WAT'S ISLE OF REFUGE
But there were two men in the ill-fated boat when she so heedlessly
rushed into the strange and dangerous outer defences of my Lord Barra's
warded Isle of Suliscanna. What had become of the other?
Wat Gordon of Lochinvar was not drowned--it is hardly necessary to
say so much. For had his body been lying in some eddy of the swirling
waters about the outer reef of the Aoinaig narrows, this narrative
of his history could not have been written. And of his life with its
chequered good and bad, its fine instincts, clear intents, and halting
performances, there would have been left no more than a little swarded
mound in the bone-yard of dead and forgotten mariners.
When their boat overset among the whirlpools and treacherous water
volcanoes of the Suck of Suliscanna, Wat Gordon had been sculling at
the stern. And when the water swallowed him, pulling him down as though
he had been jerked through a trap-door by the arm of some invisible
giant--or, more exactly, drawn slowly under by the tentacle of the
dread Kraken of these Northern seas--he kept a tight grip on the oar
with which he had been alternately steering and propelling the boat, as
Jack Scarlett cried him his orders from the bows.
Wat Gordon had been born in the old tower of Lochinvar, in the midst of
that strange, weird, far-withdrawn moorland loch, set amid its scanty
pasture-meadows of sour bent-grass and its leagues of ambient heather.
As a boy he had more often gone ashore by diving from his window or
paddling out from the little stone terrace than by the more legitimate
method of unhooking the boat from its iron lintel and pulling himself
across to the main-land. But this was a different kind of swimming, for
here in the tumble and tumultuous swirl of angry waters Wat was no more
than a plaything tossed about, to be tantalized with the blue sky and
the summer sea, and then again to be pulled under and smothered in the
seething hiss of the Suck of Suliscanna.
Nevertheless, Wat found space to breathe occasionally, and as he was
driven swiftly towards the north along the face of the great Lianacraig
precipices and close under them he clutched his oar tighter, holding it
under his arm and leaning his chest upon it. So close to the land was
he that he voyaged quite unseen by the watchers on the cliffs above,
who supposed that he had gone down with the boat. But the current had
seized him in its mid-strength, and after first sweeping him close
inshore it was now hurrying him northward and westward of the isle,
under the vast face of the mural precipice in which the cliffs of
Lianacraig culminated. The boat had cleared itself of its mast and
sail, and Wat could see that she floated, upturned indeed, but still
becking and bowing safely on the humps and swirls of the fierce tidal
current which swept both master and vessel along, equally derelict and
at its mercy.
The whole northern aspect of the Isle of Suliscanna is stern and
forbidding. Here the cliffs of Lianacraig break suddenly down to
the sea in one great face of rock many hundreds of feet in height.
So precipitous are they that only the cragsmen or the gatherer of
seabirds' eggs can scale their crests of serrated rock even from the
south, or look down upon the little island of Fiara, the tall southern
cliffs of which correspond humbly to the mightier uprising of the
precipices of Lianacraig upon the larger isle. But Fiara has for ages
been set in the whirl of the backwater which speeds past its greater
neighbor on either side, and has taken advantage of its position to
thrive upon the waste of its rival. For the tide-race of the Suck,
which sets past Suliscanna with such consuming fury, sweeps its prey,
snatched in anger from the cliffs and beaches of Suliscanna, and
spreads it in mud and sand along the lower northern rocks of Fiara. So
that this latter island, instead of frowning out grimly towards the
Pole, extends green and pastoral on the other side of the deep strait
and behind its frowning southward front of rocks.
At this time Fiara was wholly without inhabitant, and remained as it
had come from the shaping hand of the tides and waves. And so mainly it
abides to this day. The islanders of Suliscanna had indeed a few sheep
and goats upon it, the increase of which they used to harvest when my
Lord of Barra's factor came once a year in his boat to take his tithes
of the scanty produce of their barren fortress isle.
It was, then, upon the northern shore of this islet of Fiara that Wat,
exhausted with the stress and the rough, deadly horseplay of the waves,
was cast ashore still grasping his oar. He landed upon a long spit
of sand which stretched out at an obtuse angle into the scour of the
race, forming a bar which was perpetually being added to by the tide
and swept away again when the winds and the waters fought over it their
duels to the death in the time of storm.
Thus Wat Gordon found himself destitute and without helper upon
this barren isle of Fiara. His companion he had seen sink beneath
the waves, and he well knew that it was far out of the power of the
soldier Scarlett to reach the shore by swimming. Also he had seen him
entangled in the cordage of the sail. So Wat heaved a sigh for the
good comrade whom he had brought away from the solvent paymasters and
the excellently complaisant landladies of Amersfort, to lay his bones
for his sake upon the inhospitable shores of Suliscanna--and, what was
worse, without advantage to the quest upon which they had ventured
forth with so much recklessness.
Wat knew certainly that his love was upon that island of Suliscanna.
For months he had carefully traced her northward. With the aid of
Madcap Mehitabel he had been able to identify the spot at which the
chief's boat had taken off Captain Smith's passenger, and a long series
of trials and failures had at last designated Suliscanna as the only
possible prison of his love.
