← catalogue

The Deemster

by Sir Hall Caine · English · Gutenberg #35781 · 825,716 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Deemster
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Deemster

Author: Sir Hall Caine


        
Release date: April 6, 2011 [eBook #35781]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35781

Credits: E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEEMSTER ***


E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



The Shadow of a Crime

THE DEEMSTER

by

HALL CAINE

Hall Caine's Best Books
In Three Volumes

Volume I







P. F. Collier & Son
New York



CONTENTS

   CHAPTER I.       THE DEATH OF OLD EWAN
   CHAPTER II.      A MAN CHILD IS BORN
   CHAPTER III.     THE CHRISTENING OF YOUNG EWAN
   CHAPTER IV.      THE DEEMSTER OF MAN
   CHAPTER V.       THE MANXMAN'S BISHOP
   CHAPTER VI.      THE COZY NEST AT BISHOP'S COURT
   CHAPTER VII.     DANNY THE MADCAP
   CHAPTER VIII.    PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN
   CHAPTER IX.      THE SERVICE ON THE SHORE
   CHAPTER X.       THE FIRST NIGHT WITH THE HERRINGS
   CHAPTER XI.      THE HERRING BREAKFAST
   CHAPTER XII.     DAN'S PENANCE
   CHAPTER XIII.    HOW EWAN MOURNED FOR HIS WIFE
   CHAPTER XIV.     WRESTLING WITH FATE
   CHAPTER XV.      THE LIE THAT EWAN TOLD
   CHAPTER XVI.     THE PLOWING MATCH
   CHAPTER XVII.    THE WRONG WAY WITH DAN
   CHAPTER XVIII.   THE BLIND WOMAN'S SECOND SIGHT
   CHAPTER XIX.     HOW EWAN FOUND DAN
   CHAPTER XX.      BLIND PASSION AND PAIN
   CHAPTER XXI.     THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT
   CHAPTER XXII.    ALONE, ALONE--ALL, ALL ALONE!
   CHAPTER XXIII.   ALONE ON A WIDE, WIDE SEA
   CHAPTER XXIV.    "THERE'S GOLD ON THE CUSHAGS YET."
   CHAPTER XXV.     A RESURRECTION INDEED
   CHAPTER XXVI.    HOW EWAN CAME TO CHURCH
   CHAPTER XXVII.   HOW THE NEWS CAME TO THE BISHOP
   CHAPTER XXVIII.  THE CHILD GHOST IN THE HOUSE
   CHAPTER XXIX.    BY BISHOP'S LAW OR DEEMSTER'S
   CHAPTER XXX.     THE DEEMSTER'S INQUEST
   CHAPTER XXXI.    FATHER AND SON
   CHAPTER XXXII.   DIVINATION
   CHAPTER XXXIII.  KIDNAPPED
   CHAPTER XXXIV.   A RUDE TRIBUNAL
   CHAPTER XXXV.    THE COURT OF GENERAL JAIL DELIVERY
   CHAPTER XXXVI.   CUT OFF FROM THE PEOPLE

   THE BRIEF RELATION OF DANIEL MYLREA

   CHAPTER XXXVII.  OF HIS OUTCAST STATE
   CHAPTER XXXVIII. OF HIS WAY OF LIFE
   CHAPTER XXXIX.   OF THE GHOSTLY HAND UPON HIM
   CHAPTER XL.      OF HIS GREAT LONELINESS
   CHAPTER XLI.     OF HOW HE KEPT HIS MANHOOD
   CHAPTER XLII.    OF THE BREAKING OF THE CURSE
   CHAPTER XLIII.   OF HIS GREAT RESOLVE
   CHAPTER XLIV.    THE SWEATING SICKNESS
   CHAPTER XLV.     "OUR FATHER, WHICH ART IN HEAVEN"




THE DEEMSTER




CHAPTER I

THE DEATH OF OLD EWAN


Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was
wearing them at length. He was forty years of age; his black hair was
thin on the crown and streaked with gray about the temples; the
crow's-feet were thick under his small eyes, and the backs of his lean
hands were coated with a reddish down. But he had life in every vein,
and restless energy in every limb.

His father, Ewan Mylrea, had lived long, and mourned much, and died in
sorrow. The good man had been a patriarch among his people, and never a
serener saint had trod the ways of men. He was already an old man when
his wife died. Over her open grave he tried to say, "The Lord gave, and
the Lord hath taken away; blessed--" But his voice faltered and broke.
Though he lived ten years longer, he held up his head no more. Little by
little he relinquished all active interest in material affairs. The
world had lost its light for him, and he was traveling in the dusk.

On his sons, Thorkell, the elder, Gilcrist, the younger, with nearly
five years between them, the conduct of his estate devolved. Never were
brothers more unlike. Gilcrist, resembling his father, was of a simple
and tranquil soul; Thorkell's nature was fiery, impetuous, and crafty.
The end was the inevitable one; the heel of Thorkell was too soon on the
neck of Gilcrist.

Gilcrist's placid spirit overcame its first vexation, and he seemed
content to let his interests slip from his hands. Before he was out
Thorkell Mylrea was in effect the master of Ballamona; his younger
brother was nightly immersed in astronomy and the Fathers, and the old
man was sitting daily, in his slippers, in the high-backed armchair by
the ingle, over which these words were cut in the black oak: "God's
Providence is mine inheritance."

They were strange effects that followed. People said they had never
understood the extraordinary fortunes of Ballamona. Again and again the
rents were raised throughout the estate, until the farmers cried in the
grip of their poverty that they would neither go nor starve. Then the
wagons of Thorkell Mylrea, followed close at their tail-boards by the
carts of the clergy, drove into the cornfields when the corn was cut,
and picked up the stooks and bore them away amid the deep curses of the
bare-armed reapers, who looked on in their impotent rage.

Nevertheless, Thorkell Mylrea said, far and wide, without any show of
reserve, and with every accent of sincerity, that never before had his
father's affairs worn so grave a look. He told Ewan as much time after
time, and then the troubled old face looked puzzled. The end of many
earnest consultations between father and son, as the one sat by the open
hearth and the other leaned against the lettered ingle, was a speedy
recourse to certain moneys that lay at an English bank, as well as the
old man's signature to documents of high moment.

Old Ewan's spirits sank yet lower year by year, but he lived on
peacefully enough. As time went by, he talked less, and his humid eyes
seemed to look within in degree as they grew dim to things without. But
the day came at length when the old man died in his chair, before the
slumberous peat fire on the hearth, quietly, silently, without a
movement, his graspless fingers fumbling a worm-eaten hour-glass, his
long waves of thin white hair falling over his drooping shoulders, and
his upturned eyes fixed in a strong stare on the text carved on the
rannel-tree shelf, "God's Providence is mine inheritance."

That night Thorkell sat alone at the same ingle, in the same chair,
glancing at many parchments, and dropping them one by one into the fire.
Long afterward, when idle tongues were set to wag, it was said that the
elder son of Ewan Mylrea had found a means whereby to sap away his
father's personalty. Then it was remembered that through all his strange
misfortunes Thorkell had borne an equal countenance.

They buried the old man under the elder-tree by the wall of the
churchyard that stands over against the sea. It seemed as if half of the
inhabitants of the island came to his funeral, and six sets of bearers
claimed their turn to carry him to the grave. The day was a gloomy day
of winter; there was not a bird or a breath in the heavy air; the sky
was low and empty; the long dead sea was very gray and cold; and over
the unplowed land the withered stalks of the last crop lay dank on the
mold. When the company returned to Ballamona they sat down to eat and
drink and make merry, for "excessive sorrow is exceeding dry." No one
asked for the will; there was no will because there was no personalty,
and the lands were by law the inheritance of the eldest son. Thorkell
was at the head of his table, and he smiled a little, and sometimes
reached over the board to touch with his glass the glass that was held
out toward him. Gilcrist had stood with these mourners under the empty
sky, and his heart was as bare and desolate, but he could endure their
company no longer. In an agony of grief and remorse, and rage as well,
he got up from his untouched food and walked away to his own room. It
was a little, quiet nest of a room that looked out by one small window
over the marshy Curraghs that lay between the house and the sea. There
Gilcrist sat alone that day in a sort of dull stupor.

The daylight had gone, and the revolving lamps on the headland of Ayre
were twinkling red after black over the blank waters, when the door
opened and Thorkell entered. Gilcrist stirred the fire, and it broke
into a bright blaze. Thorkell's face wore a curious expression.

"I have been thinking a good deal about you, Gilcrist; especially during
the last few days. In fact, I have been troubled about you, to say the
truth," said Thorkell, and then he paused. "Affairs are in a bad way at
Ballamona--very."

Gilcrist made no response whatever, but clasped his hands about his knee
and looked steadily into the fire.

"We are neither of us young men now, but if you should think
of--of--anything, I should consider it wrong to stand--to put myself in
your way--to keep you here, that is--to your disadvantage, you know."

Thorkell was standing with his back to the fire, and his fingers
interlaced behind him.

Gilcrist rose to his feet. "Very well," he said, with a strained
quietness, and then turned toward the window and looked out at the dark
sea. Only the sea's voice from the shore beyond the churchyard broke the
silence in that little room.

Thorkell stood a moment, leaning on the mantel-shelf, and the flickering
lights of the fire seemed to make sinister smiles on his face. Then he
went out without a word.

Next morning, at daybreak, Gilcrist Mylrea was riding toward Derby Haven
with a pack in green cloth across his saddle-bow. He took passage by the
"King Orry," an old sea-tub plying once a week to Liverpool. From
Liverpool he went on to Cambridge to offer himself as a sizar at the
University.

It had never occurred to any one that Thorkell Mylrea would marry. But
his father was scarcely cold in his grave, the old sea-tub that took his
brother across the Channel had hardly grounded at Liverpool, when
Thorkell Mylrea offered his heart and wrinkled hand, and the five
hundred acres of Ballamona, to a lady twenty years of age, who lived at
a distance of some six miles from his estate. It would be more precise
to say that the liberal tender was made to the lady's father, for her
own will was little more than a cypher in the bargaining. She was a girl
of sweet spirit, very tender and submissive, and much under the spell of
religious feeling. Her mother had died during her infancy, and she had
been brought up in a household that was without other children, in a
gaunt rectory that never echoed with children's voices. Her father was
Archdeacon of the island, Archdeacon Teare; her own name was Joance.

If half the inhabitants of the island turned out at old Ewan's funeral,
the entire population of four parishes made a holiday of his son's
wedding. The one followed hard upon the other, and thrift was not absent
from either. Thorkell was married in the early spring at the
Archdeacon's church, at Andreas.

It would be rash to say that the presence of the great company at the
wedding was intended as a tribute to the many virtues of Thorkell
Mylrea. Indeed, it was as well that the elderly bridegroom could not
overhear the conversation with which some of the homely folk beguiled
the way.

"Aw, the murther of it," said one buirdly Manxman, "five-and-forty if
he's a day, and a wizened old polecat anyway."

"You'd really think the gel's got no feelin's. Aw, shockin', shockin',
extraordinary!"

"And a rael good gel too, they're sayin'. Amazin'! Amazin'!"

The marriage of Thorkell was a curious ceremony. First there walked
abreast the fiddler and the piper, playing vigorously the "Black and
Gray"; then came the bridegroom's men carrying osiers, as emblems of
their superiority over the bridesmaids, who followed them. Three times
the company passed round the church before entering it, and then they
trooped up toward the communion-rail.

Thorkell went through the ceremony with the air of a whipped terrier. On
the outside he was gay in frills and cuffs, and his thin hair was
brushed crosswise over the bald patch on his crown. He wore buckled
shoes and blue laces to his breeches. But his brave exterior lent him
small support as he took the ungloved hand of his girlish bride. He gave
his responses in a voice that first faltered, and then sent out a quick,
harsh, loud pipe. No such gaunt and grim shadow of a joyful bridegroom
ever before knelt beside a beautiful bride, and while the Archdeacon
married the spectre of a happy man to his own submissive daughter, the
whispered comments of the throng that filled nave and aisles and gallery
sometimes reached his own ears.

"You wouldn't think it, now, that the craythur's sold his own gel, and
him preaching there about the covenant and Isaac and Rebecca, and all
that!"

"Hush, man, it's Laban and Jacob he's meaning."

When the ceremony had come to an end, and the bridegroom's eyes were no
longer fixed in a stony stare on the words of the Commandments printed
in black and white under the chancel window, the scene underwent a swift
change. In one minute Thorkell was like another man. All his abject
bearing fell away. When the party was clear of the churchyard four of
the groom's men started for the Rectory at a race, and the first to
reach it won a flask of brandy, with which he returned at high speed to
the wedding company. Then Thorkell, as the custom was, bade his friends
to form a circle where they stood in the road, while he drank of the
brandy and handed the flask to his wife.

"Custom must be indulged with custom," said he, "or custom will weep."

After that the company moved on until they reached the door of the
Archdeacon's house, where the bride cake was broken over the bride's
hand, and then thrown to be scrambled for by the noisy throng that blew
neat's horns and fired guns and sang ditties by the way.

Thorkell, with the chivalrous bearing of an old courtier, delivered up
his wife to the flock of ladies who were ready to pounce upon her at the
door of the Rectory. Then he mingled freely with the people, and
chattered and bantered, and made quips and quibbles. Finally, he invited
all and sundry to partake freely of the oaten cake and ale that he had
himself brought from Ballamona in his car for the refreshment of his own
tenants there present. The fare was Lenten fare for a wedding day, and
some of the straggle-headed troop grumbled, and some sniffled, and some
scratched their heads, and some laughed outright. The beer and bread
were left almost untouched.

Thorkell was blind to the discontent of his guests, but the Archdeacon
perceived it, and forthwith called such of the tumultuous assemblage as
came from a distance into his barns. There the creels were turned bottom
up, and four close-jointed gates lifted off their hinges were laid on
the top for tables. Then from pans and boilers that simmered in the
kitchen a great feast was spread. First came the broth, well loaded with
barley and cabbage, and not destitute of the flavor of numerous sheep's
heads. This was served in wooden piggins, shells being used as spoons.
Then suet pudding, as round as a well-fed salmon, and as long as a 30
lb. cod. Last of all a fat hog, roasted whole, and cut with a cleaver,
but further dissected only by teeth and fingers, for the unfastidious
Manxman cared nothing for knife and fork.

After that there were liquor and lusty song. And all the time there
could be heard, over the boisterous harmony of the feasters within the
barn, the yet noisier racket of the people without.

By this time, whatever sentiment of doubtful charity had been harbored
in the icy breast of the Manxman had been thawed away under the
charitable effects of good cheer, and Thorkell Mylrea and Archdeacon
Teare began to appear in truly Christian character.

"It's none so ould he is yet, at all at all."

"Ould? He hasn't the hayseed out of his hair, boy."

"And a shocking powerful head-piece at him for all."

There were rough jokes and dubious toasts, and Thorkell enjoyed them
all. There was dancing, too, and fiddling, and the pipes at intervals,
and all went merry until midnight, when the unharmonious harmonies of
fiddle and pipes and unsteady song went off over the Curraghs in various
directions.

Next morning Thorkell took his wife home to Ballamona. They drove in the
open springless car in which he had brought down the oaten cake and ale.
Thorkell had seen that the remains of these good viands were thriftily
gathered up. He took them back home with him, carefully packed under the
board on which his young wife sat.




CHAPTER II

A MAN CHILD IS BORN


Three years passed and Thorkell's fortunes grew apace. He toiled early
and late. Time had no odd days or holiday in his calendar. Every day was
working day except Sunday, and then Thorkell, like a devout Christian,
went to church. Thorkell believed that he was a devoutly religious man,
but rumor whispered that he was better able to make his words fly up
than to prevent his thoughts from remaining below.

His wife did not seem to be a happy woman. During the three years of her
married life she had not borne her husband children. It began to dawn
upon her that Thorkell's sole desire in marriage had been a child, a
son, to whom he could leave what no man can carry away.

One Sunday morning, as Thorkell and his wife were on their way to
church, a young woman of about twenty passed them, and as she went by
she curtsied low to the lady. The girl had a comely, nut-brown face,
with dark wavy clusters of hair tumbling over her forehead from beneath
a white sun-bonnet, of which the poke had been dexterously rolled back.
It was summer, and her light blue bodice was open and showed a white
under-bodice and a full neck. Her sleeves were rolled up over the
elbows, and her dimpled arms were bare and brown. There was a look of
coquetry in her hazel eyes as they shot up their dark lustre under her
long lashes, and then dropped as quickly to her feet. She wore buckle
shoes with the open clock tops.

Thorkell's quick eyes glanced over her, and when the girl curtsied to
his wife he fell back the few paces that he was in front of her.

"Who is she?" he asked.

Thorkell's wife replied that the girl was a net-maker from near
Peeltown.

"What's her name?"

Thorkell's wife answered that the girl's name was Mally Kerruish.

"Who are her people? Has she any?"

Thorkell's wife explained that the girl had a mother only, who was poor
and worked in the fields, and had come to Ballamona for help during the
last hard winter.

"Humph! Doesn't look as if the daughter wanted for much. How does the
girl come by her fine feathers if her mother lives on charity?"

Thorkell's wizened face was twisted into grotesque lines. His wife's
face saddened, and her voice dropped as she hinted in faltering accents
that "scandal did say--say--"

"Well, woman, what does scandal say?" asked Thorkell; and his voice had
a curious lilt, and his mouth wore a strange smile.

"It says--I'm afraid, Thorkell, the poor girl is no better than she
ought to be."

Thorkell snorted, and then laughed in his throat like a frisky gelding.

"I thought she looked like a lively young puffin," he said, and then
trotted on in front, his head rolling between his shoulders, and his
eyes down. After going a few yards further he slackened speed again.

"Lives near Peeltown, you say--a net-maker--Mally--is it Mally
Kerruish?"

Thorkell's wife answered with a nod of the head, and then her husband
faced about, and troubled her with no further conversation until he drew
up at the church door, and said, "Quick, woman, quick, and mind you shut
the pew door after you."

But "God remembered Rachel and hearkened to her," and then, for the
first time, the wife of Thorkell Mylrea began to show a cheerful
countenance. Thorkell's own elevation of spirits was yet more
noticeable. He had heretofore showed no discontent with the old
homestead that had housed his people for six generations, but he now
began to build another and much larger house on the rising ground at the
foot of Slieu Dhoo. His habits underwent some swift and various changes.
He gave away no gray blankets that winter, the itinerant poor who were
"on the houses" often went empty from his door, and--most appalling
change of all--he promptly stopped his tithe. When the parson's cart
drove up to Ballamona, Thorkell turned the horse's head, and gave the
flank a sharp cut with his whip. The parson came in white with wrath.

"Let every pig dig for herself," said Thorkell. "I'll daub grease on the
rump of your fat pig no more."

Thorkell's new homestead rose rapidly, and when the walls were ready for
the roof the masons and carpenters went up to Ballamona for the
customary feast of cowree and jough and binjean.

"What! Is it true, then, as the saying is," Thorkell exclaimed at the
sight of them, "that when the sport is the merriest it is time to give
up?"

They ate no cowree at Ballamona that night and they drank no jough.

"We've been going to the goat's house for wool," grunted one of them as
they trudged home.

"Aw, well, man, and what can you get of the cat but his skin?" growled
another.

Next day they put on the first timbers of the roof, and the following
night a great storm swept over the island, and the roof-timbers were
torn away, not a spar or purlin being left in its place. Thorkell fumed
at the storm and swore at the men, and when the wind subsided he had the
work done afresh. The old homestead of Ballamona was thatched, but the
new one must be slated, and slates were quarried at and carted to Slieu
Dhoo, and run on to the new roof. A dead calm had prevailed during these
operations, but it was the calm that lies in the heart of the storm, and
the night after they were completed the other edge of the cyclone passed
over the island, tearing up the trees by their roots, and shaking the
old Ballamona to its foundations. Thorkell Mylrea slept not a wink, but
tramped up and down his bedroom the long night through; and next
morning, at daybreak, he drew the blind of his window, and peered
through the haze of the dawn to where his new house stood on the breast
of Slieu Dhoo. He could just descry its blue walls--it was roofless.

The people began to mutter beneath their breath.

"Aw, man, it's a judgment," said one.

"He has been middlin' hard on the widda and fatherless, and it's like
enough that there's Them aloft as knows it."

"What's that they're saying?" said one old crone, "what comes with the
wind goes with the water."

"Och, I knew his father--him and me were same as brothers--and a good
ould man for all."

"Well, and many a good cow has a bad calf," said the old woman.

Thorkell went about like a cloud of thunder, and when he heard that the
accidents to his new homestead were ascribed to supernatural agencies he
flashed like forked lightning.

"Where there are geese there's dirt," he said, "and where there are
women there's talking. Am I to be frightened if an old woman sneezes?"

But before Thorkell set to work again he paid his tithe. He paid it with
a rick of discolored oats that had been cut in the wet and threshed
before it was dry. Thorkell had often wondered whether his cows would
eat it. The next Sunday morning the parson paused before his sermon to
complain that certain of his parishioners, whom he would not name at
present, appeared to think that what was too bad for the pigs was good
enough for the priests. Let the Church of God have no more of their
pig-swill. Thorkell in his pew chuckled audibly, and muttered something
about paying for a dead horse.

It was spring when the second roof was blown down, and the new house
stood roofless until early summer. Then Thorkell sent four lean pigs
across to the Rectory, and got his carpenters together and set them to
work. The roofing proceeded without interruption.

