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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 19
Author: Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
Language: English
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STEVENSON - SWANSTON EDITION VOL. XIX (OF 25)***
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME XIX
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ ...........
[Illustration: R. L. S. AND OTHERS IN THE SANS-SOUCI SALOON, BUTARITARI,
GILBERT ISLANDS]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME NINETEEN
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
THE EBB-TIDE
PAGE
NOTE BY MR. LLOYD OSBOURNE 3
PART I.--THE TRIO
CHAPTER
I. NIGHT ON THE BEACH 7
II. MORNING ON THE BEACH--THE THREE LETTERS 19
III. THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR 29
IV. THE YELLOW FLAG 39
V. THE CARGO OF CHAMPAGNE 46
VI. THE PARTNERS 69
PART II.--THE QUARTETTE
VII. THE PEARL-FISHER 81
VIII. BETTER ACQUAINTANCE 96
IX. THE DINNER PARTY 109
X. THE OPEN DOOR 118
XI. DAVID AND GOLIATH 131
XII. A TAIL-PIECE 151
WEIR OF HERMISTON
Introductory 159
I. Life and Death of Mrs. Weir 161
II. Father and Son 175
III. In the Matter of the Hanging of Duncan Jopp 181
IV. Opinions of the Bench 196
V. Winter on the Moors:
1. At Hermiston 205
2. Kirstie 208
3. A Border Family 212
VI. A Leaf from Christina's Psalm-Book 228
VII. Enter Mephistopheles 253
VIII. A Nocturnal Visit 270
IX. At the Weaver's Stone 278
Sir Sidney Colvin's Note 284
Glossary of Scots Words 297
THE EBB-TIDE
_A Trio and Quartette_
WRITTEN IN COLLABORATION WITH
LLOYD OSBOURNE
"_There is a tide in the affairs of men_"
NOTE.--_On the pronunciation of a name very frequently repeated in these
pages, the reader may take for a guide_--
"It was the schooner _Farallone_."
_R. L. S.--L. O._
NOTE BY MR. LLOYD OSBOURNE
Stevenson and I little knew, when we began our collaboration, that we
were afterwards to raise such a hornets' nest about our ears. The
critics resented such an unequal partnership, and made it impossible for
us to continue it. It may be that they were right; they wanted
Stevenson's best, and felt pretty sure they would not get it in our
collaboration. But when they ascribed all the good in our three books to
Stevenson and all the bad to me, they went a little beyond the mark. It
is a pleasure to me to recall that the early part of both "The Wrecker"
and "The Ebb-Tide" was almost entirely my own; so also were the storm
scenes of the _Norah Creina_; so also the fight on the _Flying Scud_; so
also the inception of Huish's scheme, the revelation of it to his
companions, his landing on the atoll with the bottle of vitriol in his
breast. On the other hand, the Paris portion of "The Wrecker" was all
Stevenson's, as well as the concluding chapters of both the South Sea
books.
It is not possible to disentangle anything else that was wholly mine or
his--the blending was too complete, our method of work too criss-crossed
and intimate. For instance, we would begin by outlining the story in a
general way; this done, we marshalled it into chapters, with a few
explanatory words to each; then it was for me to write the first draft
of Chapter I. This I would read to him, and if satisfactory it was laid
to one side; but were it not, I would rewrite it, embodying his
criticisms. Each chapter in turn was fully discussed in advance before I
put pen to paper; and in this way, though the actual first draft was in
my own hand, the form of the story continually took shape under
Stevenson's eyes. When my first draft of the entire book was finished
he would rewrite it again from cover to cover.
I can remember nothing more delightful than the days we thus passed
together. If our three books are in no wise great, they preserve, it
seems to me, something of the zest and exhilaration that went into their
making--the good humour, the eagerness.
We were both under the glamour of the Islands--and that life, so
strange, so picturesque, so animated, took us both by storm. Kings and
beachcombers, pearl-fishers and princesses, traders, slavers, and
schooner-captains, castaways, and runaways--what a world it was! And all
this in a fairyland of palms, and glassy bays, and little lost
settlements nestling at the foot of forest and mountain, with kings to
make brotherhood with us, and a dubious white man or two, in earrings
and pyjamas, no less insistent to extend to us the courtesies of the
"beach."
It was amid such people, and amid such scenes, that "The Ebb-Tide" and
"The Wrecker" were written.
LLOYD OSBOURNE.
PART I
THE TRIO
THE EBB-TIDE
CHAPTER I
NIGHT ON THE BEACH
Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many
European races, and from almost every grade of society, carry activity
and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted
the steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must
marry for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame
supports them in sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still
retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with
some relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman,
they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with
memoirs of the music-hall. And there are still others, less pliable,
less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in
these isles of plenty, to lack bread.
At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the
beach under a _purao_-tree.
It was late. Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home,
a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers,
dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands. Long
ago darkness and silence had gone from house to house about the tiny
pagan city. Only the street-lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in
the umbrageous alleys, or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the
port. A sound of snoring ran among the piles of lumber by the Government
pier. It was wafted ashore from the graceful clipper-bottomed
schooners, where they lay moored close in like dinghies, and their crews
were stretched upon the deck under the open sky or huddled in a rude
tent amidst the disorder of merchandise.
But the men under the _purao_ had no thought of sleep. The same
temperature in England would have passed without remark in summer; but
it was bitter cold for the South Seas. Inanimate nature knew it, and the
bottle of cocoa-nut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about the
island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton
clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the
tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast
to mention, less dinner, and no supper at all.
In the telling South Sea phrase, these three men were _on the beach_.
Common calamity had brought them acquainted, as the three most miserable
English-speaking creatures in Tahiti; and beyond their misery, they knew
next to nothing of each other, not even their true names. For each had
made a long apprenticeship in going downward; and each, at some stage of
the descent, had been shamed into the adoption of an _alias_. And yet
not one of them had figured in a court of justice; two were men of
kindly virtues; and one, as he sat and shivered under the _purao_, had a
tattered Virgil in his pocket.
Certainly, if money could have been raised upon the book, Robert Herrick
would long ago have sacrificed that last possession; but the demand for
literature, which is so marked a feature in some parts of the South
Seas, extends not so far as the dead tongues; and the Virgil, which he
could not exchange against a meal, had often consoled him in his hunger.
He would study it, as he lay with tightened belt on the floor of the old
calaboose, seeking favourite passages and finding new ones only less
beautiful because they lacked the consecration of remembrance. Or he
would pause on random country walks; sit on the path-side, gazing over
the sea on the mountains of Eimeo; and dip into the _Aeneid_, seeking
_sortes_. And if the oracle (as is the way of oracles) replied with no
very certain nor encouraging voice, visions of England at least would
throng upon the exile's memory: the busy schoolroom, the green
playing-fields, holidays at home, and the perennial roar of London, and
the fireside, and the white head of his father. For it is the destiny of
those grave, restrained, and classic writers, with whom we make enforced
and often painful acquaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and
become native in the memory; so that a phrase of Virgil speaks not so
much of Mantua or Augustus, but of English places and the student's own
irrevocable youth.
Robert Herrick was the son of an intelligent, active, and ambitious man,
small partner in a considerable London house. Hopes were conceived of
the boy; he was sent to a good school, gained there an Oxford
scholarship, and proceeded in course to the western University. With all
his talent and taste (and he had much of both) Robert was deficient in
consistency and intellectual manhood, wandered in bypaths of study,
worked at music or at metaphysics when he should have been at Greek, and
took at last a paltry degree. Almost at the same time, the London house
was disastrously wound up; Mr. Herrick must begin the world again as a
clerk in a strange office, and Robert relinquish his ambitions and
accept with gratitude a career that he detested and despised. He had no
head for figures, no interest in affairs, detested the constraint of
hours, and despised the aims and the success of merchants. To grow rich
was none of his ambitions; rather to do well. A worse or a more bold
young man would have refused the destiny; perhaps tried his future with
his pen; perhaps enlisted. Robert, more prudent, possibly more timid,
consented to embrace that way of life in which he could most readily
assist his family. But he did so with a mind divided; fled the
neighbourhood of former comrades; and chose, out of several positions
placed at his disposal, a clerkship in New York.
His career thenceforth was one of unbroken shame. He did not drink, he
was exactly honest, he was never rude to his employers, yet was
everywhere discharged. Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought no
attention; his day was a tissue of things neglected and things done
amiss; and from place to place, and from town to town, he carried the
character of one thoroughly incompetent. No man can bear the word
applied to him without some flush of colour, as indeed there is none
other that so emphatically slams in a man's face the door of
self-respect. And to Herrick, who was conscious of talents and
acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in which he was
found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite. Early in his fall he had
ceased to be able to make remittances; shortly after, having nothing but
failure to communicate, he ceased writing home; and about a year before
this tale begins, turned suddenly upon the streets of San Francisco by a
vulgar and infuriated German Jew, he had broken the last bonds of
self-respect, and, upon a sudden impulse, changed his name and invested
his last dollar in a passage on the mail brigantine, the _City of
Papeete_. With what expectation he had trimmed his flight for the South
Seas, Herrick perhaps scarcely knew. Doubtless there were fortunes to be
made in pearl and copra; doubtless others not more gifted than himself
had climbed in the island world to be queen's consorts and king's
ministers. But if Herrick had gone there with any manful purpose, he
would have kept his father's name; the _alias_ betrayed his moral
bankruptcy; he had struck his flag; he entertained no hope to reinstate
himself or help his straitened family; and he came to the islands (where
he knew the climate to be soft, bread cheap, and manners easy) a skulker
from life's battle and his own immediate duty. Failure, he had said, was
his portion; let it be a pleasant failure.
