THE MOON TURNED ROUND AGAIN.
Of the written records on which this tale has partly depended, neither
Matthew Moon’s books nor the voluminous official documents, all
criss-crossed with signatures and stamps and seals and arms, make
mention of the departure of Arthur Monjoy from Liverpool. After he had
(according to one description) “most feloniously fired and consumed the
moor,” he ceased, officially, to exist. But word of mouth, that, with
scarce more husks and wrappings, holds now and then as good a kernel of
truth, goes a little further. To be sure, for dates and suchlike the
documents are the safer authority; for while it was said by some that he
sailed within a week, others had it that not until the month of October
did he set foot on the deck of a merchant brig bound for Boston, the
reason for the delay being the illness of his wife. But documents and
tradition together make a pretty tangle, and he who would get at the
truth of the matter must dip his cup at both sources. Partaking,
perhaps, a little of both was the letter that arrived for the Wadsworth
parson from Boston some time in the following spring, informing him of
their settling in the new-made Republic and of the birth of a little
foster-sister for Jimmy Northrop.
The official records had best be taken first. There is still extant a
letter of William Chamberlayne, Solicitor to His Majesty’s Mint, in
which oath is made, and it is said, that he and the Solicitor for the
Crown in this particular prosecution “are not prepared to proceed
further in the trials of Raikes, Dean and Thomas, or any of them, at the
assize now being held at the Castle of York, by reason, as he, this
deponent, has been informed, of the lack of clear and certain
information and the great difficulties in the coming at evidence
material to the prosecution;” and, with an extra quirk and pomposity or
two, you may read the same of Matthew Moon. Moreover, certain persons
were now to be brought to book on a more serious count than clipping and
coining, or even the unlicensed smelting of ores (though it is difficult
to see how, the penalty being the same, the distinction in guilt is
drawn), and that was the murder of Jeremy Cope, Supervisor of Excise
when it suited his purpose, Chief of the Bow Street Eight, and a good
deal besides--an officer whose lustre was only eclipsed a quarter of a
century later by that of the famous Townshend. There is yet to be seen a
proclamation in the _London Gazette_, wherein His Majesty declares
himself pleased to promise his most gracious pardon to anyone (save the
person who actually shot the said Mr. Cope) who shall declare his or her
accomplice or accomplices therein, so that he, she, or they may be
apprehended and convicted thereof--ending with an offer of a reward to
be paid by the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty’s
Treasury, and signed, “Weymouth.” The reward was supplemented by a
similar one on the part of “the gentlemen and merchants of the Town and
Parish of Horwick, to be paid by the Constables.” And for the account of
how these rewards were never paid we must leave the documents for a
moment, and turn to the fireside gossip of the weavers and sheepmasters
in the ingles on winter nights.
From that source, and similar ones, we learn how Mish Murgatroyd lay
hidden in the bellpit until after the advancing fire had roared away
above his head, and the soldiers had retired before the flames. Three
days in all (so the story went) he stayed there, and, effecting his
escape at the end of that time, he returned to his home and followed his
ordinary calling--which, to be sure, was little enough good. Maybe he
did not know they were provided with his name; if he did, he showed
uncommon coolness; for shortly afterwards he went to Horwick Thursday
market, got rather more than market-drunk, and set off at six o’clock in
the evening with (however he came by them) two heavy budgets of cloth,
one under either arm, the straps about his neck. He reached Wadsworth,
and took a sheep-track up the Scout; but near the top his foot, or the
drink, or both, betrayed him. He slipped and rolled down. He did not
roll any great distance, for he lodged against two mountain-ash trees,
already reddening with berries. His fetching up against them was the end
of Mish Murgatroyd. The heavy budgets bounded forward over an edge; they
stopped with a horrible jerk; Mish was hanged at his own cost instead of
at that of his country; and the hangman himself could not have done the
job more neatly. That was a stroke of luck for the country, for there is
no sense in wasting money.
Dick o’ Dean’s end was, too, in its way, remarkable. Of the blood-money
that had been subscribed in the loom-loft of the “Fullers’ Arms,” only
forty-five pound odd had been actually collected, and the three lucky
wolves had taken fifteen pound apiece. When he heard of the hanging of
Mish, Dick o’ Dean had the effrontery to go to his widow and to demand
the unspent balance of Mish’s fifteen pounds, averring that he had
incurred certain expenses on Mish’s behalf that had included a bribe to
a sergeant to permit of Mish’s escape from the bellpit. The tale was
thin enough, but it seems to have sufficed for Mrs. Mish. By that time,
however, Parker of Ford was very busy in Horwick, straightening up
certain matters with Captain Ritchie; and this exploit of Dick o’ Dean’s
came to his ears. (Dick had already found it an easy matter to get
fifteen pounds out of the distracted Charley.) Proceedings for blackmail
were promptly instituted, and Dick was laid by the heels. Blackmail or
what you like, once they had him they were little likely to let him go
again, and they made short work of him in York. His end was not as
satisfactory as Mish’s, costing more. The youth Charley was suffered to
enjoy such peace as his conscience would allow him; and the parson
shrugged his shoulders, but could do little more, when, in course of
time, Charley and Pim o’ Cuddy became stalwart pillars of the Church.
For a matter of some significance, we have to return again to the
documents. It is obvious that if you are permitted to select such
documents as you require, and to ignore the rest, they may be made very
serviceable things; but you will be prudent to make away entirely with
such as do not tally with the case you have thus conveniently proved. It
was an odd thing that there should have come to light, years afterwards,
a paper that in all decency should have been destroyed, namely, another
deposition of Eastwood Ellah’s. This deposition flatly contradicted the
one which Cope had put with a chuckle into his pocket. Cope may or may
not have seen this paper; of its existence he must have known, from the
circumstances under which it was found; and it is always possible that
orders he may have given for its destruction were disregarded. The
suppression of it made some difference to Northrop and Haigh, but Cope
was not the first, or last, who disregarded what was inconvenient, and,
each in our different way, most of us do it. As Cope himself had said,
the Law’s a queer thing; all’s past now, and they didn’t get Big Monjoy.
The parson of Wadsworth, too, had his cross to bear, and he reddened
when, meeting Captain Ritchie one day in Horwick, the captain looked
straight through him, ignoring his existence. Explanation was
impossible; the matter must be let go at that; and for long afterwards
that hot blush mounted into the parson’s cheek, often at inopportune
moments. So, the horse being gone, he locked the stable door to save the
harness; and the vows of amends that his praying presently gave him
strength to make he kept as well as, or, maybe, a trifle better than,
most of us. Then one fine day it suddenly occurred to him that he was
getting rather sentimentally fond of his delinquency and making quite
the most of it. “Hallo,” he thought, “this’ll never do!” and a laugh
shook him.--“A good thing too!” he declared roundly. “The fellow was a
man, anyway, and his wife a treasure, and I’d do it again rather than he
should be stretched!”
There was very little hope of the parson after that.
Such parts of Back o’ th’ Mooin as had been heather were a sad sight
for long enough to come. The fire burned here and there for a fortnight,
and then there came a light shower or two that set the hills a-steam
with opaque white smoke. For days after the apparent extinction of the
blaze, you could, by stamping your foot on the consumed patches, set
sparks glowing and little flames flickering; and then all died down. It
had swept clear over the Slack to the Causeway, and there its progress
had only been arrested by the tearing up of stretches of heather, in
which work both soldiers and Back o’ th’ Mooiners had joined.--But a
good deal of heather has grown on the hills since then, and Back o’ th’
Mooin is not very different to look at. In the villages they gradually
returned to the weaving of kerseys and shalloons, and some hold that the
saw,
“Three great ills come out o’ the north--
A cold wind, a cunning knave, and a shrinking cloth”
had its rise somewhere between Horwick Town and Trawden Edge.
One particular may be added, that, when all’s said, is very like Back o’
th’ Mooin. A little grisly it is, but things are to be valued according
to the store you set by them, and the atlas-bone of a king went the same
way. It is this: Bit by bit, the two bodies hanging in chains on
Wadsworth Shelf began to disappear by other agency than the crows and
the weather. A man began it by taking a phalange, then another took a
metatarsal bone. Others, seeing the mementoes brought from pockets or
placed on the chimney-pieces of their neighbours, followed their
example; and so it went on, just as they had bought the rope at sixpence
an inch. The things were prized; more than a few in Horwick joined in
the filching; and one November nightfall the remains were taken in a
lump in a cart by a party of Back o’ th’ Mooiners returning from the
last Thursday market of the year. For long the relics were treasured;
then they began to lie about the cottages, and to be lost sight of
during a succession of dustings and cleanings. One only, a dorsal
vertebra, probably the seventh or eighth, is now known to exist; and it
may be added to the documents and the fireside tradition that is
testimony to the truth of this tale.