The primrose was not yet gone, the swallow had not yet come, and the
young grass under the feet of the oxen was still small and sweet, when
Thorkell's wife took to her bed. Then all Ballamona was astir.
Hommy-beg, the deaf gardener of Ballamona, was sent in the hot haste of
his best two miles an hour to the village, commonly known as the Street,
to summon the midwife. This good woman was called Kerry Quayle; she was
a spinster of forty, and she was all but blind.

"I'm thinking the woman-body is after going on the straw," said
Hommy-beg, when he reached the Street, and this was the sum of the
message that he delivered.

"Then we'd better be off, as the saying is," remarked Kerry, who never
accepted responsibility for any syllable she ever uttered.

When they got to Ballamona, Thorkell Mylrea bustled Hommy-beg into the
square springless car, and told him to drive to Andreas, and fetch the
Archdeacon without an hour's delay. Hommy-beg set off at fine paces that
carried him to the Archdeaconry a matter of four miles an hour.

Thorkell followed Kerry Quayle to the room above. When they stepped into
the bedroom Thorkell drew the midwife aside to a table on which a large
candle stood in a tall brass candlestick, with gruesome gargoyles carved
on the base and upper flange. From this table he picked up a small
Testament bound in shiny leather, with silver clasps.

"I'm as great a man as any in the island," said Thorkell, in his shrill
whisper, "for laughing at the simpletons that talk about witches and
boaganes and the like of that."

"So you are, as the saying is," said Kerry.

"I'd have the law on the lot of them, if I had my way," said Thorkell,
still holding the book.

"Aw, and shockin' powerful luck it would be, as the old body said, if
all the witches and boaganes in the island could be run into the sea,"
said Kerry.

"Pshaw! I'm talking of the simpletons that believe in them," said
Thorkell, snappishly. "I'd clap them all in Castle Rushen."

"Aw, yes, and clean law and clean justice, too, as the Irishman said."

"So don't think I want the midwife to take her oath in my house," said
Thorkell.

"Och, no, of course not. You wouldn't bemean yourself, as they say."

"But, then, you know what the saying is, Kerry. 'Custom must be indulged
with custom, or custom will weep;'" and, saying this, Thorkell's voice
took a most insinuating tone.

"Aw, now, and I'm as good as here and there one at standing up for
custom, as the saying is," said the midwife.

The end of it all was that Kerry Quayle took there and then a solemn
oath not to use sorcery or incantation of any kind in the time of
travail, not to change the infant at the hour of its birth, not to leave
it in the room for a week afterward without spreading the tongs over its
crib, and much else of the like solemn purport.

The dusk deepened, and the Archdeacon had not yet arrived. Night came on
and the room was dark, but Thorkell would not allow a lamp to be brought
in, or a fire to be lighted. Some time later, say six hours after
Hommy-beg had set out on his six-mile journey, a lumbrous, jolting sound
of heavy wheels came from the road below the Curragh, and soon afterward
the Archdeacon entered the room.

"So dark," he said, on stumbling across the threshold.

"Ah, Archdeacon," said Thorkell, with the unaccustomed greeting of an
outstretched hand, "the Church shall bring light to the chamber here,"
and Thorkell handed the tinder-box to the Archdeacon and led him to the
side of the table on which the candle stood.

In an instant the Archdeacon, laughing a little, or protesting meekly
against his clerical honors, was striking the flint, when Thorkell laid
a hand on his arm.

"Wait one moment; of course you know how I despise superstition?"

"Ah! of course, of course," said the Archdeacon.

"But, then, you know the old saying, Archdeacon, 'Custom must be
indulged with custom,' you know it?" And Thorkell's face shut up like a
nut-cracker.

"So I must bless the candle. Eh, is that it?" said the Archdeacon,
with a low gurgle; and the next moment he was gabbling in a quick
undertone through certain words that seemed to be all one word:
"OLord-Jesus-Christ-bless-Thou-this-creature-of-a-waxen-taper-that-on-
what-place-soever-it-be-lighted-or-set-the-devil-may-flee-from-that-
habitation-and-no-more-disquiet-them-that-serve--Thee!"

After the penultimate word there was a short pause, and at the last word
there was the sharp crack of the flint, and in an instant the candle was
lighted.

Then the Archdeacon turned toward the bed and exchanged some words with
his daughter. The bed was a mahogany four-post one, with legs like
rocks, a hood like a pulpit sounding-board, and tapestry curtains like a
muddy avalanche. The Archdeacon--he was a small man, with a face like a
russet apple--leaned against one of the bed-posts, and said, in a tone
of banter:

"Why, Thorkell, and if you're for indulging custom, how comes it that
you have not hung up your hat?"

"My hat--my hat!" said Thorkell, in perplexity.

"Aw, now," said the midwife, "the master's as great a man as any in the
island at laughing at the men craythurs that hang up their hats over the
straw to fright the boaganes, as the old woman said."

Thorkell's laughter instantly burst forth to justify the midwife's
statement.

"Ha, ha! Hang up my hat! Well now, well now! Drives away the black
spirits from the birth-bed--isn't that what the dunces say? It's twenty
years since I saw the like of it done, and I'd forgotten the old custom.
Must look funny, very, the good man's hat perched up on the bed-post?
What d'ye say, Archdeacon, shall we have it up? Just for the laugh, you
know, ha, ha!"

In another moment Thorkell was gone from the room, and his titter could
be heard from the stairs; it ebbed away and presently flowed back again,
and Thorkell was once more by the bedside, laughing immoderately, and
perching his angular soft hat on the topmost knob of one of the posts at
the foot of the bed.

Then Thorkell and the Archdeacon went down to the little room that had
once been Gilcrist's room, looking over the Curragh to the sea.

Before daybreak next morning a man child was born to Thorkell Mylrea,
and an heir to the five hundred acres of Ballamona.




CHAPTER III

THE CHRISTENING OF YOUNG EWAN


In the dead waste of that night the old wall of Ballamona echoed to the
noise of hurrying feet. Thorkell himself ran like a squirrel, hither and
thither, breaking out now and again into shrill peals of hysterical
laughter; while the women took the kettle to the room above, and
employed themselves there in sundry mysterious ordinances on which no
male busybody might intrude. Thorkell dived down into the kitchen, and
rooted about in the meal casks for the oaten cake, and into the larder
for the cheese, and into the cupboard for the bread-basket known as the
"peck."

Hommy-beg, who had not been permitted to go home that night, had coiled
himself in the settle drawn up before the kitchen fire, and was now
snoring lustily. Thorkell roused him, and set him to break the oatcake
and cheese into small pieces into the peck, and, when this was done, to
scatter it broadcast on the staircase and landing, and on the
garden-path immediately in front of the house; while he himself carried
a similar peck, piled up like a pyramid with similar pieces of oatcake
and cheese, to the room whence there issued at intervals a thin, small
voice, that was the sweetest music that had ever yet fallen on
Thorkell's ear.

What high commotion did the next day witness! For the first time since
that lurid day when old Ewan Mylrea was laid under the elder-tree in the
churchyard by the sea, Ballamona kept open house. The itinerant poor,
who made the circuit of the houses, came again, and lifted the latch
without knocking, and sat at the fire without being asked, and ate of
the oatcake and the cheese. And upstairs, where a meek white face looked
out with an unfamiliar smile from behind sheets that were hardly more
white, the robustious statespeople from twenty miles around sat down in
their odorous atmosphere of rude health and high spirits, and noise and
laughter, to drink their glass of new brewed jough, and to spread on
their oaten bread a thick crust of the rum-butter that stood in the
great blue china bowl on the little table near the bed-head. And
Thorkell--how nimbly he hopped about, and encouraged his visitors to
drink, and rallied them if they ceased to eat!

"Come, man, come," he said a score of times, "shameful leaving is worse
than shameful eating--eat, drink!"

And they ate, and they drank, and they laughed, and they sang, till the
bedroom reeked with the fumes of a pot-house, and the confusion of
tongues therein was worse than at the foot of Babel.

Throughout three long jovial weeks the visitors came and went, and every
day the "blithe bread" was piled in the peck for the poor of the earth,
and scattered on the paths for the good spirits of the air. And when
people jested upon this, and said that not since the old days of their
grandfathers had the boaganes and the fairies been so civilly treated,
Thorkell laughed noisily, and said what great fun it was that they
should think he was superstitious, and that custom must be indulged with
custom, or custom would weep!

Then came the christening, and to this ceremony the whole country round
was invited. Thorkell was now a man of consequence, and the neighbors
high and low trooped in with presents for the young Christian.

Kerry, the midwife, who was nurse as well, carried the child to church,
and the tiny red burden lay cooing softly at her breast in a very
hillock of white swaddlings. Thorkell walked behind, his little eyes
twinkling under his bushy eyebrows; and on his arm his wife leaned
heavily after every feeble step, her white waxwork face bright with the
smile of first motherhood.

The Archdeacon met the company at the west porch and they gathered for
the baptism about the font in the aisle: half-blind Kerry with the
infant, Thorkell and his young wife, the two godfathers, the Vicar
General and the High Bailiff of Peeltown, and the godmother, the High
Bailiff's wife, and behind this circle a mixed throng of many sorts.
After the gospel and the prayers, the Archdeacon, in his white surplice,
took the infant into his hands and called on the godparents to name the
child, and they answered Ewan. Then, as the drops fell over the wee
blinking eyes, and all voices were hushed in silence and awe, there came
to the open porch and looked into the dusky church a little fleecy lamb,
all soft and white and beautiful. It lifted its innocent and dazed face
where it stood in the morning sunshine, on the grass of the graves, and
bleated, and bleated, as if it had strayed from its mother and was lost.

The Archdeacon paused with his drooping finger half raised over the
other innocent face at his breast, Thorkell's features twitched, and the
tears ran down the white cheeks of his wife.

In an instant the baby-lamb had hobbled away, and before the Archdeacon
had restored the child to the arms of blind Kerry or mumbled the last of
the prayers, there came the hum of many voices from the distance. The
noise came rapidly nearer, and as it approached it broke into a great
tumult of men's deep shouts and women's shrill cries.

The iron hasp of the lych-gate to the churchyard was heard to chink, and
at the same moment there was the sound of hurrying footsteps on the
paved way. The company that had gathered about the font broke up
abruptly, and made for the porch with looks of inquiry and amazement.
There, at the head of a mixed throng of the riff-raff of the parish,
bareheaded men, women with bold faces, and children with naked feet, a
man held a young woman by the arm and pulled her toward the church. He
was a stalwart fellow, stern of feature, iron gray, and he gripped the
girl's bare brown arm like a vise.

"Make way there! Come, mistress, and no struggling," he shouted, and he
tugged the girl after him, and then pushed her before him.

She was young; twenty at most. Her comely face was drawn hard with lines
of pain; her hazel eyes flashed with wrath; and where her white
sun-bonnet had fallen back from her head on to her shoulders, the knots
of her dark hair, draggled and tangled in the scuffle, tumbled in masses
over her neck and cheeks.

It was Mally Kerruish, and the man who held her and forced her along was
the parish sumner, the church constable.

"Make way, I tell you!" shouted the sumner to the throng that crowded
upon him, and into the porch, and through the company that had come for
the christening. When the Archdeacon stepped down from the side of the
font, the sumner with his prisoner drew up on the instant and the noisy
crew stood and was silent.

"I have brought her for her oath, your reverence," said the sumner,
dropping his voice and his head together.

"Who accuses her?" the Archdeacon asked.

"Her old mother," said the sumner; "here she is."

From the middle of the throng behind him the sumner drew out an elderly
woman with a hard and wizened face. Her head was bare, her eyes were
quick and restless, her lips firm and long, her chin was broad and
heavy. The woman elbowed her way forward; but when she was brought face
to face with the Archdeacon, and he asked her if she charged her
daughter, she looked around before answering, and seeing her girl Mally
standing there with her white face, under the fire of fifty pairs of
eyes, all her resolution seemed to leave her.

"It isn't natheral, I know," she said, "a mother speaking up agen her
child," and with that her hard mouth softened, her quick eyes reddened
and filled, and her hands went up to her face. "But nature goes down
with a flood when you're looking to have another belly to fill, and not
a shilling at you this fortnight."

The girl stood without a word, and not one streak of color came to her
white cheeks as her mother spoke.

"She denied it, and denied it, and said no, and no; but leave it to a
mother to know what way her girl's going."

There was a low murmur among the people at the back and some whispering.
The girl's keen ear caught it, and she turned her head over her shoulder
with a defiant glance.

"Who is the man?" said the Archdeacon, recalling her with a touch of his
finger on her arm.

She did not answer at first, and he repeated the question.

"Who is the guilty man?" he said, in a voice more stern.

"It's not true. Let me go," said the girl, in a quick undertone.

"Who is the partner of your sin?"

"It's not true, I say. Let me go, will you?" and the girl struggled
feebly in the sumner's grip.

"Bring her to the altar," said the Archdeacon. He faced about and walked
toward the chancel, and entered it. The company followed him and drew up
outside the communion rail. He took a Testament from the reading-desk
and stepped toward the girl. There was a dead hush.

"The Church provides a remedy for slander," he said, in a cold, clear
tone. "If you are not guilty, swear that you are innocent, that he who
tampers with your good name may beware." With that the Archdeacon held
the Testament toward the girl. She made no show of taking it. He thrust
it into her hand. At the touch of the book she gave a faint cry and
stepped a pace backward, the Testament falling open on to the
penitent-form beneath.

Then the murmur of the bystanders rose again. The girl heard it once
more, and dropped on her knees and covered her face, and cried, in a
tremulous voice that echoed over the church, "Let me go, let me go."

The company that came for the christening had walked up the aisle.
Blinking Kerry stood apart, hushing the infant in her arms; it made a
fretful whimper. Thorkell stood behind, pawing the paved path with a
restless foot. His wife had made her way to the girl's side, her eyes
overflowing with compassion.

"Take her to prison at the Peel," said the Archdeacon, "and keep her
there until she confesses the name of her paramour." At that, Thorkell's
wife dropped to her knees beside the kneeling girl, and putting one arm
about her neck, raised the other against the sumner, and cried, "No, no,
no; she will confess."

There was a pause and a long hush. Mally let her hands fall from her
face, and turned her eyes full on the eyes of the young mother at her
side. In dead silence the two rose to their feet together.

"Confess his name; whoever he is, he does not deserve that you should
suffer for him as well," said the wife of Thorkell Mylrea, and as she
spoke she touched the girl's white forehead with her pale lips.

"Do _you_ ask that?" said Mally, with a strange quietness.

For one swift instant the eyes of these women seemed to see into each
other's heart. The face of Thorkell's wife became very pale; she grew
faint, and clutched the communion rail as she staggered back.

At the next instant Mally Kerruish was being hurried by the sumner down
the aisle; the noisy concourse that had come with them went away with
them, and in a moment more the old church was empty, save for the
company that had gathered about the font.

There was a great feast at Ballamona that day. The new house was
finished, and the young Christian, Ewan Mylrea, of Ballamona, was the
first to enter it; for was it not to be his house, and his children's
and his children's children's?

Thorkell's wife did not join the revels, but in her new home she went
back to her bed. The fatigue and excitement of the day had been too much
for her. Thorkell himself sat in his place, and laughed noisily and
drank much. Toward sunset the sumner came to say that the girl who had
been taken to prison at the Peel had confessed, and was now at large.
The Archdeacon got up and went out of the room. Thorkell called lustily
on his guests to drink again, and one stupefied old crony clambered to
his feet and demanded silence for a toast.

"To the father of the girl's by-blow," he shouted, when the glasses were
charged; and then the company laughed till the roof rang, and above all
was the shrill laugh of Thorkell Mylrea. Presently the door opened
again, and the Archdeacon, with a long, grave face, stood on the
threshold and beckoned to Thorkell at the head of his table. Thorkell
went out with him, and when they returned together a little later, and
the master of Ballamona resumed his seat, he laughed yet more noisily
than before, and drank yet more liquor.

On the outside of Ballamona that night an old woman, hooded and caped,
knocked at the door. The loud laughter and the ranting songs from within
came out to her where she stood in the darkness, under the silent stars.
When the door was opened by Hommy-beg the woman asked for Mylrea
Ballamona. Hommy-beg repulsed her, and would have shut the door in her
face. She called again, and again, and yet again, and at last, by reason
of her importunity, Hommy-beg went in and told Thorkell, who got up and
followed him out. The Archdeacon heard the message, and left the room at
the same moment.

Outside, on the gravel path, the old woman stood with the light of the
lamp that burned in the hall on her wizened face. It was Mrs. Kerruish,
the mother of Mally.

"It's fine times you're having of it, Master Mylrea," she said, "and
you, too, your reverence; but what about me and my poor girl?"

"It was yourself that did it, woman," said Thorkell; and he tried to
laugh, but under the stars his laugh fell short.

"Me, you say? Me, was it for all? May the good God judge between us,
Master Mylrea. D'ye know what it is that happened? My poor girl's gone."

"Gone!"

"Eh, gone--gone off--gone to hide her shameful face; God help her."

"Better luck," said Thorkell, and a short gurgle rattled in his dry
throat.

"Luck, you call it? Luck! Take care, Ballamona."

The Archdeacon interposed. "Come, no threats, my good woman," he said,
and waved his hand in protestation. "The Church has done you justice in
this matter."

"Threats, your reverence? Justice? Is it justice to punish the woman and
let the man go free? What! the woman to stand penance six Sabbaths by
the church-door of six parishes, and the man to pay his dirty money, six
pounds to you and three to me, and then no mortal to name his name!"

The old woman rummaged in the pocket at her side and pulled out a few
coins. "Here, take them back; I'm no Judas to buy my own girl. Here, I
say, take them!"

Thorkell had thrust his hands in his pockets, and was making a great
show of laughing boisterously.

The old woman stood silent for a moment, and her pale face turned livid.
Then by a sudden impulse she lifted her eyes and her two trembling arms.
"God in Heaven," she said, in a hoarse whisper, "let Thy wrath rest on
this man's head; make this house that he has built for himself and for
his children a curse to him and them and theirs; bring it to pass that
no birth come to it but death come with it, and so on and on until Thou
hast done justice between him and me."

Thorkell's laughter stopped suddenly. As the woman spoke his face
quivered, and his knees shook perceptibly under him. Then he took her by
the arms and clutched her convulsively. "Woman, woman, what are you
saying?" he cried, in his shrill treble. She disengaged herself and went
away into the night.

For a moment Thorkell tramped the hall with nervous footsteps. The
Archdeacon stood speechless. Then the sound of laughter and of song came
from the room they had left, and Thorkell flung in on the merry-makers.

"Go home, go home, every man of you! Away with you!" he shouted,
hysterically, and then dropped like a log into a chair.

One by one, with many wise shakes of many sapient heads, the tipsy
revelers broke up and went off, leaving the master of Ballamona alone in
that chamber, dense with dead smoke, and noisome with the fumes of
liquor.




CHAPTER IV

THE DEEMSTER OF MAN


Twenty times that night Thorkell devised expedients to break the web of
fate. At first his thoughts were of revengeful defiance. By fair means
or foul the woman Kerruish should suffer. She should be turned out of
house and home. She should tramp the roads as a mendicant. He would put
his foot on her neck. Then they would see what her uncanny threats had
come to.

He tried this unction for his affrighted spirit, and put it aside as
useless. No, no; he would conciliate the woman. He would settle an
annuity of five pounds a year upon her; he would give her the snug gate
cottage of old Ballamona to live in; his wife should send her warm
blankets in winter, and sometimes a pound of tea, such as old folks
love. Then must her imprecation fall impotent, and his own fate be
undisturbed.

Thorkell's bedroom in his new house on Slieu Dhoo looked over the
Curraghs to the sea. As the day dawned he opened the window, and thrust
out his head to drink of the cool morning air. The sun was rising over
the land behind, a strong breeze was sweeping over the marshes from the
shore, and the white curves of the breakers to the west reflected here
and there the glow of the eastern sky. With the salt breath of the sea
in his nostrils, it seemed to Thorkell a pitiful thing that a man should
be a slave to a mere idea; a thing for shame and humiliation that the
sneezing of an old woman should disturb the peace of a strong man.
Superstition was the bugbear of the Manxman, but it would die of shame
at its sheer absurdity, only that it was pampered by the law. Toleration
for superstition! Every man who betrayed faith in omens or portents, or
charms or spells, or the power of the evil eye, should be instantly
clapped in the Castle. It was but right that a rabid dog should be
muzzled.

Thorkell shut the window, closed the shutters, threw off his clothes,
and went back to bed. In the silence and the darkness, his thoughts took
yet another turn. What madness it was, what pertness and unbelief, to
reject that faith in which the best and wisest of all ages had lived and
died! Had not omens and portents, and charms and spells, and the evil
eye been believed in in all ages? What midget of modern days should now
arise with a superior smile and say, "Behold, this is folly: Saul of
Israel and Saul of Tarsus, and Samuel and Solomon, rose up and lay down
in folly."

Thorkell leaped out of bed, sweating from every pore. The old woman
Kerruish should be pensioned; she should live in the cozy cottage at the
gates of Ballamona; she should have blankets and tea and many a snug
comfort; her daughter should be brought back and married--yes,
married--to some honest fellow.

The lark was loud in the sky, the rooks were stirring in the lofty ash,
the swallows pecking at the lattice, when sleep came at length to
Thorkell's bloodshot eyes, and he stretched himself in a short and
fitful slumber. He awoke with a start. The lusty rap of Hommy-beg was at
the door of his room. There was no itinerant postman, and it was one of
Hommy-beg's daily duties to go to the post-office. He had been there
this morning, and was now returned with a letter for his master.

Thorkell took the letter with nervous fingers. He had recognized the
seal--it was the seal of the insular Government. The letter came from
Castle Rushen. He broke the seal and read:

     "CASTLE RUSHEN, June 3d.