It is fortunately not enough to say, "I will be base." Herrick continued
in the islands his career of failure; but in the new scene and under the
new name, he suffered no less sharply than before. A place was got, it
was lost in the old style; from the long-suffering of the keepers of
restaurants he fell to more open charity upon the wayside; as time went
on, good-nature became weary, and, after a repulse or two, Herrick
became shy. There were women enough who would have supported a far worse
and a far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did
both, some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation.
Drenched with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and
ruinous prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish
heaps, his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had
drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to be
resigned, what it was to break forth in a childish fury of rebellion
against fate, and what it was to sink into the coma of despair. The time
had changed him. He told himself no longer tales of an easy and perhaps
agreeable declension; he read his nature otherwise; he had proved
himself incapable of rising, and he now learned by experience that he
could not stoop to fall. Something that was scarcely pride or strength,
that was perhaps only refinement, withheld him from capitulation; but he
looked on upon his own misfortune with a growing rage, and sometimes
wondered at his patience.
It was now the fourth month completed, and still there was no change or
sign of change. The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds of
every size and shape and density, some black as inkstains, some delicate
as lawn, threw the marvel of her southern brightness over the same
lovely and detested scene: the island mountains crowned with the
perennial island cloud, the embowered city studded with rare lamps, the
masts in the harbour, the smooth mirror of the lagoon, and the mole of
the barrier reef on which the breakers whitened. The moon shone too,
with bull's-eye sweeps, on his companions; on the stalwart frame of the
American who called himself Brown, and was known to be a master-mariner
in some disgrace; and on the dwarfish person, the pale eyes and
toothless smile of a vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk. Here was
society for Robert Herrick! The Yankee skipper was a man at least: he
had sterling qualities of tenderness and resolution: he was one whose
hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace
about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,
and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in
Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged
from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old
employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and
all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.
Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now
raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the
_purao_ arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling as
they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a
touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool, and, squatting
on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.
Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from
farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose and spread, and died in the
distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the
suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel
ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If
a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that
infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers
perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the
London clerk. He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing, and
the dainties of the sick-room; he lay here now, in the cold open,
exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was
besides infirm; the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions
watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled
them, and contended with and conquered their abhorrence. The disgust
attendant on so ugly a sickness magnified this dislike; at the same
time, and with more than compensating strength, shame for a sentiment so
inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil
they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is
always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual
and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken
helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor
wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they
would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark
of life. There is no one but has some virtue: that of the clerk was
courage; and he would make haste to reassure them in a pleasantry not
always decent.
"I'm all right, pals," he gasped once: "this is the thing to strengthen
the muscles of the larynx."
"Well, you take the cake!" cried the captain.
"O, I'm good plucked enough," pursued the sufferer with a broken
utterance. "But it do seem bloomin' hard to me, that I should be the
only party down with this form of vice, and the only one to do the funny
business. I think one of you other parties might wake up. Tell a fellow
something."
"The trouble is we've nothing to tell, my son," returned the captain.
"I'll tell you, if you like, what I was thinking," said Herrick.
"Tell us anything," said the clerk, "I only want to be reminded that I
ain't dead."
Herrick took up his parable, lying on his face and speaking slowly and
scarce above his breath, not like a man who has anything to say, but
like one talking against time.
"Well, I was thinking this," he began: "I was thinking I lay on Papeete
beach one night--all moon and squalls and fellows coughing--and I was
cold and hungry, and down in the mouth, and was about ninety years of
age, and had spent two hundred and twenty of them on Papeete beach. And
I was thinking I wished I had a ring to rub, or had a fairy godmother,
or could raise Beelzebub. And I was trying to remember how you did it. I
knew you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the _Freischütz_:
and that you took off your coat and turned up your sleeves, for I had
seen Formes do that when he was playing Kaspar, and you could see (by
the way he went about it) it was a business he had studied; and that you
ought to have something to kick up a smoke and a bad smell, I daresay a
cigar might do, and that you ought to say the Lord's Prayer backwards.
Well, I wondered if I could do that; it seemed rather a feat, you see.
And then I wondered if I would say it forward, and I thought I did.
Well, no sooner had I got to _world without end_, than I saw a man in a
_pariu_, and with a mat under his arm, come along the beach from the
town. He was rather a hard-favoured old party, and he limped and
crippled, and all the time he kept coughing. At first I didn't cotton to
his looks, I thought, and then I got sorry for the old soul because he
coughed so hard. I remembered that we had some of that cough mixture the
American consul gave the captain for Hay. It never did Hay a ha'porth of
service, but I thought it might do the old gentleman's business for him,
and stood up. '_Yorana!_' says I. '_Yorana!_' says he. 'Look here,' I
said, 'I've got some first-rate stuff in a bottle; it'll fix your cough,
savvy? _Harry my_[1] and I'll measure you a tablespoonful in the palm of
my hand, for all our plate is at the bankers.' So I thought the old
party came up, and the nearer he came the less I took to him. But I had
passed my word, you see."
"Wot is this bloomin' drivel?" interrupted the clerk. "It's like the rot
there is in tracts."
"It's a story; I used to tell them to the kids at home," said Herrick.
"If it bores you, I'll drop it."
"O, cut along!" returned the sick man irritably. "It's better than
nothing."
"Well," continued Herrick, "I had no sooner given him the cough mixture
than he seemed to straighten up and change, and I saw he wasn't a
Tahitian after all, but some kind of Arab, and had a long beard on his
chin. 'One good turn deserves another,' says he. 'I am a magician out of
the "Arabian Nights," and this mat that I have under my arm is the
original carpet of Mohammed Ben Somebody-or-other. Say the word, and you
can have a cruise upon the carpet.' 'You don't mean to say this is the
Travelling Carpet?' I cried. 'You bet I do,' said he. 'You've been to
America since last I read the "Arabian Nights,"' said I, a little
suspicious. 'I should think so,' said he. 'Been everywhere. A man with a
carpet like this isn't going to moulder in a semi-detached villa.' Well,
that struck me as reasonable. 'All right,' I said; 'and do you mean to
tell me I can get on that carpet and go straight to London, England?' I
said 'London, England,' captain, because he seemed to have been so long
in your part of the world. 'In the crack of a whip,' said he. I figured
up the time. What is the difference between Papeete and London,
captain?"
"Taking Greenwich and Point Venus, nine hours, odd minutes and seconds,"
replied the mariner.
"Well, that's about what I made it," resumed Herrick, "about nine hours.
Calling this three in the morning, I made out I would drop into London
about noon; and the idea tickled me immensely. 'There's only one
bother,' I said, 'I haven't a copper cent. It would be a pity to go to
London and not buy the morning _Standard_.' 'O!' said he, 'you don't
realise the conveniences of this carpet. You see this pocket? you've
only got to stick your hand in, and you pull it out filled with
sovereigns.'"
"Double-eagles, wasn't it?" inquired the captain.
"That was what it was!" cried Herrick. "I thought they seemed unusually
big, and I remember now I had to go to the money-changers at Charing
Cross and get English silver."
"O, you went there?" said the clerk. "Wot did you do? Bet you had a
B.-and-S.!"
"Well, you see, it was just as the old boy said--like the cut of a
whip," said Herrick. "The one minute I was here on the beach at three in
the morning, the next I was in front of the Golden Cross at midday. At
first I was dazzled, and covered my eyes, and there didn't seem the
smallest change; the roar of the Strand and the roar of the reef were
like the same: hark to it now, and you can hear the cabs and 'buses
rolling and the streets resound! And then at last I could look about,
and there was the old place, and no mistake! With the statues in the
square, and St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and the bobbies, and the
sparrows, and the hacks; and I can't tell you what I felt like. I felt
like crying, I believe, or dancing, or jumping clean over the Nelson
Column. I was like a fellow caught up out of Hell and flung down into
the dandiest part of Heaven. Then I spotted for a hansom with a spanking
horse. 'A shilling for yourself if you're there in twenty minutes!' said
I to the jarvey. He went a good pace, though of course it was a trifle
to the carpet; and in nineteen minutes and a half I was at the door."
"What door?" asked the captain.
"O, a house I know of," returned Herrick.
"Bet it was a public-house!" cried the clerk,--only these were not his
words. "And w'y didn't you take the carpet there instead of trundling in
a growler?"
"I didn't want to startle a quiet street," said the narrator. "Bad form.
And besides, it was a hansom."
"Well, and what did you do next?" inquired the captain.
"O, I went in," said Herrick.
"The old folks?" asked the captain.
"That's about it," said the other, chewing a grass.
"Well, I think you are about the poorest 'and at a yarn!" cried the
clerk. "Crikey, it's like 'Ministering Children!' I can tell you there
would be more beer and skittles about my little jaunt. I would go and
have a B.-and-S. for luck. Then I would get a big ulster with astrakhan
fur, and take my cane and do the la-de-da down Piccadilly. Then I would
go to a slap-up restaurant, and have green peas, and a bottle of fizz,
and a chump chop--O! and I forgot, I'd 'ave some devilled whitebait
first--and green gooseberry tart, and 'ot coffee, and some of that form
of vice in big bottles with a seal--Benedictine--that's the bloomin'
nyme! Then I'd drop into a theatre, and pal on with some chappies, and
do the dancing rooms and bars, and that, and wouldn't go 'ome till
morning, till daylight doth appear. And the next day I'd have
water-cresses, 'am, muffin, and fresh butter; wouldn't I just, O my!"