So soon as he was certain of this he had come straight to the spot
with the reckless confidence of youth, only to see his hopes shattered
upon the natural defences of the isle, before ever he had a chance to
encounter the other enemies whom, he doubted not, Barra had set to
guard the prison of Kate of the Dark Lashes.
But even in his sad and apparently hopeless plight the knowledge that
his love was near by stimulated Wat's desire to make the best of his
circumstances.
First of all he set himself the task of exploring the islet, and of
discovering if there was any way by which he could reach that other
island, past which he had been carried by the current of the race, and
on which he hoped to find his love.
From the summit of the south-looking crags of Fiara which he ascended,
he could look up at a perpendicular face of vast and gloomy cliffs.
Lianacraig fronted him, solid and unbroken on either side as far as
he could see. That lower part of it on which the surf fretted and the
swell thundered was broken by caves and openings--none of them, save
one, of any great size.
But that one made a somewhat notable exception. It was a gateway,
wide and high, squarely cut in the black front of the precipice,
into which one might have driven two carriages, with all their horses
and attendants, abreast, and yet have left room to spare on either
side. The swell which pulsed along the narrow strait between Fiara and
Suliscanna, regular as the beating of a strong man's heart, was lost
within its wide maw, and did not as elsewhere come pouring back again
in tessellated foam, white as milk curdled in a churn. The square
tunnel to which this was the imposing entrance evidently penetrated far
into the rock, and communicated with some larger cavity deep within.
The rest of the isle, which had so unexpectedly become Wat's
prison-house, was cut on its northerly aspect into green flats of
sparse grass, terminating in sweet sickle-sweeps of yellow sand, over
which the cool, green luxury of the sea lapped with a gliding motion.
And as Wat looked down upon them from above he saw lights wavering and
swaying over the clean-rippled floor, and could fancy that he discerned
the fishes wheeling and steering among the bent rays and wandering
shadows that flickered and danced like sunshine through thick leaves.
So Wat stood a long time still upon the topmost crest of Fiara,
printing its possibilities upon his heart.
Two hundred yards across the smooth, unvexed strait, which slept
between its two mighty walls of rock, rose the giant cliffs of
Lianacraig, with the ocean-swell passing evenly along their base from
end to end--smooth, green steeps of water, dimpled everywhere into
knolls and valleys. Seabirds nested up there by thousands. Gillemots
sat solemnly in rows like piebald bottles of black and white.
Cormorants stood on the lower skerries, shaking their wings for hours
together as if they had been performing a religious rite. And here with
his gorgeous beak, like a mummer's mask drawn over his ears for sport,
waddled the puffin--the bird whose sad fate it is, according to the
rhyme, to be forever incapable of amorous dalliance. For have not half
a dozen generations been told in rhyme how
"Tammy Norrie o' the Bass
Canna kiss a bonny lass?"
But as Wat looked for a moment away from the white-spotted, lime-washed
ledges of Suliscanna to the green-fringed, sandy shores of his own
island, he saw that in the water to the north which sent him off at
a run. Long ere he reached the beach he had recognized the boat from
which John Scarlett and he had been capsized, bobbing quietly up and
down at the entrance of the bay.
The rebound or "back-spang" of the current from some hidden reef to the
northward had turned the boat aside, even as it had done Wat himself
with his oar, and there the treasure was almost within his reach. Wat's
clothing was still damp from his previous immersion, so that it was no
sacrifice to slip it off him and swim out to the boat. Then, laying his
hand on the inverted stern, he managed easily enough to push her before
him to a shelving beach of sand, where presently, by the aid of a spar
of driftwood, he turned her over. To his great joy he found that the
little vessel was still fairly water-tight and apparently uninjured,
in spite of her rough-and-tumble steeple-chase with the white horses
of the Suck of Suliscanna. Wat opened the lockers and saw, as he had
expected, that the pistols and powder were useless. But he found, too,
Scarlett's sword and his own trusty blade, together with a dagger, all
of which he had the satisfaction of polishing there and then with fine
sand held in the palm of his hand.
Then he swung his sword naked to his belt, and felt himself another man
in an instant.
The lockers also contained a pair of hams of smoked bacon, which had
suffered no damage from the water, and which, so far as sustenance
went, would at least serve to tide him over a week or two should he be
compelled to remain so long upon the isle.
Nevertheless, when Wat sat down to consider his position and plans, he
felt that difficulties had indeed closed impenetrably upon him.
Yet he wasted no time in idle despondency. Lochinvar was of other
mettle. He believed his love to be on the island close to him--it might
be in the power of his enemy himself, certainly in the hands of his
emissaries. John Scarlett, his trusty comrade, was equally surely lost
to him. Nevertheless, while his own life lasted, he could not cease
from seeking his love, nor yet abandon the quest on which he had come.
So, using the dagger for both knife and cooking apparatus, he cut and
ate a slice of the smoked bacon. Then he quenched his thirst with
a long drink out of a delicious spring which sent a tiny thread of
crystal trickling down the rocks towards the northern strand of Fiara.