     "SIR--I am instructed by his Excellency to beg you to come to
     Castletown without delay, and to report your arrival at the
     Castle to Madam Churchill, who will see you on behalf of the
     Duchess.

     "I have the honor to be, etc."

The letter was signed by the Secretary to the Governor.

What did it mean? Thorkell could make nothing of it but that in some way
it boded ill. In a bewildered state of semi-consciousness he ordered
that a horse should be got ready and brought round to the front. Half an
hour later he had risen from an untouched breakfast and was seated in
the saddle.

He rode past Tynwald Hill and through Foxdale to the south. Twenty times
he drew up and half-reined his horse in another direction. But he went
on again. He could turn about at any time. He never turned about. At two
o'clock that day he stood before the low gate of the Castle and pulled
at the great clanging bell.

He seemed to be expected, and was immediately led to a chamber on the
north of the courtyard. The room was small and low; it was dimly lighted
by two lancet windows set deep into walls that seemed to be three yards
thick. The floor was covered with a rush matting; a harp stood near the
fireplace. A lady rose as Thorkell entered. She was elderly, but her
dress was youthful. Her waist was short; her embroidered skirt was very
long; she wore spangled shoes, and her hair was done into a knot on the
top of her head.

Thorkell stood before her with the mien of a culprit. She smiled and
motioned him to a seat, and sat herself.

"You have heard of the death of one of our two Deemsters?" she asked.

Thorkell's face whitened, and he bowed his head.

"A successor must soon be appointed, and the Deemster is always a
Manxman; he must know the language of the common people."

Thorkell's face wore a bewildered expression. The lady's manner was very
suave.

"The appointment is the gift of the Lord of the island, and the Duchess
is asked to suggest a name."

Thorkell's face lightened. He had regained all his composure.

"The Duchess has heard a good account of you, Mr. Mylrea. She is told
that by your great industry and--wisdom--you have raised yourself in
life--become rich, in fact."

The lady's voice dropped to a tone of most insinuating suavity. Thorkell
stammered some commonplace.

"Hush, Mr. Mylrea, you shall not depreciate yourself. The Duchess has
heard that you are a man of enterprise--one who does not begrudge the
penny that makes the pound."

Thorkell saw it all. He was to be made Deemster, but he was to buy his
appointment. The Duchess had lost money of late, and the swashbuckler
court she kept had lately seen some abridgment of its gaieties.

"To be brief, Mr. Mylrea, the Duchess has half an intention of
suggesting your name for the post, but before doing so she wished me to
see in what way your feelings lie with regard to it."

Thorkell's little eyes twinkled, and his lips took an upward curve. He
placed one hand over his breast and bent his head.

"My feelings, madam, lie in one way only--the way of gratitude," he
said, meekly.

The lady's face broadened, and there was a pause.

"It is a great distinction, Mr. Mylrea," said the lady, and she drew her
breath inward.

"The greater my gratitude," said Thorkell.

"And how far would you go to show this gratitude to the Duchess?"

"Any length, madam," said Thorkell, and he rose and bowed.

"The Duchess is at present at Bath--"

"I would go so far, and--further, madam, further," said Thorkell, and as
he spoke he thrust his right hand deep into his pocket, and there--by
what accident may not be said--it touched some coins that chinked.

There was another pause, and then the lady rose and held out her hand,
and said, in a significant tone:

"I think, sir, I may already venture to hail you as Deemster of Man."

Thorkell cantered home in great elevation of soul. The milestones fell
behind him one after one, and he did not feel the burden of the way. His
head was in his breast; his body was bent over his saddle-bow; again and
again a trill of light laughter came from his lips. Where were his
dreams now, his omens, his spells, and the power of the evil eye? He was
judge of his island. He was master of his fate.

Passing through St. John's, he covered the bleak top of the hill, and
turned down toward the shady copse of Kirk Michael. Where the trees were
thickest in the valley he drew rein by a low, long house that stood back
to the road. It was the residence of the Bishop of the island, but it
was now empty. The bishopric had been vacant these five years, and under
the heavy rains from the hills and the strong winds from the sea, the
old house had fallen into decay.

Thorkell sat in the saddle under the tall elms in the dim light, and his
mind was busy with many thoughts. His memory went back with something
akin to tenderness to the last days of old Ewan, his father; to his
brother, Gilcrist, and then, by a sudden transition, to the incidents of
that morning at Castle Rushen. How far in the past that morning seemed
to be!

The last rook had cawed out its low guttural note, and the last gleam of
daylight died off between the thick boughs of the dark trees that
pattered lightly overhead, as Thorkell set off afresh.

When he arrived at Ballamona the night was dark. The Archdeacon was
sitting with his daughter, who had not left her room that day. Thorkell,
still booted and spurred, ran like a squirrel up the stairs and into the
bedroom. In twenty hot words that were fired off like a cloud of small
shot from a blunderbuss, Thorkell told what had occurred. His wife's
white face showed no pleasure and betrayed no surprise. Her silence
acted on Thorkell as a rebuke, and when her eyes rested on his face he
turned his own eyes aside. The Archdeacon was almost speechless, but his
look of astonishment was eloquent, and when Thorkell left the room he
followed him out.

At supper the Archdeacon's manner was that of deep amity.

"They are prompt to appoint a Deemster," he said. "Has it not struck you
as strange that the bishopric has been vacant so long?"

Thorkell laughed a little over his plate, and answered that it was
strange.

"Maybe it only needs that a name should be suggested," continued the
Archdeacon. "That is to say, suggested by a man of influence--a man of
position--by the Deemster, for instance."

"Just that," said Thorkell, with a titter.

Then there was an interchange of further amity. When the two men rose
from the table the Archdeacon said, with a conscious smile, "Of course,
if you should occur--if you should ever think--if, that is, the Deemster
should ever suggest a name for the bishopric--of course, he will
remember that--that blood, in short, is thicker than water--_ta fuill my
s'chee na ushtey_, as the Manxman says."

"I will remember it," said Thorkell, in a significant tone, and with a
faint chuckle.

Satisfied with that day's work, with himself, and with the world,
Thorkell then went off to bed, and lay down in peace and content, and
slept the sleep of the just.

In due course Thorkell Mylrea became Deemster Ballamona.

He entered upon his duties after the briefest study of the Statute Laws.
A Manx judge dispensed justice chiefly by the Breast Laws, the unwritten
code locked in his own breast, and supposed to be handed down from
Deemster to Deemster. The popular superstition served Thorkell in good
stead: there was none to challenge his knowledge of jurisprudence.

As soon as he was settled in his office he began to make inquiries about
his brother Gilcrist. He learned that after leaving Cambridge, Gilcrist
had taken deacon's orders, and had become tutor to the son of an English
nobleman, and afterward chaplain to the nobleman's household. Thorkell
addressed him a letter, and received a reply, and this was the first
intercourse of the brothers since the death of old Ewan. Gilcrist had
lately married; he held a small living on one of the remote moors of
Yorkshire; he loved his people and was beloved by them. Thorkell wrote
again and again, and yet again, and his letters ran through every tone
of remonstrance and entreaty. The end of it was that the Deemster paid
yet another visit to the lady deputy at Castle Rushen, and the rumor
passed over the island that the same potent influence that had made
Thorkell a Deemster was about to make his brother the Bishop of Man.

Then the Archdeacon came down in white wrath to Ballamona, and reminded
his son-in-law of his many obligations, touched on benefits forgot,
hinted at dark sayings and darker deeds, mentioned, with a significant
accent, the girl Mally Kerruish, protested that from causes not to be
named he had lost the esteem of his clergy and the reverence of his
flock, and wound up with the touching assurance that on that very
morning, as he rode from Andreas, he had overheard a burly Manxman say
to the tawny-headed fellow who walked with him--both of them the
scabbiest sheep on the hills--"There goes the pazon that sold his
daughter and bought her husband."

Thorkell listened to the torrent of reproaches, and then said, quietly,
as he turned on his heel, "Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin."

The Deemster's wife held up her head no more. After the christening she
rarely left her room. Her cheeks grew thinner, paler they could not
grow, and her meek eyes lost their faint lustre. She spoke little, and
her interest in life seemed to be all but gone. There was the same
abject submission to her husband, but she saw less of him day by day.
Only the sight of her babe, when Kerry brought it to be nursed, restored
to her face the light of a fleeting joy. If it stayed too long at her
breast, if it cried, if its winsome ways made her to laugh outright, the
swift recoil of other feelings saddened her to melancholy, and she would
put the child from her with a sigh. This went on for several months, and
meantime the Deemster was too deeply immersed in secular affairs to make
serious note of the shadow that hung over his house. "_Goll sheese ny
lhiargagh_--she's going down the steep places," said Kerry.

It was winter when Gilcrist Mylrea was appointed to reach the island,
but he wrote that his wife's health was failing her, that it was not
unlikely that she was to bear a child, and that he preferred to postpone
his journey until the spring. Before the gorse bushes on the mountains
had caught their new spears of green, and before the fishermen of
Peeltown had gone down to the sea for their first mackerel, Thorkell's
wife was lying in her last illness. She sent for her husband and bade
him farewell. The Deemster saw no danger, and he laughed at her meek
adieu. She was soon to be the mother of another of his children--that
was all. But she shook her head when he rallied her, and when he lifted
the little creeping, cooing, babbling Ewan from the floor to his
mother's bed, and laughed and held up his long, lean, hairy finger
before the baby face and asked the little one with a puff how he would
like a little sister, the white face on the pillow twitched and fell,
and the meek eyes filled, and the shadow was over all.

"Good-by, Thorkell, and for baby's sake--"

But a shrill peal of Thorkell's laughter rang through the chamber, and
at the next instant he was gone from the room.

That day the wife of the Deemster passed beyond the sorrows of the life
that had no joys. The angels of life and death had come with linked
hands to the new homestead of Ballamona, and the young mother had died
in giving birth to a girl.

When the Deemster heard what had happened, his loud scream rang through
every room of the house. His soul was in ferment; he seemed to be
appalled, and to be stricken, not with sorrow, but with fright and
horror.

"She's dead; why, she's dead, she's dead," he cried, hysterically; "why
did not somebody tell me that she would die?"

The Deemster buried his wife by the side of old Ewan, under the
elder-tree that grew by the wall of the churchyard that stands over by
the sea. He summoned no mourners, and few stood with him by the open
grave. During the short funeral, his horse was tied to the cross-timbers
of the lych-gate, and while the earth was still falling in hollow thuds
from the sexton's spade, Thorkell got into the saddle and rode away.

Before sunset he waited by the wooden landing jetty at Derby Haven. The
old sea-tub, the "King Orry," made the port that day, and disembarked
her passengers. Among them was the new Bishop of Man, Gilcrist Mylrea.
He looked much older for the six years he had been away. His tall figure
stooped heavily; his thick hair fell in wavelets on his shoulders, and
was already sprinkled with gray; his long cheeks were deeply lined. As
he stepped from the boat on to the jetty he carried something very
tenderly in his arms. He seemed to be alone.

The brothers met with looks of constraint and bewilderment.

"Where is your wife?" asked Thorkell.

"She is gone," said Gilcrist. "I have nothing left of her but this," and
he looked down at the burden at his breast.

It was a baby boy. Thorkell's face whitened, and terror was in his eyes.




CHAPTER V

THE MANXMAN'S BISHOP


Gilcrist Mylrea had been confirmed Bishop, and consecrated in England;
but he had to be installed in his cathedral church at Peeltown with all
the honors of the insular decrees. The ceremony was not an imposing one.
Few of the native population witnessed it. The Manxman did not love the
Church with a love too fervent. "Pazon, pazon," he would say, "what can
you expect from the like o' that? Never no duck wasn't hatched by a
drake."

It was no merit in the eyes of the people that the new Bishop was
himself a Manxman. "Aw, man," they would say, "I knew his father," and
knowledge of the father implied a limitation of the respect due to the
son. "What's his family?" would be asked again and again across the
hearth that scarcely knew its own family more intimately. "Maybe some of
the first that's going," would be the answer, and then there would be a
laugh.

The Bishop was enthroned by Archdeacon Teare, who filled his function
with what grace his chagrin would allow. Thorkell watched his
father-in-law keenly during the ceremony, and more than once his little
eyes twinkled, and his lips were sucked inward as if he rolled a
delectable morsel on his tongue. Archdeacon Teare was conscious of the
close fire of his son-in-law's gaze, and after the installation was
done, and the clergy that constituted priests and congregation were
breaking up, he approached the Deemster with a benevolent smile, and
said, "Well, Thorkell, we've had some disagreements, but we'll all meet
for peace and harmony in heaven."

The Deemster tittered audibly, and said, "I'm not so sure of that,
though."

"No?" said the Archdeacon, with elevated eyebrows. "Why--why?"

"Because we read in the Good Book that there will be no more _tears_,
Archdeacon," said Thorkell, with a laugh like the whinny of a colt.

The Bishop and his brother, the Deemster, got on their horses, and
turned their heads toward the episcopal palace. It was late when they
drove under the tall elms of Bishop's Court. The old house was lighted
up for their reception. Half-blind Kerry Quayle had come over from
Ballamona to nurse the Bishop's child, and to put him to bed in his new
home. "Och, as sweet a baby boy as any on the island, I'll go bail, as
the old body said," said Kerry, and the Bishop patted her arm with a
gentle familiarity. He went up to the little room where the child lay
asleep, and stooped over the cot and touched with his lips the soft lips
that breathed gently. The dignity of the Bishop as he stood four hours
before under the roof of St. German's had sat less well on this silent
man than the tenderness of the father by the side of his motherless
child.

Thorkell was in great spirits that night. Twenty times he drank to the
health of the new Bishop; twenty times he reminded him of his own
gracious offices toward securing the bishopric to one of his own family.
Gilcrist smiled, and responded in few words. He did not deceive himself;
his eyes were open. He knew that Thorkell had not been so anxious to
make him a Bishop as to prevent a place of honor and emolument from
going to any one less near to himself than his own brother. "Near is my
shirt," as Thorkell had told the Archdeacon, "but nearer is my skin."

Next day the Bishop lost no time in settling to his work. His people
watched him closely. He found his palace in a forlorn and dilapidated
state, and the episcopal demesne, which was about a square mile of
glebe, as fallow as the rough top of the mountains. The money value of
this bishopric was rather less than L500 a year, but out of this income
he set to work to fence and drain his lands, plant trees, and restore
his house to comfort, if not to stateliness. "I find my Patmos in
ruins," he said, "and that will oblige me to interrupt my charity to the
poor in some measure."

He assumed none of the social dignity of a Bishop. He had no carriage,
and no horse for riding. When he made his pastoral visitations he went
afoot. The journey to Douglas he called crossing the Pyrenees; and he
likened the toilsome tramp across the heavy Curraghs from Bishop's Court
to Kirk Andreas to the passing of pilgrims across a desert. "To speak
truth," he would say, "I have a title too large for my scant fortune to
maintain."

His first acts of episcopal authority did not conciliate either the
populace or their superiors in station. He set his face against the
contraband trade, and refused communion to those who followed it. "Och,
terrible, wonderful hard on the poor man he is, with his laws agen
honest trading, and his by-laws and his customs and his canons and the
like o' that messing."

It was soon made clear that the Bishop did not court popularity. He
started a school in each of the parishes by the help of a lady, who
settled a bounty, payable at the Bishop's pleasure, for the support of
the teachers. The teachers were appointed by his vicars-general. One day
a number of the men of his own parish, with Jabez Gawne, the sleek
little tailor, and Matthias Jubman, the buirdly maltster, at their head,
came up to Bishop's Court to complain of the schoolmaster appointed to
Kirk Michael. According to the malcontents, the schoolmaster was unable
to divide his syllables, and his home, which was the schoolhouse also,
was too remote for the convenience of the children. "So we beseech your
Lordships," said little Jabez, who was spokesman, "to allow us a fit
person to discharge the office, _and with submission we will recommend
one_." The Bishop took in the situation at a glance; Jabez's last words
had let the cat out of the bag, and it could not be said to be a Manx
cat, for it had a most prodigious tail. Next day the Bishop went to the
school, examined master and scholars, then called the petitioners
together, and said, "I find that James Quirk is qualified to teach an
English school, and I can not remove him; but I am of your opinion that
his house is in a remote part of the parish, and I shall expect the
parishioners to build a new schoolhouse in a convenient place, near the
church, within a reasonable time, otherwise the bounty can not be
continued to them." The answer staggered the petitioners; but they were
men with the saving grace of humor, and through the mouth of little
Jabez, which twisted into curious lines, they forthwith signified to his
Lordship their earnest desire to meet his wish by building their
schoolhouse within the churchyard.

Though a zealous upholder of Church authority, the Bishop was known to
temper justice with mercy. He had not been a month in the diocese when
his sumner told him a painful story of hard penance. A young girl from
near Peeltown had been presented for incontinence, and with the partner
of her crime she had been ordered to stand six Sundays at the door of
six churches. The man, who was rich, had compounded with the Archdeacon,
paying six pounds for exemption, and being thenceforward no more
mentioned; but the woman, being penniless and appalled at the disgrace
before her, had fled from the island. The Archdeacon had learned her
whereabouts in England, and had written to the minister of the place to
acquaint him that she was under the Church's censure. The minister, on
his part, had laid before her the terror of her position if she died out
of communion with God's people. She resisted all appeals until her time
came, and then, in her travail, the force of the idea had worked upon
her, and she could resist it no more. When she rose from bed she
returned voluntarily to the island, with the sign of her shame at her
breast, to undergo the penance of her crime. She had stood three Sundays
at the doors of three churches, but her health was feeble, and she could
scarcely carry her child, so weak was she, and so long the distances
from her lodging in Peeltown. "Let her be pardoned the rest of her
penance," said the Bishop. "The Church's censure was not passed on her
to afflict her with overmuch shame or sorrow."

It was not until years afterward that the Bishop learned the full facts
of the woman's case, and comprehended the terrible significance of her
punishment. She was Mally Kerruish.

The island was in the province of York, and bound by the English canons,
but the Bishop made his own canons, and none were heard to demur. Some
of his judgments were strange, but all leaned toward the weaker side. A
man named Quayle the Gyke, a blusterous fellow, a thorn in the side of
every official within a radius of miles, died after a long illness,
leaving nothing to a legitimate son who had nursed him affectionately.
This seemed to the Bishop to be contrary to natural piety, and in the
exercise of his authority he appointed the son an executor with the
others. Quayle the younger lived, as we shall see, to return evil for
the Bishop's good. A rich man of bad repute, Thormod Mylechreest, died
intestate, leaving an illegitimate son. The Bishop ordered the ordinary
to put aside a sum of money out of the estate for the maintenance and
education of the child. But Thorkell came down in the name of the civil
power, reversed the spiritual judgment, ordered that the whole
belongings of the deceased should be confiscated to the Lord of the
Isle, and left the base-begotten to charity. We shall also see that the
bastard returned good for Thorkell's evil.

The canons and customs of Bishop Mylrea not only leaned--sometimes with
too great indulgence--to the weaker side, but they supposed faith in the
people by allowing a voluntary oath as evidence, and this made false
swearing a terror. Except in the degree of superstition, he encouraged
belief in all its forms. He trusted an oath implicitly, but no man ever
heard him gainsay his yea or nay.

A hoary old dog known as Billy the Gawk, who had never worked within
living memory, who lived, as they said, "on the houses," and frequented
the pot-house with more than the regularity of religious observance, was
not long in finding out that Bishop's Court had awakened from its
protracted sleep. The Bishop had been abroad for his morning's ramble,
and sitting on the sunny side of a high turf hedge looking vacantly out
to sea, he heard footsteps on the road behind him, and then a dialogue,
of which this is a brief summary:

"Going up to the Coort, eh? Ah, well, it's plenty that's there to take
the edge off your stomach; plenty, plenty, and a rael welcome too."

"Ah, it's not the stomach that's bothering me. It's the narves, boy--the
narves--and a drop of the rael stuff is worth a Jew's eye for studdying
a man after a night of it, as the saying is."

"Aw, Billy, Billy--aw well, well, well."

The conversation died off on the Bishop's ear in a loud roystering laugh
and a low gurgle as undertone.

Half an hour later Billy the Gawk stood before the Bishop inside the
gates of Bishop's Court. The old dog's head hung low, his battered hat
was over his eyes, and both his trembling hands leaned heavily on his
thick blackthorn stick.

"And how do you live, my man?" asked the Bishop.

"I'm getting a bite here, and a sup there, and I've had terrible little
but a bit o' barley bread since yesterday morning," said the Gawk.

"Poor man, that's hard fare," said the Bishop; "but mind you call here
every day for the future."

Billy got a measure of corn worth sixpence, and went straightway to the
village, where he sold it at the pot-house for as much liquor as could
have been bought for three-halfpence. And as Billy the Gawk drank his
drop of the real stuff he laughed very loud and boasted that he could
outwit the Bishop. But the liquor got into his head, and from laughing
he went on to swearing, and thence to fighting, until the innkeeper
turned him out into the road, where, under the weight of his measure of
corn taken in solution, Billy sank into a dead slumber. The Bishop
chanced to take an evening walk that day, and he found his poor
penisioner, who fared hard, lodged on a harder bed, and he had him
picked up and carried into the house. Next morning, when Billy awoke and
found where he was, and remembered what had occurred, an unaccustomed
sensation took possession of him, and he stole away unobserved. The
hoary old dog was never seen again at Bishop's Court.

But if Billy never came again his kith and kin came frequently. It
became a jest that the Bishop kept the beggars from every house but his
own, and that no one else could get a beggar.

