THE PEACEMAKER.
The heroes of Scaurnose expected a renewal of the attack, and in greater
force, the next day, and made their preparations accordingly,
strengthening every weak point around the village. They were put in
great heart by Malcolm's espousal of their cause, as they considered his
punishment of the factor; but most of them set it down in their wisdom
as resulting from the popular condemnation of his previous supineness.
It did not therefore add greatly to his influence with them. When he
would have prevailed upon them to allow Blue Peter to depart, arguing
that they had less right to prevent than the factor had to compel him,
they once more turned upon him: what right had he to dictate to them?
he did not belong to Scaurnose. He reasoned with them that the factor,
although he had not justice, had law on his side, and could turn out
whom he pleased. They said, "Let him try it!" He told them that they had
given great provocation, for he knew that the men they had assaulted
came surveying for a harbor, and that they ought at least to make some
apology for having maltreated them. It was all useless: that was the
women's doing, they said; besides, they did not believe him; and if what
he said was true, what was the thing to them, seeing they were all under
notice to leave? Malcolm said that perhaps an apology would be accepted.
They told him if he did not take himself off they would serve him as he
had served the factor. Finding expostulation a failure, therefore, he
begged Joseph and Annie to settle themselves again as comfortably as
they could, and left them.
Contrary to the expectation of all, however, and considerably to the
disappointment of the party of Dubs, Fite Folp and the rest, the next
day was as peaceful as if Scaurnose had been a halcyon nest floating on
the summer waves; and it was soon reported that in consequence of the
punishment he had received from Malcolm the factor was far too ill to be
troublesome to any but his wife. This was true, but, severe as his
chastisement was, it was not severe enough to have had any such
consequences but for his late growing habit of drinking whisky. As it
was, fever had followed upon the combination of bodily and mental
suffering. But already it had wrought this good in him, that he was far
more keenly aware of the brutality of the offence of which he had been
guilty than he would otherwise have been all his life through. To his
wife, who first learned the reason of Malcolm's treatment of him from
his delirious talk in the night, it did not, circumstances considered,
appear an enormity, and her indignation with the avenger of it, whom she
had all but hated before, was furious. Malcolm, on his part, was greatly
concerned to hear the result of his severity. He refrained, however,
from calling to inquire, knowing it would be interpreted as an insult,
not accepted as a sign of sympathy. He went to the doctor instead, who,
to his consternation, looked very serious at first. But when he learned
all about the affair, he changed his view considerably, and condescended
to give good hopes of his coming through, even adding that it would
lengthen his life by twenty years if it broke him of his habits of
whisky-drinking and rage.
And now Malcolm had a little time of leisure, which he put to the best
possible use in strengthening his relations with the fishers. For he had
nothing to do about the House except look after Kelpie; and Florimel, as
if determined to make him feel that he was less to her than before, much
as she used to enjoy seeing him sit his mare, never took him out with
her--always Stoat. He resolved therefore, seeing he must yet delay
action a while in the hope of the appearance of Lenorme, to go out as in
the old days after the herring, both for the sake of splicing, if
possible, what strands had been broken between him and the fishers, and
of renewing for himself the delights of elemental conflict. With these
views he hired himself to the Partan, whose boat's crew was
short-handed. And now, night after night, he reveled in the old
pleasure, enhanced by so many months of deprivation. Joy itself seemed
embodied in the wind blowing on him out of the misty infinite while his
boat rocked and swung on the waters, hanging between two worlds--that in
which the wind blew, and that other dark-swaying mystery whereinto the
nets to which it was tied went away down and down, gathering the harvest
of the ocean. It was as if Nature called up all her motherhood to greet
and embrace her long-absent son. When it came on to blow hard, as it did
once and again during those summer nights, instead of making him feel
small and weak in the midst of the storming forces, it gave him a
glorious sense of power and unconquerable life. And when his watch was
out, and the boat lay quiet, like a horse tethered and asleep in his
clover-field, he too would fall asleep with a sense of simultaneously
deepening and vanishing delight such as he had not at all in other
conditions experienced. Ever since the poison had got into his system,
and crept where it yet lay lurking in hidden corners and crannies, a
noise at night would on shore startle him awake, and set his heart
beating hard; but no loudest sea-noise ever woke him: the stronger the
wind flapped its wings around him, the deeper he slept. When a comrade
called him by name he was up at once and wide awake.
