I.
Old Deemster Christian of Ballawhaine was a hard man--hard on the
outside, at all events. They called him Iron Christian, and people said,
“Don't turn that iron hand against you.” Yet his character was stamped
with nobleness as well as strength. He was not a man of icy nature, but
he loved to gather icicles about him. There was fire enough underneath,
at which he warmed his old heart when alone, but he liked the air to
be congealed about his face. He was a man of a closed soul. One had to
wrench open the dark chamber where he kept his feelings; but the man who
had done that had uncovered his nakedness, and he cut him off for ever.
That was how it happened with his son, the father of Philip.
He had two sons; the elder was an impetuous creature, a fiery spirit,
one of the masterful souls who want the restraint of the curb if they
are not to hurry headlong into the abyss. Old Deemster Christian had
called this boy Thomas Wilson, after the serene saint who had once
been Bishop of Man. He was intended, however, for the law, not for
the Church. The office of Deemster never has been and never can be
hereditary; yet the Christians of Ballawhaine had been Deemsters through
six generations, and old Iron Christian expected that Thomas Wilson
Christian would succeed him. But there was enough uncertainty about the
succession to make merit of more value than precedent in the selection,
and so the old man had brought up his son to the English bar, and
afterwards called him to practise in the Manx one. The young fellow had
not altogether rewarded his father's endeavours. During his residence
in England, he had acquired certain modern doctrines which were highly
obnoxious to the old Deemster. New views on property, new ideas
about woman and marriage, new theories concerning religion (always
re-christened superstition), the usual barnacles of young vessels fresh
from unknown waters; but the old man was no shipwright in harbour who
has learnt the art of removing them without injury to the hull. The
Deemster knew these notions when he met with them in the English
newspapers. There was something awesome in their effect on his
stay-at-home imagination, as of vices confusing and difficult to true
men that walk steadily; but, above all, very far off, over the mountains
and across the sea, like distant cities of Sodom, only waiting for
Sodom's doom. And yet, lo! here they were in a twinkling, shunted and
shot into his own house and his own stackyard.
“I suppose now,” he said, with a knowing look, “you think Jack as good
as his master?”
“No, sir,” said his son gravely; “generally much better.”
Iron Christian altered his will. To his elder son he left only a
life-interest in Ballawhaine. “That boy will be doing something,” he
said, and thus he guarded against consequences. He could not help it; he
was ashamed, but he could not conquer his shame--the fiery old man began
to nurse a grievance against his son.
The two sons of the Deemster were like the inside and outside of a bowl,
and that bowl was the Deemster himself. If Thomas Wilson the elder
had his father's inside fire and softness, Peter, the younger, had his
father's outside ice and iron. Peter was little and almost misshapen,
with a pair of shoulders that seemed to be trying to meet over a hollow
chest and limbs that splayed away into vacancy. And if Nature had been
grudging with him, his father was not more kind. He had been brought up
to no profession, and his expectations were limited to a yearly charge
out of his brother's property. His talk was bitter, his voice cold,
he laughed little, and had never been known to cry. He had many things
against him.
Besides these sons, Deemster Christian had a girl in his household, but
to his own consciousness the fact was only a kind of peradventure. She
was his niece, the child of his only brother, who had died in early
manhood. Her name was Ann Charlotte de la Tremouille, called after
the lady of Rushen, for the family of Christian had their share of the
heroic that is in all men. She had fine eyes, a weak mouth, and great
timidity. Gentle airs floated always about her, and a sort of nervous
brightness twinkled over her, as of a glen with the sun flickering
through. Her mother died when she was a child of twelve, and in the
house of her uncle and her cousins she had been brought up among men and
boys.
One day Peter drew the Deemster aside and told him (with expressions
of shame, interlarded with praises of his own acuteness) a story of his
brother. It was about a girl. Her name was Mona Crellin; she lived on
the hill at Ballure House, half a mile south of Ramsey, and was
daughter of a man called Billy Ballure, a retired sea-captain, and
hail-fellow-well-met with all the jovial spirits of the town.
There was much noise and outcry, and old Iron sent for his son.
“What's this I hear?” he cried, looking him down. “A woman? So that's
what your fine learning comes to, eh? Take care, sir! take care! No son
of mine shall disgrace himself. The day he does that he will be put to
the door.”
Thomas held himself in with a great effort.
“Disgrace?” he said. “What disgrace, sir, if you please?”
“What disgrace, sir?” repeated the Deemster, mocking his son in a
mincing treble. Then he roared, “Behaving dishonourably to a poor
girl--that what's disgrace, sir! Isn't it enough? eh? eh?”
“More than enough,” said the young man. “But who is doing it? I'm not.”
“Then you're doing worse. _Did_ I say worse? Of course I said worse.
Worse, sir, worse! Do you hear me? Worse! You are trapsing around
Ballure, and letting that poor girl take notions. I'll have no more
of it. Is this what I sent you to England for? Aren't you ashamed of
yourself? Keep your place, sir; keep your place. A poor girl's a poor
girl, and a Deemster's a Deemster.”
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas, suddenly firing up, “and a man's a man. As for
the shame, I need be ashamed of nothing that is not shameful; and the
best proof I can give you that I mean no dishonour by the girl is that I
intend to marry her.”
“What? You intend to--what? Did I hear----”
The old Deemster turned his good ear towards his son's face, and the
young man repeated his threat. Never fear! No poor girl should be misled
by him. He was above all foolish conventions.
Old Iron Christian was dumbfounded. He gasped, he stared, he stammered,
and then fell on his son with hot reproaches.
“What? Your wife? Wife? That trollop!--that minx! that--and daughter of
that sot, too, that old rip, that rowdy blatherskite--that----And my
own son is to lift his hand to cut his throat! Yes, sir, cut his
throat----And I am to stand by! No, no! I say no, sir, no!”
The young man made some further protest, but it was lost in his father's
clamour.
“You will, though? You will? Then your hat is your house, sir. Take to
it--take to it!”
“No need to tell me twice, father.”
“Away then--away to your woman--your jade! God, keep my hands off him!”
The old man lifted his clenched fist, but his son had flung out of the
room. It was not the Deemster only who feared he might lay hands on his
own flesh and blood.
“Stop! come back, you dog! Listen! I've not done yet. Stop! you
hotheaded rascal, stop! Can't you hear a man out then? Come back! Thomas
Wilson, come back, sir! Thomas! Thomas! Tom! Where is he? Where's the
boy?”
Old Iron Christian had made after his son bareheaded down to the road,
shouting his name in a broken roar, but the young man was gone. Then
he went back slowly, his grey hair playing in the wind. He was all iron
outside, but all father within.
That day the Deemster altered his will a second time, and his elder son
was disinherited.
II.
Peter succeeded in due course to the estate of Ballawhaine, but he was
not a lawyer, and the line of the Deemsters Christian was broken.
Meantime Thomas Wilson Christian had been married to Mona Crellin
without delay. He loved her, but he had been afraid of her ignorance,
afraid also (notwithstanding his principles) of the difference in their
social rank, and had half intended to give her up when his father's
reproaches had come to fire his anger and to spur his courage. As
soon as she became his wife he realised the price he had paid for her.
Happiness could not come of such a beginning. He had broken every tie
in making the one which brought him down. The rich disowned him, and the
poor lost respect for him.
“It's positively indecent,” said one. “It's potatoes marrying herrings,”
said another. It was little better than hunger marrying thirst.
