THE PEACEMAKER.
The heroes of Scaurnose expected a renewal of the attack, and in
greater force, the next day, and made their preparations accordingly,
strengthening every weak point around the village. They were put in
great heart by Malcolm’s espousal of their cause, as they considered
his punishment of the factor; but most of them set it down in their
wisdom as resulting from the popular condemnation of his previous
supineness. It did not therefore add greatly to his influence with
them. When he would have prevailed upon them to allow Blue Peter to
depart, arguing that they had less right to prevent than the factor
had to compel him, they once more turned upon him: what right had he
to dictate to them? he did not belong to Scaurnose! He reasoned with
them that the factor, although he had not justice, had law on his side,
and could turn out whom he pleased. They said--“Let him try it!” He
told them that they had given great provocation, for he knew that the
men they had assaulted came surveying for a harbour, and that they
ought at least to make some apology for having maltreated them. It was
all useless: that was the women’s doing, they said; besides they did
not believe him; and if what he said was true, what was the thing to
them, seeing they were all under notice to leave? Malcolm said that
perhaps an apology would be accepted. They told him, if he did not take
himself off, they would serve him as he had served the factor. Finding
expostulation a failure, therefore, he begged Joseph and Annie to
settle themselves again as comfortably as they could, and left them.
Contrary to the expectation of all, however, and considerably to the
disappointment of the party of Dubs, Fite Folp, and the rest, the next
day was as peaceful as if Scaurnose had been a halcyon nest floating
on the summer waves; and it was soon reported that, in consequence of
the punishment he had received from Malcolm, the factor was far too
ill to be troublesome to any but his wife. This was true, but, severe
as his chastisement was, it was not severe enough to have had any such
consequences but for his late growing habit of drinking whisky. As
it was, fever had followed upon the combination of bodily and mental
suffering. But already it had wrought this good in him, that he was far
more keenly aware of the brutality of the offence of which he had been
guilty than he would otherwise have been all his life through. To his
wife, who first learned the reason of Malcolm’s treatment of him from
his delirious talk in the night, it did not, circumstances considered,
appear an enormity, and her indignation with the avenger of it, whom
she had all but hated before, was furious. Malcolm, on his part, was
greatly concerned to hear the result of his severity. He refrained,
however, from calling to inquire, knowing it would be interpreted as
an insult, not accepted as a sign of sympathy. He went to the doctor
instead--who, to his consternation, looked very serious at first. But
when he learned all about the affair, he changed his view considerably,
and condescended to give good hopes of his coming through, even adding
that it would lengthen his life by twenty years if it broke him of his
habits of whisky-drinking and rage.
And now Malcolm had a little time of leisure, which he put to the best
possible use in strengthening his relations with the fishers. For
he had nothing to do about the House, except look after Kelpie; and
Florimel, as if determined to make him feel that he was less to her
than before, much as she used to enjoy seeing him sit his mare, never
took him out with her--always Stoat. He resolved therefore, seeing he
must yet delay action a while in the hope of the appearance of Lenorme,
to go out as in the old days after the herring, both for the sake of
splicing, if possible, what strands had been broken between him and
the fishers, and of renewing for himself the delights of elemental
conflict. With these views, he hired himself to the Partan, whose
boat’s crew was short-handed. And now, night after night, he revelled
in the old pleasure, enhanced by so many months of deprivation. Joy
itself seemed embodied in the wind blowing on him out of the misty
infinite while his boat rocked and swung on the waters, hanging between
two worlds, that in which the wind blew, and that other dark-swaying
mystery whereinto the nets to which it was tied went away down and
down, gathering the harvest of the ocean. It was as if nature called
up all her motherhood to greet and embrace her long absent son.