He had a book, which he called his "Matricula Pauperum," in which he
entered the names of his pensioners with notes of their circumstances.
He knew all the bits of family history--when Jemmy Corkell's wife was
down with lumbago, and when Robbie Quirk was to kill his little pig.

Billy the Gawk was not alone in thinking that he could outwit the
Bishop. When the Bishop wanted a new pair of boots or a new coat, the
tailor or shoemaker came to Bishop's Court, and was kept there until his
job of work was finished. The first winter after his arrival in his
Patmos, he wanted a cloak, and sent for Jabez Gawne, the sleek little
fox who had been spokesman for the conspirators against James Quirk, the
schoolmaster. Jabez had cut out the cloak, and was preparing it for a
truly gorgeous adornment, when the Bishop ordered him to put merely a
button and a loop on it to keep it together. Jabez thereupon dropped his
cloth and held up his hands where he sat cross-legged on the kitchen
dresser, and exclaimed, with every accent of aggrieved surprise:

"My Lord, what would become of the poor buttonmakers and their families
if every one ordered his tailor in that way?"

"How so, Jabez?"

"Why, they would be starved outright."

"Do you say so, Jabez?"

"Yes, my Lord, I do."

"Then button it all over, Jabez," said the Bishop.

The Deemster was present at that interview, and went away from it
tittering audibly.

"Give to the raven and he'll come again," he muttered.

"I forgot that poor Jabez would have his buttons in his
breeches-pocket," said the Bishop.

The Manxman had not yet made up his mind concerning the composite
character of Bishop Mylrea, his dignity and his humility, his reserve
and his simplicity, when a great event settled for the Manxman's heart
the problem that had been too much for his head. This was no less a
catastrophe than a general famine. It came upon the island in the second
year of the Bishop's residence, and was the cause of many changes. One
of the changes was that the Bishop came to be regarded by his people
with the reverence of Israel for Samuel, and by his brother, the
Deemster, with the distrust, envy, and, at length, mingled fear and
hatred of Saul for Israel's prophet.

The land of the island had been held under a tenure of straw, known as
the three-lives' tenure; the third life was everywhere running out, and
the farms were reverting to the Lord of the Isle. This disheartened the
farmers, who lost all interest in agriculture, let their lands lie
fallow, and turned to the only other industry in which they had an
interest, the herring fishing. The herrings failed this season, and
without fish, with empty barns, and a scant potato crop, caused by a
long summer of drought, the people were reduced to poverty.

Then the Bishop opened wider the gates of Bishop's Court, which since
his coming had never been closed. Heaven seemed to have given him a
special blessing. The drought had parched up the grass even of the damp
Curragh, and left bleached on the whitening mold the poor, thin, dwarfed
corn, that could never be reaped. But the glebe of Bishop's Court gave
fair crops, and when the people cried in the grip of their necessity the
Bishop sent round a pastoral letter to his clergy, saying that he had
eight hundred bushels of wheat, barley, and oats more than his household
required. Then there came from the north and the south, the east and the
west, long, straggling troops of buyers with little or no money to buy,
and Bishop's Court was turned into a public market. The Bishop sold to
those who had money at the price that corn fetched before the famine,
and in his barn behind the house he kept a chest for those who came in
at the back with nothing but a sack in their hands. Once a day he
inspected the chest, and when it was low, which was frequently, he
replenished it, and when it was high, which was rarely, he smiled, and
said that God was turning away his displeasure from his people.

The eight hundred bushels were at an end in a month, and still the
famine continued. Then the Bishop bought eight hundred other bushels:
wheat at ten shillings, barley at six shillings, and oats at four
shillings, and sold them at half these prices. He gave orders that the
bushel of the poor man was not to be stroked, but left in heaped-up
measure.

A second month went by; the second eight hundred bushels were consumed,
and the famine showed no abatement. The Bishop waited for vessels from
Liverpool, but no vessels came. He was a poor priest, with a great
title, and he had little money; but he wrote to England asking for a
thousand bushels of grain and five hundred kischen of potatoes, and
promised to pay at six days after the next annual revenue. A week of
weary waiting ensued, and every day the Bishop cheered the haggard folk
that came to Bishop's Court with accounts of the provisions that were
coming; and every day they went up on to the head of the hill, and
strained their bleared eyes seaward for the sails of an English ship.
When patience was worn to despair, the old "King Orry" brought the
Bishop a letter saying that the drought had been general, that the
famine was felt throughout the kingdom, and that an embargo had been put
on all food to forbid traders to send it from English shores. Then the
voice of the hungry multitudes went up in one deep cry of pain. "The
hunger is on us," they moaned. "Poor once, poor forever," they muttered;
and the voice of the Bishop was silent.

Just at that moment a further disaster threatened the people. Their
cattle, which they could not sell, they had grazed on the mountains, and
the milk of the cows had been the chief food of the children, and the
wool of the sheep the only clothing of their old men. With parched
meadows and Curraghs, where the turf was so dry that it would take fire
from the sun, the broad tops of the furze-covered hills were the sole
resource of the poor. At daybreak the shepherd with his six ewe lambs
and one goat, and the day laborer with his cow, would troop up to where
the grass looked greenest, and at dusk they would come down to shelter,
with weary limbs and heavy hearts. "What's it sayin'," they would
mutter, "a green hill when far from me; bare, bare, when it is near."

At this crisis it began to be whispered that the Deemster had made an
offer to the Lord to rent the whole stretch of mountain land from Ramsey
to Peeltown. The rumor created consternation, and was not at first
believed. But one day the Deemster, with the Governor of the Grand
Enquest, drove to the glen at Sulby and went up the hillside. Not long
after, a light cart was seen to follow the highroad to the glen beyond
Ballaugh, and then turn up toward the mountains by the cart track. The
people who were grazing their cattle on the hills came down and gathered
with the people of the valleys at the foot, and there were dark faces
and firm-set lips among them, and hot words and deep oaths were heard.
"Let's off to the Bishop," said one, and then went to Bishop's Court.
Half an hour later the Bishop came from Bishop's Court at the head of a
draggled company of men, and his face was white and hard. They overtook
the cart half-way up the side of the mountain, and the Bishop called on
the driver to stop, and asked what he carried, and where he was going.
The man answered that he had provisions for the Governor, the Deemster,
and the Grand Enquest, who were surveying the tops of the mountains.

The Bishop looked round, and his lip was set, and his nostrils quivered.
"Can any man lend me a knife?" he asked, with a strained quietness.

A huge knife was handed to him, such as shepherds carry in the long legs
of their boots. He stepped to the cart and ripped up the harness, which
was rope harness, the shafts fell and the horse was free. Then the
Bishop turned to the driver and said very quietly:

"Where do you live, my man?"

"At Sulby, my Lord," said the man, trembling with fear.

"You shall have leather harness to-morrow."

Then the Bishop went on, his soiled and draggled company following him,
the cart lying helpless in the cart track behind them.

When they got to the top of the mountain they could see the Governor and
the Deemster and their associates stretching the chain in the purple
distance. The Bishop made in their direction, and when he came up with
them, he said:

"Gentlemen, no food will reach you on the mountains to-day; the harness
of your cart has been cut, and cart and provisions are lying on the
hillside."

At this Thorkell turned white with wrath, and clenched his fists and
stamped his foot on the turf, and looked piercingly into the faces of
the Bishop's followers.

"As sure as I'm Deemster," he said, with an oath, "the man who has done
this shall suffer. Don't let him deceive himself--no one, not even the
Bishop himself, shall step in between that man and the punishment of the
law."

The Bishop listened with calmness, and then said, "Thorkell, the Bishop
will not intercede for him. Punish him if you can."

"And so, by God, I will," cried the Deemster, and his eye traversed the
men behind his brother.

The Bishop then took a step forward. "_I_ am that man," he said, and
then there was a great silence.

Thorkell's face flinched, his head fell between his shoulders, his
manner grew dogged, he said not a word, his braggadocio was gone.

The Bishop approached the Governor. "You have no more right to rent
these mountains than to rent yonder sea," he said, and he stretched his
arm toward the broad blue line to the west. "They belong to God and to
the poor. Let me warn you, sir, that as sure as you set up one stone to
enclose these true God's acres, I shall be the first to pull that stone
down."

The Grand Enquest broke up in confusion, and the mountains were saved to
the people.

It blew hard on the hilltop that day, and the next morning the news
spread through the island that a ship laden with barley had put in from
bad weather at Douglas Harbor. "And a terrible wonderful sight of corn,
plenty for all, plenty, plenty," was the word that went round. In three
hours' time hundreds of men and women trooped down to the quay with
money to buy. To all comers the master shook his head, and refused to
sell.

"Sell, man--sell, sell," they cried.

"I can't sell. The cargo is not mine. I'm a poor man myself," said the
master.

"Well, and what's that it's sayin', 'When one poor man helps another
poor man God laughs.'"

The Bishop came to the ship's side, and tried to treat for the cargo.

"I've given bond to land it all at Whitehaven," said the master.

Then the people's faces grew black, and deep oaths rose to their lips,
and they turned and looked into each other's eyes in their impotent
rage. "The hunger is on us--we can't starve--let every herring hang by
its own gill--let's board her," they muttered among themselves.

And the Bishop heard their threats. "My people," he said, "what will
become of this poor island unless God averts his awful judgments, only
God himself can know; but this good man has given his bond, and let us
not bring on our heads God's further displeasure."

There was a murmur of discontent, and then one long sigh of patient
endurance, and then the Bishop lifted his hands, and down on their knees
on the quay the people with famished faces fell around the tall,
drooping figure of the man of God, and from parched throats, and hearts
wellnigh as dry, sent up a great cry to heaven to grant them succor lest
they should die.

About a week afterward another ship put in by contrary winds at
Castletown. It had a cargo of Welsh oats bound to Dumfries, on the order
of the Provost. The contrary winds continued, and the corn began to heat
and spoil. The hungry populace, enraged by famine, called on the master
to sell. He was powerless. Then the Bishop walked over his "Pyrenees,"
and saw that the food for which his people hungered was perishing before
their eyes. When the master said "No" to him, as to others, he
remembered how in old time David, being an hungered, did that which was
not lawful in eating of the showbread, and straightway he went up to
Castle Rushen, got a company of musketeers, returned with them to the
ship's side, boarded the ship, put the master and crew in irons, and
took possession of the corn.

What wild joy among the people! What shouts were heard; what tears
rolled down the stony cheeks of stern men!

"Patience!" cried the Bishop. "Bring the market weights and scales."

The scales and weights were brought down to the quay and every bushel of
the cargo was exactly weighed, and paid for at the prime price according
to the master's report. Then the master and crew were liberated, and the
Bishop paid the ship's freight out of his own purse. When he passed
through the market-place on his way back to the Bishop's Court the
people followed with eyes that were almost too dim to see, and they
blessed in cheers that were sobs.

And then God remembered his people, and their troubles passed away. With
the opening spring the mackerel nets came back to the boats in shining
silver masses, and peace and plenty came again to the hearth of the
poorest.

The Manxman knew his Bishop now; he knew him for the strongest soul in
the dark hour, the serenest saint in the hour of light and peace. That
hoary old dog, Billy the Gawk, took his knife and scratched "B.M.," and
the year of the Lord on the inside of his cupboard door to record the
advent of Bishop Mylrea.

A mason from Ireland, a Catholic named Patrick Looney, was that day at
work building the square tower of the church of the market-place, and
when he saw the Bishop pass under him he went down on his knees on the
scaffold and dropped his head for the good man's blessing.

A little girl of seven, with sunny eyes and yellow hair, stood by at
that moment, and for love of the child's happy face the Bishop touched
her head and said, "God bless you, my sweet child."

The little one lifted her innocent eyes to his eyes, and answered with a
courtesy, "And God bless you, too, sir."

"Thank you, child, thank you," said the Bishop. "I do not doubt that
your blessing will be as good as mine."

Such was Gilcrist Mylrea, Bishop of Man. He needed all his strength and
all his tenderness for the trials that were to come.




CHAPTER VI

THE COZY NEST AT BISHOP'S COURT


The children of the Deemster and Bishop spent the first five years as
one little brood in the cozy nest at Bishop's Court. The arrangement was
agreeable to both brothers while it lasted. It left Ballamona a silent
place, but the master recked little of that. The Deemster kept no
company, or next to none. He dismissed all his domestics except one, and
Hommy-beg, who had been gardener hitherto, became groom as well. The new
Ballamona began to gather a musty odor, and the old Ballamona took the
moss on its wall and the lichen on its roof. The Deemster rose early and
went late to bed. Much of the day was spent in the saddle passing from
town to town of his northern circuit, for he held a court twice weekly
at Ramsey and Peeltown. Toward nightfall he was usually back at his
house, sitting alone by the fireplace, whether, as in the long nights of
winter, a peat fire burned there, or, as in the summer evenings, the
hearth was empty. Hardly a sound broke the dead quiet of the solitary
place, save when some litigious farmer who had caught his neighbor in
the act of trespass brought him, there and then, for judgment, to the
Deemster's house by that most summary kind of summons, the force of
superior muscles. On such occasions the plaintiff and defendant, with
their noisy witnesses, would troop into the hall with the yaps and snaps
of a pack of dogs, and Thorkell would twist in his chair and fine one of
them, or perhaps both, and pocket their money, and then drive them all
away dissatisfied, to settle their dispute by other means in the
darkness of the road outside.

Meantime, Bishop's Court was musical with children's voices, and with
the patter of tiny feet that ferreted out every nook and cranny of the
old place. There was Ewan, the Deemster's son, a slight, sensitive boy,
who listened to you with his head aslant, and with absent looks. There
was wee Mona, Ewan's meek sister, with the big eyes and the quiet ways,
who liked to be fondled, and would cry sometimes when no one knew why.
And then there was Daniel--Danny--Dan, the Bishop's boy, a braw little
rogue, with a slice of the man in him, as broad as he was long, with
tousled fair head and face usually smudged, laughing a good deal and not
crying overmuch, loving a good tug or a delightful bit of a fight, and
always feeling high disdain at being kissed. And the Bishop, God bless
him! was father and mother both to the motherless brood, though Kerry
Quayle was kept as nurse. He would tell a story, or perhaps sing one,
while Mona sat on his knee with her pretty head resting on his breast,
and Ewan held on to his chair with his shy head hanging on his own
shoulder, and his eyes looking out at the window, listening intently in
his queer little absent way. And when Dan, in lordly contempt of such
doings, would break in on song or story, and tear his way up the back of
the chair to the back of the Bishop, Mona would be set on her feet, and
the biggest baby of the four there present would slide down on to his
hands and knees and creep along the floor with the great little man
astride him, and whinny like a horse, or perhaps bark like a dog, and
pretend to leap the four-bar gate of the baby's chair tumbled down on
its side. And when Dan would slide from his saddle, and the restless
horseman would turn coachman and tug the mane of his steed, and all the
Bishop's long hair would tumble over his face, what shrieks of laughter,
what rolling on the ground and tossing up of bare legs! And then when
supper-time came, and the porridge would be brought in, and little Mona
would begin to whimper because she had to eat it, and Ewan to fret
because it was barley porridge and not oaten cake, and Dan to devour his
share with silent industry, and then bellow for more than was good for
him, what schemes the good Bishop resorted to, what promises he made,
what crafty tricks he learned, what an artful old pate his simple head
suddenly became! And then, when Kerry came with the tub and the towels,
and three little naked bodies had to be bathed, and the Bishop stole
away to his unfinished sermon, and little Mona's wet hands clung to
Kerry's dress, and Ewan, standing bolt-upright in the three inches of
water, blubbered while he rubbed the sponge over an inch and a half of
one cheek, and Dan sat on his haunches in the bottom of the tub
splashing the water on every side, and shrieking at every splash; then
the fearful commotion would bring the Bishop back from the dusky room
upstairs, where the shaded lamp burned on a table that was littered with
papers. And at last, when the day's big battle was done, and night's
bigger battle began, and three night-dresses were popped over three wary
heads that dodged them when they could, the Bishop would carry three
sleepless, squealing piggies to bed--Mona at his breast because she was
little, Ewan on his back because he was big, and Dan across his
shoulders because he could not get to any loftier perch. Presently there
would be three little pairs of knees by the crib-side, and then three
little flaxen polls on the pillow, tumbling and tossing, and with the
great dark head of the Bishop shaking gravely at them from over the
counterpane, and then a hush broken by a question lisped drowsily, or a
baby-rime that ran a line or two and stopped, and at length the long
deep quiet and the silence of sleep, and the Bishop going off on tiptoe
to the dusky room with the shaded lamp, and to-morrow's sermon lying
half written beneath it.

And so five tearing, romping years went by, and though they were the
years of the famine and the pestilence, and of many another dark cloud
that hung blackest over Bishop's Court, a world of happiness was crowded
into them. Then when Ewan was six years old, and Danny and Mona were
five, and the boys were buttoning their own corduroys, the Deemster came
over from Ballamona and broke up the little nest of humming-birds.

"Gilcrist," said Thorkell, "you are ruining the children, and I must
take my own away from you."

The Bishop's grave face grew suddenly white, and when, after a pause, he
said, "No, no, Thorkell, you don't mean that," there was a tremor in his
deep voice.

"I do mean it," said the Deemster. "Let a father treat his children as
the world will treat them when they have nothing but the world for their
father--that's my maxim, and I'll act up to it with my own."

"That's hard treatment, Thorkell," said the Bishop, and his eyes began
to fill.

"Spare the rod, spoil the child," said Thorkell.

"Maybe you're right," said the Bishop in a quivering voice, and he could
say no more.

But the Deemster was as good as his word. Ewan and Mona were removed to
Ballamona. There they had no nurse, and shifted a good deal for
themselves. They ate oaten cake and barley porridge three times a day,
and that was to build up their bone and brain; they were bathed in cold
water summer and winter, and that was to make them hardy; they wore
frocks with low necks, and that was to strengthen their lungs; they went
to bed without a light and fell asleep while trembling in each other's
arms, and that was to make them brave and prevent them from becoming
superstitious.

If the spirit and health of the little ones did not sink under their
Spartan training it was because Nature was stronger than custom, and
because God is very good to the bruised hearts of children. They did not
laugh too loud when the Deemster was near, and they were never seen to
pull his vest, or to tug him by his hair, or to ride across his back,
which was never known to stoop low for their little legs to mount. The
house was not much noisier, or dirtier, or less orderly for their
presence; they did not fill it with their voices, or tumble it out of
its propriety with their busy fingers, as with Cousin Danny's powerful
assistance they had filled and tumbled Bishop's Court, until every room
in the comfortable old place seemed to say to you with a wink and a nod,
"A child lives here; this is his own home, and he is master of the whole
house." But when they stole away to their own little room at the back,
where no fire burned lest they should grow "nesh," not all the masks
that were ever made to make life look like a sorry tragedy could have
hidden the joy that was always wanting to break out on their little
faces. There they would romp and laugh and crow and sing, and Ewan would
play at preaching, with the back of a chair for a pulpit, and his
pinafore for surplice, and Mona of the big eyes sitting on the floor
below for choir and congregation. And if in the middle of their play it
happened that all at once they remembered Danny, then Ewan's head would
fall aside, and his look in an instant be far away, and Mona's lower lip
would hang suddenly, and the sunshine would straightway die out of her
laughing face.

When the Bishop lost the Deemster's children he found a great void in
his heart; but little Danny troubled his big head not at all about the
change that had taken place. He laughed just as loud, and never cried at
all, and when he awoke in the morning and his cousins were not there,
their place forthwith knew them no more. In a vague way he missed his
playmates, but that only meant that the Bishop had to be his playmate
even more than before, and the Bishop was nothing loth. Away they ran
through the copse together, these boon companions, and if the Bishop hid
behind a tree, of course Danny found him, and if it was Danny that hid,
of course the Bishop searched high and low, and never once heard the
merry titter that came from behind the gorse bush that was arm's-length
away, until, with a burst of laughter, Danny leaped out on him like an
avalanche. They talked one jargon, too, for Danny's industrious tongue
could not say its _w_, and it made an _s_ of its _f_. "How many 'heels
has your cart got, carter?" "Sour." "Very srosty to-day, master." "Well,
then, come in to the sire."

In a strange and unconscious way the Bishop developed a sort of physical
affinity with this sworn ally. When no sound seemed to break the silence
he could hear the little man's cry through three stout stone walls and
up two flights of stairs. If the child fell and hurt himself half a mile
from the house, the Bishop at home felt as if he had himself dropped on
a sharp stone and cut his knee. If he clambered to the top of a high
wall that was out of sight, the Bishop in his study felt dizzy.

But extraordinary as was this affinity of the Bishop and his boy, the
intercourse that subsisted between Danny and his nurse was yet more
marvelous. The Bishop had merely a prescience of disaster threatening
his darling; but Kerry seemed, by an exercise of some nameless faculty,
to know the child's whereabouts at any moment of day or night. Half
blind at the time of the birth of little Ewan, Kerry Quayle had grown
stone-blind since, and this extraordinary power was in truth her second
sight. It was confined to Danny, her nursling, but over his movements it
was an absolute gift.

"Och," she cried, leaping up from the spinning-wheel, "the wee
craythur's into the chapel, as the sayin' is."

"Impossible!" the Bishop answered; "I've only this moment locked the
door."

But Kerry and the Bishop went to the chapel to search for him, and found
the fugitive, who had clambered in through an open window, lighting the
candle at the reading-desk, after washing his black hands in the font.

"Aw, now," said Kerry, lifting up her hands and her blind face in
horror, "what's that it's saying, 'The little hemlock is sister to the
big hemlock';" which was as much as to say that the small sin was akin
to the great sin, and that little Danny, who had been caught in an act
of sacrilege, would one day be guilty of worse.

