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."