The clerk was interrupted by a fresh attack of coughing.
"Well, now, I'll tell you what I would do," said the captain: "I would
have none of your fancy rigs with the man driving from the mizzen
cross-trees, but a plain fore-and-aft hack cab of the highest registered
tonnage. First of all, I would bring up at the market and get a turkey
and a sucking-pig. Then I'd go to a wine-merchant's and get a dozen of
champagne, and a dozen of some sweet wine, rich and sticky and strong,
something in the port or madeira line, the best in the store. Then I'd
bear up for a toy-store, and lay out twenty dollars in assorted toys for
the pickaninnies; and then to a confectioner's and take in cakes and
pies and fancy bread, and that stuff with the plums in it; and then to a
newsagency and buy all the papers, all the picture ones for the kids,
and all the story papers for the old girl about the Earl discovering
himself to Anna-Mariar and the escape of the Lady Maude from the private
madhouse; and then I'd tell the fellow to drive home."
"There ought to be some syrup for the kids," suggested Herrick; "they
like syrup."
"Yes, syrup for the kids, red syrup at that!" said the captain. "And
those things they pull at, and go pop, and have measly poetry inside.
And then I tell you we'd have a thanksgiving-day and Christmas-tree
combined. Great Scott, but I would like to see the kids! I guess they
would light right out of the house when they saw daddy driving up. My
little Adar--"
The captain stopped sharply.
"Well, keep it up!" said the clerk.
"The damned thing is, I don't know if they ain't starving!" cried the
captain.
"They can't be worse off than we are, and that's one comfort," returned
the clerk. "I defy the devil to make me worse off."
It seemed as if the devil heard him. The light of the moon had been some
time cut off and they had talked in darkness. Now there was heard a
roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of the lagoon was seen to
whiten; and before they had staggered to their feet, a squall burst in
rain upon the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche one must
have lived in the tropics to conceive; a man panted in its assault as he
might pant under a shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night
and water.
They fled, groping for their usual shelter--it might be almost called
their home--in the old calaboose; came drenched into its empty chambers;
and lay down, three sops of humanity, on the cold coral floors, and
presently, when the squall was overpast, the others could hear in the
darkness the chattering of the clerk's teeth.
"I say, you fellows," he wailed, "for God's sake, lie up and try to warm
me. I'm blymed if I don't think I'll die else!"
So the three crept together into one wet mass, and lay until day came,
shivering and dozing off, and continually re-awakened to wretchedness by
the coughing of the clerk.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Come here.
CHAPTER II
MORNING ON THE BEACH--THE THREE LETTERS
The clouds were all fled, the beauty of the tropic day was spread upon
Papeete; and the wall of breaking seas upon the reef, and the palms upon
the islet, already trembled in the heat. A French man-of-war was going
out, homeward bound; she lay in the middle distance of the port, an
ant-heap for activity. In the night a schooner had come in, and now lay
far out, hard by the passage; and the yellow flag, the emblem of
pestilence, flew on her. From up the coast, a long procession of canoes
headed round the point and towards the market, bright as a scarf with
the many-coloured clothing of the natives and the piles of fruit. But
not even the beauty and the welcome warmth of the morning, not even
these naval movements, so interesting to sailors and to idlers, could
engage the attention of the outcasts. They were still cold at heart,
their mouths sour from the want of sleep, their steps rambling from the
lack of food; and they strung like lame geese along the beach in a
disheartened silence. It was towards the town they moved; towards the
town whence smoke arose, where happier folk were breakfasting; and as
they went, their hungry eyes were upon all sides, but they were only
scouting for a meal.
A small and dingy schooner lay snug against the quay, with which it was
connected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, five
Kanakas, who made up the crew, were squatted round a basin of fried
feis,[2] and drinking coffee from tin mugs.
"Eight bells: knock off for breakfast!" cried the captain, with a
miserable heartiness. "Never tried this craft before; positively my
first appearance; guess I'll draw a bumper house."
He came close up to where the plank rested on the grassy quay; turned
his back upon the schooner, and began to whistle that lively air, "The
Irish Washerwoman." It caught the ears of the Kanaka seamen like a
preconcerted signal; with one accord they looked up from their meal and
crowded to the ship's side, fei in hand and munching as they looked.
Even as a poor brown Pyrenean bear dances in the streets of English
towns under his master's baton; even so, but with how much more of
spirit and precision, the captain footed it in time to his own
whistling, and his long morning shadow capered beyond him on the grass.
The Kanakas smiled on the performance; Herrick looked on heavy-eyed,
hunger for the moment conquering all sense of shame; and a little
farther off, but still hard by, the clerk was torn by the seven devils
of the influenza.
The captain stopped suddenly, appeared to perceive his audience for the
first time, and represented the part of a man surprised in his private
hour of pleasure.
"Hello!" said he.
The Kanakas clapped hands and called upon him to go on.
"No, _sir_!" said the captain. "No eat, no dance. Savvy?"
"Poor old man!" returned one of the crew. "Him no eat?"
"Lord, no!" said the captain. "Like-um too much eat. No got."
"All right. Me got," said the sailor; "you tome here. Plenty toffee,
plenty fei. Nutha man him tome too."
"I guess we'll drop right in," observed the captain; and he and his
companions hastened up the plank. They were welcomed on board with the
shaking of hands; place was made for them round the basin; a sticky
demijohn of molasses was added to the feast in honour of company, and
an accordion brought from the forecastle and significantly laid by the
performer's side.
"_Ariana_,"[3] said he lightly, touching the instrument as he spoke; and
he fell to on a long savoury fei, made an end of it, raised his mug of
coffee, and nodded across at the spokesman of the crew. "Here's your
health, old man; you're a credit to the South Pacific," said he.
With the unsightly greed of hounds they glutted themselves with the hot
food and coffee; and even the clerk revived and the colour deepened in
his eyes. The kettle was drained, the basin cleaned; their entertainers,
who had waited on their wants throughout with the pleased hospitality of
Polynesians, made haste to bring forward a dessert of island tobacco and
rolls of pandanus leaf to serve as paper; and presently all sat about
the dishes puffing like Indian sachems.
"When a man 'as breakfast every day, he don't know what it is," observed
the clerk.
"The next point is dinner," said Herrick; and then with a passionate
utterance: "I wish to God I was a Kanaka!"
"There's one thing sure," said the captain. "I'm about desperate; I'd
rather hang than rot here much longer." And with the word he took the
accordion and struck up "Home, sweet Home."
"O, drop that!" cried Herrick, "I can't stand that."
"No more can I," said the captain. "I've got to play something though:
got to pay the shot, my son." And he struck up "John Brown's Body" in a
fine sweet baritone: "Dandy Jim of Carolina" came next; "Rorin the
Bold," "Swing low, Sweet Chariot," and "The Beautiful Land" followed.
The captain was paying his shot with usury, as he had done many a time
before; many a meal had he bought with the same currency from the
melodious-minded natives, always, as now, to their delight.
He was in the middle of "Fifteen Dollars in the Inside Pocket," singing
with dogged energy, for the task went sore against the grain, when a
sensation was suddenly to be observed among the crew.
"_Tapena Tom harry my_,"[4] said the spokesman, pointing.
And the three beachcombers, following his indication, saw the figure of
a man in pyjama trousers and a white jumper approaching briskly from the
town.
"That's Tapena Tom, is it?" said the captain, pausing in his music. "I
don't seem to place the brute."
"We'd better cut," said the clerk. "'E's no good."
"Well," said the musician deliberately, "one can't most generally always
tell. I'll try it on, I guess. Music has charms to soothe the savage
Tapena, boys. We might strike it rich; it might amount to iced punch in
the cabin."
"Hiced punch? O my!" said the clerk. "Give him something 'ot, captain.
'Way down the Swannee River': try that."
"No, _sir_! Looks Scots," said the captain; and he struck, for his life,
into "Auld Lang Syne."
Captain Tom continued to approach with the same business-like alacrity;
no change was to be perceived in his bearded face as he came swinging up
the plank: he did not even turn his eyes on the performer.
"We twa hae paidled in the burn,
Frae morning tide till dine,"
went the song.
Captain Tom had a parcel under his arm, which he laid on the house roof,
and then turning suddenly to the strangers: "Here, you!" he bellowed,
"be off out of that!"
The clerk and Herrick stood not on the order of their going, but fled
incontinently by the plank. The performer, on the other hand, flung down
the instrument and rose to his full height slowly.
"What's that you say?" he said. "I've half a mind to give you a lesson
in civility."
"You set up any more of your gab to me," returned the Scotsman, "and
I'll show ye the wrong side of a jyle. I've heard tell of the three of
ye. Ye're not long for here, I can tell ye that. The Government has
their eyes upon ye. They make short work of damned beachcombers, I'll
say that for the French."
"You wait till I catch you off your ship!" cried the captain; and then,
turning to the crew, "Good-bye, you fellows!" he said. "You're
gentlemen, anyway! The worst nigger among you would look better upon a
quarter-deck than that filthy Scotsman."
Captain Tom scorned to reply. He watched with a hard smile the departure
of his guests, and as soon as the last foot was off the plank, turned to
the hands to work cargo.
The beachcombers beat their inglorious retreat along the shore; Herrick
first, his face dark with blood, his knees trembling under him with the
hysteria of rage. Presently, under the same _purao_ where they had
shivered the night before, he cast himself down, and groaned aloud, and
ground his face into the sand.