It answered also all his hopes in regard to his companions and the
fisher-folk generally. Those who had really known him found the same old
Malcolm, and those who had doubted him soon began to see that at least
he had lost nothing in courage or skill or good-will: ere long he was
even a greater favorite than before. On his part, he learned to
understand far better the nature of his people, as well as the
individual characters of them, for his long (but not too long) absence
and return enabled him to regard them with unaccustomed, and therefore
in some respects more discriminating, eyes.
Duncan's former dwelling happening to be then occupied by a lonely
woman, Malcolm made arrangements with her to take them both in; so that
in relation to his grandfather too something very much like the old life
returned for a time--with this difference, that Duncan soon began to
check himself as often as the name of his hate with its accompanying
curse rose to his lips.
The factor continued very ill. He had sunk into a low state, in which
his former indulgence was greatly against him. Every night the fever
returned, and at length his wife was worn out with watching and waiting
upon him.
And every morning Lizzy Findlay without fail called to inquire how Mr.
Crathie had spent the night. To the last, while quarreling with every
one of her neighbors with whom he had anything to do, he had continued
kind to her, and she was more grateful than one in other trouble than
hers could have understood. But she did not know that an element in the
origination of his kindness was the belief that it was by Malcolm she
had been wronged and forsaken.
Again and again she had offered, in the humblest manner, to ease his
wife's burden by sitting with him at night; and at last, finding she
could hold up no longer, Mrs. Crathie consented. But even after a week
she found herself still unable to resume the watching, and so, night
after night, resting at home during a part of the day, Lizzy sat by the
sleeping factor, and when he woke ministered to him like a daughter. Nor
did even her mother object, for sickness is a wondrous reconciler.
Little did the factor suspect, however, that it was partly for Malcolm's
sake she nursed him, anxious to shield the youth from any possible
consequences of his righteous vengeance.
While their persecutor lay thus, gradually everything at Scaurnose, and
consequently at the Seaton, lapsed into its old way, and the summer of
such content as before they had possessed returned to the fishers. I
fear it would have proved hard for some of them, had they made effort in
that direction, to join in the prayer--if prayer it may be called--put
up in church for him every Sunday. What a fearful canopy the prayers
that do not get beyond the atmosphere would make if they turned brown
with age! Having so lately seen the factor going about like a maniac,
raving at this piece of damage and that heap of dirt, the few fishers
present could never help smiling when Mr. Cairns prayed for
him as "the servant of God and his Church now lying grievously
afflicted--persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed."
Having found the fitting phrases, he seldom varied them.
Through her sorrow Lizzy had grown tender, as through her shame she had
grown wise. That the factor had been much in the wrong only rendered her
anxious sympathy the more eager to serve him. Knowing so well what it
was to have done wrong, she was pitiful over him, and her ministrations
were none the less devoted that she knew exactly how Malcolm thought and
felt about him; for the affair, having taken place in open village and
wide field and in the light of mid-day, and having been reported by
eye-witnesses many, was everywhere perfectly known, and Malcolm
therefore talked of it freely to his friends--among them both to Lizzy
and her mother.
Sickness sometimes works marvelous changes, and the most marvelous on
persons who to the ordinary observer seem the least liable to change.
