he
had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing
you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I
must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well
know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this
statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious
lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near
thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

“Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after
all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be
it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he
went on, “this hand glass—fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a
good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my
customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole
heir of a remarkable collector.”

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had
stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a
shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a
sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as
swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the
hand that now received the glass.

“A glass,” he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more
clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

“And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask
me why not?” he said. “Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do
you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man.”

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted
him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on
hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard
favoured,” said he.

“I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas present, and you give me
this—this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this
hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell
me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself.
I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim
did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an
eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

“What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

“Not charitable?” returned the other, gloomily. “Not charitable; not
pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe
to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

“I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness,
and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love
match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

“Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in
love? Tell me about that.”

“I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the
time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

“Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand
here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry
away from any pleasure—no, not even from so mild a one as this. We
should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a
cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it—a cliff a
mile high—high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of
humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each
other: why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows,
we might become friends?”

“I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make
your purchase, or walk out of my shop!”

“True true,” said Markheim. “Enough, fooling. To business. Show me
something else.”

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the
shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim
moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he
drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different
emotions were depicted together on his face—terror, horror, and
resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard
lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer: and then, as he began
to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long,
skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen,
striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a
heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow
as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All
these told out the seconds in an intricate, chorus of tickings. Then
the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in
upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness
of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on
the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that
inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless
bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross
blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces
of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images
in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of
shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body
of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small
and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in
that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim
had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed,
this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent
voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or
direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was found.
Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that
would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit.
Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the
brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind.
Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had closed for the
victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with
every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral
turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz-the
clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered
him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle,
beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance
reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from
Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were
an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of
his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And
still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with a
sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should
have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he
should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and
only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have
been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all
things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the
mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to
be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all
this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted
attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand
of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would
jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock,
the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a
besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of
the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their
curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them
sitting motionless and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to
spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now
startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties
struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised
finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths,
prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.
Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of
the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by
the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And
then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence
of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and
freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud
among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado,
the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one
portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on
the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold
on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his
window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the
pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the
brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But
here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched
the servant set forth sweet-hearting, in her poor best, “out for the
day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course;
and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a
stir of delicate footing—he was surely conscious, inexplicably
conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the
house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and
yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet
again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and
hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which
still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small
and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to
the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the
threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness,
did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to
beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts
and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name.
Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay
quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and
shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which
would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had
become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from
his knocking, and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth
from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London
multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of
safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come: at any
moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the
deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure.
The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the
keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was
still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the
mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his
victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit
half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on
the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and
inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to
the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its
back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had
been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all
expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with
blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing
circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain
fair-day in a fishers’ village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon
the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice
of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the
crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the
chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with
pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured: Brown-rigg with her
apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the
death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing
was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was
looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at
these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums.
A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for
the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden
weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these
considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his
mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a
while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale
mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable
energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been
arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the
beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more
remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the
painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he
felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all
those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one
who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a
tremor.

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the
keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. Outside, it had
begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had
banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house
were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled
with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door,
he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of
another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated
loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his
muscles, and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs;
on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing;
and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against
the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain
through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be
distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the
tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the
counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to
mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of
the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him
to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by
presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop,
he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great
effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed
stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he
would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening with ever fresh
attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the
outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned
continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their
orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as
with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty
steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three
ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never
again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s
observing eyes, he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of
his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitions
terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some
wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on
the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as
the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould
of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said)
when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might
befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal
his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might
yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch;
ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for
instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his
victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen
invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense,
these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against
sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless
exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and
not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind
him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite
dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and
incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld
himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures,
framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine
Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with
tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good
fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this
concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It
was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides;
for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on
the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the
tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time
directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate
of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the
street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the
notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of
many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable
was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it
smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with
answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of
the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on
the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky;
and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the
somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson
(which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs,
and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his
feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went
over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted
the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the
knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the
dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some
chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But
when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room,
looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and
then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke
loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the
visitant returned.

“Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the
room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a
film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new comer seemed to change
and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the
shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he
bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror,
there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the
earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood
looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking
for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

“I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her
sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be
found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

“You know me?” cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favourite of mine,” he said;
“and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

“What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

“What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I
propose to render you.”

“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by
you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!”

“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or
rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

“Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty
and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all
men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them.
You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and
muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see
their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out
for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid;
my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose
myself.”

“To me?” inquired the visitant.

“To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were
intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of the
heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it;
my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have
dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants
of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not
look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you
not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any
wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me
for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—the unwilling
sinner?”

“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards
me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care
not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so
as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the
servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures
on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it
is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the
Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you
where to find the money?”

“For what price?” asked Markheim.

“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph.
“No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of
thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should
find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing
to commit myself to evil.”

“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from
a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man
has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion,
or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak
compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance,
he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus
to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving
followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please
yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply,
spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and
the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that
you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your
conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from
such a deathbed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening
to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had
been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you
think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and
sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the
thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because
you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this
crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of
good?”

“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are
murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving
mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and
feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their
acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my
eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on
a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a
murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues
also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes
for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in
action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,
whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling
cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the
rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but
because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape.”

“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on
which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many
lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been
driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,
driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these
temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,
and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power
and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor
in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents
of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past;
something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of
the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble
books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my
life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of
destination.”

“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked
the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some
thousands?”

“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.

“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

“That also you will lose,” said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he
exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall
one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override
the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do
not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds,
renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as
murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows
their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I
love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth
but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life,
and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the
mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you
have been in this world,” said be, “through many changes of fortune and
varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years
ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have
blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any
cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I
shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor
can anything but death avail to stop you.”

“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied
with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise
of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their
surroundings.”

“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as
you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in
many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so—and at any
account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any
one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your
own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration.
“No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you
will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are
irrevocably written down.”

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor
who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show
you the money?”

“And grace?” cried Markheim.

“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago,
did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your
voice the loudest in the hymn?”

“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by
way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are
opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house;
and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which
he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.

“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there
is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say,
is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious
countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once
the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has
already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in
your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if
needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your
safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he
cried; “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and
act!”

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil
acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease
from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I
be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet,
by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love
of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have
still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment,
you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely
change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even
as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to
watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went
downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly
before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream,
random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed
it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet
haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop,
where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely
silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood
gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your
master.”




THRAWN JANET


The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without
relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse
under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features,
his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon
on lst Peter, v. and 8th, “The devil as a roaring lion,” on the Sunday
after every seventeenth of August,

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