THE TIDE-RACE OF SULISCANNA
Kate McGhie stood looking across the boiling, hillocky water of the
Suck of Suliscanna in the direction of the boat, which moment by moment
blackened and grew larger, rising steadily towards her out of the east.
The day was so still, the tide so smooth as it swept inshore after
passing the oily "bullers" of the roost, that she had no idea of the
world of danger those in the adventurous bark had to pass before her
prow could grate on the white sand of the landing-beach between the
opposing headlands of Aionaig and Lianacraig.
Kate's heart beat strangely, almost painfully. It was wonderful, she
thought, that men should undergo perils and cross a world's seas for a
simple girl's sake. Yet there was pleasure, too, in the thought; for
somehow she knew that those who approached loved her and came from far
seeking her good.
"It is he--it is surely he!" so her soul chanted its glad triumph
within her. "Did I not say that he could break prison-bands and come to
find me--that he would overpass unruly seas only to look on my face?
Has any maid in the world a lover true like mine? And he will break my
prison also and take me away. And with him I am ready to go to the ends
of the earth, fearlessly as though he had been my mother."
Poor lassie! Little she knew the long, weary travel she had before her
ere it could come to that.
But even as she watched she became conscious of a quick stir and
movement among the usually so indolent islanders behind her. Hardly she
dared to lift her eyes from the approaching boat, which came on with
a little square sail rigged on a temporary mast as long as the wind
held, and then with flashing dips of rhythmic oars whenever the breeze
dropped away.
The voices of the men of Suliscanna crying harshly to each other among
the craig-heads and cliff-edges high above her sounded to Kate's ears
like a louder brawling of the sea-fowl. The sound had an edge on it,
shrill, keen, and bitter as the east wind in mid-January. Yet there was
something in it, too, of new. The girl had heard the like of it before,
at the kennels of Cumlodan, when the bloodhounds for the Whig-tracking
were waiting to be fed, and springing up with their feet on the bars.
"Eh, sirs me! Guid help the poor souls that are in that boat; they
will either gang doon bodily to feed the fish, or else be casten up in
gobbets the size o' my neive upon the shore!" cried the voice of Mrs.
McAlister at Kate's elbow.
"They can never weather it, and if they do they are naught advantaged,
after all. For the men of the isle are that worked upon with the fear
of my lord, and his threat to clean them off the isle of Suliscanna,
like a count off a bairn's slate, if they let the lass escape, that
they declare they will slay the poor lads so soon as ever they set foot
on the land, if, indeed, they ever win as far."
In her agitated preoccupation the tall woman from Ayrshire had let her
hair fall in a bushy mass over her back, as it was her habit to do in
the evenings after supper when preparing for bed. She kept working
at it nervously while she watched, twisting up its comely masses
in order to fix them in their places with bone pins; and, anon, as
the boat tacked shorter and shorter to avoid this hidden peril and
that, pulling them out and letting it fall again in wavy coils, so
overpowering had become her agitation.
Suddenly startled by a peculiar wavering cry from the hill, she took
Kate's hand and ran with her along the path which led to the rocks of
Lianacraig.
"Ye will never be for thinking," Bess Landsborough said to the girl
as they ran, "that this is him that likes ye--the lad ye left in the
Tolbooth irons in Holland, gotten free and come after ye?"
But Kate only clasped her friend's hand tighter and answered nothing.
"Poor lass! poor lass!" she said. "Ye believe that your lad would do as
muckle for you after a' that has come and gane between ye. But lads are
not what they were in my young days! Pray God that ye may be mistaken,
for gin this be your lad come seeking ye, I fear he is as good as dead
either from the sharp rocks of Suliscanna or from the sharper knives of
the wild McAlisters."
From the southern ridge of the headland of Lianacraig Kate and her
companion could look almost directly down upon the gambols of the
treacherous Suck of Suliscanna. The boat lay clear to their sight upon
the surface of the sea--two men in her, one sitting with the rope of
the sheet in his hand, and the other at the stern with an oar to turn
her off from the hidden dangers, as the seething run of the tidal
currents brought her head on to some sunken reef or dangerous skerry.
Sometimes, ere the voyagers could tack or turn in their unsailorlike
fashion, a white spurt of foam would suddenly spring up under their
very bows as a swell from the Atlantic lumbered lazily in, or again a
backdraw of the current would swirl upward from some submarine ledge
and raise a great breaking pyramid of salt-water on a spot where a
moment before there had been only the smooth hiss of water moving very
swiftly.
The islanders, who alone realized the terrible danger of the two in
the boat, lay for the most part wholly silent, some on the cliff's
immediate edge, and others behind little sodded breastworks which had
been erected, partly to keep the wind off, when, as now, they kept
watch from their posts of observation, and partly for the drying of
their winter's fuel.
Mistress McAlister indicated the eager gazers with her elbows.