When it came on to blow hard, as it did once and again during those
summer nights, instead of making him feel small and weak in the midst
of the storming forces, it gave him a glorious sense of power and
unconquerable life. And when his watch was out, and the boat lay quiet,
like a horse tethered and asleep in his clover-field, he too would fall
asleep with a sense of simultaneously deepening and vanishing delight
such as he had not at all in other conditions experienced. Ever since
the poison had got into his system, and crept where it yet lay lurking
in hidden corners and crannies, a noise at night would on shore startle
him awake, and set his heart beating hard; but no loudest sea-noise
ever woke him; the stronger the wind flapped its wings around him, the
deeper he slept. When a comrade called him by name, he was up at once
and wide awake.
It answered also all his hopes in regard to his companions and the
fisher-folk generally. Those who had really known him found the same
old Malcolm, and those who had doubted him soon began to see that at
least he had lost nothing in courage or skill or goodwill: ere long
he was even a greater favourite than before. On his part, he learned
to understand far better the nature of his people, as well as the
individual characters of them, for his long (but not too long) absence
and return enabled him to regard them with unaccustomed, and therefore
in some respects more discriminating eyes.
Duncan’s former dwelling happening to be then occupied by a lonely
woman, Malcolm made arrangements with her to take them both in; so
that in relation to his grandfather too something very much like the
old life returned for a time--with this difference, that Duncan soon
began to check himself as often as the name of his hate, with its
accompanying curse, rose to his lips.
The factor continued very ill. He had sunk into a low state, in which
his former indulgence was greatly against him. Every night the fever
returned, and at length his wife was worn out with watching and waiting
upon him.
And every morning Lizzy Findlay, without fail, called to inquire how Mr
Crathie had spent the night. To the last, while quarrelling with every
one of her neighbours with whom he had anything to do, he had continued
kind to her, and she was more grateful than one in other trouble than
hers could have understood. But she did not know that an element in the
origination of his kindness was the belief that it was by Malcolm she
had been wronged and forsaken.
Again and again she had offered, in the humblest manner, to ease his
wife’s burden by sitting with him at night; and at last, finding she
could hold up no longer, Mrs Crathie consented. But even after a week
she found herself still unable to resume the watching, and so, night
after night, resting at home during a part of the day, Lizzy sat by the
sleeping factor, and when he woke, ministered to him like a daughter.
Nor did even her mother object, for sickness is a wondrous reconciler.
Little did the factor suspect, however, that it was partly for
Malcolm’s sake she nursed him, anxious to shield the youth from any
possible consequences of his righteous vengeance.
While their persecutor lay thus, gradually everything at Scaurnose,
and consequently at the Seaton, lapsed into its old way, and the
summer of such content as before they had possessed, returned to the
fishers. I fear it would have proved hard for some of them, had they
made effort in that direction, to join in the prayer, if prayer it
may be called, put up in church for him every Sunday. What a fearful
canopy the prayers that do not get beyond the atmosphere would make
if they turned brown with age! Having so lately seen the factor going
about like a maniac, raving at this piece of damage and that heap
of dirt, the few fishers present could never help smiling when Mr
Cairns prayed for him as “the servant of God and his church now lying
grievously afflicted--persecuted, but not forsaken, cast down, but not
destroyed;”--having found the fitting phrases he seldom varied them.
Through her sorrow, Lizzy had grown tender, as through her shame
she had grown wise. That the factor had been much in the wrong only
rendered her anxious sympathy the more eager to serve him. Knowing so
well what it was to have done wrong, she was pitiful over him, and her
ministrations were none the less devoted that she knew exactly how
Malcolm thought and felt about him; for the affair, having taken place
in open village and wide field and in the light of mid-day, and having
been reported by eye-witnesses many, was everywhere perfectly known,
and Malcolm therefore talked of it freely to his friends, amongst them
both to Lizzy and her mother.
Sickness sometimes works marvellous changes, and the most marvellous on
persons who to the ordinary observer seem the least liable to change.