Much apparent steadfastness of nature, however, is but sluggishness, and
comes from incapacity to generate change or contribute toward personal
growth; and it follows that those whose nature is such can as little
prevent or retard any change that has its initiative beyond them. The
men who impress the world as the mightiest are those often who _can_ the
least--never those who can the most in their natural kingdom; generally
those whose frontiers lie openest to the inroads of temptation, whose
atmosphere is most subject to moody changes and passionate convulsions,
who, while perhaps they can whisper laws to a hemisphere, can utter no
decree of smallest potency as to how things shall be within themselves.
Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille
servorum servus--take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon
his Bucephalus, but set them alone and in a desert--which will prove the
great man? which the unchangeable? The question being what the man
himself shall or shall not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall
not recognize as of himself and troubling the motions of his being,
Alexander will prove a mere earth-bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which
pulses the tide of the eternal and infinite Sea.
But then first, when the false strength of the self-imagined great man
is gone, when the want or the sickness has weakened the self-assertion
which is so often mistaken for strength of individuality, when the
occupations in which he formerly found a comfortable consciousness of
being have lost their interest, his ambitions their glow and his
consolations their color, when suffering has wasted away those upper
strata of his factitious consciousness, and laid bare the lower,
simpler, truer deeps, of which he has never known or has forgotten the
existence, then there is a hope of his commencing a new and real life.
Powers then, even powers within himself, of which he knew nothing, begin
to assert themselves, and the man commonly reported to possess a strong
will is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. This
factor, this man of business, this despiser of humbug, to whom the
scruples of a sensitive conscience were a contempt, would now lie awake
in the night and weep. "Ah!" I hear it answered, "but that was the
weakness caused by his illness." True; but what then had become of his
strength? And was it all weakness? What if this weakness was itself a
sign of returning life, not of advancing death--of the dawn of a new and
genuine strength? For he wept because in the visions of his troubled
brain he saw once more the cottage of his father the shepherd, with all
its store of lovely nothings round which the nimbus of sanctity had
gathered while he thought not of them; wept over the memory of that
moment of delight when his mother kissed him for parting with his willow
whistle to the sister who cried for it: he cried now in his turn, after
five-and-fifty years, for not yet had the little fact done with him, not
yet had the kiss of his mother lost its power on the man; wept over the
sale of the pet lamb, though he had himself sold thousands of lambs
since; wept over even that bush of dusty miller by the door, like the
one he trampled under his horse's feet in the little yard at Scaurnose
that horrible day. And oh that nest of wild bees with its combs of honey
unspeakable! He used to laugh and sing then: he laughed still
sometimes--he could hear how he laughed, and it sounded frightful--but
he never sang. Were the tears that honored such childish memories all of
weakness? Was it cause of regret that he had not been wicked enough to
have become impregnable to such foolish trifles? Unable to mount a
horse, unable to give an order, not caring even for his toddy, he was
left at the mercy of his fundamentals: his childhood came up and
claimed him, and he found the childish things he had put away better
than the manly things he had adopted. It is one thing for Saint Paul and
another for Mr. Worldly Wiseman to put away childish things. The ways
they do it, and the things they substitute, are both so different! And
now first to me, whose weakness it is to love life more than manners,
and men more than their portraits, the man begins to grow interesting.
Picture the dawn of innocence on a dull, whisky-drinking, commonplace
soul, stained by self-indulgence and distorted by injustice! Unspeakably
more interesting and lovely is to me such a dawn than the honeymoon of
the most passionate of lovers, except indeed I know them such lovers
that their love will out-last all the moons.
"I'm a poor creature, Lizzy," he said, turning his heavy face one
midnight toward the girl as she sat half dozing, ready to start awake.
"God comfort ye, sir!" said the girl.
"He'll take good care of that," returned the factor. "What did I ever do
to deserve it? There's that MacPhail, now--to think of _him_! Didn't I
do what man could for him? Didn't I keep him about the place when all
the rest were dismissed? Didn't I give him the key of the library, that
he might read and improve his mind? And look what comes of it!"
"Ye mean, sir," said Lizzy, quite innocently, "'at that's the w'y ye
ha'e dune wi' God, an' sae he winna heed ye?"
