WRESTLING WITH FATE
So far as concerned the Deemster, the death of Ewan's wife was the
beginning of the end. Had she not died under the roof of the new
Ballamona? Was it not by the strangest of accidents that she had died
there, and not in her own home? Had she not died in child-bed? Did not
everything attending her death suggest the force of an irresistible
fate? More than twenty years ago the woman Kerruish, the mother of Mally
Kerruish, had cursed this house, and said that no life would come to it
but death would come with it.
And for more than twenty years the Deemster had done his best to laugh
at the prediction and to forget it. Who was he that he should be the
victim of fear at the sneezing of an old woman? What was he that he
should not be master of his fate? But what had occurred? For more than
twenty years one disturbing and distinct idea had engrossed him. In all
his waking hours it exasperated him, and even in his hours of sleep it
lay heavy at the back of his brain as a dull feeling of dread. On the
bench, in the saddle, at table, alone by the winter's fire, alone in
summer walks, the obstinate idea was always there. And nothing but death
seemed likely to shake it off.
Often he laughed at it in his long, lingering, nervous laugh; but it was
a chain that was slowly tightening about him. Everything was being
fulfilled. First came the death of his wife at the birth of Mona, and
now, after an interval of twenty years, the death of his son's wife at
the birth of her child. In that stretch of time he had become in his own
view a childless man; his hopes had been thwarted in the son on whom
alone his hopes had been built; the house he had founded was but an
echoing vault; the fortune he had reared an empty bubble. He was
accursed; God had heard the woman's voice; he looked too steadily at the
facts to mistake them, and let the incredulous fools laugh if they
liked.
When, twenty years before, the Deemster realized that he was the slave
of one tyrannical idea, he tried to break the fate that hung over him.
He bought up the cottage on the Brew, and turned the woman Kerruish into
the roads. Then he put his foot on every sign of superstitious belief
that came in his way as judge.
But not with such brave shows of unbelief could he conquer his one
disturbing idea. His nature had never been kindly, but now there grew
upon him an obstinate hatred of everybody. This was in the days when his
children, Ewan and Mona, lived in the cozy nest at Bishop's Court. If in
these days any man mentioned the Kerruishes in the Deemster's presence,
he showed irritation, but he kept his ears open for every syllable said
about them. He knew all their history; he knew when the girl Mally fled
away from the island on the day of Ewan's christening; he knew by what
boat she sailed; he knew where she settled herself in England; he knew
when her child was born, and when, in terror at the unfulfilled censure
of the Church that hung over her (separating her from all communion with
God's people in life or hope of redemption in death), she came back to
the island, drawn by an irresistible idea, her child at her breast, to
work out her penance on the scene of her shame.
Thereafter he watched her daily, and knew her life. She had been taken
back to work at the net-looms of Kinvig, the Peeltown net-maker, and she
lived with her mother at the cottage over the Head, and there in poverty
she brought up her child, her boy, Jarvis Kerruish, as she had called
him. If any pointed at her and laughed with cruelty; if any pretended to
sympathize with her and said, with a snigger, "The first error is always
forgiven, Mally woman"; if any mentioned the Deemster himself, and said,
with a wink, "I'm thinking it terrible strange, Mally, that you don't
take a slue round and put a sight on him"; if any said to her when she
bought a new garment out of her scant earnings, a gown, or even a scarf
or bit of bright ribbon such as she loved in the old days, "Dearee dear!
I thought you wouldn't take rest, but be up and put a sight on the ould
crooky"--the Deemster knew it all. He saw the ruddy, audacious girl of
twenty sink into the pallid slattern of thirty, without hope, without
joy in life, and with only a single tie.
And the Deemster found that there grew upon him daily his old malicious
feeling; but so far as concerned his outer bearing, matters took a turn
on the day he came upon the boys, Dan Mylrea and Jarvis Kerruish,
fighting in the road. It was the first time he had seen the boy Jarvis.
"Who is he?" he had asked, and the old woman Kerruish had made answer,
"Don't you know him, Deemster? Do you never see a face like that? Not
when you look in the glass?"
There was no need to look twice into a mirror like the face of that lad
to know whose son he was.
The Deemster went home to Ballamona, and thought over the fierce
encounter. He could tolerate no longer the living reproach of this boy's
presence within a few miles of his own house, and, by an impulse no
better than humbled pride, he went back to the cottage of the Kerruishes
at night, alone, and afoot. The cottage was a lone place on the top of a
bare heath, with the bleak sea in front, and the purple hills behind,
and with a fenceless cart-track leading up to it. A lead mine, known as
the Cross Vein, had been worked there forty years before. The shaft was
still open, and now full of dark, foul water almost to the surface. One
roofless wall showed where the gear had stood, and under the shelter of
this wall there crouched a low thatched tool-shed, having a door and a
small window. This was the cottage; and until old Mrs. Kerruish had
brought there her few rickety sticks when, by the Deemster's orders,
they had been thrown into the road, none had ever occupied the tool-shed
as a house.
The door was open, and the Deemster stepped in. One of the women, old
Mrs. Kerruish, was sitting on a stool by the fire--it was a fire of
sputtering hazel sticks--shredding some scraps of green vegetables into
a pot of broth that swung from the iron hook of the chimney. The other
woman, Mally, was doing something in the dark crib of a sleeping-room,
shut off from the living-room by a wooden partition like the
stanchion-board of a stable. The boy was asleep; his soft breathing came
from the dark crib.
"Mrs. Kerruish," said the Deemster, "I am willing to take the lad, and
rear him, and when the time comes, to set him to business, and give him
a start in life."
Mrs. Kerruish had risen stiffly from her stool, and her face was set
hard.
