CHAPTER IX

IN WHICH THE LIBERAL EDITOR APPEARS AS "DEUS EX MACHINA"

It was perhaps a week later, as old Mr. Naseby sat brooding in his

study, that there was shown in upon him, on urgent business, a little

hectic gentleman shabbily attired.

"I have to ask pardon for this intrusion, Mr. Naseby," he said; "but I

come here to perform a duty. My card has been sent in, but perhaps you

may not know, what it does not tell you, that I am the editor of the

_Thymebury Star_."

Mr. Naseby looked up, indignant.

"I cannot fancy," he said, "that we have much in common to discuss."

"I have only a word to say--one piece of information to communicate.

Some months ago, we had--you will pardon my referring to it, it is

absolutely necessary--but we had an unfortunate difference as to facts."

"Have you come to apologise?" asked the Squire sternly.

"No, sir; to mention a circumstance. On the morning in question, your

son, Mr. Richard Naseby----"

"I do not permit his name to be mentioned."

"You will, however, permit me," replied the Editor.

"You are cruel," said the Squire. He was right, he was a broken man.

Then the Editor described Dick's warning visit; and how he had seen in

the lad's eye that there was a thrashing in the wind, and had escaped

through pity only--so the Editor put it--"through pity only, sir. And

oh, sir," he went on, "if you had seen him speaking up for you, I am

sure you would have been proud of your son. I know I admired the lad

myself, and indeed that's what brings me here."

"I have misjudged him," said the Squire. "Do you know where he is?"

"Yes, sir, he lies sick at Thymebury."

"You can take me to him?"

"I can."

"I pray God he may forgive me," said the father.

And he and the Editor made post-haste for the country town.

Next day the report went abroad that Mr. Richard was reconciled to his

father and had been taken home to Naseby House. He was still ailing, it

was said, and the Squire nursed him like the proverbial woman. Rumour,

in this instance, did no more than justice to the truth; and over the

sick-bed many confidences were exchanged, and clouds that had been

growing for years passed away in a few hours, and, as fond mankind loves

to hope, for ever. Many long talks had been fruitless in external

action, though fruitful for the understanding of the pair; but at last,

one showery Tuesday, the Squire might have been observed upon his way to

the cottage in the lane.

The old gentleman had arranged his features with a view to self-command,

rather than external cheerfulness; and he entered the cottage on his

visit of conciliation with the bearing of a clergyman come to announce a

death.

The Admiral and his daughter were both within, and both looked upon

their visitor with more surprise than favour.

"Sir," said he to Van Tromp, "I am told I have done you much injustice."

There came a little sound in Esther's throat, and she put her hand

suddenly to her heart.

"You have, sir; and the acknowledgment suffices," replied the Admiral.

"I am prepared, sir, to be easy with you, since I hear you have made it

up with my friend Dick. But let me remind you that you owe some

apologies to this young lady also."

"I shall have the temerity to ask for more than her forgiveness," said

the Squire. "Miss Van Tromp," he continued, "once I was in great

distress, and knew nothing of you or your character; but I believe you

will pardon a few rough words to an old man who asks forgiveness from

his heart. I have heard much of you since then; for you have a fervent

advocate in my house. I believe you will understand that I speak of my

son. He is, I regret to say, very far from well; he does not pick up as

the doctors had expected; he has a great deal upon his mind, and, to

tell you the truth, my girl, if you won't help us, I am afraid I shall

lose him. Come now, forgive him! I was angry with him once myself, and I

found I was in the wrong. This is only a misunderstanding, like the

other, believe me; and, with one kind movement, you may give happiness

to him, and to me, and to yourself."

Esther made a movement towards the door, but long before she reached it

she had broken forth sobbing.

"It is all right," said the Admiral; "I understand the sex. Let me make

you my compliments, Mr. Naseby."

The Squire was too much relieved to be angry.

"My dear," said he to Esther, "you must not agitate yourself."

"She had better go up and see him right away," suggested Van Tromp.

"I had not ventured to propose it," replied the Squire. "_Les

convenances_, I believe----"

"_Je m'en fiche_," cried the Admiral, snapping his fingers. "She shall

go and see my friend Dick. Run and get ready, Esther."

Esther obeyed.

"She has not--has not run away again?" inquired Mr. Naseby, as soon as

she was gone.

"No," said Van Tromp, "not again. She is a devilish odd girl, though,

mind you that."

"But I cannot stomach the man with the carbuncles," thought the Squire.

And this is why there is a new household and a brand-new baby in Naseby

Dower House; and why the great Van Tromp lives in pleasant style upon

the shores of England; and why twenty-six individual copies of the

_Thymebury Star_ are received daily at the door of Naseby House.

THE MERRY MEN

_My dear Lady Taylor_,

_To your name, if I wrote on brass, I could add nothing; it has been

already written higher than I could dream to reach, by a strong and a

dear hand; and if I now dedicate to you these tales,[1] it is not as

the writer who brings you his work, but as the friend who would

remind you of his affection._

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_Skerryvore, Bournemouth._

THE MERRY MEN

CHAPTER I

EILEAN AROS

It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for

the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at

Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving

all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea,

struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from

an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a

poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in

the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and

when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm,

had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means

of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had

pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a

fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at

destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought

neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the

lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my

father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to

die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I

was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own

charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to

Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held

blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence,

and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend

my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and

comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that

now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so

light a heart that July day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as

rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it,

full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen--all overlooked

from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peak of Ben

Kyaw. _The Mountain of the Mist_, they say the words signify in the

Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more

than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come

blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it

must make them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea

level, there would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water,

too, and was mossy[2] to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting

in broad sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape

upon the mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more

beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hillsides there

were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far

as Aros, fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It twisted so as nearly to

double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a

man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the

moss came nearly to the knee. There was no cultivation anywhere, and

not one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course

there were--three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the

other that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large

part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger

than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather

in between them where the vipers breed. Any way the wind was, it was

always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl

over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would

kindle with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of the land,

on a day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring like

a battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the

breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself--Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it

means _the House of God_--Aros itself was not properly a piece of the

Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south-west corner of the

land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the

coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.

When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land

river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the

water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in

the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you

could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good

pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was

better because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level

of the Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a

good one for that country, two stories high. It looked westward over a

bay, with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch

the vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great

granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the

sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world

like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them

instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their

sides instead of heather; and the great sea-conger to wreathe about the

base of them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days

you can go wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following

you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man

that hears that caldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much

greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,

for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as

a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,

some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly

blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers

breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But

it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here

running like a mill-race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_

we call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a

dead calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the

sea swirling and combing up and boiling like the caldrons of a linn, and

now and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the _Roost_

were talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above

all in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a

mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a

place. You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end

there comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big

breakers dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have

got the name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said

that they run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only,

for the spray runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name

from their movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting

they make about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it,

is more than I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our

archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the reefs,

and weathered the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south

coast of Aros, in Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our

family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these dangers, in the

place I knew so long, makes me particularly welcome the works now going

forward to set lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of

our iron-bound, inhospitable islands.

The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from

my uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had

transferred his services without afterthought on the occasion of the

marriage. There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that

dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of his own among the

boiling breakers of the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag

beach, and there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that

in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till

the day he died, said only one form of words; what they were in the

original Gaelic I cannot tell, but they were thus translated: "Ah, the

sweet singing out of the sea." Seals that haunted on that coast have

been known to speak to man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters.

It was here that a certain saint first landed on his voyage out of

Ireland to convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some

claim to be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to make

so rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not

far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his monkish

underlings who had a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and

beautiful name, the House of God.

Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to

hear with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered

the ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of

Scotland, one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of

some solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all

hands, her colours flying even as she sank. There was some likelihood in

this tale; for another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty

miles from Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with more detail and

gravity than its companion stories, and there was one particularity

which went far to convince me of its truth: the name, that is, of the

ship was still remembered, and sounded, in my ears, Spanishly. The

_Espirito Santo_ they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns,

laden with treasure and grandees of Spain, and fierce soldadoes, that

now lay fathom deep to all eternity, done with her wars and voyages, in

Sandag Bay, upon the west of Aros. No more salvos of ordnance for that

tall ship, the "Holy Spirit," no more fair winds or happy ventures; only

to rot there deep in the sea-tangle and hear the shoutings of the Merry

Men as the tide ran high about the island. It was a strange thought to

me first and last, and only grew stranger as I learned the more of

Spain, from which she had set sail with so proud a company, and King

Philip, the wealthy king, that sent her on that voyage.

And now I must tell you, as I walked from Grisapol that day, the

_Espirito Santo_ was very much in my reflections. I had been favourably

remarked by our then Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous writer,

Dr. Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some papers of an

ancient date to rearrange and sift of what was worthless; and in one of

these, to my great wonder, I found a note of this very ship, the

_Espirito Santo_, with her captain's name, and how she carried a great

part of the Spaniards' treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross of

Grisapol; but in what particular spot the wild tribes of that place and

period would give no information to the king's inquiries. Putting one

thing with another, and taking our island tradition together with this

note of old King Jamie's perquisitions after wealth, it had come

strongly on my mind that the spot for which he sought in vain could be

no other than the small bay of Sandag on my uncle's land; and being a

fellow of a mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to weigh

that good ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, and doubloons, and

bring back our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten dignity and

wealth.

This was a design of which I soon had reason to repent. My mind was

sharply turned on different reflections; and since I became the witness

of a strange judgment of God's, the thought of dead men's treasures has

been intolerable to my conscience. But even at that time I must acquit

myself of sordid greed; for if I desired riches, it was not for their

own sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart--my

uncle's daughter, Mary Ellen. She had been educated well, and had been a

time to school upon the mainland; which, poor girl, she would have been

happier without. For Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the

servant, and her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in Scotland,

plainly bred up in a country place among Cameronians, long a skipper

sailing out of the Clyde about the islands, and now, with infinite

discontent, managing his sheep and a little 'long shore fishing for the

necessary bread. If it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but a

month or two, you may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same

desert all the year round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the

Merry Men singing and dancing in the Roost!

CHAPTER II

WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS

It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing

for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the

boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was

at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old

long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For

all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I

observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over

curiously into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and

haggard, and I thought he avoided my eye. The coble had been repaired,

with two new thwarts and several patches of some rare and beautiful

foreign wood, the name of it unknown to me.