"Don't speak to me, don't speak to me. I can't stand it," broke from
him.
The other two stood over him perplexed.
"Wot can't he stand now?" said the clerk. "'Asn't he 'ad a meal? _I'm_
lickin' my lips."
Herrick reared up his wild eyes and burning face. "I can't beg!" he
screamed, and again threw himself prone.
"This thing's got to come to an end," said the captain, with an intake
of the breath.
"Looks like signs of an end, don't it?" sneered the clerk.
"He's not so far from it, and don't you deceive yourself," replied the
captain.--"Well," he added in a livelier voice, "you fellows hang on
here, and I'll go and interview my representative."
Whereupon he turned on his heel, and set off at a swinging sailor's walk
towards Papeete.
It was some half-hour later when he returned. The clerk was dozing with
his back against the tree: Herrick still lay where he had flung himself;
nothing showed whether he slept or waked.
"See, boys!" cried the captain, with that artificial heartiness of his
which was at times so painful, "here's a new idea." And he produced
note-paper, stamped envelopes, and pencils, three of each. "We can all
write home by the mail brigantine; the consul says I can come over to
his place and ink up the addresses."
"Well, that's a start, too," said the clerk. "I never thought of that."
"It was that yarning last night about going home that put me up to it,"
said the captain.
"Well, 'and over," said the clerk. "I'll 'ave a shy," and he retired a
little distance to the shade of a canoe.
The others remained under the _purao_. Now they would write a word or
two, now scribble it out; now they would sit biting at the pencil end
and staring seaward; now their eyes would rest on the clerk, where he
sat propped on the canoe, leering and coughing, his pencil racing glibly
on the paper.
"I can't do it," said Herrick suddenly. "I haven't got the heart."
"See here," said the captain, speaking with unwonted gravity; "it may be
hard to write, and to write lies at that; and God knows it is; but it's
the square thing. It don't cost anything to say you're well and happy,
and sorry you can't make a remittance this mail; and if you don't I'll
tell you what I think it is--I think it's about the high-water mark of
being a brute beast."
"It's easy to talk," said Herrick. "You don't seem to have written much
yourself, I notice."
"What do you bring in me for?" broke from the captain. His voice was
indeed scarce raised above a whisper, but emotion clanged in it. "What
do you know about me? If you had commanded the finest barque that ever
sailed from Portland; if you had been drunk in your berth when she
struck the breakers in Fourteen Island Group, and hadn't had the wit to
stay there and drown, but came on deck, and given drunken orders, and
lost six lives--I could understand your talking then! There," he said
more quietly, "that's my yarn, and now you know it. It's a pretty one
for the father of a family. Five men and a woman murdered. Yes, there
was a woman on board, and hadn't no business to be either. Guess I sent
her to Hell, if there is such a place. I never dared go home again; and
the wife and the little ones went to England to her father's place. I
don't know what's come to them," he added, with a bitter shrug.
"Thank you, captain," said Herrick. "I never liked you better."
They shook hands, short and hard, with eyes averted, tenderness swelling
in their bosoms.
"Now, boys! to work again at lying!" said the captain.
"I'll give my father up," returned Herrick with a writhen smile. "I'll
try my sweetheart instead for a change of evils."
And here is what he wrote:--
"Emma, I have scratched out the beginning to my father, for I think I
can write more easily to you. This is my last farewell to all, the
last you will ever hear or see of an unworthy friend and son. I have
failed in life; I am quite broken down and disgraced. I pass under a
false name; you will have to tell my father that with all your
kindness. It is my own fault. I know, had I chosen, that I might have
done well; and yet I swear to you I tried to choose. I could not bear
that you should think I did not try. For I loved you all; you must
never doubt me in that, you least of all. I have always unceasingly
loved, but what was my love worth? and what was I worth? I had not
the manhood of a common clerk; I could not work to earn you; I have
lost you now, and for your sake I could be glad of it. When you first
came to my father's house--do you remember those days? I want you
to--you saw the best of me then, all that was good in me. Do you
remember the day I took your hand and would not let it go--and the
day on Battersea Bridge, when we were looking at a barge, and I began
to tell you one of my silly stories, and broke off to say I loved
you? That was the beginning, and now here is the end. When you have
read this letter, you will go round and kiss them all good-bye, my
father and mother, and the children, one by one, and poor uncle; and
tell them all to forget me, and forget me yourself. Turn the key in
the door; let no thought of me return; be done with the poor ghost
that pretended he was a man and stole your love. Scorn of myself
grinds in me as I write. I should tell you I am well and happy, and
want for nothing. I do not exactly make money, or I should send a
remittance; but I am well cared for, have friends, live in a
beautiful place and climate, such as we have dreamed of together, and
no pity need be wasted on me. In such places, you understand, it is
easy to live, and live well, but often hard to make sixpence in
money. Explain this to my father, he will understand. I have no more
to say; only linger, going out, like an unwilling guest. God in
heaven bless you. Think of me at the last, here, on a bright beach,
the sky and sea immoderately blue, and the great breakers roaring
outside on a barrier reef, where a little isle sits green with palms.
I am well and strong. It is a more pleasant way to die than if you
were crowding about me on a sick-bed. And yet I am dying. This is my
last kiss. Forgive, forget the unworthy."
So far he had written, his paper was all filled, when there returned a
memory of evenings at the piano, and that song, the masterpiece of love,
in which so many have found the expression of their dearest thoughts.
"_Einst, O Wunder!_" he added. More was not required; he knew that in
his love's heart the context would spring up, escorted with fair images
and harmony; of how all through life her name should tremble in his
ears, her name be everywhere repeated in the sounds of nature; and when
death came, and he lay dissolved, her memory lingered and thrilled among
his elements.
"Once, O wonder! once from the ashes of my heart
Arose a blossom----"
Herrick and the captain finished their letters about the same time; each
was breathing deep, and their eyes met and were averted as they closed
the envelopes.
"Sorry I write so big," said the captain gruffly. "Came all of a rush,
when it did come."
"Same here," said Herrick. "I could have done with a ream when I got
started; but it's long enough for all the good I had to say."
They were still at the addresses when the clerk strolled up, smirking
and twirling his envelope, like a man well pleased. He looked over
Herrick's shoulder.
"Hullo," he said, "you ain't writing 'ome."
"I am, though," said Herrick; "she lives with my father.--O, I see what
you mean," he added. "My real name is Herrick. No more Hay"--they had
both used the same _alias_,--"no more Hay than yours, I daresay."
"Clean bowled in the middle stump!" laughed the clerk. "My name's 'Uish,
if you want to know. Everybody has a false nyme in the Pacific. Lay you
five to three the captain 'as."
"So I have too," replied the captain; "and I've never told my own since
the day I tore the title-page out of my Bowditch and flung the damned
thing into the sea. But I'll tell it to you, boys. John Davis is my
name. I'm Davis of the _Sea Ranger_."
"Dooce you are!" said Huish. "And what was she? a pirate or a slyver?"
"She was the fastest barque out of Portland, Maine," replied the
captain; "and for the way I lost her, I might as well have bored a hole
in her side with an auger."
"O, you lost her, did you?" said the clerk. "'Ope she was insured?"
No answer being returned to this sally, Huish, still brimming over with
vanity and conversation, struck into another subject.
"I've a good mind to read you my letter," said he. "I've a good fist
with a pen when I choose, and this is a prime lark. She was a barmaid I
ran across in Northampton; she was a spanking fine piece, no end of
style; and we cottoned at first sight like parties in the play. I
suppose I spent the chynge of a fiver on that girl. Well, I 'appened to
remember her nyme, so I wrote to her, and told her 'ow I had got rich,
and married a queen in the Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace.
Such a sight of crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the
nigger parliament in a cocked 'at. It's really prime."
The captain jumped to his feet. "That's what you did with the paper that
I went and begged for you?" he roared.
It was perhaps lucky for Huish--it was surely in the end unfortunate for
all--that he was seized just then by one of his prostrating accesses of
cough; his comrades would have else deserted him, so bitter was their
resentment. When the fit had passed, the clerk reached out his hand,
picked up the letter, which had fallen to the earth, and tore it into
fragments, stamp and all.
"Does that satisfy you?" he asked sullenly.
"We'll say no more about it," replied Davis.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _Fei_ is the hill banana.
[3] By-and-by.
[4] "Captain Tom is coming."
CHAPTER III
THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR
The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low,
rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western
avenue and a little townward of the British consulate. Within was a
grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant
occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court: the doors, that
had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the
grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars
upon the windows.
The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the
last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of
water by the door, a half cocoa-nut shell beside it for a drinking-cup;
and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open,
his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of
sunbright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window;
and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused and
laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket. His long
arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the insults of the morning, and
the harrowing business of the letter, had strung him to that point when
pain is almost pleasure, time shrinks to a mere point, and death and
life appear indifferent. To and fro he paced like a caged brute; his
mind whirling through the universe of thought and memory; his eyes, as
he went, skimming the legends on the wall. The crumbling whitewash was
all full of them: Tahitian names, and French, and English, and rude
sketches of ships under sail and men at fisticuffs.