THE END.
* * * * *
THE PILLERS.
I.--THE NIGHTINGALE.
Since the first cuckoo, weeks ago, their talk had been of little but the
coming of the anemones and bluebells, the pairing of the birds in
hedgerow and brake and copse, and all the merry bustle of the spring of
the year; so that you might have imagined that, hale men and buxom women
as well as the younger sort, the posy-verses of the last Valentine’s Day
had left them all poetical crazy. But a little acquaintance with the
good folk and their business would have instructed you how much hung for
them on the chances of air and wind and dew; and you would then have
watched as jealously as they for that half-hour’s frost of an April
night that will stiffen the sap of trees, and set wood and bark together
past the power of any pilling-iron to part them.
Every year, as early as the middle of April or as late as the middle of
May, they set forth in a band, and the whole village assembled to see
them off. The two great waggons, packed the day before, and the
pole-wain on which the long ladders trailed almost to the ground, would
be had out of the sheds at the town end; and the talk and laughter of
the villagers would mingle with the singing of the larks and the
bleating of the lambs on the bare hillsides and all the noises of the
morning. The horses would be brought out and backed into the shafts with
a great clatter and stamping, and the brass discs and buckles of the
harness would flash and jangle in the sun. The manes of the horses had
been decked with red, blue, and white ribbons, and straw had been
trimmed and plaited into their tails; and while lads frolicked and ran
in and out, the smallest of the children would be held up to tie
rosettes and favours to the whips. The foremost waggon was always hung
round with crocks and kettles like a tinker’s caravan, and to this the
three or four women who were to accompany the men would mount. Good-byes
would be said, handkerchiefs waved, and a man would take the head of the
leading horse. The crocks and kettles would set up a clangour; the
second waggon, that carried the saws and axes and boiling-irons, would
fall in; and the lads would run behind the long wain, swinging on the
ladders that rocked up and down like a rantipole. So they would pass
between the dewy hawthorn hedges, and at the turn of the road, where the
wheels were clogged to drop down the hill, the village would lose sight
of them for maybe three weeks or a month.
Sometimes they pilled (or “barked,” as some call it) for others, being
then paid by the day or contract, sometimes they bought the bark
themselves to sell again to the tanners; and when the timber was not to
come down at once they left the stripped trees, naked and white and
ghostly, to stand for another year that the sap might retire and the
tree season as it stood. While the men worked in the woods, the women
cooked and mended, plied the pilling-irons on the smaller branches,
stacked the bark into light sheds, and perchance plaited osiers or wove
straw basses for beehives meanwhile. Sometimes they slept in inns and
farm-kitchens, and sometimes barns and sheds were prepared against their
coming.
After this fashion they came, on a May afternoon, to the Ladyshaws Wood,
that belongs to the township of Portsannet under the headland; and from
the height several of them saw, for the first time in their lives, the
sea. The warden of Portsannet and his bailiff grow the oaks of the
Ladyshaws wide and spreading, for tough, crooked pieces for the knees
and ribs of ships; and in the higher wood the columns of the pines are
crowded together to make the taller masts. Two score of them, oaks and
pines, had been marked to come down, and the placid bailiff, red-faced,
and smoking very strong tobacco, had first taken the Pillers round the
woods, and then shown them their accommodation, a small cluster of barns
and a penthouse that had once been a smithy. They made a fire that
night on the disused forge-hearth; and as they sat about it they told
one another how fair and settled the air was, and how grandly the
Ladyshaws were golding, and spoke of the sea and ships, and of the
sea-worm that bores the oak, and of bark and tanning and markets and
prices. Soft clouds lay low to the earth; scents and odours, now from
the pine woods, now from the hawthorn hedges, and again the whiff of
Portsannet and the sea, drifted in tracts on the mild air; and if now
and then a man winked at his neighbour and said something about a
pheasant or an egg, it was no such great matter after all. They sought
their blankets early; the retriever bitch and the two terriers stretched
themselves across the thresholds of the sheds; and the whole company
slept long before moonrise.
* * * * *
High in the dark laithe the four women lay on the top of a half-cut
stack; and Jessie Wheeler had avoided the corner immediately under the
great square hole that yawned in the floor of the loft overhead.
Instead, she had spread her blanket near a small vent-hole that had been
made by the leaving out of a wall-stone. Against this aperture she could
barely distinguish the shape of her arm as the tips of her fingers
touched the floor only a couple of feet above her. The women had taken
off only their upper garments; and the niche where they lay smelt of
stale hay, and the trusses crackled and whispered with each of their
movements.
A short harsh call outside startled her, and she raised herself on her
elbow to listen. The call was repeated; and then there stole on the May
night a series of long liquid notes. A nightingale had begun to sing in
the thorn hedge. The sound ceased, and the notes seemed to take flight
and diminish and die away. She waited. Again came the low liquid call,
and broke into trills that increased in volume. Another long pause left
the air trembling; and then, as if by the giving way of some barrier,
the full flood of song gushed like a torrent from the bird’s throat. The
piercing melody filled the night; it mounted and hovered and rang under
the low clouds, as if under rafters; it spread to the woods and out over
the headland; and Jessie’s heart lifted, and her lips shaped the name of
Willie Ramsey.
To poets the nightingale might sing of unattainable things; to Jessie it
sang only of Willie--Willie had all. The torrent of melody filled the
dark loft where she lay with memories and images only of Willie; and she
closed her eyes in bliss as the bird sang ever louder and clearer.
What the beginning had been she could hardly have told. They had sought
the nuts and blackberries together, and watched the trout in the shallow
brook, and popped the bags of the foxgloves. They had played and kissed
and wrangled; and he, too, with the other lads, had twisted the stalks
of the pulling-grass into her hair, and pointed at her for her outbursts
of passion.... Perhaps her hair had been the beginning. Once the
children had plaited chaplets of green leaves for their hair, and on
hers Willie had set the leaves of the copper beech, and laughed that
hair and leaves should be of one colour. Long after, she had set her
hair in a coil above her white nape; and when someone had again made
sport of this, in place of the fit of temper had come quick tears....
The memories came faster as the bird sang ecstatically--of the season
when their companionship had seemed, like Willie’s calf-voice, all
broken and here and there; of the day when she had fashioned the straw
mell-doll for the corner of the last stack, and the farm men had
laughed, and jested at her “babe,” and Willie had seen her miserable
flush ... and then of the evening in the milking-shed when he had so
kissed her that it had seemed wonderful they could ever have kissed
before as boy and girl. In spite of her passionateness, then, he had
loved her.... From the yard came the sound of a horse’s stamping, and
the dragging of the chain and the munching at the crib; she heard it
even through the song. A faint light glimmered in the vent-hole--the
moon had broken for a moment through the soft clouds, and the
nightingale sang as though the hand of a man had seized him and were
crushing the heart within him....
And so they had become lovers, and had been so for well-nigh a year. The
moon became clouded again; the bird’s song changed to lovely aching
notes, that somehow Jessie could hardly bear; and her hand stole to her
breast and sought the little gold locket that contained the tiny ring of
hair that Willie’s mother had cut from him while yet he was scarcely
bigger than the mell-doll.
* * * * *
The morning star shone over the sea, and the first cock crowed down in
Portsannet. The nightingale ceased to sing. The moon still rode high
among the clouds; but a breeze came from the east, and a greyness and
lifting altered the air. The cocks made an increasing din. A splendour
of rose and gold, in the midst of which the sun burned like a brazier,
turned the vault to an ineffable blue, and flushed the tops of the
Ladyshaws. And as the earliest of the Pillers to rise trudged down the
meadows for water, he saw that a man-o’-war, under half canvas, stood
motionless beyond the headland. He stopped to watch the men who moved
about her like ants, and saw the little fleck of white as she dropped
anchor.
II.--THE LADYSHAWS.