The factor had meant nothing in the least like it. He had merely been
talking as the imps of suggestion tossed up. His logic was as sick and
helpless as himself. So at that he held his peace, stung in his pride at
least--perhaps in his conscience too, only he was not prepared to be
rebuked by a girl like her, who had--Well, he must let it pass: how much
better was he himself?
But Lizzy was loyal: she could not hear him speak so of Malcolm and hold
her peace as if she agreed in his condemnation. "Ye'll ken Ma'colm
better some day, sir," she said.
"Well, Lizzy," returned the sick man, in a tone that but for feebleness
would have been indignant, "I have heard a good deal of the way women
_will_ stand up for men that have treated them cruelly, but you to stand
up for _him_ passes!"
"He's been the best friend I ever had," said Lizzy.
"Girl! how can you sit there, and tell me so to my face?" cried the
factor, his voice strengthened by the righteousness of the reproof it
bore. "If it were not the dead of the night--"
"I tell ye naething but the trowth, sir," said Lizzy as the contingent
threat died away. "But ye maun lie still or I maun gang for the
mistress. Gien ye be the waur the morn, it'll be a' my wyte, 'cause I
cudna bide to hear sic things said o' Ma'colm."
"Do ye mean to tell me," persisted her charge, heedless of her
expostulation, "that the fellow who brought you to disgrace, and left
you with a child you could ill provide for--and I well know never sent
you a penny all the time he was away, whatever he may have done now--is
the best friend you ever had?"
"Noo God forgie ye, Maister Crathie, for threipin' sic a thing!" cried
Lizzy, rising as if she would leave him. "Ma'colm MacPhail's as clear o'
ony sin like mine as my wee bairnie itsel'."
"Do ye daur tell _me_ he's no the father o' that same, lass?"
"_No_; nor never will be the father o' ony bairn whase mither's no his
wife!" said Lizzy, with burning cheeks but resolute voice.
The factor, who had risen on his elbow to look her in the face, fell
back in silence, and neither of them spoke for what seemed to the
watcher a long time. When she ventured to look at him, he was asleep.
He lay in one of those troubled slumbers into which weakness and
exhaustion will sometimes pass very suddenly; and in that slumber he had
a dream which he never forgot. He thought he had risen from his grave
with an awful sound in his ears, and knew he was wanted at the
judgment-seat. But he did not want to go, therefore crept into the porch
of the church and hoped to be forgotten. But suddenly an angel appeared
with a flaming sword, and drove him out of the churchyard away to
Scaurnose, where the Judge was sitting. And as he fled in terror before
the angel he fell, and the angel came and stood over him, and his sword
flashed torture into his bones, but he could not and dared not rise. At
last, summoning all his strength, he looked up at him and cried out,
"Sir, hae mercy, for God's sake!" Instantly all the flames drew back
into the sword, and the blade dropped, burning like a brand from the
hilt, which the angel threw away. And lo! it was Malcolm MacPhail, and
he was stooping to raise him. With that he awoke, and there was Lizzy
looking down on him anxiously. "What are you looking like that for?" he
asked crossly.
She did not like to tell him that she had been alarmed by his dropping
asleep, and in her confusion she fell back on the last subject. "There
maun be some mistak, Mr. Crathie," she said. "I wuss ye wad tell me what
gars ye hate Ma'colm MacPhail as ye du."
The factor, although he seemed to himself to know well enough, was yet a
little puzzled how to commence his reply; and therewith a process began
that presently turned into something with which never in his life before
had his inward parts been acquainted--a sort of self-examination, to
wit. He said to himself, partly in the desire to justify his present
dislike--he would not call it hate, as Lizzy did--that he used to get on
with the lad well enough, and had never taken offence at his freedoms,
making no doubt his manner came of his blood, and he could not help it,
being a chip of the old block; but when he ran away with the marquis's
boat, and went to the marchioness and told her lies against him, then
what could he do but--dislike him?