It came to him of a sudden that he too must leave upon these walls the
memorial of his passage. He paused before a clean space, took the pencil
out, and pondered. Vanity, so hard to dislodge, awoke in him. We call it
vanity at least; perhaps unjustly. Rather it was the bare sense of his
existence prompted him; the sense of his life, the one thing wonderful,
to which he scarce clung with a finger. From his jarred nerves there
came a strong sentiment of coming change; whether good or ill he could
not say: change, he knew no more--change with inscrutable veiled face,
approaching noiseless. With the feeling came the vision of a
concert-room, the rich hues of instruments, the silent audience, and the
loud voice of the symphony. "Destiny knocking at the door," he thought;
drew a stave on the plaster, and wrote in the famous phrase from the
Fifth Symphony. "So," thought he, "they will know that I loved music and
had classical tastes. They? He, I suppose: the unknown, kindred spirit
that shall come some day and read my _memor querela_. Ha, he shall have
Latin too!" And he added: _terque quaterque beati Queis ante ora
patrum_.
He turned again to his uneasy pacing, but now with an irrational and
supporting sense of duty done. He had dug his grave that morning; now he
had carved his epitaph; the folds of the toga were composed, why should
he delay the insignificant trifle that remained to do? He paused and
looked long in the face of the sleeping Huish, drinking disenchantment
and distaste of life. He nauseated himself with that vile countenance.
Could the thing continue? What bound him now? Had he no rights?--only
the obligation to go on, without discharge or furlough, bearing the
unbearable? _Ich trage unerträgliches_, the quotation rose in his mind;
he repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect
of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: _Du, stolzes Herz, du
hast es ja gewollt._ Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged
against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality
of scorn. "I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood," he thought,
"or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why
should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a
bandit! and to be starving here with worse than banditti--with this
trivial hell-hound!" His rage against his comrade rose and flooded him,
and he shook a trembling fist at the sleeper.
A swift step was audible. The captain appeared upon the threshold of the
cell, panting and flushed, and with a foolish face of happiness. In his
arms he carried a loaf of bread and bottles of beer; the pockets of his
coat were bulging with cigars. He rolled his treasures on the floor,
grasped Herrick by both hands, and crowed with laughter.
"Broach the beer!" he shouted. "Broach the beer, and glory hallelujah!"
"Beer?" repeated Huish, struggling to his feet.
"Beer it is!" cried Davis. "Beer, and plenty of it. Any number of
persons can use it (like Lyon's tooth-tablet) with perfect propriety and
neatness.--Who's to officiate?"
"Leave me alone for that," said the clerk. He knocked the necks off with
a lump of coral, and each drank in succession from the shell.
"Have a weed," said Davis. "It's all in the bill."
"What is up?" asked Herrick.
The captain fell suddenly grave. "I'm coming to that," said he. "I want
to speak with Herrick here. You, Hay--or Huish, or whatever your name
is--you take a weed and the other bottle, and go and see how the wind is
down by the _purao_. I'll call you when you're wanted!"
"Hey? Secrets? That ain't the ticket," said Huish.
"Look here, my son," said the captain, "this is business, and don't you
make any mistake about it. If you're going to make trouble, you can have
it your own way and stop right here. Only get the thing right: if
Herrick and I go, we take the beer. Savvy?"
"O, I don't want to shove my oar in," returned Huish. "I'll cut right
enough. Give me the swipes. You can jaw till you're blue in the face for
what I care. I don't think it's the friendly touch, that's all." And he
shambled grumbling out of the cell into the staring sun.
The captain watched him clear of the courtyard; then turned to Herrick.
"What is it?" asked Herrick thickly.
"I'll tell you," said Davis. "I want to consult you. It's a chance we've
got.--What's that?" he cried, pointing to the music on the wall.
"What?" said the other. "O, that! It's music; it's a phrase of
Beethoven's I was writing up. It means Destiny knocking at the door."
"Does it?" said the captain, rather low; and he went near and studied
the inscription. "And this French?" he asked, pointing to the Latin.
"O, it just means I should have been luckier if I had died at home,"
returned Herrick impatiently. "What is this business?"
"Destiny knocking at the door," repeated the captain; and then, looking
over his shoulder, "Well, Mr. Herrick, that's about what it comes to,"
he added.
"What do you mean? Explain yourself," said Herrick.
But the captain was again staring at the music. "About how long ago
since you wrote up this truck?" he asked.
"What does it matter?" exclaimed Herrick. "I daresay half an hour."
"My God, it's strange!" cried Davis. "There's some men would call that
accidental: not me. That----" and he drew his thick finger under the
music--"that's what I call Providence."
"You said we had a chance," said Herrick.
"Yes, _sir_!" said the captain, wheeling suddenly face to face with his
companion. "I did so. If you're the man I take you for, we have a
chance."
"I don't know what you take me for," was the reply. "You can scarce take
me too low."
"Shake hands, Mr. Herrick," said the captain. "I know you. You're a
gentleman and a man of spirit. I didn't want to speak before that bummer
there; you'll see why. But to you I'll rip it right out. I got a ship."
"A ship?" cried Herrick. "What ship?"
"That schooner we saw this morning off the passage."
"That schooner with the hospital flag?"
"That's the hooker," said Davis. "She's the _Farallone_, hundred and
sixty tons register, out of 'Frisco for Sydney, in California champagne.
Captain, mate, and one hand all died of the small-pox, same as they had
round in the Paumotus, I guess. Captain and mate were the only white
men; all the hands Kanakas; seems a queer kind of outfit from a
Christian port. Three of them left and a cook; didn't know where they
were; I can't think where they were either, if you come to that; Wiseman
must have been on the booze, I guess, to sail the course he did.
However, there _he_ was, dead; and here are the Kanakas as good as lost.
They bummed around at sea like the babes in the wood; and tumbled end-on
upon Tahiti. The consul here took charge. He offered the berth to
Williams; Williams had never had the small-pox and backed down. That was
when I came in for the letter-paper; I thought there was something up
when the consul asked me to look in again; but I never let on to you
fellows, so's you'd not be disappointed. Consul tried M'Neil; scared of
small-pox. He tried Capirati, that Corsican, and Leblue, or whatever his
name is, wouldn't lay a hand on it; all too fond of their sweet lives.
Last of all, when there wasn't nobody else left to offer it to, he
offers it to me. 'Brown, will you ship captain and take her to Sydney?'
says he. 'Let me choose my own mate and another white hand,' says I,
'for I don't hold with this Kanaka crew racket; give us all two months'
advance to get our clothes and instruments out of pawn, and I'll take
stock to-night, fill up stores, and get to sea to-morrow before dark!'
That's what I said. 'That's good enough,' says the consul, 'and you can
count yourself damned lucky, Brown,' says he. And he said it pretty
meaningful-appearing too. However, that's all one now. I'll ship Huish
before the mast--of course I'll let him berth aft--and I'll ship you
mate at seventy-five dollars and two months' advance."
"Me mate? Why, I'm a landsman!" cried Herrick.
"Guess you've got to learn," said the captain. "You don't fancy I'm
going to skip and leave you rotting on the beach, perhaps? I'm not that
sort, old man. And you're handy, anyway; I've been shipmates with
worse."
"God knows I can't refuse," said Herrick. "God knows I thank you from my
heart."
"That's all right," said the captain. "But it ain't all." He turned
aside to light a cigar.
"What else is there?" asked the other, with a pang of undefinable alarm.
"I'm coming to that," said Davis, and then paused a little. "See here,"
he began, holding out his cigar between his finger and thumb, "suppose
you figure up what this'll amount to. You don't catch on? Well, we get
two months' advance; we can't get away from Papeete--our creditors
wouldn't let us go--for less; it'll take us along about two months to
get to Sydney; and when we get there, I just want to put it to you
squarely: What the better are we?"
"We're off the beach at least," said Herrick.
"I guess there's a beach at Sydney," returned the captain; "and I'll
tell you one thing, Mr. Herrick--I don't mean to try. No, _sir_! Sydney
will never see me."
"Speak out plain," said Herrick.
"Plain Dutch," replied the captain. "I'm going to own that schooner.
It's nothing new; it's done every year in the Pacific. Stephens stole a
schooner the other day, didn't he? Hayes and Pease stole vessels all the
time. And it's the making of the crowd of us. See here--you think of
that cargo. Champagne! why, it's like as if it was put up on purpose. In
Peru we'll sell that liquor off at the pier-head, and the schooner after
it, if we can find a fool to buy her; and then light out for the mines.
If you'll back me up, I stake my life I carry it through."
"Captain," said Herrick, with a quailing voice, "don't do it!"
"I'm desperate," returned Davis. "I've got a chance; I may never get
another. Herrick, say the word: back me up; I think we've starved
together long enough for that."
"I can't do it. I'm sorry. I can't do it. I've not fallen as low as
that," said Herrick, deadly pale.
"What did you say this morning?" said Davis. "That you couldn't beg?
It's the one thing or the other, my son."
"Ah, but this is the gaol!" cried Herrick. "Don't tempt me. It's the
gaol."
"Did you hear what the skipper said on board that schooner?" pursued the
captain. "Well, I tell you he talked straight. The French have let us
alone for a long time; it can't last longer; they've got their eye on
us; and as sure as you live, in three weeks you'll be in gaol whatever
you do. I read it in the consul's face."
"You forget, captain," said the young man. "There is another way. I can
die; and to say truth, I think I should have died three years ago."
The captain folded his arms and looked the other in the face. "Yes,"
said he, "yes, you can cut your throat; that's a frozen fact; much good
may it do you! And where do I come in?"
The light of a strange excitement came in Herrick's face. "Both of us,"
said he, "both of us together. It's not possible you can enjoy this
business. Come," and he reached out a timid hand, "a few strokes in the
lagoon--and rest!"