"Why, Rorie," said I, as we began the return voyage, "this is fine wood.

How came you by that?"

"It will be hard to cheesel," Rorie opined reluctantly; and just then,

dropping the oars, he made another of those dives into the stern which I

had remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my

shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.

"What is wrong?" I asked, a good deal startled.

"It will be a great feesh," said the old man, returning to his oars; and

nothing more could I get out of him but strange glances and an ominous

nodding of the head. In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure

of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The water was still

and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay, exceeding deep.

For some time I could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if

something dark--a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow--followed

studiously in the track of the moving coble. And then I remembered one

of Rorie's superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in some great,

exterminating feud among the clans, a fish, the like of it unknown in

all our waters, followed for some years the passage of the ferryboat,

until no man dared to make the crossing.

"He will be waiting for the right man," said Rorie.

Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of

Aros. Outside and inside there were many changes. The garden was fenced

with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in

the kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from

the window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was

swinging from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of

linen and silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain

old kitchen that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the

stools, and the closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun

shone into, and the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the

mantelshelf and the three-cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells

instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare

wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole

adornment--poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven

with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of

rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that

country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by

these incongruous additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of

anger. In view of the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was

baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the first moment, in my

heart.

"Mary, girl," said I, "this is the place I had learned to call my home,

and I do not know it."

"It is my home by nature, not by the learning," she replied; "the place

I was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these

changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I would

have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into the

sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on them now."

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared

with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was

even graver than of custom.

"Ay," said I, "I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when

my father died I took his goods without remorse."

"Your father died a clean-strae death, as the folk say," said Mary.

"True," I returned; "and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she

called?"

"They ca'd her the _Christ-Anna_," said a voice behind me; and, turning

round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;

fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat

between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He never

laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like the

Cameronians he had been brought up among; and, indeed, in many ways,

used to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times

before the Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I

used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits when

he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would

look back with envy, and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.

As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his

head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to

have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his

face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or

the bones of the dead.

"Ay," he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, "the

_Christ-Anna_. It's an awfu' name."

I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of health;

for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

"I'm in the body," he replied, ungraciously enough; "aye in the body and

the sins of the body, like yoursel'. Denner," he said abruptly to Mary,

and then ran on, to me: "They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten,

are they no'? Yon's a bonny knock,[3] but it'll no gang; and the

napery's by ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; it's for the like o' them folk

sells the peace of God that passeth understanding; it's for the like o'

them, an' maybe no' even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to His face

and burn in muckle hell; and it's for that reason the Scripture ca's

them, as I read the passage, the accursed thing.--Mary, ye girzie," he

interrupted himself to cry with some asperity, "what for hae ye no' put

out the twa candlesticks?"

"Why should we need them at high noon?" she asked.

But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. "We'll bruik[4] them

while we may," he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought

silver were added to the table equipage, already so unsuited to that

rough seaside farm.

"She cam' ashore Februar' 10, about ten at nicht," he went on to me.

"There was nae wind, and a sair run o' sea; and she was in the sook o'

the Roost, as I jaloose. We had seen her a' day, Rorie and me, beating

to the wind. She wasna a handy craft, I'm thinking, that _Christ-Anna_;

for she would neither steer nor stey wi' them. A sair day they had of

it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it perishin' cauld--ower

cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o' wind, and awa' again,

to pit the emp'y hope into them. Eh, man! but they had a sair day for

the last o't! He would have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore

upon the back o' that."

"And were all lost?" I cried. "God help them!"

"Wheesht!" he said sternly. "Nane shall pray for the deid on my

hearth-stane."

I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and he seemed to accept

my disclaimer with unusual facility, and ran on once more upon what had

evidently become a favourite subject.

"We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an' me, and a' thae braws in the

inside of her. There's a kittle bit, ye see, about Sandag; whiles the

sook rins strong for the Merry Men; an' whiles again, when the tide's

makin' hard an' ye can hear the Roost blawin' at the far-end of Aros,

there comes a back-spang of current straucht into Sandag Bay. Weel,

there's the thing that got the grip on the _Christ-Anna_. She buet to

have come in ram-stam an' stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften

under, and the back-side of her is clear at hie-water o' neaps. But,

man! the dunt that she cam doon wi' when she struck! Lord save us a'l

but it's an unco life to be a sailor--a cauld, wanchancy life. Mony's

the gliff I got mysel' in the great deep; and why the Lord should hae

made yon unco water is mair than ever I could win to understand. He made

the vales and the pastures, the bonny green yaird, the halesome, canty

land--

And now they shout and sing to Thee,

For Thou hast made them glad,

as the Psalms say in the metrical version. No' that I would preen my

faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. 'Who

go to sea in ships,' they hae't again--

and in

Great waters trading be,

Within the deep these men God's works

And His great wonders see.

Weel, it's easy sayin' sae. Maybe Dauvit wasna very weel acquaint wi'

the sea. But, troth, if it wasna prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be

temp'it to think it wasna the Lord, but the muckle black deil that made

the sea. There's naething good comes oot o't but the fish; an' the

spentacle o' God riding on the tempest, to be shuere, whilk would be what

Dauvit was likely ettling at. But, man, they were sair wonders that God

showed to the _Christ-Anna_--wonders, do I ca' them? Judgments, rather:

judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons o' the deep. And their

souls--to think o' that--their souls, man, maybe no' prepared! The

sea--a muckle yett to hell!"

I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice was unnaturally moved and

his manner unwontedly demonstrative. He leaned forward at these last

words, for example, and touched me on the knee with his spread fingers,

looking up into my face with a certain pallor, and I could see that his

eyes shone with a deep-seated fire, and that the lines about his mouth

were drawn and tremulous.

Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning of our meal, did not

detach him from his train of thought beyond a moment. He condescended,

indeed, to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I

thought it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace,

which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his

preoccupation, praying, as he did, that God would "remember in mercy

fower puir, feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane

beside the great and dowie waters."

Soon there came an interchange of speeches between him and Rorie.

"Was it there?" asked my uncle.

"Ou, ay!" said Rorie.

I observed that they both spoke in a manner of aside, and with some show

of embarrassment, and that Mary herself appeared to colour, and looked

down on her plate. Partly to show my knowledge, and so relieve the party

from an awkward strain, partly because I was curious, I pursued the

subject.

"You mean the fish?" I asked.

"Whatten fish?" cried my uncle. "Fish, quo' he! Fish! Your een are fu'

o' fatness, man; your heid dozened wi' carnal leir. Fish! it's a bogle!"

He spoke with great vehemence, as though angry; and perhaps I was not

very willing to be put down so shortly, for young men are disputatious.

At least I remember I retorted hotly, crying out upon childish

superstitions.

"And ye come frae the College!" sneered Uncle Gordon. "Gude kens what

they learn folk there; it's no' muckle service onyway. Do ye think, man,

that there's naething in a' yon saut wilderness o' a world oot wast

there, wi' the sea-grasses growin', an' the sea-beasts fechtin', an' the

sun glintin' down into it, day by day? Na; the sea's like the land, but

fearsomer. If there's folk ashore, there's folk in the sea--deid they

may be, but they're folk whatever; and as for deils, there's nane that's

like the sea-deils. There's no sae muckle harm in the land-deils, when

a's said and done. Lang syne, when I was a callant in the south country,

I mind there was an auld, bald bogle in the Peewic Moss. I got a glisk

o' him mysel', sittin' on his hunkers in a hag, as grey's a tombstane.

An', troth, he was a fearsome-like taed. But he steered naebody. Nae

doobt, if ane that was a reprobate, ane the Lord hated, had gane by

there wi' his sin still upon his stamach, nae doobt the creature would

hae lowped upo' the likes o' him. But there's deils in the deep sea

would yoke on a communicant! Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon wi' the puir

lads in the _Christ-Anna_, ye would ken by now the mercy o' the seas. If

ye had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would hate the thocht of it as I

do. If ye had but used the een God gave ye, ye would hae learned the

wickedness o' that fause, saut, cauld, bullering creature, and of a'

that's in it by the Lord's permission: labsters an' partans, an'

sic-like, howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing whales; an'

fish--the hale clan o' them--cauld-wamed, blind-ee'd uncanny ferlies.

Oh, sirs," he cried, "the horror--the horror o' the sea!"

We were all somewhat staggered by this outburst; and the speaker

himself, after that last hoarse apostrophe, appeared to sink gloomily

into his own thoughts. But Rorie, who was greedy of superstitious lore,

recalled him to the subject by a question.

"You will not ever have seen a teevil of the sea?" he asked.

"No' clearly," replied the other. "I misdoobt if a mere man could see

ane clearly and conteenue in the body. I hae sailed wi' a lad--they ca'd

him Sandy Gabart; he saw ane, shuere eneuch, an' shuere eneuch it was the

end of him. We were seeven days oot frae the Clyde--a sair wark we had

had--gaun north wi' seeds an' braws an' things for the Macleod. We had

got in ower near under the Cutchull'ns, an' had just gane about by Soa,

an' were off on a long tack, we thocht would maybe hauld as far's

Copnahow. I mind the nicht weel; a mune smoored wi' mist; a fine-gaun

breeze upon the water, but no steedy; an'--what nane o' us likit to

hear--anither wund gurlin' owerheid, amang thae fearsome, auld stane

craigs o' the Cutchull'ns. Weel, Sandy was forrit wi' the jib sheet; we

couldna see him for the mains'l, that had just begude to draw, when a'

at ance he gied a skirl. I luffed for my life, for I thocht we were over

near Soa; but na, it wasna that, it was puir Sandy Gabart's deid

skreigh, or near-hand, for he was deid in half an hour. A't he could

tell was that a sea-deil, or sea-bogle, or sea-spenster, or sic-like,

had clum up by the bowsprit, an' gi'en him ae cauld, uncanny look. An',

or the life was oot o' Sandy's body, we kent weel what the thing

betokened, and why the wund gurled in the taps o' the Cutchull'ns; for

doon it cam'--a wund do I ca' it! It was the wund o' the Lord's

anger--an' a' that nicht we focht like men dementit, and the neist that

we kenned we were ashore in Loch Uskevagh, an' the cocks were crawin' in

Benbecula."