"Nonsense, woman--nonsense; a child is but a child," said the Bishop,
leading the delinquent away.

That day--it was Thursday of Whitsun week--Convocation was to be held at
Bishop's Court, and the clergy had already begun to gather in the
library that looked west toward the sea. To keep Danny out of further
mischief the Bishop led him to his own room, and there he poured water
into a bowl and proceeded to bathe his eyes, which had latterly shown
signs of weakness. To do this he had need to remove his spectacles, and
he set them down on the table by his hand. Danny watched these
proceedings with a roguish look, and when the Bishop's face was in the
bowl he whipped up the spectacles and pushed them down his neck between
his frock and his breast. With a whirr and a puff the Bishop shook the
water from his face and dried it, and when the lash comb had tossed back
his long hair he stretched his hand out for his spectacles. He could not
feel them, and when he looked he could not see them, and then he called
on Danny to search for them, and straightway the rogue was on hands and
knees hunting in every possible and impossible place. But Danny could
not find them--not he. Convocation was waiting for its chief, but the
spectacles could not be found, and the Bishop, for all bookish services,
was blinder than a bat without them. High and low, up and down, on every
table, under every paper, into every pocket, and still no spectacles. At
length the Bishop paused and looked steadily into the eyes of the little
man sitting on his haunches and tittering audibly.

"Where are the glasses?"

Danny laughed very loud.

"Where are my glasses, Danny veg?"

Danny veg laughed still louder.

There was nothing to be made of an answer like that, so down on his
knees went the Bishop again to see if the rogue had hidden the
spectacles beneath the hearth-rug, or under the seat of the settle, or
inside the shaving pot on the hearth. And all the time Danny, with his
hands clasped under his haunches, hopped about the room like a frog with
great starry eyes, and crowed and laughed till his face grew scarlet and
the tears trickled down his cheeks.

Blind Kerry came to say that the gentlemen wanted to know when the
Bishop would be with them, as the saying was; and two minutes afterward
the Bishop strode into the library through a line of his clergy, who
rose as he entered, and bowed to him in silence when his tall figure
bent slightly to each of them in turn.

"Your pardon, gentlemen, for this delay," he said, gravely, and then he
settled himself at the head of the table.

Hardly had the clergy taken their seats when the door of the room was
dashed open with a lordly bang, and into the muggy room, made darker
still by twenty long black coats, there shot a gleam of laughing
sunshine--Danny himself, at a hop, skip, and a jump, with a pair of
spectacles perched insecurely on the sliding bridge of his diminutive
nose.

The Archdeacon was there that day, and when the intruder had been
evicted by blind Kerry, who came in hot pursuit of him, he shook his
head and looked as solemn and as wise as his little russet face would
admit, and said:

"Ah, my Lord, you'll kill that child with kindness. May you never heap
up for yourself a bad harvest!"

The Bishop made no answer, but breathed on the restored spectacles, and
rubbed them with his red silk handkerchief.

"I hold with the maxim of my son-in-law the Deemster," the Archdeacon
continued: "let a child be dealt with in his father's house as the world
hereafter will deal with him."

"Nay, nay, but more gently," said the Bishop. "If he is a good man, ten
to one the world will whip him--let him remember his father's house as a
place of love."

"Ah, my Lord," said the Archdeacon, "but what of the injunction against
the neglect of the rod?"

The Bishop bent his head and did not answer.

Once in a way during these early years the Bishop took Danny across to
Ballamona, and then the two little exiles in their father's house,
banished from the place of love, would rush into the Bishop's arms, Mona
at his chin, Ewan with hands clasped about his leg and flaxen head
against the great seals that hung from his fob-pocket. But as for Danny
and his cousins, and the cousins and Danny, they usually stood a while
and inspected one another with that solemnity and aloofness which is one
of the phenomena of child manners, and then, when the reserve of the
three hard little faces had been softened by a smile, they would
forthwith rush at one another with mighty clinched fists and pitch into
one another for five minutes together, amid a chorus of squeals. In this
form of salutation Danny was never known to fail, and as he was too much
of a man to limit his greeting to Ewan, he always pitched into Mona with
the same masculine impartiality.

But the time came again when the salutation was unnecessary, for they
were sent to school together, and they saw one another daily. There was
only one school to which they could be sent, and that was the parish
school, the same that was taught by James Quirk, who "could not divide
his syllables," according to the account of Jabez Gawne, the tailor.

The parishioners had built their new schoolhouse near the church, and it
lay about midway between Bishop's Court and Ballamona. It was also about
half-way down the road that led to the sea, and that was a proximity of
never-ending delight. After school, in the long summer evenings, the
scholars would troop down to the shore in one tumultuous company, the
son of the Bishop with the son of the cobbler, the Deemster's little
girl with the big girl of Jabez, who sent his child on charity. Ragged
and well-clad, clean and dirty, and the biggest lad "rigging" the
smallest, and not caring a ha'porth if his name was the name of the
Deemster or the name of Billy the Gawk. Hand-in-hand, Danny and Ewan,
with Mona between, would skip and caper along the sands down to where
the gray rocks of the Head jutted out into the sea and bounded the
universe; Mona prattling and singing, shaking out her wavy hair to the
wind, dragging Danny aside to look at a seaweed, and pulling Ewan to
look at a shell, tripping down to the water's edge, until the big
bearded waves touched her boots, and then back once more with a
half-frightened, half-affected, laughter-loaded scream. Then the boys
would strip and bathe, and Mona, being only a woman, would mind the
men's clothes, or they would shout all together at the gulls, and Danny
would mock Mother Cary's chicken and catch the doleful cry of the
cormorant, and pelt with pebbles the long-necked bird as it sat on the
rocks; or he would clamber up over the slippery seaweed, across the
sharp slate ribs to where the sea-pinks grew in the corries and the
sea-duck laid her eggs, and sing out from some dizzy height to where
Ewan held his breath below and Mona stood crying and trembling on the
sands.

What times for Danny! How the lad seemed to swell and grow every day of
life! Before he was ten he had outgrown Ewan by half an inch, and gone
through a stand-up fight with every ruffian under twelve. Then, down
among the fishermen on the beach, what sport! Knocking about among the
boats, pulling at the oars like mad, or tugging at the sheets, baling
out and pushing off, and riding away over the white breakers, and
shouting for pure devilment above the plash of the water.

"Aw, man, it's all for the happy the lad feels inside," said Billy
Quilleash.

Danny and Billy Quilleash were sworn chums, and the little sand-boy
learned all the old salt's racy sayings, and went home to Bishop's Court
and fired them off at his father.

"There's a storm coming," the Bishop said one day, looking up at the
scudding clouds. "Ay, ay," said Danny, with his small eye askew, "the
long cat's tail was going off at a slant a while ago, and now the round
thick skate yonder is hanging mortal low." "The wind is rising," the
Bishop said on another occasion. "Ay, Davy's putting on the coppers for
the parson," said the young heretic.

School, too, was only another playground to Danny, a little less
tumultuous but no less delightful than the shore. The schoolmaster had
grown very deaf since the days when the Bishop pronounced him qualified
to teach an English school. This deafness he did his best to conceal,
for he had a lively recollection of the dissatisfaction of the
parishioners, and he had a natural unwillingness to lose his bread and
butter. But his scholars were not easily hoodwinked, and Danny, the
daring young dog, would play on the master's infirmity. "Spell me the
word arithmetic," the schoolmaster might ask when the boys were ranged
about his desk in class. And Danny would answer with a face of tragic
solemnity, "Twice one are two, twice two are four." "Very good," the
schoolmaster would reply. "And now, sir, repeat me your multiplication
table--twice times." And then, while the master held his head aside, as
if in the act of intent listening, and the other boys twisted their
faces to hide their grins or sniggered openly, Danny, still with the
face of a judge, would repeat a paraphrase of the familiar little hymn,
"Jemmy was a Welshman, Jemmy was a thief, Jemmy--" "Don't speak so fast,
sir--say your figures more plainly," the schoolmaster would interrupt.
And Danny would begin again with a more explicit enunciation, "Jemmy
Quirk was a Welshman, Jemmy--" Then the sniggers and the snorts would
rise to a tumult. And down would come the master's cane on the desk.
"Silence, boys, and let the boy say his table. Some of you big lads
might take example by him, and be none the worse. Go on, Daniel--you are
quite right so far--twice five are ten, twice six--"

There was one lad in the school who could not see the humor of the
situation, a slim, quiet boy, only a little older than Danny, but a long
way ahead of him in learning, and one evening this solemn youngster hung
behind when school was breaking up, and blurted out the mischief to the
schoolmaster. He did not get the reception he expected, for, in dire
wrath at the imputation that he was deaf, Mr. Quirk birched the
informant soundly. Nor did the reward of his treachery end with
birching. It did not take half an hour for the report of both birching
and treachery to travel by that swiftest of telephones, the schoolboy
tongue, through that widest of kingdoms, the world of school; and the
same evening, while Mona, on her way home, was gathering the bluebells
that grew on the lea of the yellow-tipped gorse, and Ewan was chasing
the humming bee through the hot air that was thick with midges, Danny,
with a face as white as a haddock, was striding alone by a long circuit
across the moor, to where a cottage stood by the path across the Head.
There he bounded in at the porch, caught a boy by the coat, dragged him
into the road, pummeled him with silent vigor, while the lad bellowed
and struggled to escape.

In another instant, an old woman hobbled out of the cottage on a stick,
and with that weapon she made for Danny, and gave him sundry hard raps
on the back and head.

"Och, the craythur," she cried, "get off with ye--the
damon--extraordinary--would the Lord think it now--it's in the breed of
ye--get off, or I'll break every bone in your skin."

Danny paid as little heed to the old woman's blows as to her threats,
and was up with his fist for the twentieth time to come down on the
craven traitor who bellowed in his grip, when all at once a horse's feet
were tramping about their limbs where they struggled in the road, and a
stern voice from over their heads shouted, "Stop, stop, or must I bring
the whip across your flanks?"

It was the Deemster. Danny fell aside on the right of the horse, and the
old woman and the boy on the left.

"What does this mean?" asked the Deemster, turning to his nephew; but
Danny stood there panting, his eyes like fire, his fists clinched, his
knuckles standing out like ribs of steel, and he made no answer.

"Who is this blubbering coward?" asked the Deemster, pointing with a
contemptuous gesture to the boy half hidden by the old woman's dress.

"Coward, is it?" said the woman. "Coward, you say?"

"Who is the brat, Mrs. Kerruish?" said the Deemster, sharply.

At that Mrs. Kerruish, for it was she, pulled the boy from behind her,
plucked off his hat, ran her wrinkled hand over his forehead to his
hair, and held up his face, and said:

"Look at him, Deemster--look at him. You don't come this way often, but
look at him while you're here. Did you ever see his picture before?
Never? Never see a face like that? No? Not when you look in the glass,
Deemster?"

"Get into the house, woman," said the Deemster, in a low, thick tone,
and so saying, he put the spurs to his horse.

"As for this young demon here," said the old woman, pushing the boy back
and pointing with her stick at Danny, "he'll have his heel on your neck
yet, Deemster--and remember the word I'm saying."




CHAPTER VII

DANNY THE MADCAP


Now, Danny was a great favorite with the Deemster, and nothing that he
could do was amiss. The spice of mischief in the lad made him the
darling of the Deemster's heart. His own son disappointed the Deemster.
He seemed to have no joy in him. Ewan was quiet, and his father thought
him a milksop. There was more than one sense in which the Deemster was
an indifferent judge of his species, but he found no difficulty in
comprehending the idiosyncrasy of his brother's son. Over the pathetic
story of Danny's maddest prank, or the last mournful account of his
daring devilry, the Deemster would chuckle and shake, and roll his head
between his shoulders, then give the boy a slap on his hindmost part,
accompanied by a lusty name, and finally rummage for something in his
pocket, and smuggle that something into the young rascal's palm.

Danny would be about fifteen years of age--a lump of a lad, and
therefore out of the leading-strings of his nurse, Kerry Quayle--when he
concocted a most audacious scheme, whereof Kerry was the chief subject
and victim. This had nothing less for its aim and object than to get
Kerry married to Hommy-beg--the blind woman to the deaf man. Now, Hommy
was a gaunt, raw-boned man, dressed in a rough blue jacket and a short
gray petticoat. His full and proper name was now quite lost. He was
known as Hommy-beg, sometimes as Hommy-beg-Bill, a name which at once
embodied a playful allusion to his great physique, and a certain
genealogical record in showing that he was little Tom, the son of Bill.
Though scarcely short of stone-deaf, he was musical. He played two
instruments, the fiddle and the voice. The former squeaked like a rasp,
and the latter thundered like a fog-horn. Away to Ballamona Master Danny
went, and found Hommy-beg thinning a bed of peonies.

"Aw, man, the terrible fond she is of the like o' that swate flower,"
said the young rogue, who spoke the homespun to the life. "Aw, dear, the
way she smells at them when you bring them up for the Bishop!"

"What, ould Kerry? Smelling, is it? And never a whiff of a smell at the
breed o' them!"

"Och, no, it's not the flowers, it's the man--the man, Hommy."

"That'll do, that'll do. And blind, too! Well, well."

"But the swate temper that's at her, Hommy! And the coaxing and coaxing
of her! And, man alive, the fond she is of you! _A fine sort of a man
anyways_, and _A rael good voice at him_. Aw, extraordinary,
extraordinary."

"D'ye raely mane it?"

"Mane it? Aw, well, well, and who but you doesn't know it, Hommy?"

"Astonishing, astonishing!"

"Come up to the Coort and take a cup o' tay with her."

Hommy-beg scratched his head. "Is it rarely true, Danny veg?"

"I'll lave it with you, Hommy," said Danny, and straightway the young
rascal went back to Bishop's Court, lighted upon blind Kerry, and
entered upon a glowing description of the personal charms of Hommy-beg.

"Aw, the good-looking he is, astonishing! My gough! You should see him
in his Sunday hat, or maybe with a frill on his shirt, and smiling, and
all to that! Terrible dacent sort is Hommy-beg!"

"What, the loblolly-boy in the petticoat?"

"Aw, but the tender-hearted he is for all, and, bless me, Kerry woman,
the swate he is on you!"

"What, the ould red-head that comes singing, as the saying is?"

"Aw, no, woman, but as black as the raven, and the way he looks
sorrowful-like when he comes beside of you. You wouldn't believe it!
And, bless me, the rael bad he is to come up to the Coort and take a cup
of tay with you, and the like o' that."

"Do you raely mane it, Danny, my chree?"

The very next day Hommy-beg arrived at the kitchen door of Bishop's
Court in his Sunday hat, in the shirt with the frill to it, and with a
peony as big as a March cabbage in his fist. The end of it all was that
Kerry and Hommy-beg were forthwith asked in church. Wild as the freak
was that made the deaf man and the blind woman man and wife, their
marriage was none the less happy for their infirmities.

The Deemster heard of the plot on his way to church on Sunday morning,
and he laughed in his throat all through the service, and when the first
of the askings was solemnly proclaimed from the reading-desk, he
tittered audibly in his pew. "Danny was tired of the woman's second
sight--found it inconvenient, very--wanted to be rid of her--good!" he
chuckled. But not long afterward he enjoyed a jest that was yet more to
his taste, for his own prime butt of ridicule, the Church itself, was
then the victim.

It was an old Manx custom that on Christmas Eve the church should be
given up to the people for the singing of their native carols or
carvals. The curious service was known as Oiel Verree (the Eve of Mary),
and at every such service for the last twenty years Hommy-beg, the
gardener, and Mr. James Quirk, the schoolmaster, had officiated as
singers in the strange Manx ritual. Great had hitherto been the rivalry
between these musical celebrities, but word had gone round the town that
at length their efforts were to be combined in a carol which they were
to sing together. Dan had effected this extraordinary combination of
talent by a plot which was expected to add largely to the amusement of
the listeners.

Hommy-beg could not read a syllable, yet he never would sing his carol
without having the printed copy of it in his hand. Of course, Mr. Quirk,
the schoolmaster, could read, but, as we have seen, he resembled
Hommy-beg in being almost stone-deaf. Each could hear himself sing, but
neither could hear another.

And now for the plot. Master Dan called on the gardener at his cottage
on the Brew on the morning of the day before Christmas Day, and "Hommy,"
said he, "it's morthal strange the way a man of your common-sense can't
see that you'd wallop that squeaking ould Jemmy Quirk in a jiffy if
you'd only consent to sing a ballad along of him. Bless me, man alive,
it's then they'd be seeing what a weak, ould cracked pot of a voice is
at him."

Hommy-beg's face began to wear a smile of benevolent condescension.
Observing his advantage, the young rascal continued, "Do it at the Oiel
Verree to-night, Hommy. He'll sing his treble, and you'll sing seconds
to him."

It was an unlucky remark. The gardener frowned austerely. "Me sing
seconds to the craythur? No, never!"

Dan explained to Hommy-beg, with a world of abject apologies, that there
was a sense in which seconds meant firsts, and at length the gardener
was mollified, and consented to the proposal; but one idea was firmly
rooted in his mind--namely, that if he was to sing a carol with the
schoolmaster, he must take the best of care to sing his loudest, in
order to drown at once the voice of his rival, and the bare notion that
it was he who was singing seconds to such a poor creature as that.

Then Master Danny trotted off to the schoolhouse, where he was now no
longer a scholar, and consequently enjoyed an old boy's privilege of
approaching the master on equal terms, and "Jemmy," he said, "it's
morthal strange the way a man of your common-sense can't see that you'd
wallop that squeaking old Hommy-beg in a jiffy if you'd only consent to
sing a ballad along of him. Do it at the Oiel Verree to-night, Jemmy,
and, bless me! that's the when they'll be seeing what a weak, ould
crack-pot of a voice is at the craythur."

The schoolmaster fell even an easier prey to the plot than the gardener
had been. A carol was selected; it was to be the ancient Manx carol on
the bad women mentioned in the Bible as having (from Eve downward)
brought evil on mankind.

Now, Hommy-beg kept his carols pinned against the walls of his cottage.
The "Bad Women" was the carol which was pinned above the mantelpiece,
just under the pendulum of the clock with the facetious face. It
resembled the other prints in being worn, crumpled, and dirty; but
Hommy-beg knew it by its position, and he could distinguish every other
carol by its place on the walls.

Danny had somehow got a "skute" into this literary mystery, and after
arranging with the schoolmaster the carol that was to be sung, he
watched Hommy-beg out of his cottage, and then went into it under
pretense of a friendly call upon blind Kerry. Before he left the cottage
he had taken down the carol that had been pinned above the mantelpiece,
and fixed up another in place of it from the opposite side of the room.
The substituted carol happened, oddly enough, to be a second copy of the
carol on "Bad Women," with this radical difference: the copy taken from
under the clock was the version of the carol in English, and the copy
put up was the version in Manx. Toward ten o'clock that night the church
bells began to ring, and Hommy-beg looked at the clock, took the carol
from under the pendulum, put on his best petticoat, and went off to
church.

Now, there were to be seasonable rejoicings at the Court on the morrow,
and Kerry had gone over to help at the Christmas preparations. Ewan and
Mona had always spent their Christmas at Bishop's Court since the day
when they left it as children. That night they had arrived as usual, and
after they had spent some hours with Danny in dressing the house in a
green-and-red garment of hibbin and hollin, the Bishop had turned them
off to bed. Danny's bedroom was the little crib over the library, and
Ewan's was the room over that. All three bade the Bishop good-night and
went into their rooms. But Danny did not go to bed; he listened until he
heard the Bishop in the library twisting his chair and stirring the
peats, and then he whipped off his boots and crept upstairs to Ewan's
room. There in bated breath he told of the great sport that was to come
off at the Oiel Verree, announced his intention of going, and urged Ewan
to go with him. They could just jump through the little window of his
room, and light on the soft grass by the library wall, and get in again
by the same easy means. No one would know that they had been out, and
what high jinks they must have! But no, Ewan was not to be persuaded,
and Danny set off alone.

Hommy-beg did not reach the church until the parson's sermon was almost
over. Prayers had been said in a thin congregation, but no sooner were
they done than crowds of young men and maidens tripped down the aisles.
The young women went up into the gallery, and from that elevation they
shot down at their bachelor friends large handfuls of peas. To what
ancient spirit of usage, beyond the ancient spirit of mischief, the
strange practise was due, we must be content to leave, as a solemn
problem, to the learned and curious antiquaries. Nearly everyboy carried
a candle, and the candles of the young women were adorned with a red
ribbon or rosette.

In passing out of the church the parson came face to face with
Hommy-beg, who was pushing his way up the aisle. The expression on his
face was not at the moment one of peculiar grace, and he stopped the
gardener and said sharply in his ear, "Mind you see that all is done in
decency and order, and that you close my church before midnight."

"Aw, but the church is the people's, I'm thinkin'," said Hommy-beg with
a shake of his tousled head.

"The people are as ignorant as goats," said the parson, angrily.

"Aw, well, and you're their shepherd, so just make sheeps of them," said
Hommy-beg, and he pushed on.

Danny was there by this time, and, with a face of mighty solemnity, he
sat on the right of Hommy-beg, and held a candle in his left hand. When
everything was understood to be ready, and Will-as-Thorn, the clerk, had
taken his station inside the communion rail, the business of the Oiel
Verree began. First one man got up and sung a carol in English; then
another sung a Manx carol. But the great event of the night was to be
the carol sung by the sworn enemies and rivals, Hommy-beg and Mr. James
Quirk.