In the general downfall of his fame his profession failed him. He lost
heart and ambition. His philosophy did not stand him in good stead, for
it had no value in the market to which he brought it. Thus, day by day,
he sank deeper into the ooze of a wrecked and wasted life.
The wife did not turn out well. She was a fretful person, with a good
face, a bad shape, a vacant mind, and a great deal of vanity. She
had liked her husband a little as a lover, but when she saw that her
marriage brought her nobody's envy, she fell into a long fit of the
vapours. Eventually she made herself believe that she was an ill-used
person. She never ceased to complain of her fate. Everybody treated her
as if she had laid plans for her husband's ruin.
The husband continued to love her, but little by little he grew to
despise her also. When he made his first plunge, he had prided himself
on indulging an heroic impulse. He was not going to deliver a good woman
to dishonour because she seemed to be an obstacle to his success. But
she had never realised his sacrifice. She did not appear to understand
that he might have been a great man in the island, but that love and
honour had held him back. Her ignorance was pitiful, and he was ashamed
of it. In earning the contempt of others he had not saved himself from
self-contempt.
The old sailor died suddenly in a fit of drunkenness at a fair, and
husband and wife came into possession of his house and property at
Ballure. This did not improve the relations between them. The woman
perceived that their positions were reversed. She was the bread-bringer
now. One day, at a slight that her husband's people had put upon her
in the street, she reminded him, in order to re-establish her wounded
vanity, that but for her and hers he would not have so much as a roof to
cover him.
Yet the man continued to love her in spite of all. And she was not
at first a degraded being. At times she was bright and cheerful, and,
except in the worst spells of her vapours, she was a brisk and busy
woman. The house was sweet and homely. There was only one thing to drive
him away from it, but that was the greatest thing of all. Nevertheless
they had their cheerful hours together.
A child was born, a boy, and they called him Philip. He was the
beginning of the end between them; the iron stay that held them together
and yet apart. The father remembered his misfortunes in the presence
of his son, and the mother was stung afresh by the recollection of
disappointed hopes. The boy was the true heir of Ballawhaine, but the
inheritance was lost to him by his father's fault and he had nothing.
Philip grew to be a winsome lad. There was something sweet and amiable
and big-hearted, and even almost great, in him. One day the father
sat in the garden by the mighty fuchsia-tree that grows on the lawn,
watching his little fair-haired son play at marbles on the path with two
big lads whom he had enticed out of the road, and another more familiar
playmate--the little barefooted boy Peter, from the cottage by the
water-trough. At first Philip lost, and with grunts of satisfaction
the big ones promptly pocketed their gains. Then Philip won, and little
curly Peter was stripped naked, and his lip began to fall. At that
Philip paused, held his head aside, and considered, and then said quite
briskly, “Peter hadn't a fair chance that time--here, let's give him
another go.”
The father's throat swelled, and he went indoors to the mother and said,
“I think--perhaps I'm to blame--but somehow I think our boy isn't
like other boys. What do you say? Foolish? May be so, may be so! No
difference? Well, no--no!”
But deep down in the secret place of his heart, Thomas Wilson Christian,
broken man, uprooted tree, wrecked craft in the mud and slime, began to
cherish a fond idea. The son would regain all that his father had lost!
He had gifts, and he should be brought up to the law; a large nature,
and he should be helped to develop it; a fine face which all must
love, a sense of justice, and a great wealth of the power of radiating
happiness. Deemster? Why not? Ballawhaine? Who could tell? The biggest,
noblest, greatest of all Manxmen! God knows!
Only--only he must be taught to fly from his father's dangers. Love?
Then let him love where he can also respect--but never outside his own
sphere. The island was too little for that. To love and to despise was
to suffer the torments of the damned.
Nourishing these dreams, the poor man began to be tortured by every
caress the mother gave her son, and irritated by every word she spoke to
him. Her grammar was good enough for himself, and the exuberant caresses
of her maudlin moods were even sometimes pleasant, but the boy must be
degraded by neither.
The woman did not reach to these high thoughts, but she was not slow to
interpret the casual byplay in which they found expression. Her husband
was taiching her son to dis-respeck her. She wouldn't have thought it
of him--she wouldn't really. But it was always the way when a
plain practical woman married on the quality. Imperence and
dis-respeck--that's the capers! Imperence and disrespeck from the
ones that's doing nothing and behoulden to you for everything. It was
shocking! It was disthressing!
In such outbursts would her jealousy taunt him with his poverty, revile
him for his idleness, and square accounts with him for the manifest
preference of the boy. He could bear them with patience when they were
alone, but in Philip's presence they were as gall and wormwood, and
whips and scorpions.
“Go, my lad, go,” he would sometimes whimper, and hustle the boy out of
the way.
“No,” the woman would cry, “stop and see the man your father is.”
And the father would mutter, “He might see the woman his mother is as
well.”
But when she had pinned them together, and the boy had to hear her out,
the man would drop his forehead on the table and break into groans and
tears. Then the woman would change quite suddenly, and put her arms
about him and kiss him and weep over him. He could defend himself from
neither her insults nor her embraces. In spite of everything he loved
her. That was where the bitterness of the evil lay. But for the love he
bore her, he might have got her off his back and been his own man once
more. He would make peace with her and kiss her again, and they would
both kiss the boy, and be tender, and even cheerful.
Philip was still a child, but he saw the relations of his parents, and
in his own way he understood everything. He loved his father best, but
he did not hate his mother. She was nearly always affectionate, though
often jealous of the father's greater love and care for him, and
sometimes irritable from that cause alone. But the frequent broils
between them were like blows that left scars on his body. He slept in a
cot in the same room, and he would cover up his head in the bedclothes
at night with a feeling of fear and physical pain.
A man cannot fight against himself for long. That deadly enemy is
certain to slay. When Philip was six years old his father lay sick of
his last sickness. The wife had fallen into habits of intemperance by
this time, and stage by stage she had descended to the condition of an
utterly degraded woman. There was something to excuse her. She had been
disappointed in the great stakes of life; she had earned disgrace
where she had looked for admiration. She was vain, and could not bear
misfortune; and she had no deep well of love from which to drink when
the fount of her pride ran dry. If her husband had indulged her with a
little pity, everything might have gone along more easily. But he had
only loved her and been ashamed. And now that he lay near to his death,
the love began to ebb and the shame to deepen into dread.
He slept little at night, and as often as he closed his eyes certain
voices of mocking and reproach seemed to be constantly humming in his
ears.
“Your son!” they would cry. “What is to become of him? Your dreams!
Your great dreams! Deemster! Ballawhaine! God knows what! You are
leaving the boy; who is to bring him up? His mother? Think of it!”
At last a ray of pale sunshine broke on the sleepless wrestler with the
night, and he became almost happy. “I'll speak to the boy,” he thought.
“I will tell him my own history, concealing nothing. Yes, I will tell
him of my own father also, God rest him, the stern old man--severe, yet
just.”
An opportunity soon befell. It was late at night--very late. The woman
was sleeping off a bout of intemperance somewhere below; and the boy,
with the innocence and ignorance of his years in all that the solemn
time foreboded, was bustling about the room with mighty eagerness,
because he knew that he ought to be in bed.
“I'm staying up to intend on you, father,” said the boy.
The father answered with a sigh.
“Don't you asturb yourself, father. I'll intend on you.”
The father's sigh deepened to a moan.
“If you want anything 'aticular, just call me; d'ye see, father?”