Arrived at this point, he opened his mouth and gave the substance of
what preceded it for answer to Lizzy's question. But she replied at
once: "Nobody 'ill gar me believe, sir, 'at Ma'colm MacPhail ever tellt
a lee again' you or onybody. I dinna believe he ever tellt a lee in 's
life. Jist ye exem' him weel anent it, sir. An' for the boat, nae doobt
it was makin' free to tak it; but ye ken, sir, 'at hoo he was maister
o' the same. It was in his chairge, an' ye ken little aboot boats
yersel' or the sailin' o' them, sir."
"But it was me that engaged him again after all the servants at the
House had been dismissed: he was _my_ servant."
"That maks the thing luik waur, nae doobt," allowed Lizzy, with
something of cunning. "Hoo was't at he cam to du 't ava' (_of all at
all_), sir? Can ye min'?" she pursued.
"I discharged him."
"An' what for, gien I may mak bold to speir, sir?" she went on.
"For insolence."
"Wad ye tell me hoo he answert ye? Dinna think me meddlin', sir: I'm
clear certain there's been some mistak. Ye cudna be sae guid to me an'
be ill to him, ohn some mistak."
It was consoling to the conscience of the factor, in regard of his
behavior to the two women, to hear his own praise for kindness from a
woman's lips. He took no offence, therefore, at her persistent
questioning, but told her as well and as truly as he could remember,
with no more than the all-but unavoidable exaggeration with which
feeling _will_ color fact, the whole passage between Malcolm and himself
concerning the sale of Kelpie, and closed with an appeal to the judgment
of his listener, in which he confidently anticipated her verdict: "A
most ridic'lous thing! ye can see yersel' as weel 's onybody, Lizzy. An'
sic a thing to ca' an honest man like mysel' a hypocreet for! ha! ha!
ha! There's no a bairn atween John o' Groat's an' the Lan's En' disna
ken 'at the seller o' a horse is b'un' to reese (_extol_) him, an' the
buyer to tak care o' himsel'. I'll no say it's jist allooable to tell a
doonricht lee, but ye may come full nearer till't in horse-dealin', ohn
sinned, nor in ony ither kin' o' merchandeze. It's like luve an' war, in
baith which, it's weel kenned, a' thing's fair. The saw sud rin--_Luve
an' war an' horse-dealin'._--Divna ye see, Lizzy?"
But Lizzy did not answer, and the factor, hearing a stifled sob, started
to his elbow.
"Lie still, sir!" said Lizzy. "It's naething. I was only jist thinkin'
'at that wad be the w'y 'at the father o' my bairn rizzoned wi' himsel'
whan he lee'd to me."
"Hey!" said the astonished factor, and in his turn held his peace,
trying to think.
Now, Lizzy for the last few months had been going to school--the same
school with Malcolm, open to all comers--the only school where one is
sure to be led in the direction of wisdom--and there she had been
learning to some purpose, as plainly appeared before she had done with
the factor.
"Whase Kirk are ye elder o', Maister Crathie?" she asked presently.
"Ow, the Kirk o' Scotlan', of coorse," answered the patient, in some
surprise at her ignorance.
"Ay, ay," returned Lizzy; "but whase aucht (_owning, property_) is 't?"
"Ow, whase but the Redeemer's?"
"An' div ye think, Mr. Crathie, 'at gien Jesus Christ had had a horse to
sell, he wad hae hidden frae him 'at wad buy ae hair o' a fau't 'at the
beast hed? Wad he no hae dune till's neiper as he wad hae his neiper du
to him?"
"Lassie! lassie! tak care hoo ye even _Him_ to sic-like as hiz (_us_).
What wad _He_ hae to du wi' horseflesh?"