At last the time came for these worthies. They rose from opposite sides
of the church, eyed each other with severe looks, stepped out of their
pews, and walked down the aisle to the door of the porch. Then they
turned about in silence, and, standing side by side, faced the
communion.

The tittering in the gallery and whispering in the body were audible to
all except the persons who were the cause of both. "Hush, hush, man
alive, that's him, that's him." "Bless me, look at Hommy-beg and the
petticut, and the handkercher pinnin' round his throat." "Aw, dear, it's
what he's used of." "A regular Punch and Judy."

Danny was exerting himself at that moment to keep order and silence.
"Hush, man, let them make a start for all."

The carol the rivals were about to sing contained some thirty verses. It
was an ancient usage that after each verse the carol singers should take
a long stride toward the communion. By the time the carol of "Bad Women"
came to an end the carol singers must, therefore, be at the opposite end
of the church.

There was now a sublime scorn printed on the features of Mr. Quirk. As
for Hommy-beg, he looked, at this last instant, like a man who was
rather sorry than otherwise for his rash adversary.

"The rermantic they're looking," whispered a girl in the gallery to the
giggling companion beside her.

Expectation was at its highest when Hommy-beg thrust his hand into his
pocket and brought out the printed copy of the carol. Hommy unfolded it,
glanced at it with the air of a conductor taking a final look at his
score, nodded his head at it as if in approval, and then, with a
magnanimous gesture, held it between himself and Mr. Quirk. The
schoolmaster in turn glanced at it, glanced again, glanced a third time
at the paper, and up into the face of Hommy-beg.

Anxiety was now on tiptoe. "Hush, d'ye hear, hush," whispered Danny from
his pew; "hush, man, or it's spoiling it all you'll be, for sure."

At the moment when Mr. Quirk glanced into the face of Hommy-beg there
was a smile on that countenance. Mr. Quirk mistook that smile. He
imagined he saw a trick. The schoolmaster could read, and he perceived
that the carol which the gardener held out to him was not the carol for
which he had been told by Master Danny to prepare. They were, by
arrangement, to have sung the English version of "Bad Women." This was
the Manx version, and though the metre was the same, it was always sung
to a different tune. Ah! Mr. Quirk understood it all! The monster wanted
to show that he, James Quirk, schoolmaster, could only sing one carol;
but, as sure as his name was Jemmy, he would be equal with him! He could
sing this Manx version, and he would. It was now Mr. Quirk's turn to
smile.

"Aw, look at them--the two of them--grinnin' together like a pair of old
gurgoils on the steeple!"

At a motion of the gardener's hand, intended to beat the time, the
singers began. Hommy-beg sang the carol agreed upon--the English version
of "Bad Women." Mr. Quirk sang the carol they held in their hands--the
Manx version of "Bad Women." Neither heard the other, and to dispel the
bare notion that either was singing seconds, each bawled at the utmost
reach of his lung-power. To one tune Hommy-beg sang:

    "Thus from the days of Adam
    Her mischief you may trace."

And to another Mr. Quirk sang:

    "She ish va'n voir ain ooilley
    Son v'ee da Adam ben."

Such laughter! How the young women in the gallery lay back in their
seats with hysterical shrieks! How the young fellows in the body made
the sacred edifice ring with guffaws! But the singers, with eyes
steadfastly fixed on the paper, heard nothing but each his own voice.

Three verses had been sung, and three strides made toward the communion,
when suddenly the laughter and shouting of the people ceased. All eyes
had turned toward the porch. There the Bishop stood, with blank
amazement printed on his face, his head bare, and one hand on the
half-opened door.

If a spectre had appeared the consternation had scarcely been greater.
Danny had been rolling in his pew with unconstrained laughter, but at
sight of the Bishop his candle fell from his hand and sputtered on the
book-rail. The Bishop turned about, and before the people had recovered
from their surprise he was gone. At the next moment everybody got up
without a word and left the church. In two minutes more not a soul
remained except Hommy-beg and Mr. Jemmy Quirk, who, with eyes riveted on
the printed carol in their hands, still sang lustily, oblivious of the
fact that they had no audience.

When Danny left the church that night it was through the lancet-window
of the vestry. Dropping on the turf at the northeast of the church, he
leaped the wall that divided the churchyard from a meadow on the north,
and struck upon a path that went round to Bishop's Court by way of the
cliff-head. The path was a long one, but it was lonesome, and its
lonesomeness was no small merit in Danny's view that night. The Bishop
must return to the Court by the highway through the village, and the
Bishop must be in front of him.

The night was dark and dumb, and, laden with salt scent, the dank vapor
floated up from the sea. Danny walked quickly. The deep boom of the
waters rolling on the sand below came up to him through the dense air.
Late as was the hour, he could hear the little sandpiper screaming at
Orris Head. The sea-swallow shot over him too, with its low, mournful
cry. Save for these sounds, and the quick beat of his own feet, all was
still around him.

Beneath his stubborn bit of skepticism Danny was superstitious. He was
full to the throat of fairy-lore and stories of witchcraft. He had
learned both from old Billy Quilleash and his mates as they sat barking
their nets on the shore. And that night the ghostly memories would
arise, do what he might to keep them down. To banish them Danny began to
whistle, and, failing to enliven himself much by that exercise, he began
to sing. His selection of a song was not the happiest under the
circumstances. It was the doleful ballad of "Myle Charaine." Danny sang
it in Manx, but here is a stave of it in English:

    "Oh, Myle Charaine, where got you your gold?
      Lone, lone, you have left me here;
    Oh, not in the Curragh, deep under the mold--
      Lone, lone, and void of cheer."

He had come up to Bishop's Court on the sea-front, and there the
Bishop's library stood out from the body of the old house, between the
chapel porch and the kitchen offices. A light was in the library, and
passing over the soft grass with the soft flight of a lapwing, Danny
peered in at the curtainless window. The familiar room was empty. On the
hearth a turf fire burned without flame, and bathed the book-encased
walls in a rosy red. The Bishop's easy-chair, in its white covering,
stood at one side of the ingle, his slippers in front of it; and beside
it, on the little three-legged mahogany table, were the inkhorn and the
long quill, and the Bishop's four-cornered library cap. The door stood
ajar, and the two candles in the two brass brackets at each side of the
fireplace were tipped by their extinguishers.

The Bishop had not returned; but the faint smile of triumph which at
that thought rested like a ray of pale sunshine on Danny's face suddenly
vanished. In a lad's vague way Danny now realized that it had not been
merely because the night was dark and the road lonely that he had
whistled and sung. He hung his head where he stood in the night, and as
if by an involuntary movement, he lifted his cap and fumbled it.

At the next instant Danny was clambering up the angle of the wall to the
lead flat that covered the projecting part of the library. From this
lead flat there opened the window of his own bedroom, and in a moment he
was striding through it. All was darkness within, but he needed no light
to see his way in that room. He knew every crib and corner; the place
where he kept his fishing lines, the nail from which his moth-net hung,
the bottle on the drawers in which he had his minnows, and the can with
the lid well down that contained the newts that were the terror of all
the women in the house. If Danny had been as blind as old Kerry he could
have found everything his room had in it, except, perhaps, his breeches,
or his shirt, or his other coat, or that cap that was always getting
itself lost, and of course no sight and no light would help a lad to
find things like these.

Hardly had Danny taken a step into his room before he realized that some
one had been there since he left it. Derry, his white-eyed collie, who
had been lying on the bed, dropped on the floor, and frisked about him.
"Down, Derry, down!" he whispered, and for a moment he thought it might
have been Derry that had pushed open the door. But the dog's snout could
not have turned down the counterpane of the bed, or opened the top
drawer that held the fishing flies, or rummaged among the long rods in
the corner. The counterpane lay double, the drawer stood open, the rods
were scattered--some one had been there to look for him, and, not
finding him, had tried to find a reason for his absence, and that some
one had either come into the room in the dark, or--been blind.

"Aw, it's always Kerry that's in it," Danny told himself, and with an
unpleasant remembrance of Kerry's strange faculty, whereof he was the
peculiar victim, he reflected that his race home had been vain. Then on
the instant Danny found himself concocting a trick to defeat
appearances. He had a foot on the stairs to carry out his design, when
he heard the door at the front of the house open and close, and a
familiar step pass through the hall. The Bishop had returned. Danny
waited and listened. Now there was talking in the library. Danny's quick
ear could scarcely distinguish the words, but the voices he could not
mistake--they were the voices of the Bishop and blind Kerry. With a
stealthy stride Danny went up to Ewan's room. Ewan was sleeping. Feeling
hot and cold together, Danny undressed and turned into bed. Before he
had time to bury his head under the clothes he heard the Bishop on the
stairs. The footsteps passed into the room below, and then after an
interval they were again on the stairs. In another moment Danny knew,
though of course his eyes were fast shut, and he was sleeping most
profoundly, that the Bishop with a lighted candle in his hand was
leaning over him.

It would wrong the truth to say that Master Danny's slumber was
disturbed that night; but next morning when the boys awoke together, and
Ewan rose on his elbow with a puzzled gaze at his unexpected bed-fellow,
Danny sidled out of the bed on to the floor, and, without looking too
much into Ewan's face, he began his toilet, as was his wont, by putting
on his cap. He had got this length, and was standing in cap and shirt,
when he blurted out the mischief of last night's adventure, the singing,
the sudden appearance of the Bishop, the race home along the cliff, and
the coming up to bed. "But you won't let on, Ewan, will you?" he said.
Ewan looked at that moment as if the fate of the universe hung on his
answer, but he gave the promise that was required of him. Then the boys
went downstairs and found Mona, and imparted the dread secret to her.
Presently the Bishop came in to breakfast with a face that was paler
than usual, and more than ordinarily solemn.

"Danny," he said, "why did you not sleep in your own bed last night, my
boy?"

"I slept with Ewan, father," Danny answered, promptly.

The Bishop said no more then, and they all sat down at the table.

"And so you two boys went to bed together--_together_?" he said, and,
with a dig of emphasis on his last word, repeated, he looked at Ewan.

Ewan's face crimsoned, and his tongue faltered, "Yes, uncle."

The Bishop's eyes fell. "Boys," he said, in another tone, "would you
think it? I have done you a great wrong."

The boys were just then most intent on the tablecloth.

"You must know," the Bishop went on, "that there was a most unseemly
riot at the Oiel Verree, and all night long I have been sore troubled by
the bad thought that Danny was in the midst of it."

The boys held their heads very low over their plates, and Mona's big
eyes filled visibly. Danny's impulse was to blurt out the whole mischief
there and then, but he reflected that to do so would be to charge Ewan
with falsehood. Ewan, on his part, would have confessed to the
deception, but he knew that this would mean that Danny must be punished.
The boy's wise head could see no way out of a tangle like that. The
breakfast was the quietest ever eaten on a Christmas morning at Bishop's
Court, and, little as the talking was, the Bishop, strangely enough, did
it all. But when they rose from the table, and the boys slunk out of the
room with most portentous gravity, Mona went up to the Bishop with a
face full of liquid grief, and, turning the whole depths of her great
troubled eyes upon him, the little maiden said: "Ewan didn't mean to
tell you what wasn't true--and cousin Danny didn't intend to
deceive--but he was--that is, Danny--I mean--dear uncle, you won't--"

"You mean that Danny was at the Oiel Verree last night--I know it,
child, I know it," said the Bishop, and he patted her head and smiled.

But the Bishop knew also that Danny had that day made one more step down
the steep of life, and left a little ghost of his child-self behind him,
and in his secret heart the Bishop saw that shadowy form, and wept over
it.




CHAPTER VIII

PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN


Now the facts of this history must stride on some six years, and in that
time the Deemster had lost nearly all the little interest he ever felt
in his children. Mona had budded into womanhood, tender, gracious,
quiet--a tall fair-haired maiden of twenty, with a drooping head like a
flower, with a voice soft and low, and the full blue eyes with their
depths of love and sympathy shaded by long fluttering lashes as the
trembling sedge shades the deep mountain pool. It was as ripe and
beautiful a womanhood as the heart of a father might dream of, but the
Deemster could take little pleasure in it. If Mona had been his son, her
quiet ways and tractable nature might have counted for something; but a
woman was only a woman in the Deemster's eyes, and the Deemster, like
the Bedouin chief, would have numbered his children without counting his
daughter. As for Ewan, he had falsified every hope of the Deemster. His
Spartan training had gone for nothing. He was physically a weakling; a
tall spare youth of two-and-twenty, fair-haired, like his sister, with a
face as spiritual and beautiful, and hardly less feminine. He was of a
self-torturing spirit, constantly troubled with vague questionings, and
though in this regard he was very much his father's son, the Deemster
held his temperament in contempt.

The end of all was that Ewan showed a strong desire to enter the Church.
The Deemster had intended that his son should study the law and follow
him in his place when his time came. But Ewan's womanly temperament
coexisted with a manly temper. Into the law he would not go, and the
Church he was resolved to follow. The Bishop had then newly opened at
Bishop's Court a training college for his clergy, and Ewan sought and
obtained admission. The Deemster fumed, but his son was not to be moved
even by his wrath. This was when Ewan was nineteen years of age, and
after two more years the spirituality of his character overcame the
obstacle of his youth, and the Bishop ordained him at twenty-one. Then
Ewan was made chaplain to the household at Bishop's Court.

Hardly had this been done when Ewan took another step in life. With the
knowledge of the Bishop, but without consulting the Deemster, he
married, being now of age, a pretty child of sixteen, the daughter of
his father's old foe, the vicar of the parish. When knowledge of this
act of unwisdom reached the Deemster his last remaining spark of
interest in his son expired, and he sent Mona across to Bishop's Court
with a curt message saying that Ewan and his wife were at liberty, if
they liked, to take possession of the old Ballamona. Thus he turned his
back upon his son, and did his best to wipe him out of his mind.

Ewan took his young wife to the homestead that had been the place of his
people for six generations, the place where he himself had been born,
the place where that other Ewan, his good grandfather, had lived and
died.

More than ever for these events the Deemster became a solitary man. He
kept no company; he took no pleasures. Alone he sat night after night in
his study at Ballamona, and Ballamona was asleep before he slept, and
before it awoke he was stirring. His daughter's presence in the house
was no society for the Deemster. She grew beside him like her mother's
youth, a yet fairer vision of the old days coming back to him hour by
hour, but he saw nothing of all that. Disappointed in his sole hope, his
son, whom truly he had never loved for love's sake, but only for his own
sorry ambitions, he sat down under his disappointment a doubly soured
and thrice-hardened man. He had grown noticeably older, but his restless
energy suffered no abatement. Biweekly he kept his court, but few sought
the law whom the law did not first find, for word went round that the
Deemster was a hard judge, and deemed the laws in rigor. If men differed
about money, they would say, "Och, why go to the Deemster? It's throwing
a bone into the bad dog's mouth," and then they would divide their
difference.

The one remaining joy of the Deemster's lonely life was centred in his
brother's son, Dan. That lusty youth had not disappointed his
expectations. At twenty he was a braw, brown-haired, brown-eyed lad of
six feet two inches in stature, straight and upright, and with the thews
and sinews of an ox. He was the athlete of the island, and where there
was a tough job of wrestling to be had, or a delightful bit of fighting
to be done, there was Dan in the heart of it. "Aw, and middling few
could come anigh him," the people used to say. But more than in Dan's
great stature and great strength, the little Deemster took a bitter
pleasure in his daring irreverence for things held sacred. In this
regard Dan had not improved with improving years. Scores of tricks his
sad pugnacity devised to help the farmers to cheat the parson of his
tithe, and it added not a little to the Deemster's keen relish of freaks
like these that it was none other than the son of the Bishop who
perpetrated them. As for the Bishop himself, he tried to shut his eyes
to such follies. He meant his son to go into the Church, and, in spite
of all outbursts of spirit, notwithstanding wrestling matches and
fights, and even some tipsy broils of which rumor was in the air, he
entered Dan as a student at the college he kept at Bishop's Court.

In due course the time of Dan's examination came, and then all further
clinging to a forlorn hope was at an end. The Archdeacon acted as the
Bishop's examining chaplain, and more than once the little man had
declared in advance his conscientious intention of dealing with the
Bishop's son as he would deal with any other. The examination took place
in the library of Bishop's Court, and besides the students and the
examiner there were some six or seven of the clergy present, and Ewan
Mylrea, then newly ordained, was among them. It was a purely oral
examination, and when Dan's turn came the Archdeacon assumed his
loftiest look, and first tackled the candidate where he was known to be
weakest.

"I suppose, sir, you think you can read your Greek Testament?"

Dan answered that he had never thought anything about it.

"I dare say for all your modesty that you have an idea that you know it
well enough to teach it," said the Archdeacon.

Dan hadn't an idea on the subject.

"Take down the Greek Testament, and imagine that I'm your pupil, and
proceed to expound it," said the Archdeacon.

Dan took the book from the bookcase and fumbled it in his fingers.

"Well, sir, open at the parable of the tares."

Dan scratched his big head leisurely, and he did his best to find the
place. "So I'm to be tutor--is that it?" he said, with a puzzled look.

"That is so."

"And you are to be the pupil?"

"Precisely--suppose yourself my tutor--and now begin."

At this Ewan stepped out with a look of anxiety. "Is not that a rather
difficult supposition, Archdeacon?" he said, timidly.

The Archdeacon glanced over his grandson loftily and made no reply.

"Begin, sir, begin," he said, with a sweep of his hand toward Dan, and
at that he sat down in the high-backed oak chair at the head of the
table.

Then on the instant there came into Dan's quick eyes a most mischievous
twinkle. He was standing before the table with the Greek Testament open
at the parable of the tares, and he knew too well he could not read the
parable.

"When do we change places, Archdeacon?" he asked.

"We have changed places--you are now the tutor--I am your pupil--begin,
sir."

"Oh! we have changed places, have we?" said Dan, and at that he lifted
up the Archdeacon's silver-tipped walking-cane which lay on the table
and brought it down again with a bang. "Then just you get up off your
chair, sir," he said, with a tone of command.

The Archdeacon's russet face showed several tints of blue at that
moment, but he rose to his feet. Thereupon Dan handed him the open book.

"Now, sir," he said, "first read me the parable of the tares."

The clergy began to shuffle about and look into each other's faces. The
Archdeacon's expression was not amiable, but he took the book and read
the parable.

"Very fair, very fair indeed," said Dan, in a tone of mild
condescension--"a few false quantities, but very fair on the whole."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is going too far," said one of the clergy.

"Silence, sir," said Dan, with a look of outraged authority.

Then there was dire confusion. Some of the clergy laughed outright, and
some giggled under their breath, and some protested in white wrath, and
the end of it all was that the examination came to a sudden termination,
and, rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, Dan was adjudged to be
unfit for the ministry of the Church.

When the Bishop heard the verdict his pale face whitened visibly, and he
seemed to see the beginning of the end. At that moment he thought of the
Deemster with bitterness. This blow to his hopes did not cement the
severed lives of the brothers. The forces that had been dividing them
year by year since the days of their father appeared to be drawing them
yet wider apart in the lives and fortunes of their children. Each felt
that the other was frustrating his dearest expectations in his son, and
that was an offense that neither could forgive. To the Deemster it
seemed that the Bishop was bearing down every ambition of his life,
tearing him up as a naked trunk, leaving him a childless man. To the
Bishop it seemed that the Deemster was wrecking the one life that was
more to him than his own soul, and standing between him and the heart
that with all its follies was dearer than the world beside. From the
time of Ewan's marriage and Dan's disgrace the Bishop and the Deemster
rarely met, and when they passed on the road they exchanged only the
coldest salutation.

But if the fates were now more than ever fostering an unnatural enmity
between the sons of old Ewan they were cherishing at the same time the
loves of their children. Never were cousins more unlike or more fondly
attached. Between Dan, the reckless scapegrace, and Mona, with the big
soft eyes and the quiet ways, the affection was such as neither
understood. They had grown up side by side, they had seen each other
daily, they had scampered along the shore with clasped hands, they had
screamed at the sea-gulls with one voice, and still they were boy and
girl together. But once they were stooking the barley in the glebe, and,
the day being hot, Mona tipped back her white sun-bonnet, and it fell on
to her shoulders. Seeing this, Dan came stealthily behind and thought
very craftily to whisk it away unobserved; but the strings by which it
was tied caught in her hair and tugged at its knot, and the beautiful
wavy shower fell rip-rip-rippling down her back. The wind caught the
loosened hair and tossed it about her, and she stood up erect among the
corn with the first blush on her cheeks that Dan had ever brought there,
and turned full upon him all the glorious light of her deep blue eyes.
Then, then, oh then, Dan seemed to see her for the first time a girl no
longer, but a woman, a woman, a woman! And the mountains behind her were
in one instant blotted out of Dan's eyes, and everything seemed to spin
about him.

When next he knew where he was, and what he was doing, behold, there
were Mona's rosy lips under his, and she was panting and gasping for
breath.

But if the love of Dan and Mona was more than cousinly, though they knew
it not as yet, the love of Ewan for Dan was wonderful and passing the
love of women. That pure soul, with its vague spiritual yearnings,
seemed to have nothing in common with the jovial roysterer, always
fighting, always laughing, taking disgrace as a duck takes water, and
losing the trace of it as easily. Twenty times he stood between the
scapegrace and the Bishop, twenty times he hid from the good father the
follies of the son. He thought for that thoughtless head that never had
an ache or a care under its abundant curls; he hoped for that light
heart that hoped for nothing; he trembled for the soul that felt no
fear. Never was such loyalty between man and man since David wept for
Jonathan. And Ewan's marriage disturbed this affection not at all, for
the love he bore to Dan was a brotherly passion for which language has
yet no name.