And away went the boy like a gleam of light. Presently he came back,
leaping like the dawn. He was carrying, insecurely, a jug of poppy-head
and camomile, which had been prescribed as a lotion.
“Poppy heads, father! Poppy-heads is good, I can tell ye.”
“Why arn't you in bed, child?” said the father. “You must be tired.”
“No, I'm not tired, father. I was just feeling a bit of tired, and then
I took a smell of poppy-heads and away went the tiredness to Jericho.
They _is_ good.”
The little white head was glinting off again when the father called it
back.
“Come here, my boy.” The child went up to the bedside, and the father
ran his fingers lovingly through the long fair hair.
“Do you think, Philip, that twenty, thirty, forty years hence, when you
are a man--aye, a big man, little one--do you think you will remember
what I shall say to you now?”
“Why, yes, father, if it's anything 'aticular, and if it isn't you can
amind me of it, can't you, father?”
The father shook his head. “I shall not be here then, my boy. I am going
away----”
“Going away, father? May I come too?”
“Ah! I wish you could, little one. Yes, truly I almost wish you could.”
“Then you'll let me go with you, father! Oh, I _am_ glad, father.” And
the boy began to caper and dance, to go down on all fours, and leap
about the floor like a frog.
The father fell back on his pillow with a heaving breast. Vain! vain!
What was the use of speaking? The child's outlook was life; his own was
death; they had no common ground; they spoke different tongues. And,
after all, how could he suffer the sweet innocence of the child's soul
to look down into the stained and scarred chamber of his ruined heart?
“You don't understand me, Philip. I mean that I am going--to die. Yes,
darling, and, only that I am leaving you behind, I should be glad to go.
My life has been wasted, Philip. In the time to come, when men speak
of your father, you will be ashamed. Perhaps you will not remember then
that whatever he was he was a good father to you, for at least he loved
you dearly. Well, I must needs bow to the will of God, but if I could
only hope that you would live to restore my name when I am gone....
Philip, are you--don't cry, my darling. There, there, kiss me. We'll
say no more about it then. Perhaps it's not true, although father tolded
you? Well, perhaps not. And now undress and slip into bed before mother
comes. See, there's your night-dress at the foot of the crib. Wants some
buttons, does it? Never mind--in with you--that's a boy.”
Impossible, impossible! And perhaps unnecessary. Who should say? Young
as the child was, he might never forget what he had seen and heard. Some
day it must have its meaning for him. Thus the father comforted
himself. Those jangling quarrels which had often scorched his brain like
iron--the memory of their abject scenes came to him then, with a sort of
bleeding solace!
Meanwhile, with little catching sobs, which he struggled to repress, the
boy lay down in his crib. When half-way gone towards the mists of the
land of sleep, he started up suddenly, and called “Good night, father,”
and his father answered him “Good night.”
Towards three o'clock the next morning there was great commotion in the
house. The servant was scurrying up and downstairs, and the mistress,
wringing her hands, was tramping to and fro in the sick-room, crying in
a tone of astonishment, as if the thought had stolen upon her unawares,
“Why, he's going! How didn't somebody tell me before?”
The eyes of the sinking man were on the crib. “Philip,” he faltered.
They lifted the boy out of his bed, and brought him in his night-dress
to his father's side; and the father twisted about and took him into his
arms, still half asleep and yawning. Then the mother, recovering from
the stupidity of her surprise, broke into paroxysms of weeping, and fell
over her husband's breast and kissed and kissed him.
For once her kisses had no response. The man was dying miserably, for he
was thinking of her and of the boy. Sometimes he babbled over Philip in
a soft, inarticulate gurgle; sometimes he looked up at his wife's face
with a stony stare, and then he clung the closer to the boy, as if he
would never let him go. The dark hour came, and still he held the boy in
his arms. They had to release the child at last from his father's dying
grip.
The dead of the night was gone by this time, and the day was at the
point of dawn; the sparrows in the eaves were twittering, and the tide,
which was at its lowest ebb, was heaving on the sand far out in the bay
with the sound as of a rookery awakening. Philip remembered afterwards
that his mother cried so much that he was afraid, and that when he
had been dressed she took him downstairs, where they all ate breakfast
together, with the sun shining through the blinds.
The mother did not live to overshadow her son's life. Sinking yet lower
in habits of intemperance, she stayed indoors from week-end to week-end,
seated herself like a weeping willow by the fireside, and drank and
drank. Her excesses led to delusions. She saw ghosts perpetually. To
avoid such of them as haunted the death-room of her husband, she had
a bed made up on a couch in the parlour, and one morning she was found
face downwards stretched out beside it on the floor.
Then Philip's father's cousin, always called his Aunty Nan, came to
Ballure House to bring him up. His father had been her favourite cousin,
and, in spite of all that had happened, he had been her lifelong hero
also. A deep and secret tenderness, too timid to be quite aware of
itself, had been lying in ambush in her heart through all the years
of his miserable life with Mona. At the death of the old Deemster, her
other cousin, Peter, had married and cast her off. But she was always
one of those woodland herbs which are said to give out their sweetest
fragrance after they have been trodden on and crushed. Philip's father
had been her hero, her lost one and her love, and Philip was his
father's son.
III.
Little curly Pete, with the broad, bare feet, the tousled black head,
the jacket half way up his back like a waistcoat with sleeves, and the
hole in his trousers where the tail of his shirt should have been, was
Peter Quilliam, and he was the natural son of Peter Christian. In the
days when that punctilious worthy set himself to observe the doings of
his elder brother at Ballure, he found it convenient to make an outwork
of the hedge in front of the thatched house that stood nearest. Two
persons lived in the cottage, father and daughter--Tom Quilliam, usually
called Black Tom, and Bridget Quilliam, getting the name of Bridget
Black Tom.
The man was a short, gross creature, with an enormous head and a big,
open mouth, showing broken teeth that were black with the juice of
tobacco. The girl was by common judgment and report a gawk--a great,
slow-eyed, comely-looking, comfortable, easy-going gawk. Black Tom was
a thatcher, and with his hair poking its way through the holes in his
straw hat, he tramped the island in pursuit of his calling. This kept
him from home for days together, and in that fact Peter Christian, while
shadowing the morality of his brother, found his own opportunity.
When the child was born, neither the thatcher nor his daughter attempted
to father it. Peter Christian paid twenty pounds to the one and eighty
to the other in Manx pound-notes, the boys daubed their door to show
that the house was dishonoured, and that was the end of everything.
The girl went through her “censures” silently, or with only one comment.
She had borrowed the sheet in which she appeared in church from Miss
Christian of Ballawhaine, and when she took it back, the good soul of
the sweet lady thought to improve the occasion.
“I was wondering, Bridget,” she said gravely, “what you were thinking of
when you stood with Bella and Liza before the congregation last Sunday
morning”--two other Magda-lenes had done penance by Bridget's side.
“'Deed, mistress,” said the girl, “I was thinkin' there wasn't a sheet
at one of them to match mine for whiteness. I'd 'a been ashamed to be
seen in the like of theirs.”
Bridget may have been a gawk, but she did two things which were not
gawkish. Putting the eighty greasy notes into the foot of an old
stocking, she sewed them up in the ticking of her bed, and then
christened her baby Peter. The money was for the child if she should not
live to rear him, and the name was her way of saying that a man's son
was his son in spite of law or devil.