"Think of it, woman, think of it, and don't answer in haste," said the
Deemster.
"We'd have to be despard hard put to for a bite and a sup before we'd
take anything from you, Deemster," said the old woman.
The Deemster's quick eyes, under the shaggy gray brows, glanced about
the room. It was a place of poverty, descending to squalor. The floor
was of the bare earth trodden hard, the roof was of the bare thatch,
with here and there a lath pushed between the uphewn spars to keep it
up, and here and there a broken patch dropping hayseed.
"You are desperate hard put to, woman," said the Deemster, and at that
Mally herself came out of the sleeping-crib. Her face was thin and pale,
and her bleared eyes had lost their sharp light; it was a countenance
without one ray of hope.
"Stop, mother," she said; "let us hear what the Deemster has to offer."
"Offer? Offer?" the old woman rapped out; "you've had enough of the
Deemster's offers, I'm thinking."
"Be quiet, mother," said Mally, and then she turned to the Deemster and
said, "Well, sir, and what is it?"
"Aw, very nate and amazing civil to dirks like that--go on, girl, go
on," said the old woman, tossing her head and hand in anger toward
Mally.
"Mother, this is my concern, I'm thinking--what is it, sir?"
But the old woman's wrath at her daughter's patience was not to be kept
down. "Behold ye!" she said, "it's my own girl that's after telling me
before strangers that I've not a farthing at me, and me good for nothing
at working, and only fit to hobble about on a stick, and fix the house
tidy maybe, and to have no say in nothing--go on, och, go on, girl."
The Deemster explained his proposal. It was that the boy Jarvis should
be given entirely into his control, and be no more known by his mother
and his mother's mother, and perhaps no more seen or claimed or
acknowledged by them, and that the Deemster should provide for him and
see him started in life.
Mrs. Kerruish's impatience knew no bounds. "My gough!" she cried--"my
gough, my gough!" But Mally listened and reflected. Her spirit was
broken, and she was thinking of her poverty. Her mother was now laid
aside by rheumatism, and could earn nothing, and she herself worked
piecework at the net-making--so much for a piece of net, a hundred yards
long by two hundred meshes deep, toiling without heart from eight to
eight, and earning four, five, and six shillings a week. And if there
was a want, her boy felt it. She did not answer at once, and after a
moment the Deemster turned to the door. "Think of it," he said; "think
of it."
"Hurroo! hurroo!" cried the old woman, derisively, from her stool, her
untamable soul aflame with indignation.
"Be quiet, mother," said Mally, and the hopelessness that had spoken
from her eyes seemed then to find a way into her voice.
The end of it was that Jarvis Kerruish was sent to a school at
Liverpool, and remained there three years, and then became a clerk in
the counting-house of Benas Brothers, of the Goree Piazza, ostensibly
African merchants, really English money-lenders. Jarvis did not fret at
the loss of his mother, and of course he never wrote to her; but he
addressed a careful letter to the Deemster twice a year, beginning
"Honored Sir," and ending "Yours, with much respect, most obediently."
Mally had miscalculated her self-command. If she had thought of her
poverty, it had been because she had thought of her boy as well. He
would be lifted above it all if she could but bring herself to part with
him. She wrought up her feelings to the sacrifice, and gave away her
son, and sat down as a broken-spirited and childless woman. Then she
realized the price she had to pay. The boy had been the cause of her
shame; but he had been the centre of her pride as well. If she had been
a hopeless woman before, she was now a heartless one. Little by little
she fell into habits of idleness and intemperance. Before young Jarvis
sat in his frilled shirt on the stool in the Goree Piazza, and before
the down had begun to show on his lean cheeks, his mother was a lost and
abandoned woman.
But not yet had the Deemster broken his fate. When Ewan disappointed his
hopes and went into the Church, and married without his sanction or
knowledge, it seemed to him that the chain was gradually tightening
about him. Then the Deemster went over once more to the cottage at the
Cross Vein, alone, and in the night.
"Mrs. Kerruish," he said, "I am willing to allow you six pounds a year
pension, and I will pay it in three pound notes on Lady Day and
Martinmas," and putting his first payment on the table he turned about
and was gone before the rheumatic old body could twist in her chair.
The Deemster had just made his third visit to the cottage at the Cross
Vein, and left his second payment, when the death of Ewan's young wife
came as a thunderbolt and startled him to the soul. For days and nights
thereafter he went about like a beaten horse, trembling to the very
bone. He had resisted the truth for twenty years; he had laughed at it
in his long lingering laugh at going to bed at night and at rising in
the morning; he had ridiculed superstition in others, and punished it
when he could; he was the judge of the island, and she through whose
mouth his fate fell upon him was a miserable ruin cast aside on life's
highway; but the truth would be resisted no longer: the house over his
head was accursed--accursed to him, and to his children, and to his
children's children.
The Deemster's engrossing idea became a dominating terror. Was there no
way left to him to break the fate that hung over him? None? The Deemster
revolved the problem night and day, and meantime lived the life of the
damned. At length he hit on a plan, and then peace seemed to come to
him, a poor paltering show of peace, and he went about no longer like a
beaten and broken horse. His project was a strange one; it was the last
that prudence would have suggested, but the first that the evil spirit
of his destiny could have hoped for--it was to send to Liverpool for
Jarvis Kerruish, and establish him in Ballamona as his son.
In that project the hand of his fate was strongly upon him; he could not
resist it; he seemed to yield himself to its power; he made himself its
willing victim; he was even as Saul when the Spirit of the Lord had gone
from him and an evil spirit troubled him, sending for the anointed son
of Jesse to play on the harp to him and to supplant him on the throne.