"It will have been a merman," Rorie said.

"A merman!" screamed my uncle with immeasurable scorn. "Auld wives'

clavers! There's nae sic things as mermen."

"But what was the creature like?" I asked.

"What like was it? Gude forbid that we suld ken what like it was! It had

a kind of a heid upon it--man could say nae mair."

Then Rorie, smarting under the affront, told several tales of mermen,

mermaids, and sea-horses that had come ashore upon the islands and

attacked the crews of boats upon the sea; and my uncle, in spite of his

incredulity, listened with uneasy interest.

"Aweel, aweel," he said, "it may be sae; I may be wrang; but I find nae

word o' mermen in the Scriptures."

"And you will find nae word of Aros Roost, maybe," objected Rorie, and

his argument appeared to carry weight.

When dinner was over, my uncle carried me forth with him to a bank

behind the house. It was a very hot and quiet afternoon; scarce a ripple

anywhere upon the sea, nor any voice but the familiar voice of sheep and

gulls; and perhaps in consequence of this repose in nature, my kinsman

showed himself more rational and tranquil than before. He spoke evenly

and almost cheerfully of my career, with every now and then a reference

to the lost ship or the treasures it had brought to Aros. For my part, I

listened to him in a sort of trance, gazing with all my heart on that

remembered scene, and drinking gladly the sea-air and the smoke of

peats that had been lit by Mary.

Perhaps an hour had passed when my uncle, who had all the while been

covertly gazing on the surface of the little bay, rose to his feet and

bade me follow his example. Now I should say that the great run of tide

at the south-west end of Aros exercises a perturbing influence round all

the coast. In Sandag Bay, to the south, a strong current runs at certain

points of the flood and ebb respectively; but in this northern bay--Aros

Bay, as it is called--where the house stands and on which my uncle was

now gazing, the only sign of disturbance is towards the end of the ebb,

and even then it is too slight to be remarkable. When there is any

swell, nothing can be seen at all; but when it is calm, as it often is,

there appear certain strange, undecipherable marks--sea-runes, as we may

name them--on the glassy surface of the bay. The like is common in a

thousand places on the coast; and many a boy must have amused himself as

I did, seeking to read in them some reference to himself or those he

loved. It was to these marks that my uncle now directed my attention,

struggling, as he did so, with an evident reluctance.

"Do you see yon scart upo' the water?" he inquired; "yon ane wast the

grey stane? Ay? Weel, it'll no' be like a letter, wull it?"

"Certainly it is," I replied. "I have often remarked it. It is like a

C."

He heaved a sigh as if heavily disappointed with my answer, and then

added below his breath: "Ay, for the _Christ-Anna_."

"I used to suppose, sir, it was for myself," said I; "for my name is

Charles."

"And so ye saw't afore?" he ran on, not heeding my remark. "Weel, weel,

but that's unco strange. Maybe, it's been there waitin', as a man wad

say, through a' the weary ages. Man, but that's awfu'." And then,

breaking off: "Ye'll no' see anither, will ye?" he asked.

"Yes," said I. "I see another very plainly, near the Ross side, where

the road comes down--an M."

"An M," he repeated very low; and then, again after another pause: "An'

what wad ye make o' that?" he inquired.

"I had always thought it to mean Mary, sir," I answered, growing

somewhat red, convinced as I was in my own mind that I was on the

threshold of a decisive explanation.

But we were each following his own train of thought to the exclusion of

the other's. My uncle once more paid no attention to my words; only hung

his head and held his peace; and I might have been led to fancy that he

had not heard me, if his next speech had not contained a kind of echo

from my own.

"I would say naething o' thae clavers to Mary," he observed, and began

to walk forward.

There is a belt of turf along the side of Aros Bay where walking is

easy; and it was along this that I silently followed my silent kinsman.

I was perhaps a little disappointed at having lost so good an

opportunity to declare my love; but I was at the same time far more

deeply exercised at the change that had befallen my uncle. He was never

an ordinary, never, in the strict sense, an amiable, man; but there was

nothing in even the worst that I had known of him before, to prepare me

for so strange a transformation. It was impossible to close the eyes

against one fact; that he had, as the saying goes, something on his

mind; and as I mentally ran over the different words which might be

represented by the letter M--misery, mercy, marriage, money, and the

like--I was arrested with a sort of start by the word murder. I was

still considering the ugly sound and fatal meaning of the word, when the

direction of our walk brought us to a point from which a view was to be

had to either side, back towards Aros Bay and homestead, and forward on

the ocean, dotted to the north with isles, and lying to the southward

blue and open to the sky. There my guide came to a halt, and stood

staring for awhile on that expanse. Then he turned to me and laid a hand

on my arm.

"Ye think there's naething there?" he said, pointing with his pipe; and

then cried out aloud, with a kind of exultation: "I'll tell ye, man! The

deid are down there--thick like rattons!"

He turned at once, and, without another word, we retraced our steps to

the house of Aros.

I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was not till after supper, and

then but for a short while, that I could have a word with her. I lost no

time beating about the bush, but spoke out plainly what was on my mind.

"Mary," I said, "I have not come to Aros without a hope. If that should

prove well founded, we may all leave and go somewhere else, secure of

daily bread and comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that,

which it would seem extravagant in me to promise. But there's a hope

that lies nearer to my heart than money." And at that I paused. "You can

guess fine what that is, Mary," I said. She looked away from me in

silence, and that was small encouragement, but I was not to be put off.

"All my days I have thought the world of you," I continued; "the time

goes on and I think always the more of you; I could not think to be

happy or hearty in my life without you: you are the apple of my eye."

Still she looked away, and said never a word; but I thought I saw that

her hands shook. "Mary," I cried in fear, "do ye no' like me?"

"Oh, Charlie man," she said, "is this a time to speak of it? Let me be a

while; let me be the way I am; it'll not be you that loses by the

waiting!"

I made out by her voice that she was nearly weeping, and this put me out

of any thought but to compose her. "Mary Ellen," I said, "say no more; I

did not come to trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your time too;

and you have told me all I wanted. Only just this one thing more: what

ails you?"

She owned it was her father, but would enter into no particulars, only

shook her head, and said he was not well and not like himself, and it

was a great pity. She knew nothing of the wreck. "I havena been near

it," said she. "What for would I go near it, Charlie lad? The poor souls

are gone to their account long syne; and I would just have wished they

had ta'en their gear with them--poor souls!"

This was scarcely any great encouragement for me to tell her of the

_Espirito Santo_; yet I did so, and at the very first word she cried out

in surprise. "There was a man at Grisapol," she said, "in the month of

May--a little, yellow, black-avised body, they tell me, with gold rings

upon his fingers, and a beard; and he was speiring high and low for that

same ship."

It was towards the end of April that I had been given these papers to

sort out by Dr. Robertson: and it came suddenly back upon my mind that

they were thus prepared for a Spanish historian, or a man calling

himself such, who had come with high recommendations to the Principal,

on a mission of inquiry as to the dispersion of the great Armada.

Putting one thing with another, I fancied that the visitor "with the

gold rings upon his fingers" might be the same with Dr. Robertson's

historian from Madrid. If that were so, he would be more likely after

treasure for himself than information for a learned society. I made up

my mind, I should lose no time over my undertaking; and if the ship lay

sunk in Sandag Bay, as perhaps both he and I supposed, it should not be

for the advantage of this ringed adventurer, but for Mary and myself,

and for the good, old, honest, kindly family of the Darnaways.

CHAPTER III

LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY

I was early afoot next morning; and as soon as I had a bite to eat, set

forth upon a tour of exploration. Something in my heart distinctly told

me that I should find the ship of the Armada; and although I did not

give way entirely to such hopeful thoughts, I was still very light in

spirits and walked upon air. Aros is a very rough islet, its surface

strewn with great rocks and shaggy with fern and heather; and my way lay

almost north and south across the highest knoll; and though the whole

distance was inside of two miles, it took more time and exertion than

four upon a level road. Upon the summit, I paused. Although not very

high--not three hundred feet, as I think--it yet outtops all the

neighbouring lowlands of the Ross, and commands a great view of sea and

islands. The sun, which had been up some time, was already hot upon my

neck; the air was listless and thundery, although purely clear; away

over the north-west, where the isles lie thickliest congregated, some

half a dozen small and ragged clouds hung together in a covey; and the

head of Ben Kyaw wore, not merely a few streamers, but a solid hood of

vapour. There was a threat in the weather. The sea, it is true, was

smooth like glass: even the Roost was but a seam on that wide mirror,

and the Merry Men no more than caps of foam; but to my eye and ear, so

long familiar with these places, the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a

sound of it, like a long sigh, mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet

as it was, the Roost itself appeared to be revolving mischief. For I

ought to say that all we dwellers in these parts attributed, if not

prescience, at least a quality of warning, to that strange and dangerous

creature of the tides.

I hurried on, then, with the greater speed, and had soon descended the

slope of Aros to the part that we call Sandag Bay. It is a pretty large

piece of water compared with the size of the isle; well sheltered from

all but the prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low

sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several fathoms deep

along a ledge of rocks. It is upon that side that, at a certain time

each flood, the current mentioned by my uncle sets so strong into the

bay; a little later, when the Roost begins to work higher, an undertow

runs still more strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action

of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep. Nothing

is to be seen out of Sandag Bay but one small segment of the horizon

and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep-sea reef.

From half-way down the hill I had perceived the wreck of February last,

a brig of considerable tonnage, lying, with her back broken, high and

dry on the east corner of the sands; and I was making directly towards

it, and already almost on the margin of the turf, when my eyes were

suddenly arrested by a spot, cleared of fern and heather, and marked by

one of those long, low, and almost human-looking mounds that we see so

commonly in graveyards. I stopped like a man shot. Nothing had been said

to me of any dead man or interment on the island; Rorie, Mary, and my

uncle had all equally held their peace; of her at least, I was certain

that she must be ignorant; and yet here, before my eyes, was proof

indubitable of the fact. Here was a grave; and I had to ask myself, with

a chill, what manner of man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the

signal of the Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place? My mind

supplied no answer but what I feared to entertain. Shipwrecked, at

least, he must have been; perhaps, like the old Armada mariners, from

some far and rich land over-sea; or perhaps one of my own race,

perishing within eyesight of the smoke of home. I stood awhile uncovered

by his side, and I could have desired that it had lain in our religion

to put up some prayer for that unhappy stranger, or, in the old classic

way, outwardly to honour his misfortune. I knew, although his bones lay

there, a part of Aros, till the trumpet sounded, his imperishable soul

was forth and far away, among the raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or

the pangs of hell; and yet my mind misgave me even with a fear, that

perhaps he was near me where I stood, guarding his sepulchre, and

lingering on the scene of his unhappy fate.

Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat overshadowed that I turned away

from the grave to the hardly less melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her

stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a

little abaft the foremast--though indeed she had none, both masts having

broken short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was very

sharp and sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the

fracture gaped widely open, and you could see right through her poor

hull upon the farther side. Her name was much defaced, and I could not

make out clearly whether she was called _Christiania_, after the

Norwegian city, or _Christiana_, after the good woman, Christian's wife,

in that old book the "Pilgrim's Progress." By her build she was a

foreign ship, but I was not certain of her nationality. She had been

painted green, but the colour was faded and weathered, and the paint

peeling off in strips. The wreck of the mainmast lay alongside,

half-buried in sand. She was a forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not

look without emotion at the bits of rope that still hung about her, so

often handled of yore by shouting seamen; or the little scuttle where

they had passed up and down to their affairs; or that poor noseless

angel of a figure-head that had dipped into so many running billows.

I do not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but

I fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one

hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men, and even of

inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon

my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an

unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of

something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary I took

heart again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent marriage, nor

would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full approval. It behoved

me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I thought with a laugh how

long it was since that great sea-castle, the _Espirito Santo_, had left

her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it would be to consider rights so

long extinguished and misfortunes so long forgotten in the process of

time.

I had my theory of where to seek for her remains. The set of the current

and the soundings both pointed to the east side of the bay under the

ledge of rocks. If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after these

centuries, any portion of her held together, it was there that I should

find it. The water deepens, as I have said, with great rapidity, and

even close alongside the rocks several fathoms may be found. As I walked

upon the edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of the bay;

the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps; the bay seemed

rather like a great transparent crystal, as one sees them in a

lapidary's shop; there was naught to show that it was water but an

internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows,

and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge. The

shadows of the rocks lay out for some distance at their feet, so that my

own shadow, moving, pausing, and stooping on the top of that, reached

sometimes half across the bay. It was above all in this belt of shadows

that I hunted for the _Espirito Santo_; since it was there the undertow

ran strongest, whether in or out. Cool as the whole water seemed this

broiling day, it looked, in that part, yet cooler, and had a mysterious

invitation for the eyes. Peer as I pleased, however, I could see nothing

but a few fishes or a bush of sea-tangle, and here and there a lump of

rock that had fallen from above and now lay separate on the sandy floor.

Twice did I pass from one end to the other of the rocks, and in the

whole distance I could see nothing of the wreck, nor any place but one

where it was possible for it to be. This was a large terrace in five

fathoms of water, raised off the surface of the sand to a considerable

height, and looking from above like a mere outgrowth of the rocks on

which I walked. It was one mass of great sea-tangles like a grove, which

prevented me judging of its nature, but in shape and size it bore some

likeness to a vessel's hull. At least it was my best chance. If the

_Espirito Santo_ lay not there under the tangles, it lay nowhere at all

in Sandag Bay; and I prepared to put the question to the proof, once and

for all, and either go back to Aros a rich man or cured for ever of my

dreams of wealth.

I stripped to the skin, and stood on the extreme margin with my hands

clasped, irresolute. The bay at that time was utterly quiet; there was

no sound but from a school of porpoises somewhere out of sight behind

the point; yet a certain fear withheld me on the threshold of my

venture. Sad sea-feelings, scraps of my uncle's superstitions, thoughts

of the dead, of the grave, of the old broken ships, drifted through my

mind. But the strong sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I

stooped forward and plunged into the sea.

It was all that I could do to catch a trail of the sea-tangle that grew

so thickly on the terrace; but once so far anchored I secured myself by

grasping a whole armful of these thick and slimy stalks, and, planting

my feet against the edge, I looked around me. On all sides the clear

sand stretched forth unbroken; it came to the foot of the rocks,

scoured into the likeness of an alley in a garden by the action of the

tides; and before me, for as far as I could see, nothing was visible but

the same many-folded sand upon the sun-bright bottom of the bay. Yet the

terrace to which I was then holding was as thick with strong sea-growths

as a tuft of heather, and the cliff from which it bulged hung draped

below the water-line with brown lianas. In this complexity of forms, all

swaying together in the current, things were hard to be distinguished;

and I was still uncertain whether my feet were pressed upon the natural

rock or upon the timbers of the Armada treasure-ship, when the whole

tuft of tangle came away in my hand, and in an instant I was on the

surface, and the shores of the bay and the bright water swam before my

eyes in a glory of crimson.

I clambered back upon the rocks, and threw the plant of tangle at my

feet. Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin. I

stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an

iron shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the

heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy. I

held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like

the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor's

hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot

that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the swerving

decks--the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair

and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary place, not

like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely injured. Was the

great treasure-ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain and

treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the

seaweed, her cabin a breeding-place for fish, soundless but for the

dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle upon her

battlements--that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag

Bay? Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of

the foreign brig--was this shoe-buckle bought but the other day and worn

by a man of my own period in the world's history, hearing the same news

from day to day, thinking the same thoughts, praying, perhaps, in the

same temple with myself? However it was, I was assailed with dreary

thoughts; my uncle's words, "the dead are down there," echoed in my

ears; and though I determined to dive once more, it was with a strong

repugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of the rocks.

A great change passed at that moment over the appearance of the bay. It

was no more that clear, visible interior, like a house roofed with

glass, where the green submarine sunshine slept so stilly. A breeze, I

suppose, had flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and blackness

filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds of shadow tossed

confusedly together. Even the terrace below obscurely rocked and

quivered. It seemed a graver thing to venture on this place of ambushes;

and when I leaped into the sea a second time it was with a quaking in my

soul.

I secured myself as at first, and groped among the waving tangle. All

that met my touch was cold and soft and gluey. The thicket was alive

with crabs and lobsters, trundling to and fro lopsidedly, and I had to

harden my heart against the horror of their carrion neighbourhood. On

all sides I could feel the grain and the clefts of hard, living stone;

no planks, no iron, not a sign of any wreck; the _Espirito Santo_ was

not there. I remember I had almost a sense of relief in my

disappointment, and I was about ready to leave go, when something

happened that sent me to the surface with my heart in my mouth. I had

already stayed somewhat late over my explorations; the current was

freshening with the change of the tide, and Sandag Bay was no longer a

safe place for a single swimmer. Well, just at the last moment there

came a sudden flush of current, dredging through the tangles like a

wave. I lost one hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and,

instinctively grasping for a fresh support, my fingers closed on

something hard and cold. I think I knew at that moment what it was. At

least I instantly left hold of the tangle, leaped for the surface, and

clambered out next moment on the friendly rocks with the bone of a man's

leg in my grasp.

Mankind is a material creature, slow to think and dull to perceive

connections. The grave, the wreck of the brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle

were surely plain advertisements. A child might have read their dismal

story, and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of mankind

that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon my spirit. I laid

the bone beside the buckle, picked up my clothes, and ran as I was along

the rocks towards the human shore. I could not be far enough from the

spot; no fortune was vast enough to tempt me back again. The bones of

the drowned dead should henceforth roll undisturbed by me, whether on

tangle or minted gold. But as soon as I trod the good earth again, and

had covered my nakedness against the sun, I knelt down over against the

ruins of the brig, and out of the fulness of my heart prayed long and

passionately for all poor souls upon the sea. A generous prayer is never

presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is

always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation. The horror, at

least, was lifted from my mind; I could look with calm of spirit on that

great bright creature, God's ocean; and as I set off homeward up the

rough sides of Aros, nothing remained of my concern beyond a deep

determination to meddle no more with the spoils of wrecked vessels or

the treasures of the dead.

I was already some way up the hill before I paused to breathe and look

behind me. The sight that met my eyes was doubly strange.

For, first, the storm that I had foreseen was now advancing with almost

tropical rapidity. The whole surface of the sea had been dulled from its

conspicuous brightness to an ugly hue of corrugated lead; already in

the distance the white waves, the "skipper's daughters," had begun to

flee before a breeze that was still insensible on Aros; and already

along the curve of Sandag Bay there was a splashing run of sea that I

could hear from where I stood. The change upon the sky was even more

remarkable. There had begun to arise out of the south-west a huge and

solid continent of scowling cloud; here and there, through rents in its

contexture, the sun still poured a sheaf of spreading rays; and here and

there, from all its edges, vast inky streamers lay forth along the yet

unclouded sky. The menace was express and imminent. Even as I gazed, the

sun was blotted out. At any moment the tempest might fall upon Aros in

its might.

The suddenness of this change of weather so fixed my eyes on heaven that

it was some seconds before they alighted on the bay, mapped out below my

feet, and robbed a moment later of the sun. The knoll which I had just

surmounted overflanked a little amphitheatre of lower hillocks sloping

towards the sea, and beyond that the yellow arc of beach and the whole

extent of Sandag Bay. It was a scene on which I had often looked down,

but where I had never before beheld a human figure. I had but just

turned my back upon it and left it empty, and my wonder may be fancied

when I saw a boat and several men in that deserted spot. The boat was

lying by the rocks. A pair of fellows, bareheaded, with their sleeves

rolled up, and one with a boat-hook, kept her with difficulty to her

moorings, for the current was growing brisker every moment. A little way

off upon the ledge two men in black clothes, whom I judged to be

superior in rank, laid their heads together over some task which at

first I did not understand, but a second after I had made it out--they

were taking bearings with the compass; and just then I saw one of them

unroll a sheet of paper and lay his finger down, as though identifying

features in a map. Meanwhile a third was walking to and fro, poking

among the rocks and peering over the edge into the water. While I was

still watching them with the stupefaction of surprise, my mind hardly

yet able to work on what my eyes reported, this third person suddenly

stooped and summoned his companions with a cry so loud that it reached

my ears upon the hill. The others ran to him, even dropping the compass

in their hurry, and I could see the bone and the shoe-buckle going from

hand to hand, causing the most unusual gesticulations of surprise and

interest. Just then I could hear the seamen crying from the boat, and

saw them point westward to that cloud continent which was ever the more

rapidly unfurling its blackness over heaven. The others seemed to

consult; but the danger was too pressing to be braved, and they bundled

into the boat, carrying my relics with them, and set forth out of the

bay with all speed of oars.