After that she kept both herself and her child by day labour in the
fields, weeding and sowing potatoes, and following at the tail of the
reapers, for sixpence a day dry days, and fourpence all weathers. She
might have badgered the heir of Ballawhaine, but she never did so. That
person came into his inheritance, got himself elected member for Ramsey
in the House of Keys, married Nessy Taubman, daughter of the rich
brewer, and became the father of another son. Such were the doings
in the big house down in the valley, while up in the thatched cottage
behind the water-trough, on potatoes and herrings and barley bonnag,
lived Bridget and her little Pete.
Pete's earliest recollections were of a boy who lived at the beautiful
white house with the big fuchsia, by the turn of the road over the
bridge that crossed the glen. This was Philip Christian, half a year
older than himself, although several inches shorter, with long yellow
hair and rosy cheeks, and dressed in a velvet suit of knickerbockers.
Pete worshipped him in his simple way, hung about him, fetched and
carried for him, and looked up to him as a marvel of wisdom and goodness
and pluck.
His first memory of Philip was of sleeping with him, snuggled up by his
side in the dark, hushed and still in a narrow bed with iron ends to it,
and of leaping up in the morning and laughing. Philip's father--a
tall, white gentleman, who never laughed at all, and only smiled
sometimes--had found him in the road in the evening waiting for his
mother to come home from the fields, that he might light the fire in the
cottage, and running about in the meantime to keep himself warm, and not
too hungry.
His second memory was of Philip guiding him round the drawing-room (over
thick carpets, on which his bare feet made no noise), and showing him
the pictures on the walls, and telling him what they meant. One
(an engraving of St. John, with a death's-head and a crucifix) was,
according to this grim and veracious guide, a picture of a brigand who
killed his victims, and always skinned their skulls with a cross-handled
dagger. After that his memories of Philip and himself were as two gleams
of sunshine which mingle and become one.
Philip was a great reader of noble histories. He found them, frayed
and tattered, at the bottom of a trunk that had tin corners and two
padlocks, and stood in the room looking towards the harbour where his
mother's father, the old sailor, had slept. One of them was his special
favourite, and he used to read it aloud to Pete. It told of the doings
of the Carrasdhoo men. They were a bold band of desperadoes, the terror
of all the island. Sometimes they worked in the fields at ploughing, and
reaping, and stacking, the same as common practical men; and sometimes
they lived in houses, just like the house by the water-trough. But when
the wind was rising in the nor-nor-west, and there was a taste of the
brine on your lips, they would be up, and say, “The sea's calling us--we
must be going.” Then they would live in rocky caves of the coast where
nobody could reach them, and there would be fires lit at night in
tar-barrels, and shouting, and singing, and carousing; and after that
there would be ships' rudders, and figure heads, and masts coming up
with the tide, and sometimes dead bodies on the beach of sailors they
had drowned--only foreign ones though--hundreds and tons of them. But
that was long ago, the Carrasdhoo men were dead, and the glory of their
day was departed.
One quiet evening, after an awesome reading of this brave history,
Philip, sitting on his haunches at the gable, with Pete like another
white frog beside him, said quite suddenly, “Hush! What's that?”
“I wonder,” said Pete.
There was never a sound in the air above the rustle of a leaf, and
Pete's imagination could carry him no further.
“Pete,” said Philip, with awful gravity, “the sea's calling me.”
“And me,” said Pete solemnly.
Early that night the two lads were down at the most desolate part of
Port Mooar, in a cave under the scraggy black rocks of Gobny-Garvain,
kindling a fire of gorse and turf inside the remains of a broken barrel.
“See that tremendous sharp rock below low water?” said Philip.
“Don't I, though?” said Pete.
There was never a rock the size of a currycomb between them and the line
of the sky.
“That's what we call a reef,” said Philip. “Wait a bit and you'll see
the ships go splitting on top of it like--like----”
“Like a tay-pot,” said Pete.
“We'll save the women, though,” said Philip. “Shall we save the women,
Pete? We always do.”
“Aw, yes, the women--and the boys,” said Pete thoughtfully.
Philip had his doubts about the boys, but he would not quarrel. It
was nearly dark, and growing very cold. The lads croodled down by the
crackling blaze, and tried to forget that they had forgotten tea-time.
“We never has to mind a bit of hungry,” said Philip stoutly.
“Never a ha'p'orth,” said Pete.
“Only when the job's done we have hams and flitches and things for
supper.”
“Aw, yes, ateing and drinking to the full.”
“Rum, Pete, we always drinks rum.”
“We has to,” said Pete.
“None of your tea,” said Philip.
“Coorse not, none of your ould grannie's two-penny tay,” said Pete.
It was quite dark by this time, and the tide was rising rapidly.
There was not a star in the sky, and not a light on the sea except
the revolving light of the lightship far a Way. The boys crept closer
together and began to think of home. Philip remembered Aunty Nan. When
he had stolen away on hands and knees under the parlour window she had
been sewing at his new check night-shirt. A night-shirt for a Carrasdhoo
man had seemed to be ridiculous then; but where was Aunty Nannie now?
Pete remembered his mother--she would be racing round the houses and
crying; and he had visions of Black Tom--he would be racing round also
and swearing.
“Shouldn't we sing something, Phil?” said Pete, with a gurgle in his
throat.
“Sing!” said Philip, with as much scorn as he could summon, “and give
them warning we're watching for them! Well, you _are_ a pretty, Mr.
Pete! But just you wait till the ships goes wrecking on the rocks--I
mean the reefs--and the dead men's coming up like corks--hundreds and
ninety and dozens of them; my jove! yes, then you'll hear me singing.”
The darkness deepened, and the voice of the sea began to moan through
the back of the cave, the gorse crackled no longer, and the turf burned
in a dull red glow. Night with its awfulness had come down, and the boys
were cut off from everything.
“They don't seem to be coming--not yet,” said Philip, in a husky
whisper.
“Maybe it's the same as fishing,” said Pete; “sometimes you catch and
sometimes you don't.”
“That's it,” said Philip eagerly, “generally you don't--and then you
both haves to go home and come again,” he added nervously.
But neither of the boys stirred. Outside the glow of the fire the
blackness looked terrible. Pete nuzzled up to Philip's side, and, being
untroubled by imaginative fears, soon began to feel drowsy. The sound of
his measured breathing startled Philip with the terror of loneliness.
“Honour bright, Mr. Pete,” he faltered, nudging the head on his
shoulder, and trying to keep his voice from shaking; “_you_ call
yourself a second mate, and leaving all the work to me!”
The second mate was penitent, but in less than half a minute more he was
committing the same offence again. “It isn't no use,” he said, “I'm that
sleepy you never seen.”
“Then let's both take the watch below i'stead,” said Philip, and they
proceeded to stretch themselves out by the fire together.
“Just lave it to me,” said Pete; “I'll hear them if they come in the
night. I'll always does. I'm sleeping that light it's shocking. Why,
sometimes I hear Black Tom when he comes home tipsy. I've done it
times.”
“We'll have carpets to lie on to-morrow, not stones,” said Philip,
wriggling on a rough one; “rolls of carpets--kidaminstrel ones.”
They settled themselves side by side as close to each other as they
could creep, and tried not to hear the surging and sighing of the sea.
Then came a tremulous whimper:
“Pete!”
“What's that?”
“Don't you never say your prayers when you take the watch below?”
“Sometimes we does, when mother isn't too tired, and the ould man's
middling drunk and quiet.”
“Then don't you like to then?”
“Aw, yes, though, I'm liking it scandalous.”