Much apparent steadfastness of nature, however, is but sluggishness,
and comes from incapacity to generate change or contribute towards
personal growth; and it follows that those whose nature is such can
as little prevent or retard any change that has its initiative beyond
them. The men who impress the world as the mightiest are those often
who _can_ the least--never those who can the most in their natural
kingdom; generally those whose frontiers lie openest to the inroads
of temptation, whose atmosphere is most subject to moody changes and
passionate convulsions, who, while perhaps they can whisper laws
to a hemisphere, can utter no decree of smallest potency as to how
things shall be within themselves. Place Alexander ille Magnus beside
Malcolm’s friend Epictetus, ille servorum servus; take his crutch
from the slave and set the hero upon his Bucephalus--but set them
alone and in a desert: which will prove the great man? which the
unchangeable? The question being what the man himself shall or shall
not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall not recognize as of
himself and troubling the motions of his being, Alexander will prove a
mere earth-bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which pulses the tide of the
eternal and infinite Sea.
But then first, when the false strength of the self-imagined great man
is gone, when the want or the sickness has weakened the self-assertion
which is so often mistaken for strength of individuality, when the
occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness
of being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow, and his
consolations their colour, when suffering has wasted away those upper
strata of his factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower,
simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten
the existence, then there is a hope of his commencing a new and real
life. Powers then, even powers within himself of which he knew nothing,
begin to assert themselves, and the man commonly reported to possess a
strong will, is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
This factor, this man of business, this despiser of humbug, to whom
the scruples of a sensitive conscience were a contempt, would now lie
awake in the night and weep. “Ah!” I hear it answered, “but that was
the weakness caused by his illness.” True: but what then had become
of his strength? And was it all weakness? What if this weakness was
itself a sign of returning life, not of advancing death--of the dawn
of a new and genuine strength! For he wept because, in the visions of
his troubled brain, he saw once more the cottage of his father the
shepherd, with all its store of lovely nothings round which the nimbus
of sanctity had gathered while he thought not of them; wept over the
memory of that moment of delight when his mother kissed him for parting
with his willow whistle to the sister who cried for it: he cried now in
his turn, after five and fifty years, for not yet had the little fact
done with him, not yet had the kiss of his mother lost its power on the
man: wept over the sale of the pet-lamb, though he had himself sold
thousands of lambs, since; wept over even that bush of dusty miller
by the door, like the one he trampled under his horse’s feet in the
little yard at Scaurnose that horrible day. And oh, that nest of wild
bees with its combs of honey unspeakable! He used to laugh and sing
then: he laughed still sometimes--he could hear how he laughed, and
it sounded frightful--but he never sang! Were the tears that honoured
such childish memories all of weakness? Was it cause of regret that he
had not been wicked enough to have become impregnable to such foolish
trifles? Unable to mount a horse, unable to give an order, not caring
even for his toddy, he was left at the mercy of his fundamentals; his
childhood came up and claimed him, and he found the childish things
he had put away better than the manly things he had adopted. It is
one thing for St Paul and another for Mr Worldly Wiseman to put away
childish things. The ways they do it, and the things they substitute,
are both so different. And now first to me, whose weakness it is to
love life more than manners, and men more than their portraits, the man
begins to grow interesting. Picture the dawn of innocence on a dull,
whisky-drinking, common-place soul, stained by self-indulgence, and
distorted by injustice! Unspeakably more interesting and lovely is to
me such a dawn than the honeymoon of the most passionate of lovers,
except indeed I know them such lovers that their love will outlast all
the moons.
“I’m a poor creature, Lizzy,” he said, turning his heavy face one
midnight towards the girl, as she sat half-dozing, ready to start awake.
“God comfort ye, sir!” said the girl.
“He’ll take good care of that!” returned the factor. “What did I ever
do to deserve it?--There’s that MacPhail, now--to think of _him_!
Didn’t I do what man could for him? Didn’t I keep him about the place
when all the rest were dismissed? Didn’t I give him the key of the
library, that he might read and improve his mind? And look what comes
of it!”
“Ye mean, sir,” said Lizzy, quite innocently, “’at that’s the w’y ye
ha’e dune wi’ God, an’ sae he winna heed ye?”