The woods resounded with the calling of the men, the hacking of the
grub-axe at roots, the clash of irons flung down, and the ceaseless
snapping and crackle of the undergrowth. The wide spaces that had been
cleared for the fall of the oaks were trampled and trodden, mould and
bluebells and the dead brown bracken; and hazel and thorn and dark holly
were speckled white as if with cuckoo-spit where the bill-hooks had
shorn through them. Now and then men, stacking the brushwood about the
clearings, peered into it for eggs and nests; and the frightened birds
fluttered continually here and there, refusing to leave their young.
At the gnarled oak that stood lowest down the slope of the wood Willie
Ramsey and Jerry Holmes were already at work with the great-axe. They
swung alternately, and the white chips lay thick over their boots, and
the deep notch, that was rapidly becoming deeper, made the tree look as
if it was balanced on a blunt apex. A few yards beyond the flying chips
lay the great double saw, a tin of grease for easing it, and a coil of
rope; and Jerry’s wrinkled face twitched into wonderful folds and
creases as he delivered each blow. As again, for the tenth time, the
thought of the forenoon drinking that the women would bring occurred to
him, he grunted “Spell,” dropped the head of his axe, and leaned on the
heft to recover his breath.
“Ye look thirsty, too, my lad,” he observed by and by, glancing up at
Willie.
Willie passed his fingers across his brow and looked at them all wet. He
was tall, black-browed, and black-haired, and his neck lifted at his
chest with his breathing, and the muscles of his forearm started sharply
as his fingers played on the heft of his axe.
“Ay, this ought to be grand stuff for ribs, if th’ chopping of it’s
aught to reckon by,” he answered.
“Nay, ye’re limber enow; ’tis owd bones like me it finds out,” quoth
Jerry, grinning. “’Tis th’ season o’ life wi’ ye to think more o’ th’
women nor th’ drink they bring. I ken your ways; but me, I’m naughbut
rare and thirsty.”
“Well, maybe I’se mend o’ that.”
“Ay, Jessie ’ll mend ye, if ye’re mendable. Ye may laugh; ginger’s for
game, and al’ays was----”
“They ken best where th’ shoe pinches that has it on, Jerry.”
“Ay, when they get it on; thou’rt not shod yet, lad.--Well, wisdom’s
wasted o’ youth; let’s to th’ ribs an’ knees again---- Spell----”
They turned to with the axes again.
Somewhere up the wood a man was setting a hone to a bill-hook, and away
to the right they had begun to chop at another tree. Willie and Jerry
were well ahead, and nowhere were they sawing yet; and as the chips
started and flew, and the keen axes cut deeper and deeper into the bole,
and Jerry’s mouth and eyebrow flickered and dipped, they began to pass
round the tree and to cut more carefully here and there. A whiff of
strong tobacco came down the glade, and the placid bailiff stood and
watched them.
“Ye’ll be almost ready for th’ ropes and cross-cut,” he remarked, “and
then there’ll be _one_ on ’em down.--Eh, they must ha’ seen some scenes,
must these oaks! Ay, they must.--Are ye acquainted wi’ these parts? No,
say ye? Eh, things has happened i’ this neighbourhood, hundreds o’ years
back. It were off th’ Head, yonder, that Paul Jones fought, that ye ’ll
ha’ heard tell of.--No! Well, that’s surprising!”
He continued to talk in his mild, easy way, telling them his story of
Paul Jones; and, by and by, Willie shouted out loud, “Skipjack!” A call
up the wood answered him.
“Skipjack” was Charlie Dodd. He came, an ungainly youth with a long
neck, a back shaped like a lad’s kite by reason of his sloping
shoulders, and enormous hands and wrists.
“Nay, don’t hang yoursel’,” the bailiff observed as Charlie passed a
loop of rope about his neck; and Jerry and Willie hoisted him up to a
bough.
Dead bark and twigs and tree-scurf came down as the Skipjack swung from
branch to branch; and he made fast the loop to a high fork, gave a
grimace and shout, and came down it in three perilous-looking swings,
his especial feat. Jerry smeared the great cross-cut with grease, and
they set it into the notch. The sun shone warmly through the bare
branches, and the ruddy oak-apples made a rich colour against the sky.
Sawdust lodged in the folds of the clothing of the two men as they bent
their backs to the cross-cut, and the birds cried more and more loudly.
They were chopping in several places at once now, and from the top of
another tree the Skipjack gave another shout. Now and then Willie and
Jerry loosened the saw and rested, their faces crimson; and the bailiff
mused among the oaks and told over again the story of Paul Jones. Then
Willie and Jerry set the saw aside; the tree was ready for the fall; and
men ran from here and there, and gathered round the oak, and took the
rope and set the huge tree gently rocking on its base. The tree-scurf
descended on them, and the birds made a piteous clamour. Willie ran in
with a wedge; the tree tottered, hung for a moment beyond its point of
balance, and then gave a long groan and twisted slowly. Men sprang for
safety as it came over. There was a rushing and breaking of branches,
the fibres burst with a loud crack, the boughs whipped out dangerously,
and the tree left a great white blade like that of a sword standing a
yard up from the butt. They stood back for a minute, as men stand back
from the dying body of a formidable beast; then they ran in and set to
work with saws and axes in half a dozen places at once. While some sawed
and lopped its branches, Willie and Jerry marked the trunk into six-foot
lengths and took the cross-cut again. Soon the women brought the morning
ale; and then the pilling and bolling irons, like spoons with a solid
bowl, were got out.
Fat Maggie had brought a straw hassock, and as she sat wide-lapped on it
and worked her pilling-iron the points of her elbows were redder than
her red arms. Nan and Jennie Holmes, Jerry’s wife and daughter, sat in a
litter of brushwood, and Jennie’s face worked like her father’s as she
cut the slashes with a knife and thrust in the iron. The sun caught
Jessie Wheeler’s hair as she sat in the brown bracken with her skirts
tucked close about her ankles; and now and then she glanced across to
where Willie thrust at the noisy cross-cut. The air became fragrant with
the smell of sawdust and the sharp odour of the new green timber, and
the sap glistened in bright films and webs as the bark parted from the
white wood. The piles of the smaller bark accumulated about the women,
and the white-stripped twigs and billets turned a pale buff in an hour.
The creak and rush of another falling tree came from up the wood. Fat
Maggie clapped her black hands to her ears as a man began to set a saw
immediately behind her; and Willie’s oak lay in three great sections,
the middle one of which had rolled to one side.
The easy-going bailiff came up again as Jerry stooped to examine the
face of the butt section. “What is it?” he said; and Jerry pointed at
something. Willie took a bar and rolled the middle section away; and all
three of them stooped again to the cut.
“If that’s a ring-shake----” Jerry began; but the bailiff rubbed his
hands and beamed.
“It isn’t a ring-shake; I’ll lay I know what it is. Look you! saw this
slice clean out, here.”
Other men gathered round and watched them saw a three-inch slice out of
the tree. The saw polished the heart of the oak like marble, and a foot
or so within the bark, and three or four inches in length, a curious
mark showed. The bailiff took an axe and chopped into the flat disc;
then he took up the disc and one of the fragments.
“Well!” he said, his mild face radiant, “I wouldn’t ha’ missed that for
a crown! I’ve heard tell of ’em, too! D’ye see?”
Buried in the heart of the tree, and fitting together like a die and
matrix, were two letters, an M and a V. They had been cut long ago in
the wood itself, and had become overgrown with the newer wood, but had
never healed. Men called to one another, and all pressed for a sight of
the marvel. Jessie’s head rested for a moment against Willie’s
shoulder, and his hand sought hers as the pieces were passed from hand
to hand; and soon the bailiff said, “I’se take these home,” and put them
into his pocket.
The women fetched the dinner at midday, and, after it, Willie and Jessie
sat apart in a little copse of hazels. A lean-to of thick base-bark
screened them from the others, and the green tassels of the hazels
dangled over them. His fingers strayed in her rich hair; as she smiled
up at him the corners of her mouth were dewy as the sap that glistened
under the rind of the great oaks. Nellie, the retriever bitch, blinked
drowsily at them both.
“It’s no deeper nor I ha’ for thee,” she whispered by and by, as if he
knew without telling what she spoke of.
“What, dear?”
“Th’ tree,” she murmured; and again he caressed her burnished hair.
“Only ten days and we’se be home,” he said, presently; “shall ye be
glad, Jess?”