"I tell you, Herrick, I'm 'most tempted to answer you the way the man
does in the Bible, and say, '_Get thee behind me, Satan!_'" said the
captain. "What! you think I would go drown myself, and I got children
starving? Enjoy it? No, by God, I do not enjoy it! but it's the row I've
got to hoe, and I'll hoe it till I drop right here. I have three of
them, you see, two boys and the one girl, Adar. The trouble is that you
are not a parent yourself. I tell you, Herrick, I love you," the man
broke out; "I didn't take to you at first, you were so Anglified and
tony, but I love you now; it's a man that loves you stands here and
wrestles with you. I can't go to sea with the bummer alone; it's not
possible. Go drown yourself, and there goes my last chance--the last
chance of a poor miserable beast, earning a crust to feed his family. I
can't do nothing but sail ships, and I've no papers. And here I get a
chance, and you go back on me! Ah, you've no family, and that's where
the trouble is!"
"I have indeed," said Herrick.
"Yes, I know," said the captain, "you think so. But no man's got a
family till he's got children. It's only the kids count. There's
something about the little shavers ... I can't talk of them. And if you
thought a cent about this father that I hear you talk of, or that
sweetheart you were writing to this morning, you would feel like me. You
would say, What matter laws, and God, and that? My folks are hard up, I
belong to them, I'll get them bread, or, by God! I'll get them wealth,
if I have to burn down London for it. That's what you would say. And
I'll tell you more: your heart is saying so this living minute. I can
see it in your face. You're thinking, Here's poor friendship for the man
I've starved along of, and as for the girl that I set up to be in love
with, here's a mighty limp kind of a love that won't carry me as far as
'most any man would go for a demijohn of whisky. There's not much
_ro_mance to that love, anyway; it's not the kind they carry on about in
song-books. But what's the good of my carrying on talking, when it's all
in your inside as plain as print? I put the question to you once for
all. Are you going to desert me in my hour of need?--you know if I've
deserted you--or will you give me your hand, and try a fresh deal, and
go home (as like as not) a millionaire? Say No, and God pity me! Say
Yes, and I'll make the little ones pray for you every night on their
bended knees. 'God bless Mr. Herrick:' that's what they'll say, one
after the other, the old girl sitting there holding stakes at the foot
of the bed, and the damned little innocents ..." he broke off. "I don't
often rip out about the kids," he said; "but when I do, there's
something fetches loose."
"Captain," said Herrick faintly, "is there nothing else?"
"I'll prophesy if you like," said the captain with renewed vigour.
"Refuse this, because you think yourself too honest, and before a
month's out you'll be gaoled for a sneak-thief. I give you the word
fair. I can see it, Herrick, if you can't; you're breaking down. Don't
think, if you refuse this chance, that you'll go on doing the
evangelical; you're about through with your stock; and before you know
where you are, you'll be right out on the other side. No, it's either
this for you; or else it's Caledonia. I bet you never were there, and
saw those white, shaved men, in their dust-clothes and straw hats,
prowling around in gangs in the lamplight at Noumea; they look like
wolves, and they look like preachers, and they look like the sick; Huish
is a daisy to the best of them. Well, there's your company. They're
waiting for you, Herrick, and you got to go; and that's a prophecy."
And as the man stood and shook through his great stature, he seemed
indeed like one in whom the spirit of divination worked and might utter
oracles. Herrick looked at him, and looked away; it seemed not decent to
spy upon such agitation; and the young man's courage sank.
"You talk of going home," he objected. "We could never do that."
"_We_ could," said the other. "Captain Brown couldn't, nor Mr. Hay that
shipped mate with him couldn't. But what's that to do with Captain Davis
or Mr. Herrick, you galoot?"
"But Hayes had these wild islands where he used to call," came the next
fainter objection.
"We have the wild islands of Peru," retorted Davis. "They were wild
enough for Stephens, no longer agone than just last year. I guess
they'll be wild enough for us."
"And the crew?"
"All Kanakas. Come, I see you're right, old man. I see you'll stand by."
And the captain once more offered his hand.
"Have it your own way then," said Herrick. "I'll do it: a strange thing
for my father's son. But I'll do it. I'll stand by you, man, for good or
evil."
"God bless you!" cried the captain, and stood silent. "Herrick," he
added with a smile, "I believe I'd have died in my tracks if you'd said
No!"
And Herrick, looking at the man, half believed so also.
"And now we'll go break it to the bummer," said Davis.
"I wonder how he'll take it," said Herrick.
"Him? Jump at it!" was the reply.
CHAPTER IV
THE YELLOW FLAG
The schooner _Farallone_ lay well out in the jaws of the pass, where the
terrified pilot had made haste to bring her to her moorings and escape.
Seen from the beach through the thin line of shipping, two objects stood
conspicuous to seaward: the little isle, on the one hand, with its palms
and the guns and batteries raised forty years before in defence of Queen
Pomare's capital; the outcast _Farallone_, upon the other, banished to
the threshold of the port, rolling there to her scuppers, and flaunting
the plague-flag as she rolled. A few sea-birds screamed and cried about
the ship; and within easy range, a man-of-war guard-boat hung off and on
and glittered with the weapons of marines. The exuberant daylight and
the blinding heaven of the tropics picked out and framed the pictures.
A neat boat, manned by natives in uniform, and steered by the doctor of
the port, put from shore towards three of the afternoon, and pulled
smartly for the schooner. The fore-sheets were heaped with sacks of
flour, onions, and potatoes, perched among which was Huish dressed as a
foremast hand; a heap of chests and cases impeded the action of the
oarsmen; and in the stern, by the left hand of the doctor, sat Herrick,
dressed in a fresh rig of slops, his brown beard trimmed to a point, a
pile of paper novels on his lap, and nursing the while between his feet
a chronometer, for which they had exchanged that of the _Farallone_,
long since run down and the rate lost.
They passed the guard-boat, exchanging hails with the boatswain's mate
in charge, and drew near at last to the forbidden ship. Not a cat
stirred, there was no speech of man; and the sea being exceeding high
outside, and the reef close to where the schooner lay, the clamour of
the surf hung round her like the sound of battle.
"_Ohé la goëlette!_" sang out the doctor, with his best voice.
Instantly, from the house where they had been stowing away stores, first
Davis, and then the ragamuffin, swarthy crew made their appearance.
"Hullo, Hay, that you?" said the captain, leaning on the rail. "Tell the
old man to lay her alongside, as if she was eggs. There's a hell of a
run of sea here, and his boat's brittle."
The movement of the schooner was at that time more than usually violent.
Now she heaved her side as high as a deep-sea steamer's, and showed the
flashing of her copper; now she swung swiftly towards the boat until her
scuppers gurgled.
"I hope you have sea-legs," observed the doctor. "You will require
them."
Indeed, to board the _Farallone_, in that exposed position where she
lay, was an affair of some dexterity. The less precious goods were
hoisted roughly; the chronometer, after repeated failures, was passed
gently and successfully from hand to hand; and there remained only the
more difficult business of embarking Huish. Even that piece of dead
weight (shipped A.B. at eighteen dollars, and described by the captain
to the consul as an invaluable man) was at last hauled on board without
mishap; and the doctor, with civil salutations, took his leave.
The three co-adventurers looked at each other, and Davis heaved a breath
of relief.
"Now let's get this chronometer fixed," said he, and led the way into
the house. It was a fairly spacious place; two state-rooms and a
good-sized pantry opened from the main cabin; the bulk-heads were
painted white, the floor laid with waxcloth. No litter, no sign of life
remained; for the effects of the dead men had been disinfected and
conveyed on shore. Only on the table, in a saucer, some sulphur burned,
and the fumes set them coughing as they entered. The captain peered into
the starboard state-room, where the bed-clothes still lay tumbled in the
bunk, the blanket flung back as they had flung it back from the
disfigured corpse before its burial.
"Now, I told these niggers to tumble that truck overboard," grumbled
Davis. "Guess they were afraid to lay hands on it. Well, they've hosed
the place out; that's as much as can be expected, I suppose. Huish, lay
on to these blankets."
"See you blooming well far enough first," said Huish, drawing back.
"What's that?" snapped the captain. "I'll tell you, my young friend, I
think you make a mistake. I'm captain here."
"Fat lot I care," returned the clerk.
"That so?" said Davis. "Then you'll berth forward with the niggers! Walk
right out of this cabin."
"O, I dessay!" said Huish. "See any green in my eye? A lark's a lark."
"Well, now, I'll explain this business, and you'll see, once for all,
just precisely how much lark there is to it," said Davis. "I'm captain,
and I'm going to be it. One thing of three. First, you take my orders
here as cabin steward, in which case you mess with us. Or, second, you
refuse, and I pack you forward--and you get as quick as the word's said.
Or, third and last, I'll signal that man-of-war and send you ashore
under arrest for mutiny."
"And, of course, I wouldn't blow the gaff? O no!" replied the jeering
Huish.
"And who's to believe you, my son?" inquired the captain. "No, _sir_!
There ain't no larking about my captainising. Enough said. Up with these
blankets."
Huish was no fool, he knew when he was beaten; and he was no coward
either, for he stepped to the bunk, took the infected bed-clothes
fairly in his arms, and carried them out of the house without a check or
tremor.
"I was waiting for the chance," said Davis to Herrick. "I needn't do the
same with you, because you understand it for yourself."
"Are you going to berth here?" asked Herrick, following the captain into
the state-room, where he began to adjust the chronometer in its place at
the bed-head.
"Not much!" replied he. "I guess I'll berth on deck. I don't know as I'm
afraid, but I've no immediate use for confluent small-pox."