The wreckers agreed to say their prayers, and got up again and said
them, knee to knee, with their two little faces to the fire, and then
stretched themselves out afresh.
“Pete, where's your hand?”
“Here you are, Phil.”
In another minute, under the solemn darkness of the night, broken only
by the smouldering fire, amid the thunderous quake of the cavern after
every beat of the waves on the beach, the Carrasdhoo men were asleep.
Sometime in the dark reaches before the dawn Pete leapt up with a start
“What's that?” he cried, in a voice of fear.
But Philip was still in the mists of sleep, and, feeling the cold, he
only whimpered, “Cover me up, Pete.”
“Phil!” cried Pete, in an affrighted whisper.
“Cover me up,” drawled Philip.
“I thought it was Black Tom,” said Pete.
There was some confused bellowing outside the cave.
“My goodness grayshers!” came in a terrible voice, “it's them, though,
the pair of them! Impozzible! who says it's impozzible? It's themselves
I'm telling you, ma'm. Guy heng! The woman's mad, putting a scream out
of herself like yonder. Safe? Coorse they're safe, bad luck to the young
wastrels! You're for putting up a prayer for your own one. Eh? Well,
I'm for hommering mine. The dirts? Weaned only yesterday, and fetching
a dacent man out of his bed to find them. A fire at them, too! Well, it
was the fire that found them. Pull the boat up, boys.”
Philip was half awake by this time. “They've come,” he whispered. “The
ships is come, they're on the reef. Oh, dear me! Best go and meet them.
P'raps they won't kill us if--if we--Oh, dear me!”
Then the wreckers, hand in hand, quaking and whimpering, stepped out to
the mouth of the cave. At the next moment Philip found himself snatched
up into the arms of Aunty Nan, who kissed him and cried over him, and
rammed a great chunk of sweet cake into his cheek. Pete was faring
differently. Under the leathern belt of Black Tom, who was thrashing him
for both of them, he was howling like the sea in a storm.
Thus the Carrasdhoo men came home by the light of early morning--Pete
skipping before the belt and bellowing; and Philip holding a piece of
the cake at his teeth to comfort him.
IV.
Philip left home for school at King William's by Castletown, and then
Pete had a hard upbringing. His mother was tender enough, and there were
good souls like Aunty Nan to show pity to both of them. But life went
like a springless bogey, nevertheless. Sin itself is often easier than
simpleness to pardon and condone. It takes a soft heart to feel tenderly
towards a soft head.
Poor Pete's head seemed soft enough and to spare. No power and no
persuasion could teach him to read and write. He went to school at the
old schoolhouse by the church in Maughold village. The schoolmaster was
a little man called John Thomas Corlett, pert and proud, with the sharp
nose of a pike and the gait of a bantam. John Thomas was also a tailor.
On a cowhouse door laid across two school forms he sat cross-legged
among his cloth, his “maidens,” and his smoothing irons, with his boys
and girls, class by class, in a big half circle round about him.
The great little man had one standing ground of daily assault on the
dusty jacket of poor Pete, and that was that the lad came late to
school. Every morning Pete's welcome from the tailor-schoolmaster was a
volley of expletives, and a swipe of the cane across his shoulders. “The
craythur! The dunce! The durt! I'm taiching him, and taiching him, and
he won't be taicht.”
The soul of the schoolmaster had just two human weaknesses. One of these
was a weakness for drink, and as a little vessel he could not take much
without being full. Then he always taught the Church catechism and swore
at his boys in Manx.
“Peter Quilliam,” he cried one day, “who brought you out of the land of
Egypt and the house of bondage?”
“'Deed, master,” said Pete, “I never was in no such places, for I never
had the money nor the clothes for it, and that's how stories are getting
about.”
The second of the schoolmaster's frailties was love of his daughter, a
child of four, a cripple, whom he had lamed in her infancy, by letting
her fall as he tossed her in his arms while in drink. The constant
terror of his mind was lest some further accident should befall her.
Between class and class he would go to a window, from which, when he had
thrown up its lower sash, dim with the scratches of names, he could see
one end of his own white cottage, and the little pathway, between lines
of gilvers, coming down from the porch.
Pete had seen the little one hobbling along this path on her lame leg,
and giggling with a heart of glee when she had eluded the eyes of her
mother and escaped into the road. One day it chanced, after the heavy
spring rains had swollen every watercourse, that he came upon the little
curly poll, tumbling and tossing like a bell-buoy in a gale, down the
flood of the river that runs to the sea at Port Mooar. Pete rescued the
child and took her home, and then, as if he had done nothing unusual, he
went on to school, dripping water from his legs at every step.
When John Thomas saw him coming, in bare feet, triddle-traddle,
triddle-traddle, up the school-house floor, his indignation at the boy
for being later than usual rose to fiery wrath for being drenched as
well. Waiting for no explanation, concluding that Pete had been fishing
for crabs among the stones of Port Lewaigue, he burst into a loud volley
of his accustomed expletives, and timed and punctuated them by a thwack
of the cane between every word.
“The waistrel! (thwack). The dirt! (thwack). I'm taiching him (thwack),
and taiching him (thwack), and he won't be taicht!” (Thwack, thwack,
thwack.)
Pete said never a word. Boiling his stinging shoulders under his jacket,
and ramming his smarting hands, like wet eels, into his breeches'
pockets, he took his place in silence at the bottom of the class.
But a girl, a little dark thing in a red frock, stepped out from her
place beside the boy, shot up like a gleam to the schoolmaster as he
returned to his seat among the cloth and needles, dealt him a smart slap
across the face, and then burst into a lit of hysterical crying. Her
name was Katherine Cregeen. She was the daughter of Cæsar the Cornaa
miller, the founder of Ballajora Chapel, and a mighty man among the
Methodists.
Katherine went unpunished, but that was the end of Pete's schooling.
His learning was not too heavy for a big lad's head to carry--a bit
of reading if it was all in print, and no writing at all except
half-a-dozen capital letters. It was not a formidable equipment for the
battle of life, but Bridget would not hear of more.
She herself, meanwhile, had annexed that character which was always
the first and easiest to attach itself to a woman with a child but
no visible father for it--the character of a witch. That name for his
mother was Pete's earliest recollection of the high-road, and when the
consciousness of its meaning came to him, he did not rebel, but sullenly
acquiesced, for he had been born to it and knew nothing to the contrary.
If the boys quarrelled with him at play, the first word was “your
mother's a butch.” Then he cried at the reproach, or perhaps fought like
a vengeance at the insult, but he never dreamt of disbelieving the fact
or of loving his mother any the less.
Bridget was accused of the evil eye. Cattle sickened in the fields, and
when there was no proof that she had looked over the gate, the idea was
suggested that she crossed them as a hare. One day a neighbour's dog
started a hare in a meadow where some cows were grazing. This was
observed by a gang of boys playing at hockey in the road. Instantly
there was a shout and a whoop, and the boys with their sticks were in
full chase after the yelping dog, crying, “The butch! The butch! It's
Bridget Tom! Corlett's dogs are hunting Bridget Black Tom! Kill her,
Laddie! Kill her, Sailor! Jump, dog, jump!”
One of the boys playing at hockey was Pete. When his play-fellows ran
after the dogs in their fanatic thirst, he ran too, but with a storm of
other feelings. Outstripping all of them, very close at the heels of
the dogs, kicking some, striking others with the hockey-stick, while the
tears poured down his cheeks, he cried at the top of his voice to the
hare leaping in front, “Run, mammy, run! clink (dodge), mammy, clink!