“Yes, love; there’s no comfort wi’ yon sea all about ye, like as if
something were al’ays watching ye. I’d sooner meet thee aback o’ th’
little lambing-shed at home o’ th’ hill. An’ when we’re back I’se mak’
thee a dozen shirts wi’ my wages, dear----”
Willie laughed. “And what shall we gi’e her, Nellie?” he asked the
retriever; and the animal moved her tail lazily, hearing her name. Soon
they heard stirrings behind the hazel copse; the women began to pack up
tins and dishes; and Jerry’s voice called, “Where’s my mate?” The men
scattered again about the clearings. Again the wood became noisy with
the chop of the axe, the knock of the iron, and the hoarse voice of the
saw. The huge sections, stripped of their thick rinds, lay white on the
bracken. White faggots gleamed against the tan of the inner bark,
against the pink-budding thorn and the slate-purple brambles and the
quick green of the hazels and elders. The men made another spell of
half-an-hour late in the afternoon; and when the sunset gun boomed
sullenly from the ship off the Head, they covered the irons and saws and
axes with sacking, hid them under a stack of brushwood, and turned their
faces towards the sheds for supper.
III.--THE PRESS.
Dim riding-lights twinkled down in Portsannet Harbour, and a few
swinging oil lanterns crowded the narrow streets with dense shadows.
Threads of light came through cracks of barred and shuttered windows,
and the rusty glimmerings of the horn lanterns that hung in antique iron
brackets on the angles of houses showed the short flights of cobbled
steps and the precipitous ladders of wood that seemed to tumble from one
level of the streets to another. The strong odour of dead fish, brine,
tarred nets, and groynes and timbers half rotted by the sea-worms, lay
over the town; and incessant tuggings and gruntings, with over all the
sigh and rustle of the sea, came from the smacks and keels and cobles
that moved at their moorings.
From an alley down by the bridge a harsh clamour broke out, and half a
mile away you could distinguish the shouts and oaths and cries. It was
down by the bridge that the sailors’ taverns and kitchens lay, and the
men who sat snug by their own firesides nodded, as much as to say they
had expected it. They knew that Portsannet was not a quota-port; but
they knew also that the lieutenants of His Majesty’s ships did not stick
at niceties when the gun-deck complement ran low, and they had been wary
of a press as soon as the ship had dropped anchor. And so the bolts had
been shot, and the cumbrous bars set into the staples; as for the
“Mermaid” and the “Anchor,” the press was welcome to the tinkers and
rogues and gipsies they would find there with the women.
Jews and water-side men and sellers of old copper and iron and cordage
kept the shops adjacent to the “Mermaid” and “Anchor,” and such among
them as had no dread of the press were gathered with three or four women
about the closed door of the “Mermaid.” Half a dozen unkempt sailors,
with cudgels and stretchers, thrust them back, keeping the door; and the
shrill cries of the women and the gruff voices of the men filled the
narrow alley. From an upper window opposite the inn a ship’s chandler
shook his fist; and a score of yards away a few men peered round
corners, ready to take to their heels. A bony virago, who had been cast
half drunk from the tavern, screamed at the men-o’-war’s men in the
fishwives’ tongue; and a coxswain with a tarred hat pushed her back
continually as she ever advanced.
“See you’re not taken, you scald trull!” he menaced her; “you lack
little but a beard o’ being a man, and we have two bonnie Lord-Mayor’s
men you could berth between!”
“Ay, ye damned tarrybreeks, ye women i’ petticoats; what th’ jails turns
out th’ gun-deck doesn’t mak’ dainty wi’, ye----!”
“Dainty, ho, ho!” another bawled; “chuck, chuck, come wi’ me,
dainty----!”
“Yah, ye rascals!” the chandler shouted from his window, “ye rotten
mast-greasing rogues--ye captain’s chicken-crammers--wi’ a red-checked
shirt at th’ gratings once a month----”
He cursed them, and they taunted him for his stolen tallow and canvas,
and bade him stop hammering the King’s arrow out of copper bolts and
untwisting the coloured strand that marked his cordage as filched from
the King’s dockyards. The rakish woman broke a window with a stone, and
cried through the opening, “Ned! Ned!” and the coxswain thrust her back
with his hand on her flat breast, and took her a rap over the knuckles.
The men handled their stretchers as if they would as lief have broken a
head or two as not.
Suddenly the inn door opened, and there was a press forward. A
lieutenant appeared in the entrance, his cocked hat athwart like a
half-moon and his hooked nose sticking out scarcely less prominently as
he turned his profile. Other men could be seen behind him, and the woman
darted forward with a cry of “Ned!”
“Turn that slut off!” the lieutenant ordered curtly; and he grumbled to
himself: “A pretty lot o’ cattle to pink! I want men with
bodies!--We’ll try the Wood, then.... Here, you long rascal: in case
you’re deceiving me, do you know what they keep on a ship in a red-baize
bag?”
The fellow the woman had addressed as Ned snivelled, and the chandler
across the alley cried, “That’s him that robs th’ roosts! Feel in his
pocket for handkerchiefs----!”
“You don’t, eh? Well, it makes your back black--black, like dead liver,
d’you hear? And some have chosen hanging before a flogging with it. If
it isn’t as you say in the Wood, that’s your choice, too, my man!”
The man blubbered in his fear: “It’s so, captain. There’s one fellow
swings down a tree on a rope, a right sailor for you--Skipjack they call
him--there’s a two-three sheds, wi’ a long pole-wain----”
“Bring those other tinkers out, coxswain; they shall go with us. Which
way?--Back, you woman!”
The chandler screamed, hanging half out of his window: “Yah, ye walking
fever! Ye’d sell a real man to save your skin, would ye? But ye’ll go
yet for a sessions-bird! Choose th’ hanging afore th’ red check--save up
your rum and tak’ it drunk----”
“Fling a stone at that man, somebody,” the officer said.
The “Mermaid” emptied itself into the street--a score or so of the men
of the press, seven or eight wretched vagrants, and one or two of the
sailors’ doxies who had remained in hiding. A few of the seamen slung
their lanterns on their cudgels; the whole company moved; and, as they
passed to the harbour front, candles and heads appeared in windows, and
groans and hootings followed them. They turned up the main street; the
sailors thwacked their miserable captives as they failed to make haste
enough up the cobbled steps and timber stairways; one or two of the
women dropped behind, breathless; and at the top of the street the
Portsannet folk stayed and watched the men of the press take the road
that led to the Ladyshaws.
* * * * *
Jessie Wheeler slept soundly in the niche on top of the hay. The
nightingale on the thorn was silent, and the embers of the fire on the
hearth in the penthouse had sunk to a grey wood ash, that only now and
then the light breeze fanned to a faint pink glow. The clouds were close
folded overhead; hardly a whisper came from the Ladyshaws. Nellie and
the two terriers slept across the thresholds, and with a last soft
settling the fire itself seemed to go to sleep.
The retriever heard the noise first, and, suddenly alert, dropped to the
down-charge. The terriers set their heads and fore feet low, and growled
softly. A man asleep in a shed muttered mechanically, “Quiet!” and
turned over. From the brow at the bottom of the meadows came the sound
of voices and of a moving company; and then the voices dropped, but the
moving came nearer. The terriers broke suddenly into a hubbub of
barking; and Jessie woke, and started and trembled.
Jerry Holmes, without his boots, came out of the shed with a lantern; it
showed the furrows of his own face, but not the forms that were
approaching. They had muffled their lanterns about with coats and
handkerchiefs, and the shrouding of one had been done with a spotted
neckerchief that showed dabbled with a dusky pattern. Jerry knew no more
than that honest men do not wander about the country at night, a score
in a band, with doused lanterns; and he gave a shout of “Up, lads!” The
terriers barked furiously; the shout was answered by a score of voices;
the cloths were twitched off the lanterns; and the press and the seven
or eight pressed rushed forward. Jerry, for all he was inland, knew what
it was, and his hand tightened on a mattock that all at once he seemed
to find in his grasp without being able to tell how he had come by it.
In the big barn doorway the Skipjack and Willie Ramsey appeared. They,
too, had caught up what lay nearest to hand--Charlie, the crooked iron
handle of some machine, and Willie a breadth of a split lid with a
batten across it full of bent nails. There were no doors to the barn,
and behind these three other faces peered out anxiously. Old Jerry
muttered, “Nay, this is no good; we’re done afore we start”; and he
thought of the axes that lay under the brushwood in the Ladyshaws.