"I don't know that I'm afraid either," said Herrick. "But the thought of
these two men sticks in my throat; that captain and mate dying here, one
opposite to the other. It's grim. I wonder what they said last?"
"Wiseman and Wishart?" said the captain. "Probably mighty small
potatoes. That's a thing a fellow figures out for himself one way, and
the real business goes quite another. Perhaps Wiseman said, 'Here, old
man, fetch up the gin, I'm feeling powerful rocky.' And perhaps Wishart
said, 'O, hell!'"
"Well, that's grim enough," said Herrick.
"And so it is," said Davis.--"There; there's that chronometer fixed. And
now it's about time to up anchor and clear out."
He lit a cigar and stepped on deck.
"Here, you! What's _your_ name?" he cried to one of the hands, a
lean-flanked, clean-built fellow from some far western island, and of a
darkness almost approaching to the African.
"Sally Day," replied the man.
"Devil it is," said the captain, "Didn't know we had ladies on
board.--Well, Sally, oblige me by hauling down that rag there. I'll do
the same for you another time." He watched the yellow bunting as it was
eased past the cross-trees and handed down on deck. "You'll float no
more on this ship," he observed. "Muster the people aft, Mr. Hay," he
added, speaking unnecessarily loud, "I've a word to say to them."
It was with a singular sensation that Herrick prepared for the first
time to address a crew. He thanked his stars indeed that they were
natives. But even natives, he reflected, might be critics too quick for
such a novice as himself; they might perceive some lapse from that
precise and cut-and-dry English which prevails on board a ship; it was
even possible they understood no other; and he racked his brain, and
overhauled his reminiscences of sea romance, for some appropriate words.
"Here, men! tumble aft!" he said. "Lively now! all hands aft!"
They crowded in the alleyway like sheep.
"Here they are, sir," said Herrick.
For some time the captain continued to face the stern; then turned with
ferocious suddenness on the crew, and seemed to enjoy their shrinking.
"Now," he said, twisting his cigar in his mouth and toying with the
spokes of the wheel. "I'm Captain Brown. I command this ship. This is
Mr. Hay, first officer. The other white man is cabin steward, but he'll
stand watch and do his trick. My orders shall be obeyed smartly. You
savvy, '_smartly_'? There shall be no growling about the kaikai, which
will be above allowance. You'll put a handle to the mate's name, and
tack on 'sir' to every order I give you. If you're smart and quick, I'll
make this ship comfortable for all hands." He took the cigar out of his
mouth. "If you're not," he added, in a roaring voice, "I'll make it a
floating hell.--Now, Mr. Hay, we'll pick watches, if you please."
"All right," said Herrick.
"You will please use 'sir' when you address me, Mr. Hay," said the
captain. "I'll take the lady. Step to starboard, Sally." And then he
whispered in Herrick's ear, "Take the old man."
"I'll take you, there," said Herrick.
"What's your name?" said the captain. "What's that you say? O, that's
not English; I'll have none of your highway gibberish on my ship. We'll
call you old Uncle Ned, because you've got no wool on the top of your
head, just the place where the wool ought to grow. Step to port, Uncle.
Don't you hear Mr. Hay has picked you? Then I'll take the white man.
White Man, step to starboard. Now, which of you two is the cook? You?
Then Mr. Hay takes your friend in the blue dungaree. Step to port,
Dungaree, There, we know who we all are: Dungaree, Uncle Ned, Sally Day,
White Man, and Cook. All F.F.V.'s I guess. And now, Mr. Hay, we'll up
anchor, if you please."
"For heaven's sake, tell me some of the words," whispered Herrick.
An hour later the _Farallone_ was under all plain sail, the rudder hard
a-port, and the cheerfully-clanking windlass had brought the anchor
home.
"All clear, sir," cried Herrick from the bow.
The captain met her with the wheel, as she bounded like a stag from her
repose, trembling and bending to the puffs. The guard-boat gave a
parting hail, the wake whitened and ran out; the _Farallone_ was under
weigh.
Her berth had been close to the pass. Even as she forged ahead Davis
slewed her for the channel between the pier-ends of the reef, the
breakers sounding and whitening to either hand. Straight through the
narrow band of blue she shot to seaward; and the captain's heart exulted
as he felt her tremble underfoot, and (looking back over the taffrail)
beheld the roofs of Papeete changing position on the shore and the
island mountains rearing higher in the wake.
But they were not yet done with the shore and the horror of the yellow
flag. About midway of the pass there was a cry and a scurry, a man was
seen to leap upon the rail, and, throwing his arms over his head, to
stoop and plunge into the sea.
"Steady as she goes," the captain cried, relinquishing the wheel to
Huish.
The next moment he was forward in the midst of the Kanakas, belaying-pin
in hand.
"Anybody else for shore?" he cried, and the savage trumpeting of his
voice, no less than the ready weapon in his hand, struck fear in all.
Stupidly they stared after their escaped companion, whose black head was
visible upon the water, steering for the land. And the schooner
meanwhile slipped like a racer through the pass, and met the long sea of
the open ocean with a souse of spray.
"Fool that I was, not to have a pistol ready!" exclaimed Davis. "Well,
we go to sea short-handed; we can't help that. You have a lame watch of
it, Mr. Hay."
"I don't see how we are to get along," said Herrick.
"Got to," said the captain. "No more Tahiti for me."
Both turned instinctively and looked astern. The fair island was
unfolding mountain-top on mountain-top; Eimeo, on the port board, lifted
her splintered pinnacles; and still the schooner raced to the open sea.
"Think!" cried the captain, with a gesture, "yesterday morning I danced
for my breakfast like a poodle dog."
CHAPTER V
THE CARGO OF CHAMPAGNE
The ship's head was laid to clear Eimeo to the north, and the captain
sat down in the cabin, with a chart, a ruler, and an epitome.
"East a half no'the," said he, raising his face from his labours. "Mr.
Hay, you'll have to watch your dead reckoning; I want every yard she
makes on every hair's-breadth of a course. I'm going to knock a hole
right straight through the Paumotus, and that's always a near touch.
Now, if this South East Trade ever blew out of the S.E., which it don't,
we might hope to lie within half a point of our course. Say we lie
within a point of it. That'll just about weather Fakarava. Yes, sir,
that's what we've got to do, if we tack for it. Brings us through this
slush of little islands in the cleanest place: see?" And he showed where
his ruler intersected the wide-lying labyrinth of the Dangerous
Archipelago. "I wish it was night, and I could put her about right now;
we're losing time and easting. Well, we'll do our best. And if we don't
fetch Peru, we'll bring up to Ecuador. All one, I guess. Depreciated
dollars down, and no questions asked. A remarkable fine institootion,
the South American don."
Tahiti was already some way astern, the Diadem rising from among broken
mountains--Eimeo was already close aboard, and stood black and strange
against the golden splendour of the west--when the captain took his
departure from the two islands, and the patent log was set.
Some twenty minutes later, Sally Day, who was continually leaving the
wheel to peer in at the cabin clock, announced in a shrill cry "Fo'
bell," and the cook was to be seen carrying the soup into the cabin.
"I guess I'll sit down and have a pick with you," said Davis to Herrick.
"By the time I've done it'll be dark, and we'll clap the hooker on the
wind for South America."
In the cabin at one corner of the table, immediately below the lamp, and
on the lee side of a bottle of champagne, sat Huish.
"What's this? Where did that come from?" asked the captain.
"It's fizz, and it came from the after-'old, if you want to know," said
Huish, and drained his mug.
"This'll never do," exclaimed Davis, the merchant seaman's horror of
breaking into cargo showing incongruously forth on board that stolen
ship. "There was never any good came of games like that."
"You byby!" said Huish. "A fellow would think (to 'ear him) we were on
the square! And look 'ere, you've put this job up 'ansomely for me,
'aven't you? I'm to go on deck and steer, while you two sit and guzzle,
and I'm to go by a nickname, and got to call you 'sir' and 'mister.'
Well, you look here, my bloke: I'll have fizz _ad lib._, or it won't
wash. I tell you that. And you know mighty well, you ain't got any
man-of-war to signal now."
Davis was staggered. "I'd give fifty dollars this had never happened,"
he said weakly.
"Well, it _'as_ 'appened, you see," returned Huish. "Try some; it's
devilish good."
The Rubicon was crossed without another struggle. The captain filled a
mug and drank.
"I wish it was beer," he said with a sigh. "But there's no denying it's
the genuine stuff and cheap at the money. Now, Huish, you clear out and
take your wheel."
The little wretch had gained a point, and he was gay. "Ay, ay, sir,"
said he, and left the others to their meal.
"Pea-soup!" exclaimed the captain. "Blamed if I thought I should taste
pea-soup again!"
Herrick sat inert and silent. It was impossible after these months of
hopeless want to smell the rough, high-spiced sea victuals without lust,
and his mouth watered with desire of the champagne. It was no less
impossible to have assisted at the scene between Huish and the captain,
and not to perceive, with sudden bluntness, the gulf where he had
fallen. He was a thief among thieves. He said it to himself. He could
not touch the soup. If he had moved at all, it must have been to leave
the table, throw himself overboard, and drown--an honest man.
"Here," said the captain, "you look sick, old man; have a drop of this."
The champagne creamed and bubbled in the mug; its bright colour, its
lively effervescence, seized his eye. "It is too late to hesitate," he
thought; his hand took the mug instinctively; he drank, with
unquenchable pleasure and desire of more; drained the vessel dry, and
set it down with sparkling eyes.