Aw, mammy, mammy, run faster, run for your life, run!”
The hare dodged aside, shot into a thicket, and escaped its pursuers
just as Corlett, the farmer, who had heard the outcry, came racing up
with a gun. Then Pete swept his coat-sleeve across his gleaming eyes and
leapt off home. When he got there, he found his mother sitting on the
bink by the door knitting quietly. He threw himself into her arms and
stroked her cheek with his hand.
“Oh, mammy, bogh,” he cried, “how well you run! If you never run in your
life you run then.”
“Is the boy mad?” said Bridget.
But Pete went on stroking her cheek and crying between sobs of joy, “I
heard Corlett shouting to the house for a gun and a fourpenny bit, and
I thought I was never going to see mammy no more. But you did clink,
mammy! You did, though!”
The next time Katherine Cregeen saw Peter Quilliam, he was sitting on
the ridge of rock at the mouth of Ballure Glen, playing doleful strains
on a home-made whistle, and looking the picture of desolation and
despair. His mother was lying near to death. He had left Mrs. Cregeen,
Kath-erine's mother, a good soul getting the name of Grannie, to watch
and tend her while he came out to comfort his simple heart in this lone
spot between the land and the sea.
Katherine's eyes filled at sight of him, and when, without looking up or
speaking, he went on to play his crazy tunes, something took the girl by
the throat and she broke down utterly.
“Never mind, Pete. No--I don't mean that--but don't cry, Pete.”
Pete was not crying at all, but only playing away on his whistle and
gazing out to sea with a look of dumb vacancy. Katherine knelt beside
him, put her arms around his neck, and cried for both of them.
Somebody hailed him from the hedge by the water-trough, and he rose,
took off his cap, smoothed his hair with his hand, and walked towards
the house without a word.
Bridget was dying of pleurisy, brought on by a long day's work at hoeing
turnips in a soaking rain. Dr. Mylechreest had poulticed her lungs with
mustard and linseed, but all to no purpose. “It's feeling the same
as the sun on your back at harvest,” she murmured, yet the poultices
brought no heat to her frozen chest.
Cæsar Cregeen was at her side; John the Clerk, too, called John the
Widow; Kelly, the rural postman, who went by the name of Kelly the
Thief; as well as Black Tom, her father. Cæsar was discoursing of
sinners and their latter end. John was remembering how at his election
to the clerkship he had rashly promised to bury the poor for nothing;
Kelly was thinking he would be the first to carry the news to Christian
Balla-whaine; and Black Tom was varying the exercise of pounding
rock-sugar for his bees with that of breaking his playful wit on the
dying woman.
“No use; I'm laving you; I'm going on my long journey,” said Bridget,
while Granny used a shovel as a fan to relieve her gusty breathing.
“Got anything in your pocket for the road, woman?” said the thatcher.
“It's not houses of bricks and mortal I'm for calling at now,” she
answered.
“Dear heart! Put up a bit of a prayer,” whispered Grannie to her
husband; and Cæsar took a pinch of snuff out of his waistcoat pocket,
and fell to “wrastling with the Lord.”
Bridget seemed to be comforted. “I see the jasper gates,” she panted,
fixing her hazy eyes on the scraas under the thatch, from which broken
spiders' webs hung down like rats' tails.
Then she called for Pete. She had something to give him. It was the
stocking foot with the eighty greasy Manx banknotes which his father,
Peter Christian, had paid her fifteen years before. Pete lit the candle
and steadied it while Grannie cut the stocking from the wall side of the
bed-ticking.
Black Tom dropped the sugar-pounder and exposed his broken teeth in his
surprise at so much wealth; John the Widow blinked; and Kelly the Thief
poked his head forward until the peak of his postman's cap fell on to
the bridge of his nose.
A sea-fog lay over the land that morning, and when it lifted Bridget's
soul went up as well.
“Poor thing! Poor thing!” said Grannie. “The ways were cold for
her--cold, cold!”
“A dacent lass,” said John the Clerk; “and oughtn't to be buried with
the common trash, seeing she's left money.”
“A hard-working woman, too, and on her feet for ever; but 'lowanced in
her intellecks, for all,” said Kelly.
And Cæsar cried, “A brand plucked from the burning! Lord, give me more
of the like at the judgment.”
When all was over, and tears both hot and cold were wiped away--Pete
shed none of them--the neighbours who had stood with the lad in the
churchyard on Maughold Head returned to the cottage by the water-trough
to decide what was to be done with his eighty good bank-notes. “It's
a fortune,” said one. “Let him put it with Mr. Dumbell,” said another.
“Get the boy a trade first--he's a big lump now, sixteen for spring,”
said a third. “A draper, eh?” said a fourth. “May I presume? My nephew,
Bobbie Clucas, of Ramsey, now?” “A dacent man, very,” said John the
Widow; “but if I'm not ambitious, there's my son-in-law, John Cowley.
The lad's cut to a dot for a grocer, and what more nicer than having
your own shop and your own name over the door, if you plaze--' Peter
Quilliam, tay and sugar merchant!'--they're telling me John will be
riding in his carriage and pair soon.”
“Chut! your grannie and your carriage and pairs,” shouted a rasping
voice at last. It was Black Tom. “Who says the fortune is belonging to
the lad at all? It's mine, and if there's law in the land I'll have it.”
Meanwhile, Pete, with the dull thud in his ears of earth falling on a
coffin, had made his way down to Ballawhaine. He had never been there
before, and he felt confused, but he did not tremble. Half-way up the
carriage-drive he passed a sandy-haired youth of his own age, a slim
dandy who hummed a tune and looked at him carelessly over his shoulder.
Pete knew him--he was Boss, the boys called him Dross, son and heir of
Christian Ballawhaine.
At the big house Pete asked for the master. The English footman, in
scarlet knee-breeches, left him to wait in the stone hall. The place was
very quiet and rather cold, but all as clean as a gull's wing. There was
a dark table in the middle and a high-backed chair against the wall. Two
oil pictures faced each other from opposite sides. One was of an old man
without a beard, but with a high forehead, framed around with short grey
hair. The other was of a woman with a tired look and a baby on her lap.
Under this there was a little black picture that seemed to Pete to be
the likeness of a fancy tombstone. And the print on it, so far as Pete
could spell it out, was that of a tombstone too, “In loving memory of
Verbena, beloved wife of Peter Chr--”
The Ballawhaine came crunching the sand on the hall-floor. He looked
old, and had now a pent-house of bristly eyebrows of a different colour
from his hair. Pete had often seen him on the road riding by.
“Well, my lad, what can I do for _you?_” he said. He spoke in a jerky
voice, as if he thought to overawe the boy.
Pete fumbled his stocking cap. “Mothers dead,” he answered vacantly.
The Ballawhaine knew that already. Kelly the Thief had run hot-foot to
inform him. He thought Pete had come to claim maintenance now that his
mother was gone.
“So she's been telling you the same old story?” he said briskly. •
At that Pete's face stiffened all at once. “She's been telling me that
you're my father, sir.”
The Ballawhaine tried to laugh. “Indeed!” he replied; “it's a wise
child, now, that knows its own father.”
“I'm not rightly knowing what you mane, sir,” said Pete.
Then the Ballawhaine fell to slandering the poor woman in her grave,
declaring that she could not know who was the father of her child, and
protesting that no son of hers should ever see the colour of money of
his. Saying this with a snarl, he brought down his right hand with a
thump on to the table. There was a big hairy mole near the joint of the
first finger.