“That’s the Skipjack, him wi’ th’ crook; what did I tell ye?” a tall
fellow, bound, cried appealingly to a man with a hooked nose and a blue
coat with white facings. “And him wi’ th’ black hair’s Willie
something--he were back of a hazel bush wi’ a lass--it’s true what I
say----”
“Close in and seize them,” the lieutenant ordered. “Creep along the
wall, one or two of you, and the rest rush in.”
“Ay, that’s th’ road,” Jerry muttered again, bitterly; “well, we’ll ha’
one knock----”
And, indeed, there could be but one end to it; the plight was hopeless.
The short scuffle barely lasted two minutes. A stretcher cracked across
Jerry’s shins and he went down; at the very first stroke that Willie
struck, his batten nailed itself fast to a cudgel, and, having no
handle, was wrenched from his hand; and the Skipjack’s crank, having a
wooden case for the grip, twirled uselessly this way and that. They
struck with their hands, but were overborne and rolled over with their
assailants, and the sailors leaped over them as they rolled, and poured
into the barn. Half of them had not even their boots on, but desperate
grunts and scuffles sounded inside the dark sheds. Jerry, his arms
already secured, was crouched up against a wall, his head bowed almost
to his injured shins. The Skipjack lay near him with the breath knocked
out of him; and as Willie Ramsey lay flat on his belly with a heavy knee
in his back he suddenly made a “Tss, Nell!” between his teeth, and the
retriever fastened herself to the officer’s hand. The lieutenant gave a
cry and an oath with the pain, and then he drew and shortened his sword
and ran the retriever through the body.
Suddenly Willie shouted in a loud voice, “Bide where ye are, Jessie!”
and at that the informer pressed nearer to the lieutenant.
“Ay, they ha’ some women wi’ em, four of ’em, but I don’t know where
they are----”
“Curse ’em,” snarled the officer, wringing the dark blood from his hand;
“where there’s women there’s men. Rout ’em out.”
A dozen men were already at the door of the laithe. Suddenly they fell
back, and the informer, raising himself on his toes, cried, “Ay, her wi’
red hair; wasn’t it true what I told ye, captain?...”
Her arms were white and bare to the short shift that showed at her
shoulders, and her brown hands fumbled at her waist. Her hair lay in a
heavy mass half down her back, and her boots were thrust on unlaced. Her
mouth was open, and her eyes shifted rapidly, seeking Willie. She saw
him, and made a little shuffling run, her boots slipping; and a sailor
barred her way and glanced at the officer for orders.
The lieutenant advanced and peered into her face.
“Wife?... Ah, sweetheart!” His eyes rested on the gold locket at her
naked bosom. He put out his hand to touch it, and Willie cried in a low,
husky voice, “Man, loose my hands ... gi’e me my billet o’ wood and tak’
your sword ... or wi’ my naked hands----”
Jessie dropped to her knees and seized the officer’s hand. He drew it
away with a sharp exclamation.
“Oh, ’tis blood!” she cried.--“Nay, I didn’t mean to hurt thee, sir, but
dinna tak’ him! Let me bind thy hand, i’ pity and friendliness, and
dinna tak’ him! A handkercher and some watter--see, let me cleanse it
and heal it wi’ herbs and draw th’ foulness out wi’ my mouth. But poor
wood-folk we are, fro’ th’ inland parts, and harm none, but pill th’
trees i’ springtime, ask th’ bailiff else.... He’s my lad, and’ll wed me
this back-end, and’ll ha’ th’ farm when his father’s ta’en--nay, I
sorrow to see thee bleed so!--and thou’s ha’ my prayers every night....”
His blood had dripped to her own naked arms, and then, all at once, she
saw the dead retriever. Her mouth went round as an O with horror. Still
kneeling, she sank back till she had to put one hand behind her for
support; and she breathed softly, “Oh--Nellie!” The next moment she was
up on her feet, quivering and ugly with passion.
“Ay?” she cried in a high voice, “Ay? Th’ dog too? Let’s see thee,
Nell.--Ay, right through; th’ dog, too! They tak’ their swords to dogs,
gentlemen does; cocked hats and lace on ’em, they kill dogs. Tak’ her
and wash her, Maggie, for me to bury: and ye ken herbs.--Did I touch yon
man’s hand that kills dogs?--Ye ken herbs: tell me o’ one that keeps
wounds oppen, and lets ’em drain, and sets a venom i’ ’em so they shriek
at th’ sight o’ watter, dog-killers, and slaver at their cruel mouths
through their teeth that’s locked i’ torment----”
“Oh, come away, Jessie!” Maggie implored, seizing her arms.
“A sword! Ay, a sword to a dog, but a man wi’ his bare hands is bound
fast wi’ cords----”
“Do you know who you’re wreaking this on?” said the lieutenant, in a
smothered voice; “not on me, my lass!----” His voice changed, and he
cried abruptly, “Come, stir; do we need a whole night for a bare dozen
capstan-pushers? Fall in! Gag that whining pickpocket! Form ’em up,
coxswain! Ready?”
“Ye’d best tak’ th’ dog’s tongue,” Jessie cried, “chance another
gentleman boasts he’s killed him. Lend me thy sword while I cut it out!”
“By God, your own ought to be cut out, you red witch!--Faugh!--Up, men!”
“Ay, forward; I’m walking Portsannet way mysel’; I’ve a dead dog to show
folk; me and Nellie’s for Portsannet!--Come, poor lass.”
She took the dead retriever up in her arms. The women strove to
restrain her, but she answered them in a hard voice; and the hook-nosed
lieutenant, grinding his teeth as she railed, was yet unable to keep his
eyes from her throat and shoulders. She saw it, and laughed shrilly, and
made a display of the bare arms that held the dog for him. He swore a
filthy oath under his breath; Fat Maggie and Jerry’s wife and daughter
wept; the men’s faces were hard set; and the two terriers leaped and
barked about the lieutenant as Jessie clucked them on with her tongue
and asked him where his sword was. They set forward down the meadows; a
dim ring of orange showed where the moon swam behind the clouds; and as
they left the meadows and began the descent to the valley the coxswain
stepped back to Jessie, who was heaping taunt on taunt, and said, “Let
it alone--ye’re but making it worse for him....”
IV.--AT PORTSANNET.
The news had spread in Portsannet, and many of the decent fisherfolk had
joined the common sort at the head of the street. They murmured, but it
was little of their business, after all. Had any of their own kin been
seized, they might have resisted; as it was, Portsannet was well rid of
a rogue or two; and as for the Pillers, they, too, were in a sort
vagrants. True, when a red-haired, slipshod, unkempt wench appeared,
holding a dead retriever bitch in her arms, they wondered, and some
called her a hussy; but others, looking again, cried that it was a
shame. But a dead dog was not a deal to make a trouble about, and what
they would be gladdest to see was the stern of the longboat that was
fastened down by the jetty.
And why did Jessie, with her lover pinioned and about to be reft from
her, take his case less passionately than that of the cold and heavy
animal? She could not have told you. Maybe her mind could comprehend
only the small evil; or, as men in moments of stress will occupy
themselves with foolish, trivial things, an instinct bade her hold the
unbearable thought away from her. Likely enough it was this last; for,
suddenly seeing Willie’s haggard eyes on her, she cried, faintly: “Dinna
look at me now, or ’twill be th’ last! Turn thy face away! And ye--some
o’ ye--show me where th’ bailiff lives----”
A woman took her own shawl and set it over her shoulders. “Dinna shame
us, lassie,” she said; and “Ay, ay--where d’ye say he lives?” Jessie
replied.
“Best tak’ her to our spare cham’er, Ellen,” a man’s voice said; but
Jessie called again for the bailiff: he was a harmless man, wi’ a
pleasant word for folk; his oaks and pines were but half cut; nay, they
had not started with the pines....
“I’ll tak’ ye to th’ bailiff, dearie. Come, then,” said the woman who
had given her the shawl; and suddenly Jessie began to tremble. Without
glancing once at Willie, she crossed to the narrow entry of a passage,
laid down the dog’s body, and then turned to the woman. “Come, make
haste,” she said. She passed the lieutenant without seeming to see him.
The two women turned into a dark lane that was deep rutted with carts,
as if it led to a farm. By and by Jessie began to run.