The factor had meant nothing in the least like it. He had merely been
talking as the imps of suggestion tossed up. His logic was as sick and
helpless as himself. So at that he held his peace-- stung in his pride
at least--perhaps in his conscience too, only he was not prepared to be
rebuked by a girl like her, who had---- Well, he must let it pass: how
much better was he himself?
But Lizzy was loyal: she could not hear him speak so of Malcolm and
hold her peace as if she agreed in his condemnation.
“Ye’ll ken Ma’colm better some day, sir,” she said.
“Well, Lizzy,” returned the sick man, in a tone that but for feebleness
would have been indignant, “I have heard a good deal of the way women
_will_ stand up for men that have treated them cruelly, but you to
stand up for _him_ passes!”
“He’s been the best friend I ever had,” said Lizzy.
“Girl! how can you sit there, and tell me so to my face?” cried the
factor, his voice strengthened by the righteousness of the reproof it
bore. “If it were not the dead of the night----”
“I tell ye naething but the trowth, sir,” said Lizzy, as the contingent
threat died away. “But ye maun lie still or I maun gang for the
mistress. Gien ye be the waur the morn, it’ll be a’ my wyte, ’cause I
cudna bide to hear sic things said o’ Ma’colm.”
“Do you mean to tell me,” persisted her charge, heedless of her
expostulation, “that the fellow who brought you to disgrace, and left
you with a child you could ill provide for--and I well know never sent
you a penny all the time he was away, whatever he may have done now--is
the best friend you ever had?”
“Noo God forgi’e ye, Maister Craithie, for threepin’ sic a thing!”
cried Lizzy, rising as if she would leave him; “Ma’colm MacPhail’s as
clear o’ ony sin like mine as my wee bairnie itsel’.”
“Do ye daur tell me he’s no the father o’ that same, lass?”
“_No_, nor never will be the father o’ ony bairn whase mither’s no his
wife!” said Lizzy, with burning cheeks and resolute voice.
The factor, who had risen on his elbow to look her in the face, fell
back in silence; and neither of them spoke for what seemed to the
watcher a long time. When she ventured to look at him, he was asleep.
He lay in one of those troubled slumbers into which weakness and
exhaustion will sometimes pass very suddenly; and in that slumber he
had a dream which he never forgot. He thought he had risen from his
grave with an awful sound in his ears, and knew he was wanted at the
judgment seat. But he did not want to go, therefore crept into the
porch of the church, and hoped to be forgotten. But suddenly an angel
appeared with a flaming sword and drove him out of the churchyard away
to Scaurnose where the judge was sitting. And as he fled in terror
before the angel, he fell, and the angel came and stood over him, and
his sword flashed torture into his bones, but he could not and dared
not rise. At last, summoning all his strength, he looked up at him, and
cried out, “Sir, ha’e mercy, for God’s sake.” Instantly all the flames
drew back into the sword, and the blade dropped, burning like a brand,
from the hilt, which the angel threw away.--And lo! it was Malcolm
MacPhail, and he was stooping to raise him. With that he awoke, and
there was Lizzy looking down on him anxiously.
“What are you looking like that for?” he asked crossly.
She did not like to tell him that she had been alarmed by his dropping
asleep: and in her confusion she fell back on the last subject.
“There maun be some mistak, Mr Craithie,” she said. “I wuss ye wad tell
me what gars ye hate Ma’colm MacPhail as ye du.”
The factor, although he seemed to himself to know well enough, was yet
a little puzzled how to commence his reply; and therewith a process
began that presently turned into something with which never in his life
before had his inward parts been acquainted--a sort of self-examination
to wit. He said to himself, partly in the desire to justify his present
dislike--he would not call it hate, as Lizzy did--that he used to
get on with the lad well enough, and had never taken offence at his
freedoms, making no doubt his manner came of his blood, and he could
not help it, being a chip of the old block; but when he ran away with
the marquis’s boat, and went to the marchioness and told her lies
against him--then what could he do but dislike him?