Lizzy held her peace. Here was no room for argument. He had flung the
door of his conscience in the face of her who woke it. But it was too
late, for the word was in already. Oh that false reverence which men
substitute for adoring obedience, and wherewith they reprove the
childlike spirit that does not know another kingdom than that of God and
that of Mammon! God never gave man thing to do concerning which it were
irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.
But, I say, the word was in, and, partly no doubt from its following so
close upon the dream the factor had had, was potent in its operation. He
fell a-thinking, and a-thinking more honestly than he had thought for
many a day. And presently it was revealed to him that, if he were in the
horse-market wanting to buy, and a man there who had to sell said to
him, "He wadna du for you, sir: ye wad be tired o' 'im in a week," he
would never remark, "What a fool the fellow is!" but, "Weel, noo, I ca'
that neiborly!" He did not get quite so far just then as to see that
every man to whom he might want to sell a horse was as much his neighbor
as his own brother; nor, indeed, if he had got as far, would it have
indicated much progress in honesty, seeing he would at any time, when
needful and possible, have cheated that brother in the matter of a horse
as certainly as he would a Patagonian or Chinaman. But the warped glass
of a bad maxim had at least been cracked in his window.
The peacemaker sat in silence the rest of the night, but the factor's
sleep was broken, and at times he wandered. He was not so well the next
day, and his wife, gathering that Lizzy had been talking, and herself
feeling better, would not allow her to sit up with him any more.
Days and days passed, and still Malcolm had no word from Lenorme, and
was getting hopeless in respect to that quarter of possible aid. But so
long as Florimel could content herself with the quiet of Lossie House,
there was time to wait, he said to himself. She was not idle, and that
was promising. Every day she rode out with Stoat. Now and then she would
make a call in the neighborhood, and, apparently to trouble Malcolm,
took care to let him know that on one of these occasions her call had
been upon Mrs. Stewart. One thing he did feel was, that she made no
renewal of her friendship with his grandfather: she had, alas! outgrown
the girlish fancy. Poor Duncan took it much to heart. She saw more of
the minister and his wife--who both flattered her--than anybody else,
and was expecting the arrival of Lady Bellair and Lord Liftore with the
utmost impatience. They, for their part, were making the journey by the
easiest possible stages, tacking and veering, and visiting every one of
their friends that lay between London and Lossie: they thought to give
Florimel the little lesson that, though they accepted her invitation,
they had plenty of friends in the world besides her ladyship, and were
not dying to see her.
One evening, Malcolm, as he left the grounds of Mr. Morrison, on whom
he had been calling, saw a traveling-carriage pass toward Portlossie,
and something liker fear laid hold of his heart than he had ever felt
except when Florimel and he on the night of the storm took her father
for Lord Gernon the wizard. As soon as he reached certain available
fields, he sent Kelpie tearing across them, dodged through a fir wood,
and came out on the road half a mile in front of the carriage: as again
it passed him he saw that his fears were facts, for in it sat the
bold-faced countess and the mean-hearted lord. Something _must_ be done
at last, and until it was done good watch must be kept.
I must here note that during this time of hoping and waiting Malcolm had
attended to another matter of importance. Over every element influencing
his life, his family, his dependants, his property, he desired to
possess a lawful, honest command: where he had to render account he
would be head. Therefore, through Mr. Soutar's London agent, to whom he
sent up Davy, and whom he brought acquainted with Merton and his former
landlady at the curiosity-shop, he had discovered a good deal about Mrs.
Catanach from her London associates, among them the herb-doctor and his
little boy who had watched Davy; and he had now almost completed an
outline of evidence which, grounded on that of Rose, might be used
against Mrs. Catanach at any moment. He had also set inquiries on foot
in the track of Caley's antecedents, and had discovered more than the
acquaintance between her and Mrs. Catanach. Also he had arranged that
Hodges, the man who had lost his leg through his cruelty to Kelpie,
should leave for Duff Harbor as soon as possible after his discharge
from the hospital. He was determined to crush the evil powers which had
been ravaging his little world.