Through a bare orchard a candle shone in the bailiff’s window. They
found him in his comfortable kitchen smoking his strong tobacco. The two
pieces of wood he had brought from the Ladyshaws lay on the table
before him, and with the point of his penknife he was counting the rings
of the tree’s growth. “A hundred and ninety-six--a hundred and
ninety-seven--a hundred and ninety-eight,” he said, counting aloud; and
when he got to the two hundredth ring he stuck the point of his penknife
into the wood and looked up mildly and enquiringly.
Jessie’s railing was past now; she thought no more of Nellie.
“They’re taking th’ men--th’ press--that’s cutting the trees; they’re
taking ’em down th’ street now,” she announced shortly; “go stop ’em.”
“Men?” the bailiff enquired, quite unruffled: “Oh, ay, the Pillers. I
remember ye were with ’em. Dear, dear, now; that’s awk’ard. Two more
days o’ this weather and the leaves’ll be breaking out everywhere. We
shall lose the price o’ the bark--wi’out we could prosecute for
it--no--now that’s vexing.... Ye’d see this piece of oak this morning?
Of course. I’ve counted two hundred; think o’ that! Two hundred year
sin’ them letters were cut, and more to count yet.”
“But they’re taking ’em--Willie and Jerry,” Jessie murmured, dazed.
“Like enow ye wouldn’t know Willie’s name--it were him cut them pieces
for ye.... Oh, man!” she cried suddenly, “he’s my lover--chance ye’re
wed yoursel’----”
“Eh?” said the bailiff; “No.”
“Oh, think, wi’ your talk o’ two hundred year--happen lovers cut them
marks, same as ye’ve cut a lass’s name on a tree!”
“Them that I heard tell of was King’s marks,” the bailiff mused, “but
ay, happen this would be some lad----”
Jessie dropped face foremost on the table, and the fisherwoman spoke
sharply.
“Come out o’ your moon-trances, Matthew Hudson!” she cried; “think what
can be done. They’ll up anchor in a couple of hours wi’ th’ turn o’ th’
tide.--Wad th’ Warden stop ’em?”
Jessie moaned softly on the table, and the bailiff deliberated.
“Ay--no--there’s no knowing; the Warden might.”
“Then put th’ horse i’ the trap, ye daft fool, and tak’ us ower!” the
woman cried, losing her temper.
And as the bailiff set his pieces of wood aside with a sigh, he
murmured, “Me wed? No----”
In ten minutes the trap was ready, and the bailiff started the horse at
a walk down the rutted lane.
“Give me them reins, ye fat oaf!” Ellen exclaimed. “D’ye think
to-morrow’ll do for this?”
She shook up the horse, and the trap rocked and jolted. She made a cut
with the whip as they reached the street; but Jessie, her face buried in
the shawl, saw nothing of the throng a couple of score yards away.
“He trots better nor he gallops,” the bailiff suggested mildly, as they
turned into another miry lane.
Soon Ellen passed the reins to the bailiff and set her arm about
Jessie’s swaying, jolting body. She turned back a corner of the shawl to
say in her ear, “‘Twill be all right yet, dearie! Come, be easy, now.”
Before them, where the road wound round the headland, spread the
impenetrable blackness of the sea. A sharp turn showed lights half a
mile ahead, a little way up the hill; and as they drew nearer the
bailiff remarked, as if the fact were not without interest, “He’s up,
for a wonder; I’d have laid a crown he’d gone to bed.”
He pulled up at a wooden gate that had neither lodge nor avenue. One end
of the large house a little way up the hill was brightly lighted.
“Lean on my shoulder, lassie,” Ellen said. “And you, Matthew, just step
as if ye knew what ye’d come about.”
They passed up the treeless drive, and at a dark side door the bailiff
rang a bell. A servant appeared with a candle, the bailiff said a few
words, and they were shown into a small office with a desk and ledgers
and tin boxes. The servant left the candle on the desk, and they waited.
In five minutes a heavily-built, grave-looking, elderly man appeared in
the doorway. He looked first at one, then at another of the three, and,
finally, he turned to the bailiff.
“What’s the meaning of this, Hudson?” he demanded.
The bailiff glanced at Ellen and murmured, “Ay, ’tis late--past
eleven--half-past eleven, I should say----”
“I’ll tell ye th’ meaning of it, sir,” Ellen said, abruptly. “They’ll be
off afore Matthew’s done looking for his wits i’ th’ candle-flame.” She
told him how eight or nine unoffending landsmen, going quietly about
their trade, had been seized for service on the gun-deck of the
third-rater that lay off Portsannet Head.
“Well?” said the Warden; and Matthew removed his eyes from the flame of
the candle.
“Ay,” he said. “It’s them that’s pilling up at Ladyshaws, and the
question is, sir, in two days the sap’ll be set and ye’ll lose the price
o’ the bark. Wi’ them off and away, an action would never lie. The best
ye could do would be to seize the odd day’s pilling.”
“I know this woman; who’s the other?”
“Nay, I’m sure I can’t tell ye,” the bailiff replied; and then, at a
touch from Ellen, Jessie let the shawl slip from her head, and looked at
the grave face of the Warden. She did not speak. Quietly, as quietly as
if she had been at her own bedside, she sank to her knees and folded her
hands. She closed her eyes, and the Warden looked on her with knitted
brows for a moment, and then began to walk up and down the small
apartment.
“I think I see,” he said, by and by, stopping before Jessie, and taking
her hand and raising her. “I passed Edward my word,” he continued, half
to himself, “on condition our own people were unmolested. That I can’t
withdraw, not even on the plea that these are in my own employ. But I’ll
do what I can. Follow me.”
He led the way along a dark passage, and at the end of it drew a curtain
aside. A soft glow of light spread about them. “Go in that door,” the
Warden said, pushing Jessie gently forward; and Jessie found herself in
a dining-room where half a dozen candles in silver sticks stood over
their own still images in a polished table. “There’s the Commander
himself,” said the Warden.
A white-haired gentleman, in a rich uniform of blue, white, and gold,
sat at one corner of the shining-table. A decanter of wine stood at his
elbow, the breaking of the soft light through which dyed the white
ruffle at his wrist with ruby red. He was looking at a watch that he
held in his hand, and Jessie knew not what beauty it was in his face
that seemed to steal like a comforting balsam over her heart. The Warden
crossed and spoke in a low voice to him, and presently he looked up from
his watch. At a sign from him Jessie stood forward, and Ellen and the
bailiff fell back.
“What is your name?” he asked her, in a very gentle voice; and when she
had told him, “Where do you live?” he asked again. She told him that,
too; and then he began to ask her many questions. What brought her so
far from her home? Of what sort were her friends? What her daily
life?--She answered all very tremblingly; she felt that there could be
no passion in this man’s presence; and by and by he knew all about
Willie and Jerry and Fat Maggie and the fatal journey that had given her
her first sight of the sea.
“Come nearer, my maid.--And so you have but now seen the sea and a
ship?”
“Ay, sir, to my sorrow.”
“So?” answered the stately gentleman. “Ah, women, women, never one of
you yet but dreaded the sea!--Tell me, Henry: is it that they know the
sea is more powerful than they? Do they know the dream that we, we
others, dream--the discontent that lies in all achievement, the urge?...
And not the youth only; the old man, too, is drawn from the
chimney-corner, as I am drawn--as I must go even now with the turn of
the tide.--Well, I had my choice, and twice or thrice I have warmed my
hands at a fire that glows on no husband’s hearth. Perhaps I shall do so
once more, and so die content. For marrying some, but we others are for
the sea, the dream, the unrest....” He mused, and Jessie wondered if the
face of a saint could be more beautiful than that on which her eyes were
fixed.
“Well, that is my destiny, not another’s,” he resumed by and by.--“My
child, have they told you why the acorn is set in the ground, and
tended and fostered till it becomes a tree, and then dies, as we all
die, to a nobler service?”
Jessie did not reply, not rightly understanding him; and the
white-haired commander, putting his fingers into the pocket of his
waistcoat, drew out two acorns. He considered them as they lay in the
palm of his hand.