Arrived at this point, he opened his mouth and gave the substance of
what preceded it for answer to Lizzy’s question. But she replied at
once.
“Nobody ’ill gar me believe, sir, ’at Ma’colm MacPhail ever tellt a lee
again’ you or onybody. I dinna believe he ever tellt a lee in ’s life.
Jist ye exem’ him weel anent it, sir. An’ for the boat, nae doobt it
was makin’ free to tak it; but ye ken, sir, ’at hoo he was maister o’
the same. It was in his chairge, an’ ye ken little aboot boats yersel’,
or the sailin’ o’ them, sir.”
“But it was me that engaged him again, after all the servants at the
House had been dismissed: he was _my_ servant.”
“That maks the thing luik waur, nae doobt,” allowed Lizzy, with
something of cunning. “Hoo was ’t ’at he cam to du ’t ava’ (_of all; at
all_), sir? Can ye min’?” she pursued.
“I discharged him.”
“An’ what for, gien I may mak bold to speir, sir?” she went on.
“For insolence.”
“Wad ye tell me hoo he answert ye? Dinna think me meddlin’, sir. I’m
clear certain there’s been some mistak. Ye cudna be sae guid to me, an’
be ill to him, ohn some mistak.”
It was consoling to the conscience of the factor, in regard of his
behaviour to the two women, to hear his own praise for kindness
from a woman’s lips. He took no offence therefore at her persistent
questioning, but told her as well and as truly as he could remember,
with no more than the all but unavoidable exaggeration with which
feeling _will_ colour fact, the whole passage between Malcolm and
himself concerning the sale of Kelpie, and closed with an appeal to
the judgment of his listener, in which he confidently anticipated her
verdict.
“A most ridic’lous thing! ye can see yersel’ as weel ’s onybody, Lizzy!
An’ sic a thing to ca’ an honest man like mysel’ a hypocrete for! ha!
ha! ha! There’s no a bairn ’atween John o’ Groat’s an’ the Lan’s En’
disna ken ’at the seller o’ a horse is b’un’ to reese (_extol_) him,
an’ the buyer to tak care o’ himsel’. I’ll no say it’s jist allooable
to tell a doonricht lee, but ye may come full nearer till ’t in
horse-dealin’, ohn sinned, nor in ony ither kin’ o’ merchandeze. It’s
like luve an’ war, in baith which, it’s weel kenned, a’ thing’s fair.
The saw sud rin--_Luve an’ war an’ horse dealin’_.--Divna ye see,
Lizzy?”
But Lizzy did not answer, and the factor, hearing a stifled sob,
started to his elbow.
“Lie still, sir,” said Lizzy. “It’s naething. I was only jist thinkin’
’at that wad be the w’y ’at the father o’ my bairn rizoned wi’ himsel’
whan he lee’d to me.”
“Hey!” said the astonished factor, and in his turn held his peace,
trying to think.
Now Lizzy, for the last few months, had been going to school, the same
school with Malcolm, open to all comers, the only school where one
is sure to be led in the direction of wisdom, and there she had been
learning to some purpose--as plainly appeared before she had done with
the factor.
“Whase kirk are ye elder o’, Maister Craithie?” she asked presently.
“Ow, the kirk o’ Scotlan’, of coorse!” answered the patient, in some
surprise at her ignorance.
“Ay, ay,” returned Lizzy; “but whase aucht (_owning, property_) is ’t?”
“Ow, whase but the Redeemer’s!”
“An’ div ye think, Mr Craithie, ’at gien Jesus Christ had had a horse
to sell, he wad ha’e hidden frae him ’at wad buy, ae hair a fau’t ’at
the beast hed? Wad he no ha’e dune till ’s neiper as he wad ha’e his
neiper du to him?”
“Lassie! lassie! tak care hoo ye even _him_ to sic like as hiz (_us_).
What wad _he_ hae to du wi’ horse-flesh?”