Let us tell one story that shall show this friendship in its double
bearings--Ewan's love and temper and Dan's heedless harshness and the
great nature beneath it, and then we will pass on with fuller knowledge
to weightier matters.

Derry, the white-eyed collie that had nestled on the top of his master's
bed the night Dan sneaked home in disgrace from Oiel Verree, was a
crafty little fox, with cunning and duplicity bred in his very bones. If
you were a tramp of the profession of Billy the Gawk, he would look up
at you with his big innocent eyes, and lick your hand, and thrust his
nose into your palm, and the next moment he would seize you by the
hindmost parts and hold on like a leech. His unamiable qualities grew as
he grew in years, and one day Dan went on a long journey, leaving Derry
behind, and when he returned he had another dog with him, a great shaggy
Scotch collie, with bright eyes, a happy phiz, and a huge bush of a
tail. Derry was at the gate when his master came home, and he eyed the
new-comer with looks askance. From that day Derry turned his back on his
master, he would never answer his call, and he did not know his whistle
from the croak of a corn-crake. In fact, Derry took his own courses, and
forthwith fell into all manner of dissolute habits. He went out at night
alone, incognito, and kept most unchristian hours. The farmers around
complained that their sheep were found dead in the field, torn and
worried by a dog's teeth. Derry was known to be a dog that did not live
a reputable life, and suspicion fell on him. Dan took the old fox in
hand, and thenceforward Derry looked out on the world through a rope
muzzle.

One day there was to be a sheep-dog match, and Dan entered his Scotch
collie, Laddie. The race was to be in the meadow at the foot of Slieu
Dhoo, and great crowds of people came to witness it. Hurdles were set up
to make all crooks and cranks of difficulty, and then a drift of sheep
were turned loose in the field. The prize was to the dog that would, at
the word of its master, gather the sheep together and take them out at
the gate in the shortest time. Ewan, then newly married, was there, and
beside him was his child-wife. Time was called, and Dan's turn came to
try the mettle of his Laddie. The dog started well, and in two or three
minutes he had driven the whole flock save two into an alcove of hurdles
close to where Ewan and his wife stood together. Then at the word of his
master Laddie set off over the field for the stragglers, and Dan shouted
to Ewan not to stir a hand or foot, or the sheep would be scattered
again. Now, just at that instant who should pop over the hedge but Derry
in his muzzle, and quick as thought he shot down his head, put up his
paws, threw off his muzzle, dashed at the sheep, snapped at their legs,
and away they went in twenty directions.

Before Ewan had time to cry out Derry was gone, with his muzzle between
his teeth. When Dan, who was a perch or two up the meadow, turned round
and saw what had happened, and that his dog's chances were gone, his
anger overcame him, and he turned on Ewan with a torrent of reproaches.

"There--you've done it with your lumbering--curse it."

With complete self-possession Ewan explained how Derry had done the
mischief.

Then Dan's face was darker with wrath than it had ever been before.

"A pretty tale," he said, and his lip curled in a sneer. He turned to
the people around. "Anybody see the dog slip his muzzle?"

None had seen what Ewan had affirmed. The eyes of every one had been on
the two stragglers in the distance pursued by Dan and Laddie.

Now, when Ewan saw that Dan distrusted him, and appealed to strangers as
witness to his word, his face flushed deep, and his delicate nostrils
quivered.

"A pretty tale," Dan repeated, and he was twisting on his heel, when up
came Derry again, his muzzle on his snout, whisking his tail, and
frisking about Dan's feet with an expression of quite lamb-like
simplicity.

At that sight Ewan's livid face turned to a great pallor, and Dan broke
into a hard laugh.

"We've heard of a dog slipping his muzzle," he said, "but who ever heard
of a dog putting a muzzle on again?"

Then Ewan stepped from beside his girl-wife, who stood there with
heaving breast. His eyes were aflame, but for an instant he conquered
his emotions and said, with a constrained quietness, but with a deep
pathos in his tone, "Dan, do you think I've told you the truth?"

Dan wheeled about. "I think you've told me a lie," he said, and his
voice came thick from his throat.

All heard the word, and all held their breath. Ewan stood a moment as if
rooted to the spot, and his pallid face whitened every instant. Then he
fell back, and took the girl-wife by the hand and turned away with her,
his head down, his very heart surging itself out of his choking breast.
And, as he passed through the throng, to carry away from that scene the
madness that was working in his brain, he overheard the mocking comments
of the people. "Aw, well, well, did ye hear that now?--called him a
liar, and not a word to say agen it." "A liar! Och, a liar? and him a
parzon, too!" "Middling chicken-hearted, anyways--a liar! Aw, well,
well, well!"

At that Ewan flung away the hand of his wife, and, quivering from head
to foot, he strode toward Dan.

"You've called me a liar," he said, in a shrill voice that was like a
cry. "Now, you shall prove your word--you shall fight me--you shall, by
God."

He was completely carried away by passion.

"The parzon, the parzon!" "Man alive, the young parzon!" the people
muttered, and they closed around.

Dan stood a moment. He looked down from his great height at Ewan's
quivering form and distorted face. Then he turned about and glanced into
the faces of the people. In another instant his eyes were swimming in
tears; he took a step toward Ewan, flung his arms about him, and buried
his head in his neck, and the great stalwart lad wept like a little
child. In another moment Ewan's passion was melted away, and he kissed
Dan on the cheek.

"Blubbering cowards!" "Aw, blatherskites!" "Och, man alive, a pair of
turtle-doves!"

Dan lifted his head and looked around, raised himself to his full
height, clinched his fists, and said:

"Now, my lads, you did your best to make a fight, and you couldn't
manage it. I won't fight my cousin, and he shan't fight me; but if
there's a man among you would like to know for himself how much of a
coward I am, let him step out--I'm ready."

Not a man budged an inch.




CHAPTER IX

THE SERVICE ON THE SHORE


It was the spring of the year when the examining chaplain gave the
verdict which for good or ill put Dan out of the odor of sanctity. Then
in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, he haunted the shore where old
Billy and his mates were spreading their nets and barking them in
preparation for the herring season that was soon to begin. There it was,
while stretched on the warm shingle, with old Billy Quilleash sitting
near, smoking his black cutty and mending the meshes broken by the
dogfish of last year, that Dan hit on the idea of a new course in life.
This was nothing better or worse than that of turning fisherman. He
would buy a smack and make old Billy his skipper; he would follow the
herrings himself, and take up his own share and the share of the boat.
It would be delightful, and, of course, it would be vastly profitable.
Everything looked plain and straight and simple, and though old Billy
more than half shook his gray head at the project, and let fall by
several inches his tawny face, and took his pipe out of his mouth and
cleared his throat noisily, and looked vacantly out to sea, and gave
other ominous symptoms of grave internal dubitation, Dan leaped to his
feet at the sudden access of new purpose, and bowled off in hot haste to
tell the Bishop.

The Bishop listened in silence at first, and with a sidelong look out at
the window up to the heights of Slieu Dhoo, and when Dan, in a hang-dog
manner, hinted at certain new-born intentions of reform, there was a
perceptible trembling of the Bishop's eyelids; and when he gathered
voice and pictured the vast scheme of profit without loss, the Bishop
turned his grave eyes slowly upon him, and then Dan's own eyes suddenly
fell, and the big world began to shrivel up to the pitiful dimensions of
an orange with the juice squeezed out of it. But the end of it all was
that the Bishop undertook to become responsible for the first costs of
the boat, and, having made this promise with the air of a man who knows
too well that he is pampering the whim of a spoiled boy, he turned away
rather suddenly, with his chin a thought deeper than ever in his breast.

What hurry and bustle ensued. What driving away to north, south, east,
and west, to every fishing port in the island where boats were built or
sold! At length a boat was bought on the chocks at Port le Mary, a
thirty-ton boat of lugger build, and old Billy Quilleash was sent south
to bring it up through the Calf Sound to the harbor at Peeltown.

Then there was the getting together of a crew. Of course old Billy was
made skipper. He had sailed twenty years in a boat of Kinvig's with
three nets to his share, and half that time he had been admiral of the
Peeltown fleet of herring boats, with five pounds a year for his post of
honor. In Dan's boat he was to have four nets by his own right, and one
for his nephew, Davy Fayle. Davy was an orphan, brought up by Billy
Quilleash. He was a lad of eighteen, and was to sail as boy. There were
four other hands--Crennel, the cook; Teare, the mate; Corkell, and
Corlett.

Early and late Dan was down at the harbor, stripped to the woolen shirt,
and tackling any odd job of painting or carpentry, for the opening of
the herring season was hard upon them. But he found time to run up to
the new Ballamona to tell Mona that she was to christen his new boat,
for it had not been named when it left the chocks; and then to the old
Ballamona, to persuade Ewan to go with him on his first trip to the
herrings.

The day appointed by custom for the first takings of the herring came
quickly round. It was a brilliant day in early June. Ewan had been
across to Slieu Dhoo to visit his father, for the first time since his
marriage, more than half a year ago, in order to say that he meant to go
out for the night's fishing in Dan's new boat, and to beg that his young
wife, who was just then in delicate health, might be invited to spend
the night of his absence with Mona at the new Ballamona. The Deemster
complied with a grim face; Ewan's young wife went across in the early
morning, and in the afternoon all four, the Deemster and Mona, Ewan and
his wife, set off in a lumbering, springless coach--the first that the
island had yet seen--to witness the departure of the herring fleet from
Peeltown, and to engage in that day's ceremony.

The salt breath of the sea was in the air, and the light ripples of the
bay glistened through a drowsy haze of warm sunshine. It was to be high
water at six o'clock. When the Deemster's company reached Peeltown, the
sun was still high over Contrary Head, and the fishing boats in the
harbor, to the number of two hundred, were rolling gently, with their
brown sails half set, to the motion of the rising tide.

There was Dan in his guernsey on the deck of his boat, and, as the coach
drew up near the bottom of the wooden pier, he lifted his red cap from
his curly head, and then went on to tie a bottle by a long blue ribbon
to the tiller. There was old Billy Quilleash in his sea-boots, and there
was Davy Fayle, a shambling sort of lad, long rather than tall, with
fair hair tangled over his forehead, and a face which had a simple,
vacant look that came of a lagging lower lip. Men on every boat in the
harbor were washing the decks, or bailing out the dingey, or laying down
the nets below. The harbor-master was on the quay, shouting to this boat
to pull up or to that one to lie back. And down on the broad sands of
the shore were men, women, and children in many hundreds, sitting and
lying and lounging about an empty boat with a hole in the bottom that
lay high and dry on the beach. The old fishing town itself had lost its
chill and cheerless aspect, and no longer looked hungrily out over miles
of bleak sea. Its blind alleys and dark lanes, its narrow, crabbed,
crooked streets were bright with little flags hung out of the little
stuffed-up windows, and yet brighter with bright faces that hurried to
and fro.

About five o'clock, as the sun was dipping seaward across the back of
Contrary, leaving the brown sails in the harbor in shade, and glistening
red on the sides of the cathedral church on the island-rock that stood
twenty yards out from the mainland, there was a movement of the people
on the shore toward the town behind them, and of fisher-fellows from
their boats toward the beach. Some of the neighboring clergy had come
down to Peeltown, and the little Deemster sat in his coach, thrown open,
blinking in the sun under his shaggy gray eyebrows. But some one was
still looked for, and expectation was plainly evident in every face
until a cheer came over the tops of the houses from the market-place.
Then there was a general rush toward the mouth of the quay, and
presently there came, laboring over the rough cobbles of the tortuous
Castle Street, flanked by a tumultuous company of boys and men,
bareheaded women, and children, who halloed and waved their arms and
tossed up their caps, a rough-coated Manx pony, on which the tall figure
of the Bishop sat.

The people moved on with the Bishop at their head until they came to the
beach, and there, at the disused boat lying dry on the sand, the Bishop
alighted. In two minutes more every fisherman in the harbor had left his
boat and gathered with his fellows on the shore. Then there began a
ceremony of infinite pathos and grandeur.

In the open boat the pale-faced Bishop stood, his long hair, sprinkled
with gray, lifted gently over his drooping shoulders by the gentle
breeze that came with its odor of brine from the sea. Around him, on
their knees on the sand, were the tawny-faced, weather-beaten fishermen
in their sea-boots and guernseys, bareheaded, and fumbling their soft
caps in their hands. There, on the outside, stood the multitude of men,
women, and young children, and on the skirts of the crowd stood the
coach of the Deemster, and it was half encircled by the pawing horses of
some of the black-coated clergy.

The Bishop began the service. It asked for the blessing of God on the
fishing expedition which was about to set out. First came the lesson,
"And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly"; and then the
story of Jesus in the ship, when there arose a great tempest while He
slept, and His disciples awoke Him, and He arose and rebuked the waves;
and then that other story of how the disciples toiled all night and took
nothing, but let down their nets again at Christ's word, and there came
a great multitude of fishes, and their nets brake. "Restore and continue
to us the harvest of the sea," prayed the Bishop, with his face
uplifted; and the men on their knees on the sand, with uncovered heads
and faces in their caps, murmured their responses in their own tongue,
"Yn Meailley."

And while they prayed, the soft boom of the unruffled waters on the
shore, and the sea's deep murmur from away beyond the headland, and the
wild jabbering cries of a flight of sea-gulls disporting on a rock in
the bay, were the only sounds that mingled with the Bishop's deep tones
and the men's hoarse voices.

Last of all, the Bishop gave out a hymn. It was a simple old hymn, such
as every man had known since his mother had crooned it over his cot. The
men rose to their feet, and their lusty voices took up the strain; the
crowd behind, and the clergy on their horses, joined it; and from the
Deemster's coach two women's voices took it up, and higher, higher,
higher, like a lark, it floated up, until the soft boom and deep murmur
of the sea and the wild cry of the sea-birds were drowned in the broad
swell of the simple old sacred song.

The sun was sinking fast through a red haze toward the sea's verge, and
the tide was near the flood, when the service on the shore ended, and
the fishermen returned to their boats.

Billy Quilleash leaped aboard the new lugger, and his four men followed
him. "See all clear," he shouted to Davy Fayle; and Davy stood on the
quay with the duty of clearing the ropes from the blocks, and then
following in the dingey that lay moored to the wooden steps.

Dan had gone up to the Deemster's coach and helped Mona and the young
wife of Ewan to alight. He led them to the quay steps, and when the
company had gathered about, and all was made ready, he shouted to old
Billy to throw him the bottle that lay tied by the blue ribbon to the
tiller. Then he handed the bottle to Mona, who stood on the step, a few
feet above the water's edge.

Mona was looking very fresh and beautiful that day, with a delicious joy
and pride in her deep eyes. Dan was talking to her with an awkward sort
of consciousness, looking askance at his big brown hands when they came
in contact with her dainty white fingers, then glancing down at his
great clattering boots, and up into her soft, smooth face.

"What am I to christen her?" said Mona, with the bottle held up in her
hand.

"Mona," answered Dan, with a shamefaced look and one hand in his brown
hair.

"No, no," said she, "not that."

"Then what you like," said Dan.

"Well, the 'Ben-my-Chree,'" said Mona, and with that the bottle broke on
the boat's side.

In another instant Ewan was kissing his meek little wife, and bidding
her good-by, and Dan, in a fumbling way, was, for the first time in his
life, demurely shaking Mona's hand, and trying hard to look her in the
face.

"Tail on there," shouted Quilleash from the lugger. Then the two men
jumped aboard, Davy Fayle ran the ropes from the blocks, the admiral's
boat cleared away from the quay, and the admiral's flag was shot up to
the masthead. The other boats in the harbor followed one by one, and
soon the bay was full of the fleet.

As the "Ben-my-Chree" stood out to sea beyond the island-rock, Dan and
Ewan stood aft, Dan in his brown guernsey, Ewan in his black coat; Ewan
waving his handkerchief, and Dan his cap; old Billy was at the tiller,
Crennel, the cook, had his head just above the hatchways, and Davy was
clambering hand-over-hand up the rope by which the dingey was hauled to
the stern.

Then the herring fleet sailed away under the glow of the setting sun.




CHAPTER X

THE FIRST NIGHT WITH THE HERRINGS


The sun went down, and a smart breeze rose off the land as the
"Ben-my-Chree," with the fleet behind her, rounded Contrary Head, and
crossed the two streams that flow there. For an hour afterward there was
still light enough to see the coast-line curved into covelets and
promontories, and to look for miles over the hills with their moles of
gorse, and tussocks of lush grass. The twilight deepened as the fleet
rounded Niarbyl Point, and left the islet on their lee, with
Cronk-ny-Irey-Lhaa towering into the gloomy sky. When they sailed across
Fleshwick Bay the night gradually darkened, and nothing was seen of
Ennyn Mooar. But after an hour of darkness the heavens lightened again,
and glistened with stars, and when old Billy Quilleash brought his boat
head to the wind in six fathoms of water outside Port Erin, the moon had
risen behind Bradda, and the rugged headland showed clear against the
sky. One after another the boats and the fleet brought to about the
"Ben-my-Chree."

Dan asked old Billy if he had found the herrings on this ground at the
same time in former seasons.

"Not for seven years," said the old man.

"Then why try now?"

Billy stretched out his hand to where a flight of sea-gulls were dipping
and sailing in the moonlight. "See the gull there?" he said. "She's
skipper to-night; she's showing us the fish."

Davy Fayle had been leaning over the bow, rapping with a stick at the
timbers near the water's edge.

"Any signs?" shouted Billy Quilleash.

"Ay," said Davy, "the mar-fire's risin'."

The wind had dropped, and luminous patches of phosphorescent light in
the water were showing that the herrings were stirring.

"Let's make a shot; up with the gear," said Quilleash, and preparations
were made for shooting the nets over the quarter.

"Ned Teare, you see to the line. Crennel, look after the corks.
Davy--where's that lad?--look to the seizings, d'ye hear?"

Then the nets were hauled from below, and passed over a bank-board
placed between the hatchway and the top of the bulwark. Teare and
Crennel shot the gear, and as the seizings came up, Davy ran aft with
them, and made them fast to the warp near the taffrail.

When the nets were all paid out, every net in the drift being tied to
the next, and a solid wall of meshes nine feet deep had been swept away
along the sea for half a mile behind them, Quilleash shouted, "Down with
the sheets."

The ropes were hauled, the sails were taken in, the mainmast--which was
so made as to lower backward--was dropped, and only the drift-mizzen was
left, and that was to keep the boat head on to the wind.

"Up with the light there," said Quilleash.

At this word Davy Fayle popped his head out of the hatchways.

"Aw, to be sure, that lad's never ready. Get out of that, quick."

Davy jumped on deck, took a lantern, and fixed it to the top of the
mitch board. Then vessel and nets drifted together, and Dan and Ewan,
who had kept the deck until now, went below together.

It was now a calm, clear night, with just light enough to show two or
three of the buoys on the back of the net nearest to the boat, as they
floated under water. Old Billy had not mistaken his ground. Large white
patches came moving out of the surrounding pavement of deep black,
lightened only by the image of a star where the vanishing ripples left
the dark sea smooth. Once or twice countless faint popping sounds were
to be heard, and minute points of shooting silver were to be seen on the
water around. The herrings were at play, and shoals on shoals soon broke
the black sea into a glistening foam.

But no "strike" was made, and after an hour's time Dan popped his head
over the hatchways and asked the skipper to try the "look-on" net. The
warp was hauled in until the first net was reached. It came up as black
as coal, save for a single dogfish or two that had broken a mesh here
and there.

"Too much moon to-night," said Quilleash; "they see the nets, and 'cute
they are extraordinary."

But half an hour later the moon went out behind a thick ridge of cloud
that floated over the land; the sky became gray and leaden, and a rising
breeze ruffled the sea. Then hour after hour wore on, and not a fish
came to the look-on net. Toward one o'clock in the morning, the moon
broke out again. "There'll be a heavy strike now," said Quilleash, and
in another instant a luminous patch floated across the line of the nets,
sank, disappeared, and finally pulled three of the buoys down with them.

"Pull up now," shouted Quilleash, in another tone.

Then the nets were hauled. Davy, the boy, led the warp through a
snatch-block fixed to the mast-hole on to the capstan. Ned Teare
disconnected the nets from the warps, and Crennel and Corlett pulled the
nets over the gunwale. They came up silver-white in the moonlight, a
solid block of fish. Billy Quilleash and Dan passed them over the
scudding-pole and shook the herrings into the hold.

"Five maze at least," said Quilleash, with a chuckle of satisfaction.
"Try again." And once more the nets were shot. The other boats of the
fleet were signaled, by a blue light run up the drift-mizzen, that the
"Ben-my-Chree" had struck a scale of fish. In a few minutes more the
blue light was answered by other blue lights on every side, and these
reported that the fishery was everywhere faring well.

One, two, three o'clock came and went. The night was wearing on; the
moon went out once more, and in the darkness which preceded the dawn the
lanterns burning on the fleet of drifting boats gave out an eerie glow
across the waters that lay black and flat around. The gray light came at
length in the east, and the sun rose over the land. Then the nets were
hauled in for the last time and that night's fishing was done.

The mast was lifted, but before the boat was brought about the skipper
shouted, "Men, let us do as we're used of," and instantly the admiral's
flag was run up to the masthead, and at this sign the men dropped on one
knee, with their faces in their caps, and old Billy offered up a short
and simple prayer of thanks for the blessings of the sea.

When this was done every man leaped to his feet, and all was work,
bustle, shouting, singing out, and some lusty curses.

"Tumble up the sheets--bear a hand there--d---- the lad," bawled
Quilleash; "get out of the way, or I'll make you walk handsome over the
bricks."

In five minutes more the "Ben-my-Chree," with the herring fleet behind
her, was running home before a stiff breeze.