I made no more ado about the matter, but turned and ran for the house.

Whoever these men were, it was fit my uncle should be instantly

informed. It was not then altogether too late in the day for a descent

of the Jacobites; and maybe Prince Charlie, whom I knew my uncle to

detest, was one of the three superiors whom I had seen upon the rock.

Yet as I ran, leaping from rock to rock, and turned the matter loosely

in my mind, this theory grew ever the longer the less welcome to my

reason. The compass, the map, the interest awakened by the buckle, and

the conduct of that one among the strangers who had looked so often

below him in the water, all seemed to point to a different explanation

of their presence on that outlying, obscure islet of the western sea.

The Madrid historian, the search instituted by Dr. Robertson, the

bearded stranger with the rings, my own fruitless search that very

morning in the deep water of Sandag Bay, ran together, piece by piece,

in my memory, and I made sure that these strangers must be Spaniards in

quest of ancient treasure and the lost ship of the Armada. But the

people living in outlying islands, such as Aros, are answerable for

their own security; there is none near by to protect or even to help

them; and the presence in such a spot of a crew of foreign

adventurers--poor, greedy, and most likely lawless--filled me with

apprehensions for my uncle's money, and even for the safety of his

daughter. I was still wondering how we were to get rid of them when I

came, all breathless, to the top of Aros. The whole world was shadowed

over; only in the extreme east, on a hill of the mainland, one last

gleam of sunshine lingered like a jewel; rain had begun to fall, not

heavily, but in great drops; the sea was rising with each moment, and

already a band of white encircled Aros and the nearer coasts of

Grisapol. The boat was still pulling seaward, but I now became aware of

what had been hidden from me lower down--a large, heavily sparred,

handsome schooner lying-to at the south end of Aros. Since I had not

seen her in the morning when I had looked around so closely at the signs

of the weather, and upon these lone waters where a sail was rarely

visible, it was clear she must have lain last night behind the

uninhabited Eilean Gour, and this proved conclusively that she was

manned by strangers to our coast, for that anchorage, though good enough

to look at, is little better than a trap for ships. With such ignorant

sailors upon so wild a coast, the coming gale was not unlikely to bring

death upon its wings.

CHAPTER IV

THE GALE

I found my uncle at the gable-end, watching the signs of the weather,

with a pipe in his fingers.

"Uncle," said I, "there were men ashore at Sandag Bay----"

I had no time to go further; indeed, I not only forgot my words, but

even my weariness, so strange was the effect on Uncle Gordon. He dropped

his pipe and fell back against the end of the house with his jaw fallen,

his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. We must have

looked at one another silently for a quarter of a minute, before he made

answer in this extraordinary fashion: "Had he a hair kep on?"

I knew as well as if I had been there that the man who now lay buried at

Sandag had worn a hairy cap, and that he had come shore alive. For the

first and only time I lost toleration for the man who was my benefactor

and the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.

"These were living men," said I, "perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the French,

perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the Spanish

treasure-ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your

daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man, the dead

sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this morning by his grave;

he will not wake before the trump of doom."

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his

eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but

it was plain that he was past the power of speech.

"Come," said I. "You must think for others. You must come up the hill

with me and see this ship."

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient

strides. The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he

scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was

wont, from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to

make better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like

one in bodily pain: "Ay, ay, man, I'm coming." Long before we had

reached the top I had no other thought for him but pity. If the crime

had been monstrous, the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around

us. All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had

vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to

the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was the

interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there

last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and

already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first, in

vain for the schooner.

"There she is," I said at last. But her new position, and the course she

was now lying, puzzled me. "They cannot mean to beat to sea," I cried.

"That's what they mean," said my uncle, with something like joy; and

just then the schooner went about and stood upon another tack, which put

the question beyond the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a gale

on hand, had thought first of sea-room. With the wind that threatened,

in these reef-sown waters and contending against so violent a stream of

tide, their course was certain death.

"Good God!" said I, "they are all lost."

"Ay," returned my uncle, "a'--a' lost. They hadna a chance but to rin

for Kyle Dona. The gate they're gaun the noo, they couldna win through

an the muckle deil were there to pilot them. Eh, man," he continued,

touching me on the sleeve, "it's a braw nicht for a shipwreck! Twa in ae

twalmonth! Eh, but the Merry Men'll dance bonny!"

I looked at him, and it was then that I began to fancy him no longer in

his right mind. He was peering up to me, as if for sympathy, a timid joy

in his eyes. All that had passed between us was already forgotten in the

prospect of this fresh disaster.

"If it were not too late," I cried with indignation, "I would take the

coble and go out to warn them."

"Na, na," he protested, "ye maunna interfere; ye maunna meddle wi' the

like o' that. It's His"--doffing his bonnet--"His wull. And, eh, man!

but it's a braw nicht for't!"

Something like fear began to creep into my soul; and, reminding him that

I had not yet dined, I proposed we should return to the house. But no;

nothing would tear him from his place of outlook.

"I maun see the hail thing, man Charlie," he explained; and then as the

schooner went about a second time, "Eh, but they han'le her bonny!" he

cried. "The _Christ-Anna_ was naething to this."

Already the men on board the schooner must have begun to realise some

part, but not yet the twentieth, of the dangers that environed their

doomed ship. At every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen

how fast the current swept them back. Each tack was made shorter, as

they saw how little it prevailed. Every moment the rising swell began to

boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker

would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, and the brown

reef and streaming tangle appear in the hollow of the wave. I tell you,

they had to stand to their tackle: there was no idle man aboard that

ship, God knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible to any

human-hearted man that my misguided uncle now pored and gloated like a

connoisseur. As I turned to go down the hill, he was lying on his belly

on the summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching in the

heather. He seemed rejuvenated, mind and body.

When I got back to the house already dismally affected, I was still more

sadly downcast at the sight of Mary. She had her sleeves rolled up over

her strong arms, and was quietly making bread. I got a bannock from the

dresser and sat down to eat it in silence.

"Are ye wearied, lad?" she asked after a while.

"I am not so much wearied, Mary," I replied, getting on my feet, "as I

am weary of delay, and perhaps of Aros too. You know me well enough to

judge me fairly, say what I like. Well, Mary, you may be sure of this:

you had better be anywhere but here."

"I'll be sure of one thing," she returned: "I'll be where my duty is."

"You forget, you have a duty to yourself," I said.

"Ay, man," she replied, pounding at the dough; "will you have found that

in the Bible, now?"

"Mary," I said solemnly, "you must not laugh at me just now. God knows I

am in no heart for laughing. If we could get your father with us, it

would be best; but with him or without him, I want you far away from

here, my girl; for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your

father's too, I want you far--far away from here. I came with other

thoughts; I came here as a man comes home; now it is all changed, and I

have no desire nor hope but to flee--for that's the word--flee, like a

bird out of the fowler's snare, from this accursed island."

She had stopped her work by this time.

"And do you think, now," said she, "do you think, now, I have neither

eyes nor ears? Do ye think I havena broken my heart to have these braws

(as he calls them, God forgive him!) thrown into the sea? Do ye think I

have lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you saw in an

hour or two? No," she said, "I know there's wrong in it; what wrong, I

neither know nor want to know. There was never an ill thing made better

by meddling, that I could hear of. But, my lad, you must never ask me to

leave my father. While the breath is in his body, I'll be with him. And

he's not long for here, either: that I can tell you, Charlie--he's not

long for here. The mark is on his brow; and better so--maybe better so."

I was a while silent, not knowing what to say; and when I roused my head

at last to speak, she got before me.

"Charlie," she said, "what's right for me needna be right for you.

There's sin upon this house and trouble; you are a stranger; take your

things upon your back and go your ways to better places and to better

folk, and if you were ever minded to come back, though it were twenty

years syne, you would find me aye waiting."

"Mary Ellen," I said, "I asked you to be my wife, and you said as good

as yes. That's done for good. Wherever you are, I am; as I shall answer

to my God."

As I said the words the wind suddenly burst out raving, and then seemed

to stand still and shudder round the house of Aros. It was the first

squall, or prologue, of the coming tempest, and as we started and looked

about us, we found that a gloom, like the approach of evening, had

settled round the house.

"God pity all poor folks at sea!" she said. "We'll see no more of my

father till the morrow's morning."

And then she told me, as we sat by the fire and hearkened to the rising

gusts, of how this change had fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he

had been dark and fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, or,

as Mary said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out for

hours together on the Head, if it were night, or on the top of Aros by

day, watching the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for a

sail. After February the 10th, when the wealth-bringing wreck was cast

ashore at Sandag, he had been at first unnaturally gay, and his

excitement had never fallen in degree, but only changed in kind from

dark to darker. He neglected his work, and kept Rorie idle. They two

would speak together by the hour at the gable-end, in guarded tones and

with an air of secrecy, and almost of guilt; and if she questioned

either, as at first she sometimes did, her inquiries were put aside with

confusion. Since Rorie had first remarked the fish that hung about the

ferry, his master had never set foot but once upon the mainland of the

Ross. That once--it was in the height of the springs--he had passed

dry-shod while the tide was out; but, having lingered overlong on the

far side, found himself cut off from Aros by the returning waters. It

was with a shriek of agony that he had leaped across the gut, and he had

reached home thereafter in a fever-fit of fear. A fear of the sea, a

constant haunting thought of the sea, appeared in his talk and

devotions, and even in his looks when he was silent.

Rorie alone came in to supper; but a little later my uncle appeared,

took a bottle under his arm, put some bread in his pocket, and set forth

again to his outlook, followed this time by Rorie. I heard that the

schooner was losing ground, but the crew was still fighting every inch

with hopeless ingenuity and courage; and the news filled my mind with

blackness.