Lizzy held her peace. Here was no room for argument. He had flung the
door of his conscience in the face of her who woke it. But it was too
late, for the word was in already. Oh! that false reverence which
men substitute for adoring obedience, and wherewith they reprove the
childlike spirit that does not know another kingdom than that of God
and that of Mammon! God never gave man thing to do concerning which it
were irreverent to ponder how the son of God would have done it.
But, I say, the word was in, and, partly no doubt from its following so
close upon the dream the factor had had, was potent in its operation.
He fell a-thinking, and a-thinking more honestly than he had thought
for many a day. And presently it was revealed to him that, if he were
in the horse market wanting to buy, and a man there who had to sell
said to him--“He wadna du for you, sir; ye wad be tired o’ ’im in a
week,” he would never remark, “What a fool the fellow is!” but--“Weel
noo, I ca’ that neibourly!” He did not get quite so far just then as to
see that every man to whom he might want to sell a horse was as much
his neighbour as his own brother; nor, indeed, if he had got as far,
would it have indicated much progress in honesty, seeing he would at
any time, when needful and possible, have cheated that brother in the
matter of a horse, as certainly as he would a Patagonian or a Chinaman.
But the warped glass of a bad maxim had at least been cracked in his
window.
The peacemaker sat in silence the rest of the night, but the factor’s
sleep was broken, and at times he wandered. He was not so well the next
day, and his wife, gathering that Lizzy had been talking, and herself
feeling better, would not allow her to sit up with him any more.
Days and days passed, and still Malcolm had no word from Lenorme, and
was getting hopeless in respect of that quarter of possible aid. But
so long as Florimel could content herself with the quiet of Lossie
House, there was time to wait, he said to himself. She was not idle,
and that was promising. Every day she rode out with Stoat. Now and then
she would make a call in the neighbourhood, and, apparently to trouble
Malcolm, took care to let him know that on one of these occasions
her call had been upon Mrs Stewart. One thing he did feel was that
she made no renewal of her friendship with his grandfather: she had,
alas! outgrown the girlish fancy. Poor Duncan took it much to heart.
She saw more of the minister and his wife, who both flattered her,
than anybody else, and was expecting the arrival of Lady Bellair and
Lord Liftore with the utmost impatience. They, for their part, were
making the journey by the easiest possible stages, tacking and veering,
and visiting everyone of their friends that lay between London and
Lossie: they thought to give Florimel the little lesson, that, though
they accepted her invitation, they had plenty of friends in the world
besides her ladyship, and were not dying to see her.
One evening, Malcolm, as he left the grounds of Mr Morrison, on whom he
had been calling, saw a travelling carriage pass towards Portlossie;
and something liker fear laid hold of his heart than he had ever felt
except when Florimel and he on the night of the storm took her father
for Lord Gernon the wizard. As soon as he reached certain available
fields, he sent Kelpie tearing across them, dodged through a fir-wood,
and came out on the road half a mile in front of the carriage: as again
it passed him he saw that his fears were facts, for in it sat the
bold-faced countess, and the mean-hearted lord. Something _must_ be
done at last, and until it was done good watch must be kept.
I must here note that, during this time of hoping and waiting, Malcolm
had attended to another matter of importance. Over every element
influencing his life, his family, his dependents, his property, he
desired to possess a lawful, honest command: where he had to render
account, he would be head. Therefore, through Mr Soutar’s London agent,
to whom he sent up Davy, and whom he brought acquainted with Merton,
and his former landlady at the curiosity shop, he had discovered a
good deal about Mrs Catanach from her London associates, among them
the herb-doctor, and his little boy who had watched Davy, and he had
now almost completed an outline of evidence, which, grounded on that
of Rose, might be used against Mrs Catanach at any moment. He had also
set inquiries on foot in the track of Caley’s antecedents, and had
discovered more than the acquaintance between her and Mrs Catanach.
Also he had arranged that Hodges, the man who had lost his leg through
his cruelty to Kelpie, should leave for Duff Harbour as soon as
possible after his discharge from the hospital. He was determined to
crush the evil powers which had been ravaging his little world.