“Aisy, sir, if you plaze,” said Pete; “she was telling me you gave her
this.”
He turned up the corner of his jersey, tugged out of his pocket, from
behind his flaps, the eighty Manx bank-notes, and held them in his right
hand on the table. There was a mole at the joint of Pete's first finger
also.
The Ballawhaine saw it. He drew back his hand and slid it behind him.
Then in another voice he said, “Well, my lad, isn't it enough? What are
you wanting with more?”
“I'm not wanting more,” said Pete; “I'm not wanting this. Take it back,”
and he put down the roll of notes between them.
The Ballawhaine sank into the chair, took a handkerchief out of his
tails with the hand that had been lurking there, and began to mop his
forehead. “Eh? How? What d'ye mean, boy?” he stammered.
“I mane,” said Pete, “that if I kept that money there is people would
say my mother was a bad woman, and you bought her and paid her--I'm
hearing the like at some of them.”
He took a step nearer. “And I mane, too, that you did wrong by my mother
long ago, and now that she's dead you're blackening her; and you're a
bad heart, and a low tongue, and if I was only a man, and didn't _know_
you were my father, I'd break every bone in your skin.”
Then Pete twisted about and shouted into the dark part of the hall,
“Come along, there, my ould cockatoo! It's time to be putting me to the
door.”
The English footman in the scarlet breeches had been peeping from under
the stairs.
That was Pete's first and last interview with his father. Peter
Christian Ballawhaine was a terror in the Keys by this time, but he had
trembled before his son like a whipped cur.
V.
Katherine Cregeen, Pete's champion at school, had been his companion at
home as well. She was two years younger than Pete. Her hair was a black
as a gipsy's, and her face as brown as a berry. In summer she liked
best to wear a red frock without sleeves, no boots and no stockings, no
collar and no bonnet, not even a sun-bonnet. From constant exposure
to the sun and rain her arms and legs were as ruddy as her cheeks, and
covered with a soft silken down. So often did you see her teeth that you
would have said she was always laughing. Her laugh was a little saucy
trill given out with head aside and eyes aslant, like that of a squirrel
when he is at a safe height above your head, and has a nut in his open
jaws.
Pete had seen her first at school, and there he had tried to draw the
eyes of the maiden upon himself by methods known only to heroes, to
savages, and to boys. He had prowled around her in the playground with
the wild vigour of a young colt, tossing his head, swinging his arms,
screwing his body, kicking up his legs, walking on his hands, lunging
out at every lad that was twice as big as himself, and then bringing
himself down at length with a whoop and a crash on his hindmost parts
just in front of where she stood. For these tremendous efforts to show
what a fellow he could be if he tried, he had won no applause from the
boys, and Katherine herself had given no sign, though Pete had watched
her out of the corners of his eyes. But in other scenes the children
came together.
After Philip had gone to King William's, Pete and Katherine had become
bosom friends. Instead of going home after school to cool his heels in
the road until his mother came from the fields, he found it neighbourly
to go up to Ballajora and round by the network of paths to Cornaa. That
was a long detour, but Cæsar's mill stood there. It nestled down in the
low bed of the river that runs through the glen called Ballaglass.
Song-birds built about it in the spring of the year, and Cæsar's little
human songster sang there always.
When Pete went that way home, what times the girl had of it! Wading up
the river, clambering over the stones, playing female Blondin on the
fallen tree-trunks that spanned the chasm, slipping, falling, holding on
any way up (legs or arms) by the rotten branches below, then calling for
Pete's help in a voice between a laugh and a cry, flinging chips into
the foaming back-wash of the mill-wheel, and chasing them down stream,
racing among the gorse, and then lying full length like a lamb, without
a thought of shame, while Pete took the thorns out of her bleeding feet.
She was a wild duck in the glen where she lived, and Pete was a great
lumbering tame duck waddling behind her.
But the glorious, happy, make-believe days too soon came to an end. The
swinging cane of the great John Thomas Corlett, and the rod of a yet
more relentless tyrant, darkened the sunshine of both the children. Pete
was banished from school, and Catherine's father removed from Cornaa.
When Cæsar had taken a wife, he had married Betsy, the daughter of the
owner of the inn at Sulby. After that he had “got religion,” and he held
that persons in the household of faith were not to drink, or to buy or
to sell drink. But Grannie's father died and left his house, “The Manx
Fairy,” and his farm, Glenmooar, to her and her husband. About the same
time the miller at Sulby also died, and the best mill in the island
cried out for a tenant. Cæsar took the mill and the farm, and Grannie
took the inn, being brought up to such profanities and no way bound by
principle. From that time forward, Cæsar pinned all envious cavillers
with the text which says, “Not that which goeth into the mouth of a man
defileth him, but that which cometh out.”
Nevertheless, Cæsar's principles grew more and more puritanical year by
year. There were no half measures with Cæsar. Either a man was a saved
soul, or he was in the very belly of hell, though the pit might not have
shut its mouth on him. If a man was saved he knew it, and if he felt
the manifestations of the Spirit he could live without sin. His cardinal
principles were three--instantaneous regeneration, assurance,
and sinless perfection. He always said--he had said it a thousand
times--that he was converted in Douglas marketplace, a piece off the
west door of ould St. Matthew's, at five-and-twenty minutes past six on
a Sabbath evening in July, when he was two-and-twenty for harvest.
While at Cornaa, Cæsar had been a “local” on the preachers' plan, a
class leader, and a chapel steward; but at Sulby he outgrew the Union
and set up a “body” of his own. He called them “The Christians.” a title
that was at once a name, a challenge, and a protest. They worshipped
in the long barn over Cæsar's mill, and held strong views on conduct. A
saved soul must not wear gold or costly apparel, or give way to softness
or bodily indulgence, or go to fairs for sake of sport, or appear in
the show-tents of play-actors, or sing songs, or read books, or take
any diversion that did not tend to the knowledge of God. As for carnal
transgression, if any were guilty of it, they were to be cut off from
the body of believers, for the souls of the righteous must be delivered.
“The religion that's going among the Primitives these days is just
Popery,” said Cæsar. “Let's go back to the warm ould Methodism and put
out the Romans.”
When Pete turned his face from Ballawhaine, he thought first of Cæsar
and his mill. It would be more exact to say he thought of Katherine
and Grannie. He was homeless as well as penniless. The cottage by the
water-trough was no longer possible to him, now that the mother was gone
who had stood between his threatened shoulders and Black Tom. Philip
was at home for a few weeks only in the year, and Ballure had lost its
attraction. So Pete made his way to Sulby, offered himself to Cæsar for
service at the mill, and was taken on straightway at eighteenpence a
week and his board.
It was a curious household he entered into. First there was Cæsar
himself, in a moleskin waistcoat with sleeves open three buttons up,
knee-breeches usually unlaced, stockings of undyed wool, and slippers
with the tongues hanging out--a grim soul, with whiskers like a hoop
about his face, and a shaven upper lip as heavy as a moustache, for,
when religion like Cæsar's lays hold of a man, it takes him first by
the mouth. Then Grannie, a comfortable body in a cap, with an outlook on
life that was all motherhood, a simple, tender, peaceable soul, agreeing
with everybody and everything, and seeming to say nothing but “Poor
thing! Poor thing!” and “Dear heart! Dear heart!” Then there was
Nancy Cain, getting the name of Nancy Joe, the servant in name but
the mistress in fact, a niece of Grannie's, a bit of a Pagan, an early
riser, a tireless worker, with a plain face, a rooted disbelief in all
men, a good heart, an ugly tongue, and a vixenish temper. Last of all,
there was Katherine, now grown to be a great girl, with her gipsy hair
done up in a red ribbon and wearing a black pinafore bordered with white
braid.