A little after sundown the full fury of the gale broke forth, such a

gale as I have never seen in summer, nor, seeing how swiftly it had

come, even in winter. Mary and I sat in silence, the house quaking

overhead, the tempest howling without, the fire between us sputtering

with raindrops. Our thoughts were far away with the poor fellows on the

schooner, or my not less unhappy uncle, houseless on the promontory; and

yet ever and again we were startled back to ourselves, when the wind

would rise and strike the gable like a solid body, or suddenly fall and

draw away, so that the fire leaped into flame and our hearts bounded in

our sides. Now the storm in its might would seize and shake the four

corners of the roof, roaring like Leviathan in anger. Anon, in a lull,

cold eddies of tempest moved shudderingly in the room, lifting the hair

upon our heads and passing between us as we sat. And again the wind

would break forth in a chorus of melancholy sounds, hooting low in the

chimney, wailing with flutelike softness round the house.

It was perhaps eight o'clock when Rorie came in and pulled me

mysteriously to the door. My uncle, it appeared, had frightened even his

constant comrade; and Rorie, uneasy at his extravagance, prayed me to

come out and share the watch. I hastened to do as I was asked; the more

readily as, what with fear and horror, and the electrical tension of the

night, I was myself restless and disposed for action. I told Mary to be

under no alarm, for I should be a safeguard on her father; and wrapping

myself warmly in a plaid, I followed Rorie into the open air.

The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as

January. Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter

blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes in

the flying horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of a man's

nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail; and

when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts

dismally sweeping in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross the

wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows

the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of

mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces. All round the isle of

Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs

and beaches. Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like the

combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly

varied for a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could hear

the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of the

Merry Men. At that hour, there flashed into my mind the reason of the

name that they were called. For the noise of them seemed almost

mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not

mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. Nay, and it seemed

even human. As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and,

discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my

ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.

Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind, Rorie and I won every yard

of ground with conscious effort. We slipped on the wet sod, we fell

together sprawling on the rocks. Bruised, drenched, beaten, and

breathless, it must have taken us near half an hour to get from the

house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost. There, it seemed, was

my uncle's favourite observatory. Right in the face of it, where the

cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump of earth, like a parapet, makes

a place of shelter from the common winds, where a man may sit in quiet

and see the tide and the mad billows contending at his feet. As he might

look down from the window of a house upon some street disturbance, so,

from this post, he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry Men. On

such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of blackness, where the

waters wheel and boil, where the waves joust together with the noise of

an explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an

eye. Never before had I seen the Merry Men thus violent. The fury,

height, and transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be seen and not

recounted. High over our heads on the cliff rose their white columns in

the darkness; and the same instant, like phantoms, they were gone.

Sometimes three at a time would thus aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust

took them, and the spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave. And yet

the spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than impressive by its

force. Thought was beaten down by the confounding uproar; a gleeful

vacancy possessed the brains of men, a state akin to madness; and I

found myself at times following the dance of the Merry Men as it were a

tune upon a jigging instrument.

I first caught sight of my uncle when we were still some yards away in

one of the flying glimpses of twilight that chequered the pitch darkness

of the night. He was standing up behind the parapet, his head thrown

back and the bottle to his mouth. As he put it down, he saw and

recognised us with a toss of one hand fleeringly above his head.

"Has he been drinking?" shouted I to Rorie.

"He will aye be drunk when the wind blaws," returned Rorie in the same

high key, and it was all that I could do to hear him.

"Then--was he so--in February?" I inquired.

Rorie's "Ay" was a cause of joy to me. The murder, then, had not sprung

in cold blood from calculation; it was an act of madness no more to be

condemned than to be pardoned. My uncle was a dangerous madman, if you

will, but he was not cruel and base as I had feared. Yet what a scene

for a carouse, what an incredible vice, was this that the poor man had

chosen! I have always thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful

pleasure, rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out here in the

roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above that hell of waters, the

man's head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on the edge of

death, his ear watching for the signs of shipwreck, surely that, if it

were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a man like my uncle,

whose mind was set upon a damnatory creed and haunted by the darkest

superstitions. Yet so it was; and, as we reached the bight of shelter

and could breathe again, I saw the man's eyes shining in the night with

an unholy glimmer.

"Eh, Charlie man, it's grand!" he cried. "See to them!" he continued,

dragging me to the edge of the abyss from whence arose that deafening

clamour and those clouds of spray; "see to them dancin', man! Is that no

wicked?"

He pronounced the word with gusto, and I thought it suited with the

scene.

"They're yowlin' for thon schooner," he went on, his thin, insane voice

clearly audible in the shelter of the bank, "an' she's comin' aye

nearer, aye nearer, aye nearer an' nearer an' nearer; an' they ken't,

the folk kens it, they ken weel it's by wi' them. Charlie lad, they're

a' drunk in yon schooner, a' dozened wi' drink. They were a' drunk in

the _Christ-Anna_, at the hinder end. There's nane could droon at sea

wantin' the brandy. Hoot awa, what do you ken?" with a sudden blast of

anger. "I tell ye, it canna be; they daurna droon without it. Hae,"

holding out the bottle, "tak' a sowp."

I was about to refuse, but Rorie touched me as if in warning; and indeed

I had already thought better of the movement. I took the bottle,

therefore, and not only drank freely myself, but contrived to spill even

more as I was doing so. It was pure spirit, and almost strangled me to

swallow. My kinsman did not observe the loss, but, once more throwing

back his head, drained the remainder to the dregs. Then, with a loud

laugh, he cast the bottle forth among the Merry Men, who seemed to leap

up, shouting to receive it.

"Hae, bairns!" he cried, "there's your hansel. Ye'll get bonnier nor

that or morning."

Suddenly, out in the black night before us, and not two hundred yards

away, we heard, at a moment when the wind was silent, the clear note of

a human voice. Instantly the wind swept howling down upon the Head, and

the Roost bellowed, and churned, and danced with a new fury. But we had

heard the sound, and we knew, with agony, that this was the doomed ship

now close on ruin, and that what we had heard was the voice of her

master issuing his last command. Crouching together on the edge, we

waited, straining every sense, for the inevitable end. It was long,

however, and to us it seemed like ages, ere the schooner suddenly

appeared for one brief instant, relieved against a tower of glimmering

foam. I still see her reefed mainsail flapping loose, as the boom fell

heavily across the deck; I still see the black outline of the hull, and

still think I can distinguish the figure of a man stretched upon the

tiller. Yet the whole sight we had of her passed swifter than lightning;

the very wave that disclosed her fell burying her for ever; the mingled

cry of many voices at the point of death rose and was quenched in the

roaring of the Merry Men. And with that the tragedy was at an end. The

strong ship, with all her gear, and the lamp perhaps still burning in

the cabin, the lives of so many men, precious surely to others, dear, at

least, as heaven to themselves, had all, in that one moment, gone down

into the surging waters. They were gone like a dream. And the wind still

ran and shouted, and the senseless waters in the Roost still leaped and

tumbled as before.

How long we lay there together, we three, speechless and motionless, is

more than I can tell, but it must have been for long. At length, one by

one, and almost mechanically, we crawled back into the shelter of the

bank. As I lay against the parapet, wholly wretched and not entirely

master of my mind, I could hear my kinsman maundering to himself in an

altered and melancholy mood. Now he would repeat to himself with maudlin

iteration, "Sic a fecht as they had--sic a sair fecht as they had, puir

lads, puir lads!" and anon he would bewail that "a' the gear was as

gude's tint," because the ship had gone down among the Merry Men instead

of stranding on the shore; and throughout, the name--the

_Christ-Anna_--would come and go in his divagations, pronounced with

shuddering awe. The storm all this time was rapidly abating. In half an

hour the wind had fallen to a breeze, and the change was accompanied or

caused by a heavy, cold, and plumping rain. I must then have fallen

asleep, and when I came to myself, drenched, stiff, and unrefreshed, day

had already broken, grey, wet, discomfortable day; the wind blew in

faint and shifting capfuls, the tide was out, the Roost was at its

lowest, and only the strong beating surf round all the coasts of Aros

remained to witness of the furies of the night.

CHAPTER V

A MAN OUT OF THE SEA

Rorie set out for the house in search of warmth and breakfast; but my

uncle was bent upon examining the shores of Aros, and I felt it a part

of duty to accompany him throughout. He was now docile and quiet, but

tremulous and weak in mind and body; and it was with the eagerness of a

child that he pursued his exploration. He climbed far down upon the

rocks; on the beaches he pursued the retreating breakers. The merest

broken plank or rag of cordage was a treasure in his eyes to be secured

at the peril of his life. To see him, with weak and stumbling footsteps,

expose himself to the pursuit of the surf, or the snares and pitfalls of

the weedy rock, kept me in a perpetual terror. My arm was ready to

support him, my hand clutched him by the skirt, I helped him to draw his

pitiful discoveries beyond the reach of the returning wave; a nurse

accompanying a child of seven would have had no different experience.

Yet, weakened as he was by the reaction from his madness of the night

before, the passions that smouldered in his nature were those of a

strong man. His terror of the sea, although conquered for the moment,

was still undiminished; had the sea been a lake of living flames, he

could not have shrunk more panically from its touch; and once, when his

foot slipped and he plunged to the mid-leg into a pool of water, the

shriek that came up out of his soul was like the cry of death. He sat

still for a while, panting like a dog, after that; but his desire for

the spoils of shipwreck triumphed once more over his fears; once more

he tottered among the curded foam; once more he crawled upon the rocks

among the bursting bubbles; once more his whole heart seemed to be set

on driftwood, fit, if it was fit for anything, to throw upon the fire.

Pleased as he was with what he found, he still incessantly grumbled at

his ill-fortune.

"Aros," he said, "is no' a place for wrecks ava'--no' ava'. A' the years

I've dwalt here, this ane maks the second; and the best o' the gear

clean tint!"

"Uncle," said I, for we were now on a stretch of open sand, where there

was nothing to divert his mind, "I saw you last night, as I never

thought to see you--you were drunk."

"Na, na," he said, "no' as bad as that. I had been drinking, though. And

to tell ye the God's truth, it's a thing I canna mend. There's nae

soberer man than me in my ordnar; but when I hear the wind blaw in my

lug, it's my belief that I gang gyte."

"You are a religious man," I replied, "and this is sin."