“Heart o’ the oak, that holds it all for us, for us others--the rest we
scorned in our youth, the boundless sea, the endeavour that must be its
own reward, the pleasantness of life foregone.... It may be that we
chose ignorantly, blindly; perhaps we have doubted since, doubted but it
had been better to choose the shelter of the rafters and the woman at
our side and the little ones ... no matter. Twice or thrice, and once
more under God’s pleasure.... Girl, I come ashore but thrice in ten
years, and there are hardly ten of years now remaining to me. For thirty
years I have carried acorns in my pocket, and have planted them when
opportunity came, and have seen tall oaks of my own planting. And your
woodsmen come in the season and cut them down, and they are bolted
together to be the houses of some of us--our hearths, homes, lodging, we
others who have chosen it so.... Think of it when you see your lover set
his hand to the axe, and when you feel his arms about you in the
darkness, too.... You, too, have your choice; go--nay, stay.--You shall
see the last of me, Henry: the gig is waiting now.--Plant me these last
acorns, girl; heart o’ the oak, heart o’ the oak....”
* * * * *
The tide rustled and talked as it receded swiftly down the river
channel, and here and there one of the stakes that marked out the
waterway could be distinguished dimly in the darkness. The craft in the
harbour began to heel over as the water left them. The tide washed and
slapped against hulls and pebbles and wooden groynes and stone angles;
and at the top of the breakwater half a dozen lanterns showed a group of
dark figures that looked seaward.
The riding-lights of the ship had changed position; and between the ship
and the harbour mouth the grunt of oars on rowlocks could be heard. A
light appeared at the bow of a boat and shone on the water that broke at
its foot. The groups shuffled to one side of the breakwater as the
creaking of the oars drew nearer, and they could see the effort of the
rowers as the current became rapid and confined. The boat laboured up
past the stone entrance, and a man ran along the breakwater, leaped down
to the crunching pebbles, and cast a rope. The pebbles grated harshly as
the group followed him and pressed down to the boats. A man sprang from
the ship’s boat to a rocking dinghy, and thence to another and another;
and the boats tossed and knocked, and the water lapped loudly. The man
sprang down to the beach, and Jessie Wheeler ran to him with a low cry.
Another followed him, but, except that Jennie Holmes cried once
“Father!” nobody spoke. In a few minutes all were landed, and the boat
was thrust off immediately. Mechanically the group moved towards the
breakwater again; they stood there as the boat dropped down the harbour
and went out on the whispering tide.
Suddenly Jennie Holmes broke into hysterical sobs, and Willie Ramsey
caught Jessie in his arms as she reeled against a wooden butt.
A woman touched his arm.
“Are ye him?... Ay, she’s overwrought. Ye’d best carry her to my house
while morning. Happen a two-three neighbours’ll put the rest o’ ye up.
What say ye, folk?”
--And the Pillers turned their backs to the sea, filed off the
breakwater, and followed the men and women of Portsannet.
SKELF-MARY.
A wise man loves the ocean,
A good man loves the hills.
I.
With the wearing on of the afternoon, the flat, treeless country to
which for half a day I had steadily dropped had but increased in
monotony, and long before nightfall I had begun to weary for other
company than that of my own meditations. The road, of a reddish gravel,
had begun to cross, by wooden bridges, innumerable drains and channels
and narrow waterways; and that there was clay beneath it was evident no
less from the wreaths and wisps of vapour that crept fantastically over
carr and mere than from the sudden chills of the air, that seemed to
stand in banks or to move in thick, idle currents. The clatter of the
mare’s hoofs on the bridges flushed multitudes of waterfowl, that rose
with harsh cries and beatings of wings; and from the number of gulls I
had noticed among these while yet a little light remained, I had judged
I could not be far from the sea.
How it came to pass that I, having had lands of my own, should find
myself so circumstanced as to be fain to look after those of somebody
else as factor or steward, is of no present moment; it is more to the
point that, if this was the domain of the Master of Skelf, I liked it
exceedingly little. The continual flurry and commotion of the waterfowl
seemed to rouse in me a restlessness; and, remembering what Cardan had
said of lands with a dark and fennish air, that they had the property of
folding our thoughts back on themselves, I could only hope that I should
not prove the worse bailiff for being acquainted with Cardan.
At first I mistook the man’s lantern for an ignis fatuus; but I heard a
whistle and the panting of a dog, and he gave me good-evening. He was a
tall fellow, with a sheepskin about him; he carried his lantern at the
end of a long pole; and he told me, as he trotted by my side, that I was
within the confines of Skelf Decoy. I eased the mare that he might keep
pace with me.
“Ay, this is Skelf Decoy, and I tend it; they call me Ducky Watt, but
they mean Decoy. It isn’t what it were, not for fish, sin’ they drained
it, but there’s Friday-meat yet, and birds.... Ower th’ Wolds, are ye?
Well, it’s a good air o’ th’ Wolds. They ha’ farmed part about here too,
but it’s a black ear and thin crops; that’s th’ fogs.... Ay, we
fish--hark! yon’s a pike--trout and eels and roach and pike--and tak’
birds for th’ markets. Ye’ll be a arable man; all’s carrs hereabouts;
but I don’t doubt ye know all about Skelf-Mary.”
I told him that I had never been there before.
“Ay? H’m!... Ye’ll know nowt o’ th’ sea i’ these parts, then?”
I said that I did not.
“H’m!--well, this is how it is. Th’ sea’s taking it, as it’s ta’en
Auburn and Hartburn and Ravenspur; and a two-three stops, but th’ most’s
flitted months back; ye’ll see to-morrow.--Ye won’t ha’ heard o’
Buttevant-Mary neither: no. Well, they talk o’ bells chiming under th’
sea o’ still nights, and folks seen walking up and down th’ wharves and
marts, and all that; I think them’s tales; but Kempery and Flaxton isn’t
tales. Th’ Sheriff o’ Kingston, he’ll show ye th’ Court Rolls o’
Flaxton; and Kempery--I’ll show ye where Kempery is to-morrow, for ye’d
best bide wi’ me to-night.--Ay, they took Flaxton Church to Windlesea i’
carts; and then there’s sea-marks....”
“In a word, the sea’s advancing?”
“Ay; sometimes just licking-like, and sometimes a dozen yards of a
sudden; ye’ll see to-morrow.--And th’ sea doesn’t keep all it taks,
neither. Ye’ll be a arable man, say; well, there’s a thousand acres o’
warp come up out o’ Humber, and wheat on it now; a foot-bridge joins it;
but there’s men has seen deep keels, half a dozen on ’em, passing up yon
same channel. That’s that side; and o’ this, as I tell ye, a farmer can
go to bed i’ reaping-time and wake up wi’ a swath or two less to
reap....”
He continued to tell me tales of lost villages, of broken houses with
their chambers open to the winds, of wooden groynes that had been put up
and abandoned, and a deal more well fitted to the hour and place.
Suddenly I asked him about the Master of Skelf-Mary; and the light of
the lantern shone on his knuckles as he thumbed his chin.
“Ay, ye’re th’ new steward.... What wad ye know o’ him?” he asked,
slowly.
“Seeing I know nothing, you can’t get wrong.”
“And that’s providential--if it was true,” he retorted. “Well, sir, if
ye can’t bide while morning, ye can put your questions now.”
But, though I interrogated him, he so fubbed me off with bland and wary
answers that I was little the wiser by the time I desisted. The Master
of Skelf-Mary, I gathered, was all but bed-ridden, and in very ill fame
with such as read their Bibles (but that might have been because he had
turned the chapel of the mansion into a library); but my friend was
sensible, and careful to assign to others certain tales of devils and
familiars and voices that servants, with their ears at the rosewood door
of the library, had heard o’ nights. Nevertheless, his reluctance was
evident, and by and by he pointed out a beam of light smothered in the
fen-mists; that was his cottage.
I supped and lay that night in his hut; and by eight o’clock next
morning he had conducted me to the village of Skelf-Mary. It was much as
he had described it. One or two houses on the north side of the
market-place, opposite an ancient butter-cross, appeared to be tenanted,
as did also a row of very poor cottages that ran towards the sea; the
rest was desolate, and already grass pushed between the cobbles. Two or
three folk appeared at upper windows, hearing the sound of hoofs (having
no business to take them abroad, I judged they were still abed); and as
we left the cottages a couple of rabbits scampered across the street.
Half a mile before us lay the church and hall, and beyond it the smooth
sea, with a brig motionless far out.
“This road,” said the keeper, indicating a bridlepath to the right; but
that was so plainly not the road that I answered shortly, “No, it
isn’t,” and pushed forward towards the church. Five minutes brought me
level with it; and then I stopped with an exclamation.