Pete got on steadily at the mill. He began by lighting the kiln fire and
cleaning out the pit-wheel, and then on to the opening the flood-gates
in the morning and regulating the action of the water-wheel according to
the work of the day. In two years' time he was a sound miller, safe to
trust with rough stuff for cattle or fine flour for white loaf-bread.
Cæsar trusted him. He would take evangelising journeys to Peel or
Douglas and leave Pete in charge.
That led to the end of the beginning. Pete could grind the farmers'
corn, but he could not make their reckonings. He kept his counts in
chalk on the back of the mill-house door, a down line for every stone
weight up to eight stones, and a line across for every hundredweight.
Then, once a day, while the father was abroad, Katherine came over from
the inn to the desk at the little window of the mill, and turned Pete's
lines into ledger accounts. These financial councils were full of
delicious discomfiture. Pete always enjoyed them--after they were over.
“John Robert--Molleycarane--did you say Molleycarane, Pete? Oh,
Mylecharane--Myle-c-h-a-r-a-i-n-e, Molleycarane; ten stones--did you
say ten? Oh, eight--e-i-g-h-t--no, eight; oatmeal, Pete? Oh,
barley-male--meal, I mean--m-e-a-l.”
In the middle of the night Pete remembered all these entries. They were
very precious to his memory after Katherine had spoken them. They sang
in his heart the same as song-birds then. They were like hymns and tunes
and pieces of poetry.
Cæsar returned home from a preaching tour with a great and sudden
thought. He had been calling on strangers to flee from the wrath to
come, and yet there were those of his own house whose faces were not
turned Zionwards. That evening he held an all-night prayer-meeting for
the conversion of Katherine and Pete. Through six long hours he called
on God in lusty tones, until his throat cracked and his forehead
streamed. The young were thoughtless, they had the root of evil in them,
they flew into frivolity from contrariness. Draw the harrow over their
souls, plough the fallows of their hearts, grind the chaff out of their
household, let not the sweet apple and the crabs grow on the same bough
together, give them a Melliah, let not a sheaf be forgotten, grant them
the soul of this girl for a harvest-home, and of this boy for a last
stook.
Cæsar was dissatisfied with the results. He was used to groaning and
trembling and fainting fits.
“Don't you feel the love?” he cried. “I do--here, under the watch-pocket
of my waistcoat.”
Towards midnight Katherine began to fail. “Chain the devil,”, cried
Cæsar. “Once I was down in the pit with the devil myself, but now I'm
up in the loft, seeing angels through the thatch. Can't you feel the
workings of the Spirit?”
As the clock was warning to strike two Katherine thought she could,
and from that day forward she led the singing of the women in the choir
among “The Christians.”
Pete remained among the unregenerate; but nevertheless “The Christians”
saw him constantly. He sat on the back form and kept his eyes fixed on
the “singing seat.” Observing his regularity, Cæsar laid a hand on his
head and told him the Spirit was working in his soul at last. Sometimes
Pete thought it was, and that was when he shut his eyes and listened to
Katherine's voice floating up, up, up, like an angel's, into the sky.
But sometimes he knew it was not; and that was when he caught himself
in the middle of Cæsar's mightiest prayers crooking his neck past the
pitching bald pate of Johnny Niplightly, the constable, that he might
get a glimpse of the top of Katherine's bonnet when her eyes were down.
Pete fell into a melancholy, and once more took to music as a comforter.
It was not a home-made whistle now, but a fiddle bought out of his
wages. On this he played in the cowhouse on winter evenings, and from
the top of the midden outside in summer. When Cæsar heard of it his
wrath was fearful. What was a fiddler? He was a servant of corruption,
holding a candle to disorderly walkers and happy sinners on their way
into the devil's pinfold. And what for was fiddles? Fiddles was for
play-actors and theaytres. “And theaytres is _there_,” said Cæsar,
indicating with his foot one flag on the kitchen-floor, “and hell flames
is _there_,” he added, rolling his toe over to the joint of the next
one.
Grannie began to plead. What was a fiddle if you played the right tunes
on it? Didn't they read in the ould Book of King David himself playing
on harps and timbrels and such things? And what was harps but fiddles in
a way of spak-ing? Then warn't they all looking to be playing harps in
heaven? 'Deed, yes, though the Lord would have to be teaching her how to
play hers!
Cæsar was shaken. “Well, of course, certainly,” he said, “if there's a
power in fiddling to bring souls out of bondage, and if there's going to
be fiddling and the like in Abraham's bosom--why, then, of course--well,
why not?--let's have the lad's fiddle up at 'The Christians.'”
Nothing could have suited Pete so well. From that time forward he went
out no more at nights to the cowhouse, but stayed indoors to practise
hymns with Katherine. Oh, the terrible rapture of those nightly
“practices!” They brought people to the inn to hear them, and so Cæsar
found them good for profit both ways.
There was something in Cæsar's definition, nevertheless. It was found
that among the saints there were certain weaker brethren who did not
want a hymn to their ale. One of these was Johnny Niplightly, the rural
constable, who was the complement of Katherine in the choir, being
leader of the singing among the men. He was a tall man with a long nose,
which seemed to have a perpetual cold. Making his rounds one night, he
turned in at “The Manx Fairy,” when Cæsar and Grannie were both
from home, and Nancy Joe was in charge, and Pete and Katherine were
practising a revival chorus.
“Where's Cæsar, dough?” he snuffled.
“At Peel, buying the stock,” snapped Nancy.
“Dank de Lord! I mean--where's Grannie?”
“Nursing Mistress Quiggin.”
Niplightly eased the strap of his beaver, liberated his lips, took a
deep draught of ale, and then turned to Pete, with apologetic smiles,
and suggested a change in the music.
At that Katherine leapt up as light as laughter. “A dance,” she cried,
“a dance!”
“Good sakes alive?” said Nancy Joe. “Listen to the girl? Is it the moon,
Kitty, or what is it that's doing on you?”
“Shut your eyes, Nancy,” said Katherine, “just for once, now won't you?”
“You can do what you like with me, with your coaxing and woaxing,” said
Nancy. “Enjoy yourself to the full, girl, but don't make a noise above
the singing of the kettle.”
Pete tuned his strings, and Katherine pinned up the tail of her skirt,
and threw herself into position.
At the sound of the livelier preludings there came thronging out of the
road into the parlour certain fellows of the baser sort, and behind them
came one who was not of that denomination--a fair young man with a fine
face under an Alpine hat. Heeding nothing of this audience, the girl
gave a little rakish toss of her head and called on Pete to strike up.
Then Pete plunged into one of the profaner tunes which he had practised
in the days of the cowhouse, and off went Katherine with a whoop. The
boys stood back for her, bending down on their haunches as at a fight of
gamecocks, and encouraging her with shouts of applause.
“Beautiful! Look at that now! Fine, though, fine! Clane done, aw, clane!
Done to a dot! There's leaping for you, boys! Guy heng, did you ever see
the like? Hommer the floor, girl--higher a piece! higher, then! Whoop,
did ye ever see such a nate pair of ankles?”