"Ou," he returned, "if it wasna sin, I dinna ken that I would care

for't. Ye see, man, it's defiance. There's a sair spang o' the auld sin

o' the world in yon sea; it's an unchristian business at the best o't;

an' whiles when it gets up, an' the wind skreighs--the wind an' her are

a kind of sib, I'm thinkin'--an' thae Merry Men, the daft callants,

blawin' and lauchin', and puir souls in the deid-thraws warstlin' the

leelang nicht wi' their bit ships--weel, it comes ower me like a

glamour. I'm a deil, I ken't. But I think naething o' the puir sailor

lads; I'm wi' the sea, I'm just like ane o' her ain Merry Men."

I thought I should touch him in a joint of his harness. I turned me

towards the sea; the surf was running gaily, wave after wave, with their

manes blowing behind them, riding one after another up the beach,

towering, curving, falling one upon another on the trampled sand.

Without, the salt air, the scared gulls, the widespread army of the

sea-chargers, neighing to each other, as they gathered together to the

assault of Aros; and close before us, that line on the flat sands, that,

with all their number and their fury, they might never pass.

"Thus far shalt thou go," said I, "and no farther." And then I quoted as

solemnly as I was able a verse that I had often before fitted to the

chorus of the breakers:--

But yet the Lord, that is on high,

Is more of might by far

Than noise of many waters is,

Or great sea-billows are.

"Ay," said my kinsman, "at the hinder end, the Lord will triumph; I

dinna misdoobt that. But here on earth, even silly men-folk daur Him to

His face. It is no' wise; I am no sayin' that it's wise; but it's the

pride of the eye, and it's the lust o' life, an' it's the wale o'

pleesures."

I said no more, for we had now begun to cross a neck of land that lay

between us and Sandag; and I withheld my last appeal to the man's better

reason till we should stand upon the spot associated with his crime. Nor

did he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a firmer step.

The call that I had made upon his mind acted like a stimulant, and I

could see that he had forgotten his search for worthless jetsam, in a

profound, gloomy, and yet stirring train of thought. In three or four

minutes we had topped the brae and began to go down upon Sandag. The

wreck had been roughly handled by the sea; the stem had been spun round

and dragged a little lower down; and perhaps the stern had been forced a

little higher, for the two parts now lay entirely separate on the beach.

When we came to the grave I stopped, uncovered my head in the thick

rain, and, looking my kinsman in the face, addressed him.

"A man," said I, "was in God's providence suffered to escape from mortal

dangers; he was poor, he was naked, he was wet, he was weary, he was a

stranger; he had every claim upon the bowels of your compassion; it may

be that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, and kind; it may be

he was a man laden with iniquities to whom death was the beginning of

torment. I ask you in the sight of Heaven: Gordon Darnaway, where is the

man for whom Christ died?"

He started visibly at the last words; but there came no answer, and his

face expressed no feeling but a vague alarm.

"You were my father's brother," I continued; "you have taught me to

count your house as if it were my father's house; and we are both sinful

men walking before the Lord among the sins and dangers of this life. It

is by our evil that God leads us into good; we sin, I dare not say by

His temptation, but I must say with His consent; and to any but the

brutish man his sins are the beginning of wisdom. God has warned you by

this crime; He warns you still by the bloody grave between our feet; and

if there shall follow no repentance, no improvement, no return to Him,

what can we look for but the following of some memorable judgment?"

Even as I spoke the words, the eyes of my uncle wandered from my face. A

change fell upon his looks that cannot be described; his features seemed

to dwindle in size, the colour faded from his cheeks, one hand rose

waveringly and pointed over my shoulder into the distance, and the

oft-repeated name fell once more from his lips: "The _Christ-Anna_!"

I turned; and if I was not appalled to the same degree, as I return

thanks to Heaven that I had not the cause, I was still startled by the

sight that met my eyes. The form of a man stood upright on the

cabin-hutch of the wrecked ship; his back was towards us; he appeared to

be scanning the offing with shaded eyes, and his figure was relieved to

its full height, which was plainly very great, against the sea and sky.

I have said a thousand times that I am not superstitious; but at that

moment, with my mind running upon death and sin, the unexplained

appearance of a stranger on that sea-girt, solitary island filled me

with a surprise that bordered close on terror. It seemed scarce possible

that any human soul should have come ashore alive in such a sea as had

raged last night along the coast of Aros; and the only vessel within

miles had gone down before our eyes among the Merry Men. I was assailed

with doubts that made suspense unbearable, and, to put the matter to the

touch at once, stepped forward and hailed the figure like a ship.

He turned about, and I thought he started to behold us. At this my

courage instantly revived, and I called and signed to him to draw near,

and he, on his part, dropped immediately to the sands, and began slowly

to approach, with many stops and hesitations. At each repeated mark of

the man's uneasiness I grew the more confident myself; and I advanced

another step, encouraging him as I did so with my head and hand. It was

plain the castaway had heard indifferent accounts of our island

hospitality; and indeed, about this time, the people farther north had a

sorry reputation.

"Why," I said, "the man is black!"

And just at that moment, in a voice that I could scarce have recognised,

my kinsman began swearing and praying in a mingled stream. I looked at

him; he had fallen on his knees, his face was agonised; at each step of

the castaway's the pitch of his voice rose, the volubility of his

utterance and the fervour of his language redoubled. I call it prayer,

for it was addressed to God; but surely no such ranting incongruities

were ever before addressed to the Creator by a creature: surely if

prayer can be a sin, this mad harangue was sinful. I ran to my kinsman,

I seized him by the shoulders, I dragged him to his feet.

"Silence, man," said I, "respect your God in words, if not in action.

Here, on the very scene of your transgressions, He sends you an occasion

of atonement. Forward and embrace it: welcome like a father yon

creature who comes trembling to your mercy."

With that, I tried to force him towards the black; but he felled me to

the ground, burst from my grasp, leaving the shoulder of his jacket, and

fled up the hillside towards the top of Aros like a deer. I staggered to

my feet again, bruised and somewhat stunned; the negro had paused in

surprise, perhaps in terror, some half-way between me and the wreck; my

uncle was already far away, bounding from rock to rock; and I thus found

myself torn for a time between two duties. But I judged, and I pray

Heaven that I judged rightly, in favour of the poor wretch upon the

sands; his misfortune was at least not plainly of his own creation; it

was one, besides, that I could certainly relieve; and I had begun by

that time to regard my uncle as an incurable and dismal lunatic. I

advanced accordingly towards the black, who now awaited my approach with

folded arms, like one prepared for either destiny. As I came nearer, he

reached forth his hand with a great gesture, such as I had seen from the

pulpit, and spoke to me in something of a pulpit voice, but not a word

was comprehensible. I tried him first in English, then in Gaelic, both

in vain; so that it was clear we must rely upon the tongue of looks and

gestures. Thereupon I signed to him to follow me, which he did readily

and with a grave obeisance like a fallen king; all the while there had

come no shade of alteration in his face, neither of anxiety while he was

still waiting, nor of relief now that he was reassured; if he were a

slave, as I supposed, I could not but judge he must have fallen from

some high place in his own country, and, fallen as he was, I could not

but admire his bearing. As we passed the grave, I paused and raised my

hands and eyes to heaven in token of respect and sorrow for the dead;

and he, as if in answer, bowed low and spread his hands abroad; it was a

strange motion, but done like a thing of common custom; and I supposed

it was ceremonial in the land from which he came. At the same time he

pointed to my uncle, whom we could just see perched upon a knoll, and

touched his head to indicate that he was mad.

We took the long way round the shore, for I feared to excite my uncle if

we struck across the island; and as we walked, I had time enough to

mature the little dramatic exhibition by which I hoped to satisfy my

doubts. Accordingly, pausing on a rock, I proceeded to imitate before

the negro the action of the man whom I had seen the day before taking

bearings with the compass at Sandag. He understood me at once, and,

taking the imitation out of my hands, showed me where the boat was,

pointed out seaward as if to indicate the position of the schooner, and

then down along the edge of the rock with the words "Espirito Santo,"

strangely pronounced, but clear enough for recognition. I had thus been

right in my conjecture; the pretended historical inquiry had been but a

cloak for treasure-hunting; the man who had played on Dr. Robertson was

the same as the foreigner who visited Grisapol in spring, and now, with

many others, lay dead under the Roost of Aros: there had their greed

brought them, there should their bones be tossed for evermore. In the

meantime the black continued his imitation of the scene, now looking up

skyward as though watching the approach of the storm; now, in the

character of a seaman, waving the rest to come aboard; now as an

officer, running along the rock and entering the boat; and anon bending

over imaginary oars with the air of a hurried boatman; but all with the

same solemnity of manner, so that I was never even moved to smile.

Lastly, he indicated to me, by a pantomime not to be described in words,

how he himself had gone up to examine the stranded wreck, and, to his

grief and indignation, had been deserted by his comrades; and thereupon

folded his arms once more, and stooped his head, like one accepting

fate.

The mystery of his presence being thus solved for me, I explained to

him by means of a sketch the fate of the vessel and of all aboard her.

He showed no surprise nor sorrow, and, with a sudden lifting of his open

hand, seemed to dismiss his former friends or masters (whichever they

had been) into God's pleasure. Respect came upon me and grew stronger,

the more I observed him; I saw he had a powerful mind and a sober and

severe character, such as I loved to commune with; and before we reached

the house of Aros I had almost forgotten, and wholly forgiven him, his

uncanny colour.

To Mary I told all that had passed without suppression, though I own my

heart failed me; but I did wrong to doubt her sense of justice.

"You did the right," she said. "God's will be done." And she set out

meat for us at once.

As soon as I was satisfied, I bade Rorie keep an eye upon the castaway,

who was still eating, and set forth again myself to find my uncle. I had

not gone far before I saw him sitting in the same place, upon the very

topmost knoll, and seemingly in the same attitude as when I had last

observed him. From that point, as I have said, the most of Aros and the

neighbouring Ross would be spread below him like a map; and it was plain

that he kept a bright look-out in all directions, for my head had

scarcely risen above the summit of the first ascent before he had leaped

to his feet and turned as if to face me. I hailed him at once, as well

as I was able, in the same tones and words as I had often used before,

when I had come to summon him to dinner. He made not so much as a

movement in reply. I passed on a little farther, and again tried parley,

with the same result. But when I began a second time to advance, his

insane fears blazed up again, and still in dead silence, but with

incredible speed, he began to flee from before me along the rocky summit

of the hill. An hour before he had been dead weary, and I had been

comparatively active. But now his strength was recruited by the fervour

of insanity, and it would have been vain for me to dream of pursuit.