A few yards beyond a rail of hedge-stakes the road ended as suddenly as
if it had been cut off with a knife. The fencing, that was continued on
either hand, straggled to the north across the middle of the graveyard,
and the marks of wheels in the red clay and the unsightly mounds in
which they ended showed what had recently been done. Over the rails,
hulks and shoulders of earth fouled the beach; and from the point to
which, with a dreadful curiosity, I advanced I saw three square ends,
ochrous with the clay, sticking out to the tide like “throughs” in a
stone wall.
The keeper pointed to a three-inch fissure at my feet.
“That’s th’ next,” he said, gloomily; “th’ first heavy rain--a touch o’
frost--th’ sea eats it down there, and a touch o’ frost and rain....
Yonder’s Kempery.” ... He pointed to the motionless brig.
“Let’s get to the hall,” I said; and we did not speak further till we
reached the mansion that had so gruesome a prospect to the north of it.
It was of grey pebbles, set in a sort of mud-mortar, and was very
ancient and handsome. The south lawn was overlooked by an octagonal
bay-window, from the flat leads of which (so the keeper said) dead and
gone lords of the manor and their chaplains had addressed the assembled
tenantry; and this bay formed one end of a long western wing that I
judged to be the chapel turned library. To the north lay the courtyard
and outbuildings; and to the east, not twenty yards away, was the placid
sea and the brig motionless over Kempery.
II.
Knowing what I now know, I think I might almost have guessed, from my
first glance at him as the bandy-legged servant closed the rosewood door
of the library behind me, what manner of man he was; nevertheless, this
knowledge was not long delayed. The bed he seldom left was wheeled into
the octagonal window-bay; he was propped up in wraps and blankets, with
a book set against his sharp knees; and as he turned, his profile, for
flat brow and beak, was for all the world like some grotesque bird
carved on a pillar or spout. His large dull eyes, too, protruded
remarkably; and the tying of the clout wherewith his head was bound as
if for study resembled ears laid back.
“Ye are a day late, sir,” he said at once in a sick, querulous voice;
and when I answered that I had been stayed on the road, “Ay,” he
complained, “it was a dark night last night; enough.--And now that ye
have seen the place in the daylight, ye’ll be of the same mind as the
rest of them, eh?”
For all his sickness, this nettled me a little, and I replied that if
the opinion of others was that the coast in the immediate vicinity was
not a pleasing sight, I was disposed to agree with them; “but,” I added,
“for that matter, I have some acquaintance with the sciences, and am
free from superstition.”
“Eh?” he said sharply. “And what may that amount to?”
Certainly he had in some measure the right to catechise me, albeit not
to be both petulant and domineering, as he was; and as I answered his
questions as to the extent of my reading, I noticed with what ease I
could have taken up his shrivelled figure. By and by he changed abruptly
to matters of business; and as in this I wish to imitate his own
brevity, I will only say that to a factor’s ordinary duties was to be
added all the care of a considerable _déménagement_. He ceased; and I
had bowed and was for leaving him when he beckoned me to come nearer. I
stooped over the couch.
“Tell me,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “tell me, has it
been your chance in the course of your reading to come across--this?”
His face was within a foot of mine, and I barely checked a sound that,
for all the early morning, was one of fright. Few men but in an idle
moment now and then have tried that trick of gazing into metals, and
phials, and flames of candles; and of the stupor or lethargy a man can
work in himself by these means I had read in Olaus Magnus, in Suavius,
and elsewhere. Neither was I entirely ignorant of that disordered
function of the mind whereby a man can people the world with images of
his own raising; but he was an ugly devil at best, and the abominable
expression into which for a moment his eyeballs were deliberately
set--the Squint Upwards and Inwards--added a sensible horror to the
already horrible.... As I turned away his gaze righted again; but I knew
him now. “I see ye know it,” he said.
“I do, sir,” I answered curtly over my shoulder. “What good the
Platonists had of it I could never see, and, by your leave, I will
confine myself to my stewardship, which I take to be the godlier
business.”
“He, he!” he chuckled weakly. “Free from superstition, too!--So we both
know it; good, we will talk of it later.”
“You shall pardon me,” thought I; and left him.
Here, then, was Cardan out-Cardaned; and there rose in my mind an image,
not of this terrestrial sea that overwhelms the pleasant habitations of
men, but of a dreader ocean, that of the terror of the Spirit, which,
when men with anguish and labour have raised creeds and customs and laws
against the void the thought of which they could not else endure, licks
and laps till darkness cover all again. In this more heinous destruction
and treason against all mankind this man trafficked. But if I am to
tell my tale--or, rather, to set down this inconclusive record--I must
trust you to take my meaning without further words.
The conversation of the bandy-legged servant was, as I should have
expected, of the commonplace of desolate neighbourhoods, and I omit it
that I may come the sooner to the man under whose influence, within a
week, I found myself. For it was easier to say that I would have no
commerce with him other than that of my office than it was to perform
it; and, being inveigled willy-nilly into it, I salved my conscience by
persuading myself that my study was of him and not of his theories.
Unless you had read somewhat of the books I have mentioned, you would
have found the fabric of folly that composed even the ordinary of his
conjectures hard to credit; and since I cannot omit it altogether, it
was of such stuff as this: Whether spirits do not commonly assume the
globular shape, as being the most perfect of shapes; whether, could we
but see them, the air might not be (as Leo Suavius held) thick with them
as with snowflakes; whether that be true of the witches of Lapland,
_ecstasi omnia prædicere_; and, above all, of the substance of spirits
and of the texture of those light essences that, being divided, come
with such celerity together again. That he should need a doctor to come
over from Kingston twice in the week was little wonder to me; and when,
shortly, this doctor persuaded me that my companionship would be good
for my employer’s unsettled mind, I only stipulated that I should be
spared that distortion of his face that had first shocked me.
The night whereon the invalid first broke his word in this respect was
one evening in the middle of October, when I had been, maybe, a month at
Skelf-Mary. For several days we had had thick, misty weather (I remember
I had been that afternoon to the Decoy, and I leave it to you which was
the more dismal, carr or coast), and the fog, penetrating the library,
made haloes about the two tapers. The master’s face was very white and
peaked that evening, and the little nodule of his hooked nose where bone
joined cartilage showed sharply. The chamber was full of vague mists and
shadows; now and then a ship’s horn hooted far out; we had ceased to
talk; and while I had settled down to a bundle of lawyer’s tangle, he
had apparently dozed over the book that was propped against his knees.
I know not what it was that caused me to look up, but I did so as if I
had been bidden; and from the way his glassy corneas were set they might
have been so for hours. He would no more have felt it had a fly crossed
his eyeballs than do cattle. He had managed again to put himself into
his trance, and instinctively I glanced over my shoulder to the upper
end of the library.
“This is beyond the bargain, sir!” I cried, bringing my hand down on the
table. He did not hear. I passed a taper before his eyes, but he did
not see. It lasted for some minutes; then the balls traversed the
farther end of the library, and the lids flickered and fell. He was
asleep. Again I thumped the table, and he woke sluggishly.
“I had your promise,” I said sternly.
“Eh, eh? What’s that ye say?... I have been asleep.”
“Man, do you call _that_ sleep?----”
“Eh?... Ah, yes!... It is my weakness, sir, and ye shall pardon it,” he
replied; and I truly believe that for the moment the creature felt a
sort of contrition. Suddenly there came over me a feeling nearer to
compassion than to disgust; God knows I am backward to judge those He
has seen fit to set in the world with me; and I turned to him earnestly.
“’Tis for your own good,” I said in a moved voice; “good Heaven!... Tell
me what you were looking at yonder.”
The weakness following that vile ecstasy seemed to have made him
tractable. “’Tis not in the classics,” he muttered; “ye may walk through
them without resistance ... how then should there be a mutilation?... I
cannot see.”...
This I set down in pity to his lunacy, and he continued to mutter
fragments. “A mischance to the mortal remains ... but the hinds in
yonder vault were too terrified ... and then, what correspondence.... _I
tell ye, sir, ye know nothing_ ... why does it not reunite?”...
And as he chattered thus, I wondered that I, who dreaded no spectre,
should dread exceedingly the mind that could so conjure one up.
On the morrow I again sought Watt the keeper; I had now a purpose, and
as he packed hampers in a flat-bottomed boat he again sought to ward off
my questions.
“What did he mean by mutilation? You said nothing to me,” I demanded;
and “Ye didn’t ask me,” Watt replied; “----come, Bess!”