"Nine maze--not bad for the first night," said Dan to Ewan.

"Souse them well," said Quilleash, and Ned Teare sprinkled salt on the
herrings as they lay in the hold.

Crennel, the cook, better known as the "slushy," came up the hatchways
with a huge saucepan, which he filled with the fish. As he did so there
was a faint "cheep, cheep" from below--the herrings were still alive.

All hands went down for a smoke except Corlett, who stood at the tiller,
Davy, who counted for nobody and stretched himself out at the bow, and
Ewan. The young parson, who had been taking note of the lad during the
night, now seated himself on a coil of rope near where Davy lay. The
"cheep, cheep" was the only sound in the air except the plash of the
waters at the boat's bow, and with an inclination of the head in the
direction of the fish in the hold, Ewan said, "It seems cruel, Davy,
doesn't it?"

"Cruel? Well, pozzible, pozzible. Och, 'deed now, they've got their
feelings same as anybody else."

The parson had taken the lad's measure at a glance.

"You should see the shoals of them lying round the nets, watching the
others--their mothers and sisters, as you might say--who've got their
gills 'tangled. And when you haul the net up, away they go at a slant in
millions and millions, just the same as lightning going through the
water. Och, yes, yes, leave them alone for having their feelings."

"It does seem cruel, Davy, eh?"

Davy looked puzzled; he was reasoning out a grave problem.

"Well, sir, that's the mortal strange part of it. It does look cruel to
catch them, sarten sure; but then the herrings themselves catch the
sand-eels, and the cod catch the herring, and the porpoises and
grampuses catch the cod."

Ewan did his best to look astonished.

"Aw, that's the truth, sir. It's terrible, wonderful strange, but I
suppose it's all nathur. You see, sir, we do the same ourselves."

"How do you mean, Davy? We don't eat each other, I hope," said the young
parson.

"Och, don't we, though? Lave us alone for that."

Ewan tried to look appalled.

"Well, of coorse, not to say _ate_, not 'xactly _ate;_ but the biggest
chap allis rigs the rest; and the next biggest chap allis rigs a littler
one, you know, and the littlest chap, he gets rigged by everybody all
round, doesn't he, sir?"

Davy had got a grip of the knotty problem, but the lad's poor, simple
face looked sadly burdened, and he came back to his old word.

"Seems to me it must be all nathur, sir."

Ewan began to feel some touch of shame at playing with this simple,
earnest, big little heart. "So you think it all nature, Davy?" he said,
with a lump gathering in his throat.

"Well, well, I do, you know, sir; it does make a fellow fit to cry a
bit, somehow; but it must be nathur, sir."

And Davy took off his blue worsted cap and fumbled it and gave his
troubled young head a grave shake.

Then there was some general talk about Davy's early history. Davy's
father had been pressed into the army before Davy was born, and had
afterward been no more heard of; then his mother had died, and Billy
Quilleash, being his mother's elder brother, had brought him up. Davy
had always sailed as boy with Uncle Billy, he was sailing as boy then,
and that was to the end that Uncle Billy might draw his share, but the
young master (Mastha Dan) had spoken up for him, so he had, and he knew
middlin' well what that would come to. "'He's a tidy lump of a lad now,'
says Mastha Dan, 'and he's well used of the boats, too,' says he, 'and
if he does well this time,' he says, 'he must sail man for himself next
season.' Aw, yes, sir, that was what Mastha Dan said."

It was clear that Dan was the boy's hero. When Dan was mentioned that
lagging lip gave a yearning look to Davy's simple face. Dan's doubtful
exploits and his dubious triumphs all looked glorious in Davy's eyes.
Davy had watched Dan, and listened to him, and though Dan might know
nothing of his silent worship, every word that Dan had spoken to him had
been hoarded up in the lad's heart like treasure. Davy had the dog's
soul, and Dan was his master.

"Uncle Billy and him's same as brothers," said Davy; "and Uncle Billy's
uncommon proud of the young master, and middlin' jealous, too. Aw, well!
who's wondering at it?"

Just then Crennel, the cook, came up to say that breakfast was ready,
and Ewan and Davy went below, the young parson's hand resting on the
boy's shoulder. In the cabin Dan was sitting by the stove, laughing
immoderately. Ewan saw at a glance that Dan had been drinking, and he
forthwith elbowed his way to Dan's side and lifted a brandy bottle from
the stove-top into the locker, under pretense of finding a place for his
hat. Then all hands sat down to the table. There was a huge dish of
potatoes boiled in their jackets, and a similar dish of herrings. Every
man dipped into the dishes with his hands, lifted his herring on to his
plate, ran his fingers from tail to head, swept all the flesh off the
fresh fish, and threw the bare backbone into the crock that stood
behind.

"Keep a corner for the Meailley at the 'Three Legs,'" said Dan.

There was to be a herring breakfast that morning at the "Three Legs of
Man," to celebrate the opening of the fishing season.

"You'll come, Ewan, eh?"

The young parson shook his head.

Dan was in great spirits, to which the spirits he had imbibed
contributed a more than common share. Ewan saw the too familiar light of
dangerous mischief dancing in Dan's eyes, and made twenty attempts to
keep the conversation within ordinary bounds of seriousness. But Dan was
not to be restrained, and breaking away into the homespun--a sure
indication that the old Adam was having the upper hand--he forthwith
plunged into some chaff that was started by the mate, Ned Teare, at Davy
Fayle's expense.

"Aw, ye wouldn't think it's true, would ye, now?" said Ned, with a wink
at Dan and a "glime" at Davy.

"And what's that?" said Dan, with another "glime" at the lad.

"Why, that the like o' yander is tackin' round the gels."

"D'ye raely mane it?" said Dan, dropping his herring and lifting his
eyes.

Ewan coughed with some volume, and said, "There, there, Dan--there,
there."

"Yes, though, and sniffin' and snuffin' abaft of them astonishin'," Ned
Teare put it again.

"Aw, well, well, well," said Dan, turning up afresh the whites of his
eyes.

There was not a sign from Davy; he broke his potato more carefully, and
took both hands and both eyes to strip away its jacket.

"Yes, yes, the craythur's doing somethin' in the spooney line," said
Billy Quilleash; "him as hasn't the hayseed out of his hair yet."

"Aw, well," said Dan, pretending to come to Davy's relief, "it isn't
raisonable but the lad should be coortin' some gel now."

"What's that?" shouted Quilleash, dropping the banter rather suddenly.
"What, and not a farthing at him? And owin' me fortune for the bringin'
up."

"No matter, Billy," said Dan, "and don't ride a man down like a
main-tack. One of these fine mornings Davy will be payin' his debt to
you with the foretopsail."

Davy's eyes were held very low, but it was not hard to see that they
were beginning to fill.

"That will do, Dan, that will do," said Ewan. The young parson's face
had grown suddenly pale, but Dan saw nothing of that.

"And look at him there," said Dan, reaching round Ewan to prod Davy in
the ribs--"look at him there, pretendin' he never knows nothin'."

The big tears were near to toppling out of Davy's eyes. He could have
borne the chaff from any one but Dan.

"Dan," said Ewan, with a constrained quietness, "stop it; I can't stand
it much longer."

At that Davy got up from the table, leaving his unfinished breakfast,
and began to climb the hatchways.

"Aw, now, look at that," said Dan, with affected solemnity, and so
saying, and not heeding the change in Ewan's manner, Dan got up too and
followed Davy out, put an arm round the lad's waist, and tried to draw
him back. "Don't mind the loblolly-boys, Davy veg," he said, coaxingly.
Davy pushed him away with an angry word.

"What's that he's after saying?" asked Quilleash.

"Nothin'; he only cussed a bit," said Dan.

"Cussed, did he? He'd better show a leg if he don't want the rat's
tail."

Then Ewan rose from the table, and his eyes flashed and his pale face
quivered.

"I'll tell you what it is," he said in a tense, tremulous voice,
"there's not a man among you. You're a lot of skulking cowards."

At that he was making for the deck; but Dan, whose face, full of the
fire of the liquor he had taken, grew in one moment old and ugly, leaped
to his feet in a tempest of wrath, overturned his stool, and rushed at
Ewan with eyes aflame and uplifted hand, and suddenly, instantly, like a
flash, his fist fell, and Ewan rolled on the floor.

Then the men jumped up and crowded round in confusion. "The parzon! the
parzon! God preserve me, the parzon!"

There stood Dan, with a ghastly countenance, white and convulsed, and
there at his feet lay Ewan.

"God A'mighty! Mastha Dan, Mastha Dan," cried Davy. Before the men had
found time to breathe, Davy had leaped back from the deck to the
cockpit, and had lifted Ewan's head on to his knee.

Ewan drew a long breath and opened his eyes. He was bleeding from a gash
above the temple, having fallen among some refuse of iron chain. Davy,
still moaning piteously, "Oh, Mastha Dan, God A'mighty, Mastha Dan,"
took a white handkerchief from Ewan's breast, and bound it about his
head over the wound. The blood oozed through and stained the
handkerchief.

Ewan rose to his feet pale and trembling, and without looking at any
one, steadied himself by Davy's shoulder, and clambered weakly to the
deck. There he stumbled forward, sat down on the coil of rope that had
been his seat before, and buried his uncovered head in his breast.

The sun had now risen above Contrary, and the fair young morning light
danced over the rippling waters far and near. A fresh breeze blew from
the land, and the boats of the fleet around and about scudded on before
the wind like a flight of happy birds, with outspread wings.

The "Ben-my-Chree" was then rounding the head, and the smoke was
beginning to coil up in many a slender shaft above the chimneys of the
little town of Peel. But Ewan saw nothing of this; with head on his
breast, and his heart cold within him, he sat at the bow.

Down below, Dan was then doing his best to make himself believe that he
was unconcerned. He whistled a little, and sang a little, and laughed a
good deal; but the whistle lost its tune, and the song stopped short,
and the laugh was loud and empty. When he first saw Ewan lie where he
fell, all the fire of his evil passion seemed to die away, and for the
instant his heart seemed to choke him, and he was prompted to drop down
and lift Ewan to his feet; but at that moment his stubborn knees would
not bend, and at the next moment the angel of God troubled the waters of
his heart no more. Then the fisher-fellows overcame their amazement, and
began to crow, and to side with him, and to talk of his pluck, and what
not.

"The parzons--och, the parzons--they think they may ride a man down for
half a word inside his gills."

"'Cowards'--och, 'skulking cowards,' if you plaize--right sarved, say
I!"

Dan tramped about the cabin restlessly, and sometimes chuckled aloud and
asked himself what did he care, and then laughed noisily, and sat down
to smoke, and presently jumped up, threw the pipe into the open stove,
and took the brandy bottle out of the locker. Where was Ewan? What was
he doing? What was he looking like? Dan would rather have died than
humbled himself to ask; but would none of these grinning boobies tell
him? When Teare, the mate, came down from the deck and said that sarten
sure the young parzon was afther sayin' his prayers up forrard Dan's
eyes flashed again, and he had almost lifted his hand to fell the
sniggering waistrel. He drank half a tumbler of brandy, and protested
afresh, though none had yet disputed it, that he cared nothing, not he,
let them say what they liked to the contrary.

In fifteen minutes from the time of the quarrel the fleet was running
into harbor. Dan had leaped on deck just as the "Ben-my-Chree" touched
the two streams outside Contrary. He first looked forward, and saw Ewan
sitting on the cable in the bow with his eyes shut and his pallid face
sunk deep in his breast. Then a strange, wild light shot into Dan's
eyes, and he reeled aft and plucked the tiller from the hand of Corlett,
and set it hard aport, and drove the boat head on for the narrow neck of
water that flowed between the mainland and the island-rock on which the
old castle stood.

"Hould hard," shouted old Billy Quilleash, "there's not water enough for
the like o' that--you'll run her on the rocks."

Then Dan laughed wildly, and his voice rang among the coves and caves of
the coast.

"Here's for the harbor or--hell," he screamed, and then another wild
peal of his mad laughter rang in the air and echoed from the land.

"What's agate of the young mastha?" the men muttered one to another; and
with eyes of fear they stood stock-still on the deck and saw themselves
driven on toward the shoals of the little sound.

In two minutes more they breathed freely. The "Ben-my-Chree" had shot
like an arrow through the belt of water and was putting about in the
harbor.

Dan dropped the tiller, reeled along the deck, scarcely able to bear
himself erect, and stumbled under the hatchways. Old Billy brought up
the boat to its moorings.

"Come, lay down, d'ye hear? Where's that lad?"

Davy was standing by the young parson.

"You idiot waistrel, why d'ye stand prating there? I'll pay you, you
beachcomber."

The skipper was making for Davy, when Ewan got up, stepped toward him,
looked him hard in the face, seemed about to speak, checked himself, and
turned away.

Old Billy broke into a bitter little laugh, and said, "I'm right up and
down like a yard o' pump-water, that's what I am."

The boat was now at the quay-side, and Ewan leaped ashore. Without a
word or a look more, he walked away, the white handkerchief, clotted
with blood, still about his forehead, and his hat carried in his hand.

On the quay there were numbers of women with baskets waiting to buy the
fish. Teare, the mate, and Crennel, the cook, counted the herrings and
sold them. The rest of the crew stepped ashore.

Dan went away with the rest. His face was livid in the soft morning
sunlight. He was still keeping up his brave outside, while the madness
was growing every moment fiercer within. As he stumbled along the paved
way with an unsteady step his hollow laugh grated on the quiet air.




CHAPTER XI

THE HERRING BREAKFAST


It was between four o'clock and five when the fleet ran into Peeltown
harbor after the first night of the herring season, and toward eight the
fisher-fellows, to the number of fifty at least, had gathered for their
customary first breakfast in the kitchen of the "Three Legs of Man."
What sport! What noisy laughter! What singing and rollicking cheers! The
men stood neither on the order of their coming nor their going, their
sitting nor their standing. In they trooped in their woolen caps or
their broad sou'westers, their oilskins or their long sea-boots swung
across their arms. They wore their caps or not as pleased them, they
sang or talked as suited them, they laughed or sneezed, they sulked or
snarled, they were noisy or silent, precisely as the whim of the
individual prescribed the individual rule of manners. Rather later than
the rest Dan Mylrea came swinging in, with a loud laugh and a shout, and
something like an oath, too, and the broad homespun on his lips.

"Billy Quilleash--I say, Billy, there--why don't you put up the young
mastha for the chair?"

"Aw, lave me alone," answered Billy Quilleash, with a contemptuous toss
of the head.

"Uncle Billy's proud uncommon of the mastha," whispered Davy Fayle, who
sat meekly on a form near the door, to the man who sat cross-legged on
the form beside him.

"It's a bit free them chaps is making," said old Billy, in a
confidential undertone to Dan, who was stretching himself out on the
settle. Then rising to his feet with gravity, "Gen'l'men," said
Quilleash, "what d'ye say now to Mistha Dan'l Mylrea for the elber-cheer
yander?"

At that there was the response of loud raps on the table with the heels
of the long boots swung over various arms, and with several clay pipes
that lost their heads in the encounter. Old Billy resumed his seat with
a lofty glance of patronage at the men about him, which said as plainly
as words themselves, "I tould ye to lave it all to me."

"Proud, d'ye say? Look at him," muttered the fisherman sitting by Davy
Fayle.

Dan staggered up and shouldered his way to the elbow-chair at the head
of the table. He had no sooner taken his seat than he shouted for the
breakfast, and without more ado the breakfast was lifted direct on to
the table from the pans and boilers that simmered on the hearth.

First came the broth, well loaded with barley and cabbage; then suet
puddings; and last of all the frying-pan was taken down from the wall,
and four or five dozen of fresh herrings were made to grizzle and
crackle and sputter over the fire.

Dan ate ravenously, and laughed noisily, and talked incessantly as he
ate. The men at first caught the contagion of his boisterous manners,
but after a time they shook their tousled heads and laid them together
in gravity, and began to repeat in whispers, "What's agate of the young
mastha, at all, at all?"

Away went the dishes, away went the cloth, an oil-lamp with its open
mouth--a relic of some monkish sanctuary of the Middle Ages--was lifted
from the mantel-shelf and put on the table for the receipt of custom; a
brass censer, choked with spills, was placed beside it; pipes emerged
from waistcoat-pockets, and pots of liquor with glasses and bottles came
in from the outer bar.

"Is it heavy on the liquor you're going to be, Billy?" said Ned, the
mate; and old Billy replied with a superior smile and the lifting up of
a whisky bottle, from which he had just drawn the cork.

Then came the toasts. The chairman arose amid hip, hip, hooraa! and gave
"Life to man and death to fish!" and Quilleash gave "Death to the head
that never wore hair!"

Then came more noise and more liquor, and a good deal of both in the
vicinity of the chair. Dan struck up a song. He sang "Drink to Me Only,"
and the noisy company were at first hushed to silence and then melted to
audible sobs.

"Aw, man, the voice he has, anyway!"

"And the loud it is, and the tender, too, and the way he slidders up and
down, and no squeaks and jumps."

"No, no; nothin' like squeezin' a tune out of an ould sow by pulling the
tail at her."

Old Billy listened to this dialogue among the fisher-fellows about him,
and smiled loftily. "It's nothin'," he said, condescendingly--"that's
nothin'. You should hear him out in the boat, when we're lying at
anchor, and me and him together, and the stars just makin' a peep, and
the moon, and the mar-fire, and all to that, and me and him lying aft
and smookin', and having a glass maybe, but nothin' to do no
harm--that's the when you should hear him. Aw, man alive, him and me's
same as brothers."

"More liquor there," shouted Dan, climbing with difficulty to his feet.

"Ay, look here. D'ye hear, down yander? Give us a swipe o' them
speerits. Right. More liquor for the chair!" said Billy Quilleash. "And
for some one besides?--is that what they're saying, the loblolly-boys?
Well, look here, bad cess to it, of coorse, some for me, too. It's
terrible good for the narves, and they're telling me it's morthal good
for steddyin' the vi'ce. Going to sing? Coorse, coorse. What's that from
the elber-cheer? Enemy, eh? Confound it, and that's true, though. What's
that it's sayin'? 'Who's fool enough to put the enemy into his mouth to
stale away his brains?' Aw, now, it's the good ould Book that's fine at
summin' it all up."

Then there was more liquor and yet more, till the mouth of the monastic
lamp ran over with chinking coin. Old Billy struck up his song. It was a
doleful ditty on the loss of the herring fleet on one St. Matthew's Day
not long before.

        An hour before day,
        Tom Grimshaw, they say,
    To run for the port had resolved;
        Himself and John More
        Were lost in that hour,
    And also unfortunate Kinved.

The last three lines of each verse were repeated by the whole company in
chorus. Doleful as the ditty might be, the men gave it voice with a
heartiness that suggested no special sense of sorrow, and loud as were
the voices of the fisher-fellows, Dan's voice was yet louder.

"Aw, Dan, man, Dan, man alive, Dan," the men whispered among themselves.
"What's agate of Mastha Dan? it's more than's good, man, aw, yes, yes,
yes."

Still more liquor and yet more noise, and then, through the dense fumes
of tobacco-smoke, old Billy Quilleash could be seen struggling to his
feet. "Silence!" he shouted; "aisy there!" and he lifted up his glass.
"Here's to Mistha Dan'l Mylrea, and if he's not going among the parzons,
bad cess to them, he's going among the Kays, and when he gets to the big
house at Castletown, I'm calkerlatin' it'll be all up with the lot o'
them parzons, with their tithes and their censures, and their customs
and their canons, and their regalashuns agen the countin' of the
herrin', and all the rest of their messin'. What d'ye say, men?
'Skulking cowards?' Coorse, and right sarved, too, as I say. And what's
that you're grinning and winkin' at, Ned Teare? It's middlin' free
you're gettin' with the mastha anyhow, and if it wasn't for me he
wouldn't bemane himself by comin' among the like of you, singin' and
makin' aisy. Chaps, fill up your glasses every man of you, d'ye hear?
Here's to the best gen'l'man in the island, bar none--Mistha Dan'l
Mylrea, hip, hip, hooraa!"

The toast was responded to with alacrity, and loud shouts of "Dan'l
Mylrea--best gen'l'man--bar none."

But what was going on at the head of the table? Dan had risen from the
elbow-chair; it was the moment for him to respond, but he stared wildly
around, and stood there in silence, and his tongue seemed to cleave to
his mouth. Every eye was now fixed on his face, and that face quivered
and turned white. The glass he had held in his hand fell from his
nerveless fingers and broke on the table. Laughter died on every lip,
and the voices were hushed. At last Dan spoke; his words came slowly,
and fell heavily on the ear.

"Men," he said, "you have been drinking my health. You call me a good
fellow. That's wrong. I'm the worst man among you. Old Billy says I'm
going to the House of Keys. That's wrong, too. Shall I tell you where I
am going? Shall I tell you? I'm going to the devil," and then, amid
breathless silence, he dropped back in his seat and buried his head in
his hands.

No one spoke. The fair head lay on the table among broken pipes and the
refuse of spilled liquor. There could be no more drinking that morning.
Every man rose to his feet, and picking up his waterproofs or his long
sea-boots, one after one went shambling out. The room was dense with
smoke; but outside the air was light and free, and the morning sun shone
brightly.

"Strange now, wasn't it?" muttered one of the fellows.

"Strange uncommon!"

"He's been middlin' heavy on the liquor lately."

"And he'd never no right to strike the young parzon, and him his cousin,
too, and terrible fond of him, as they're saying."

"Well, well, it's middlin' wicked anyway."

And so the croakers went their way. In two minutes more the room was
empty, except for the stricken man, who l

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/35781