Nay, the very attempt, I thought, might have inflamed his terrors, and

thus increased the miseries of our position. And I had nothing left but

to turn homeward and make my sad report to Mary.

She heard it, as she had heard the first, with a concerned composure,

and, bidding me lie down and take that rest of which I stood so much in

need, set forth herself in quest of her misguided father. At that age it

would have been a strange thing that put me from either meat or sleep; I

slept long and deep; and it was already long past noon before I awoke

and came downstairs into the kitchen. Mary, Rorie, and the black

castaway were seated about the fire in silence; and I could see that

Mary had been weeping. There was cause enough, as I soon learned, for

tears. First she, and then Rorie, had been forth to seek my uncle; each

in turn had found him perched upon the hill-top, and from each in turn

he had silently and swiftly fled. Rorie had tried to chase him, but in

vain; madness lent a new vigour to his bounds; he sprang from rock to

rock over the widest gullies; he scoured like the wind along the

hill-tops; he doubled and twisted like a hare before the dogs; and Rorie

at length gave in; and the last that he saw, my uncle was seated as

before upon the crest of Aros. Even during the hottest excitement of the

chase, even when the fleet-footed servant had come, for a moment, very

near to capture him, the poor lunatic had uttered not a sound. He fled,

and he was silent, like a beast; and this silence had terrified his

pursuer.

There was something heart-breaking in the situation. How to capture the

madman, how to feed him in the meanwhile, and what to do with him when

he was captured, were the three difficulties that we had to solve.

"The black," said I, "is the cause of this attack. It may even be his

presence in the house that keeps my uncle on the hill. We have done the

fair thing; he has been fed and warmed under this roof; now I propose

that Rorie put him across the bay in the coble, and take him through the

Ross as far as Grisapol."

In this proposal Mary heartily concurred; and bidding the black follow

us, we all three descended to the pier. Certainly, Heaven's will was

declared against Gordon Darnaway; a thing had happened, never paralleled

before in Aros: during the storm, the coble had broken loose, and,

striking on the rough splinters of the pier, now lay in four feet of

water with one side stove in. Three days of work at least would be

required to make her float. But I was not to be beaten. I led the whole

party round to where the gut was narrowest, swam to the other side, and

called to the black to follow me. He signed, with the same clearness and

quiet as before, that he knew not the art; and there was truth apparent

in his signals, it would have occurred to none of us to doubt his truth;

and that hope being over, we must all go back even as we came to the

house of Aros, the negro walking in our midst without embarrassment.

All we could do that day was to make one more attempt to communicate

with the unhappy madman. Again he was visible on his perch; again he

fled in silence. But food and a great cloak were at least left for his

comfort; the rain, besides, had cleared away, and the night promised to

be even warm. We might compose ourselves, we thought, until the morrow;

rest was the chief requisite, that we might be strengthened for unusual

exertions; and as none cared to talk, we separated at an early hour.

I lay long awake, planning a campaign for the morrow. I was to place the

black on the side of Sandag, whence he should head my uncle towards the

house; Rorie in the west, I on the east, were to complete the cordon, as

best we might. It seemed to me, the more I recalled the configuration of

the island, that it should be possible, though hard, to force him down

upon the low ground along Aros Bay; and once there, even with the

strength of his madness, ultimate escape was hardly to be feared. It was

on his terror of the black that I relied; for I made sure, however he

might run, it would not be in the direction of the man whom he supposed

to have returned from the dead, and thus one point of the compass at

least would be secure.

When at length I fell asleep, it was to be awakened shortly after by a

dream of wrecks, black men, and submarine adventure; and I found myself

so shaken and fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped out

before the house. Within, Rorie and the black were asleep together in

the kitchen; outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and

there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near

the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless

quiet of the night. Never, not even in the height of the tempest, had I

heard their song with greater awe. Now, when the winds were gathered

home, when the deep was dandling itself back into its summer slumber,

and when the stars rained their gentle light over land and sea, the

voice of these tide-breakers was still raised for havoc. They seemed,

indeed, to be a part of the world's evil and the tragic side of life.

Nor were their meaningless vociferations the only sounds that broke the

silence of the night. For I could hear, now shrill and thrilling and now

almost drowned, the note of a human voice that accompanied the uproar of

the Roost. I knew it for my kinsman's; and a great fear fell upon me of

God's judgments, and the evil in the world. I went back again into the

darkness of the house as into a place of shelter, and lay long upon my

bed, pondering these mysteries.

It was late when I again woke, and I leaped into my clothes and hurried

to the kitchen. No one was there; Rorie and the black had both

stealthily departed long before; and my heart stood still at the

discovery. I could rely on Rorie's heart, but I placed no trust in his

discretion. If he had thus set out without a word, he was plainly bent

upon some service to my uncle. But what service could he hope to render

even alone, far less in the company of the man in whom my uncle found

his fears incarnated? Even if I were not already too late to prevent

some deadly mischief, it was plain I must delay no longer. With the

thought I was out of the house; and often as I have run on the rough

sides of Aros, I never ran as I did that fatal morning. I do not believe

I put twelve minutes to the whole ascent.

My uncle was gone from his perch. The basket had indeed been torn open

and the meat scattered on the turf; but, as we found afterwards, no

mouthful had been tasted; and there was not another trace of human

existence in that wide field of view. Day had already filled the clear

heavens; the sun already lighted in a rosy bloom upon the crest of Ben

Kyaw; but all below me the rude knolls of Aros and the shield of sea lay

steeped in the clear darkling twilight of the dawn.

"Rorie!" I cried; and again "Rorie!" My voice died in the silence, but

there came no answer back. If there were indeed an enterprise afoot to

catch my uncle, it was plainly not in fleetness of foot, but in

dexterity of stalking, that the hunters placed their trust. I ran on

farther, keeping the higher spurs, and looking right and left, nor did I

pause again till I was on the mount above Sandag. I could see the wreck,

the uncovered belt of sand, the waves idly beating, the long ledge of

rocks, and on either hand the tumbled knolls, boulders, and gullies of

the island. But still no human thing.

At a stride the sunshine fell on Aros, and the shadows and colours

leaped into being. Not half a moment later, below me to the west, sheep

began to scatter as in a panic. There came a cry. I saw my uncle

running. I saw the black jump up in hot pursuit; and before I had time

to understand, Rorie also had appeared, calling directions in Gaelic as

to a dog herding sheep.

I took to my heels to interfere, and perhaps I had done better to have

waited where I was, for I was the means of cutting off the madman's last

escape. There was nothing before him from that moment but the grave, the

wreck, and the sea in Sandag Bay. And yet Heaven knows that what I did

was for the best.

My Uncle Gordon saw in what direction, horrible to him, the chase was

driving him. He doubled, darting to the right and left; but high as the

fever ran in his veins, the black was still the swifter. Turn where he

would, he was still forestalled, still driven toward the scene of his

crime. Suddenly he began to shriek aloud, so that the coast re-echoed;

and now both I and Rorie were calling on the black to stop. But all was

vain, for it was written otherwise. The pursuer still ran, the chase

still sped before him screaming; they avoided the grave, and skimmed

close past the timbers of the wreck; in a breath they had cleared the

sand; and still my kinsman did not pause, but dashed straight into the

surf; and the black, now almost within reach, still followed swiftly

behind him. Rorie and I both stopped, for the thing was now beyond the

hands of men, and these were the decrees of God that came to pass before

our eyes. There was never a sharper ending. On that steep beach they

were beyond their depth at a bound; neither could swim; the black rose

once for a moment with a throttling cry; but the current had them,

racing seaward; and if ever they came up again, which God alone can

tell, it would be ten minutes after, at the far end of Aros Roost, where

the sea-birds hover fishing.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _i.e._ the six stories which were in 1887 published in a volume

entitled _The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables_: of this volume

"The Merry Men" and "Olalla" formed part.

[2] Boggy.

[3] Clock.

[4] Enjoy.

OLALLA

OLALLA

"Now," said the doctor, "my part is done, and, I may say, with some

vanity, well done. It remains only to get you out of this cold and

poisonous city, and to give you two months of a pure air and an easy

conscience. The last is your affair. To the first I think I can help

you. It falls indeed rather oddly; it was but the other day the Padre

came in from the country; and as he and I are old friends, although of

contrary professions, he applied to me in a matter of distress among

some of his parishioners. This was a family--but you are ignorant of

Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you;

suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen

to the brink of destitution. Nothing now belongs to them but the

residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part

of which not even a goat could support life. But the house is a fine old

place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most

salubriously; and I had no sooner heard my friend's tale than I

remembered you. I told him I had a wounded officer, wounded in the good

cause, who was now able to make a change; and I proposed that his

friends should take you for a lodger. Instantly the Padre's face grew

dark, as I had maliciously foreseen it would. It was out of the

question, he said. Then let them starve, said I, for I have no sympathy

with tatterdemalion pride. Thereupon we separated, not very content with

one another; but yesterday, to my wonder, the Padre returned and made a

submission: the difficulty, he said, he had found upon inquiry to be

less than he had feared; or, in other words, these proud people had put

their pride in their pocket. I closed with the offer; and, subject to

your approval, I have taken rooms for you in the residencia. The air of

these mountains will renew your blood; and the quiet in which you will

there live is worth all the medicines in the world."

"Doctor," said I, "you have been throughout my good angel, and your

advice is a command. But tell me, if you please, something of the family

with which I am to reside."

"I am coming to that," replied my friend; "and, indeed, there is a

difficulty in the way. These beggars are, as I have said, of very high

descent, and swollen with the most baseless vanity; they have lived for

some generations in a growing isolation, drawing away, on either hand,

from the rich who had now become too high for them, and from the poor,

whom they still regarded as too low; and even to-day, when poverty

forces them to unfasten their door to a guest, they cannot do so without

a most ungracious stipulation. You are to remain, they say, a stranger;

they will give you attendance, but they refuse from the first the idea

of the smallest intimacy."