"See the Heelantmen," she said; "they are a' up there! Lord, what
Christians! The verra minister is amang them himsel'--they canna help
it. The spirit is on them ever since langsyne the Spaniard's ship
drave in, and brocht a' that peltry of mahogany aumries and wrought
cupboards, and forbye the queer fashions of knitting that the sailor
folk of the crew learned them after they wan ashore. But they learn
little from them that's shipwrecked on Suliscanna noo. For them
that's no deid corpses before they come to land get a bit clour wi' a
stane that soon puts them oot o' conceit wi' a' this world o' sin and
suffering."
Kate's face was white and drawn, but she hardly noticed the woman's
fell prophecies.
For all the while the two men in the boat were laboring hard, fighting
tensely for life, and every eye on the island was upon them. They had
reached one of the smoothest and therefore most dangerous places,
when suddenly the black back of a skip-jack dolphin curved over like
a mill-wheel beside the boat, and a hoarse shout went up from the
islanders of Suliscanna, who lay breathlessly waiting the event on the
rocks of Lianacraig.
"It's a' by wi' the poor lads noo!" said Bess McAlister, "a' but the
warsle in the water and the grip o' the saut in their thrapples! The
deil's ain beast is doon there watching for them."
[Illustration: "THEN THE SWIRLING TIDE-RACE TOOK HOLD OF HER"]
"God help my Wat!" sobbed Kate, half to herself and half to the
Divinity--who, as the Good Book says, can do wonders in the great
waters.
"Aye, 'deed, lass, as ye say, God help him! He never had mair need. The
dead-fish are louping for him and the other with him."
Just at this moment Kate uttered a cry and clasped her hands, for the
boat was heaved up from the side nearest the cliffs on the summit of a
toppling pyramid of water. The mast fell over, and the whole breadth
of the sail hugged the surface of the sea. Then the swirling tide-race
took hold of her and sucked her under. In a smooth sea, without a
particle of wind, the two men went down within cry of the rocks of
Suliscanna, and not a hand could be stretched out to save them. Only
now and then something black, a wet, air-filled blob of the sail, the
surge-tossed back of a man, or the angle of the boat, showed dark for a
moment upon the surface of the pale water, and then was carried under,
all racing northward in the grip of the angry tide current.
Kate McGhie had fallen on her knees.
"God forgive his sins and take me soon to him!" she said.
"Wheest, lass! Nae Papist prayers in my hearin'," said Mrs. McAlister
in her ear. "Gin that be your lad, he's dead and gane. And that's a
hantle better than dying on the gully-knives of the McAlisters."
At the sight of the disaster beneath them on the wrinkled face of
the water, all the islanders had leaped suddenly erect behind their
shelters and craggy hiding-places. Each man stood with his head thrown
forward in an attitude of the most intent watchfulness. And once
when the stern of the boat cocked up, and a man's arm rose like the
fin of a fish beside it for a moment, every son of Alister expelled
the long-withholden air from his lungs in a sonorous "Hough!" which
indicated that in his opinion all was over. Instantly the islanders of
Suliscanna collected here and there, at likely places along the shore,
into quick-gathering knots and clusters which dissolved as quickly.
They discussed the disaster from every point of view. The minister was
specially active, going about from group to group.
"We must e'en submit," he was saying; "it is the will of God. And,
after all, though both men and boat had been cast ashore, it is little
likely that they would have had anything worth lifting on them. They
were just poor bodies that by misadventure have been cast away in a
fog, and would have no other gear about them save the clothes on their
backs."
But Alister McAlister was of another mind.
"Work like this is enough to make an unbeliever out of a God-fearing
man," he affirmed to his intimates, "to see what Providence will
permit--a good fishing-boat with a mast and sail in the charge of two
landward men that did not even know where to let her go to pieces, so
that Christians and men of sense might get some good of her. For the
fools let her sink plumb down in the Suck of Suliscanna, instead of
driving her straight inshore against the hill of Aoinaig, whence she
would have come safe as weed-drift to our very feet."
And there were more of Alister's opinion than of the minister's, whose
spiritual consolation was discounted, at any rate, by the fact that he
was officially compelled to speak well of Providence.
But before long there was another sound on the Isle of Suliscanna. Away
on the edge of the bay, under the cliffs, a group of men was to be seen
grappling some object which repeatedly slipped from their poles between
two long shore-skirting reefs. It lay black and limp in the water, and
again and again, breaking from their hands, it returned to the push of
the tide in the narrow gut with a splash of flaccid weight.
"Lord, what's yon they hae gotten?" cried Mistress McAlister, as soon
as she had seen the figures of the men collecting about the thing, like
carrion-crows gathering about a dead sheep on the hill. "Thank God, my
Alister loon is away south'ard on the heuchs of Lianacraig!"
She stood on tiptoe and looked for the flash of the killing knife or
the dull crash of the stone with which commonly the wreckers insured
silence and safety when any came alive ashore along with wreckage of
price from the great waters.
The heads of the men were all bent inward, but Bess Landsborough saw no
threatening movement of their arms nor yet any signs of a struggle.
She would have drawn Kate away from the scene, but the girl by her side
suddenly wrenched herself free, and, plucking up her skirts in her
hands, ran hot-foot for the northern shore.