"There is something in life after all!" he cried. "I had forgot what it
was like. Yes, even this is worth while. Wine, food, dry clothes--why,
they're worth dying, worth hanging for! Captain, tell me one thing: why
aren't all the poor folk foot-pads?"
"Give it up," said the captain.
"They must be damned good," cried Herrick. "There's something here
beyond me. Think of that calaboose! Suppose we were sent suddenly back."
He shuddered as stung by a convulsion, and buried his face in his
clutching hands.
"Here, what's wrong with you?" cried the captain. There was no reply;
only Herrick's shoulders heaved, so that the table was shaken. "Take
some more of this. Here, drink this. I order you to. Don't start crying
when you're out of the wood."
"I'm not crying," said Herrick, raising his face and showing his dry
eyes. "It's worse than crying. It's the horror of that grave that we've
escaped from."
"Come now, you tackle your soup; that'll fix you," said Davis kindly. "I
told you you were all broken up. You couldn't have stood out another
week."
"That's the dreadful part of it!" cried Herrick. "Another week and I'd
have murdered some one for a dollar! God! and I know that? And I'm still
living? It's some beastly dream."
"Quietly, quietly! Quietly does it, my son. Take your pea-soup. Food,
that's what you want," said Davis.
The soup strengthened and quieted Herrick's nerves; another glass of
wine, and a piece of pickled pork and fried banana completed what the
soup began; and he was able once more to look the captain in the face.
"I didn't know I was so much run down," he said.
"Well," said Davis, "you were as steady as a rock all day: now you've
had a little lunch, you'll be as steady as a rock again."
"Yes," was the reply, "I'm steady enough now, but I'm a queer kind of a
first officer."
"Shucks!" cried the captain. "You've only got to mind the ship's course,
and keep your slate to half a point. A babby could do that, let alone a
college graduate like you. There ain't nothing _to_ sailoring, when you
come to look it in the face. And now we'll go and put her about. Bring
the slate; we'll have to start our dead reckoning right away."
The distance run since the departure was read off the log by the
binnacle light and entered on the slate.
"Ready about," said the captain. "Give me the wheel, White Man, and you
stand by the mainsheet. Boom tackle, Mr. Hay, please, and then you can
jump forward and attend head sails."
"Ay, ay, sir," responded Herrick.
"All clear forward?" asked Davis.
"All clear, sir."
"Hard a-lee!" cried the captain. "Haul in your slack as she comes," he
called to Huish. "Haul in your slack, put your back into it; keep your
feet out of the coils." A sudden blow sent Huish flat along the deck,
and the captain was in his place. "Pick yourself up and keep the wheel
hard over!" he roared. "You wooden fool, you wanted to get killed, I
guess. Draw the jib," he cried a moment later; and then to Huish, "Give
me the wheel again, and see if you can coil that sheet."
But Huish stood and looked at Davis with an evil countenance. "Do you
know you struck me?" said he.
"Do you know I saved your life?" returned the other, not deigning to
look at him, his eyes travelling instead between the compass and the
sails. "Where would you have been if that boom had swung out and you
bundled in the slack? No, _sir_, we'll have no more of you at the
mainsheet. Seaport towns are full of mainsheet-men; they hop upon one
leg, my son, what's left of them, and the rest are dead. (Set your boom
tackle, Mr. Hay.) Struck you, did I? Lucky for you I did."
"Well," said Huish slowly, "I dessay there may be somethink in that.
'Ope there is." He turned his back elaborately on the captain, and
entered the house, where the speedy explosion of a champagne cork showed
he was attending to his comfort.
Herrick came aft to the captain. "How is she doing now?" he asked.
"East and by no'the a half no'the," said Davis. "It's about as good as I
expected."
"What'll the hands think of it?" said Herrick.
"O, they don't think. They ain't paid to," says the captain.
"There was something wrong, was there not? between you and--" Herrick
paused.
"That's a nasty little beast; that's a biter," replied the captain,
shaking his head. "But so long as you and me hang in, it don't matter."
Herrick lay down in the weather alleyway; the night was cloudless, the
movement of the ship cradled him, he was oppressed besides by the first
generous meal after so long a time of famine; and he was recalled from
deep sleep by the voice of Davis singing out: "Eight bells!"
He rose stupidly and staggered aft, where the captain gave him the
wheel.
"By the wind," said the captain. "It comes a little puffy; when you get
a heavy puff, steal all you can to windward, but keep her a good full."
He stepped towards the house, paused and hailed the forecastle.
"Got such a thing as a concertina forward?" said he. "Bully for you,
Uncle Ned. Fetch it aft, will you?"
The schooner steered very easy; and Herrick, watching the moon-whitened
sails, was overpowered by drowsiness. A sharp report from the cabin
startled him; a third bottle had been opened; and Herrick remembered the
_Sea Ranger_ and Fourteen Island Group. Presently the notes of the
accordion sounded, and then the captain's voice:
"O honey, with our pockets full of money,
We will trip, trip, trip, we will trip it on the quay,
And I will dance with Kate, and Tom will dance with Sall,
When we're all back from South Amerikee."
So it went to its quaint air; and the watch below lingered and listened
by the forward door, and Uncle Ned was to be seen in the moonlight
nodding time; and Herrick smiled at the wheel, his anxieties a while
forgotten. Song followed song; another cork exploded; there were voices
raised, as though the pair in the cabin were in disagreement: and
presently it seemed the breach was healed; for it was now the voice of
Huish that struck up, to the captain's accompaniment:--
"Up in a balloon, boys,
Up in a balloon,
All among the little stars
And round about the moon."
A wave of nausea overcame Herrick at the wheel. He wondered why the air,
the words (which were yet written with a certain knack), and the voice
and accent of the singer, should all jar his spirit like a file on a
man's teeth. He sickened at the thought of his two comrades drinking
away their reason upon stolen wine, quarrelling and hiccupping and
waking up, while the doors of a prison yawned for them in the near
future. "Shall I have sold my honour for nothing?" he thought; and a
heat of rage and resolution glowed in his bosom--rage against his
comrades--resolution to carry through this business if it might be
carried; pluck profit out of shame, since the shame at least was now
inevitable; and come home, home from South America--how did the song
go?--"with his pockets full of money."
"O honey, with our pockets full of money,
We will trip, trip, trip, we will trip it on the quay":
so the words ran in his head; and the honey took on visible form, the
quay rose before him and he knew it for the lamp-lit Embankment, and he
saw the lights of Battersea bridge bestride the sullen river. All
through the remainder of his trick he stood entranced, reviewing the
past. He had been always true to his love, but not always sedulous to
recall her. In the growing calamity of his life, she had swum more
distant, like the moon in mist. The letter of farewell, the
dishonourable hope that had surprised and corrupted him in his distress,
the changed scene, the sea, the night and the music--all stirred him to
the roots of manhood. "I _will_ win her," he thought, and ground his
teeth. "Fair or foul, what matters if I win her?"
"Fo' bell, matey. I think um fo' bell"--he was suddenly recalled by
these words in the voice of Uncle Ned.
"Look in at the clock, Uncle," said he. He would not look himself, from
horror of the tipplers.
"Him past, matey," repeated the Hawaiian.
"So much the better for you, Uncle," he replied; and he gave up the
wheel, repeating the directions as he had received them.
He took two steps forward and remembered his dead reckoning. "How has
she been heading?" he thought; and he flushed from head to foot. He had
not observed or had forgotten; here was the old incompetence; the slate
must be filled up by guess. "Never again!" he vowed to himself in silent
fury, "never again. It shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry." And
for the remainder of his watch he stood close by Uncle Ned, and read the
face of the compass as perhaps he had never read a letter from his
sweetheart.
All the time, and spurring him to the more attention, song, loud talk,
fleering laughter, and the occasional popping of a cork, reached his
ears from the interior of the house; and when the port watch was
relieved at midnight, Huish and the captain appeared upon the
quarter-deck with flushed faces and uneven steps, the former laden with
bottles, the latter with two tin mugs. Herrick silently passed them by.
They hailed him in thick voices, he made no answer; they cursed him for
a churl, he paid no heed although his belly quivered with disgust and
rage. He closed-to the door of the house behind him, and cast himself on
a locker in the cabin--not to sleep, he thought--rather to think and to
despair. Yet he had scarce turned twice on his uneasy bed, before a
drunken voice hailed him in the ear, and he must go on deck again to
stand the morning watch.
The first evening set the model for those that were to follow. Two cases
of champagne scarce lasted the four-and-twenty hours, and almost the
whole was drunk by Huish and the captain. Huish seemed to thrive on the
excess; he was never sober, yet never wholly tipsy; the food and the sea
air had soon healed him of his disease, and he began to lay on flesh.
But with Davis things went worse. In the drooping, unbuttoned figure
that sprawled all day upon the lockers, tippling and reading novels; in
the fool who made of the evening watch a public carouse on the
quarter-deck, it would have been hard to recognise the vigorous seaman
of Papeete roads. He kept himself reasonably well in hand till he had
taken the sun and yawned and blotted through his calculations; but from
the moment he rolled up the chart, his hours were passed in slavish
self-indulgence or in hoggish slumber. Every other branch of his duty
was neglected, except maintaining a stern discipline about the
dinner-table. Again and again Herrick would hear the cook called aft,
and see him running with fresh tins, or carrying away again a meal that
had been totally condemned. And the more the captain became sunk in
drunkenness, the more delicate his palate showed itself. Once, in the
forenoon, he had a bo'sun's chair rigged over the rail, stripped to his
trousers, and went overboard with a pot of paint. "I don't like the way
this schooner's painted," said he, "and I've taken a down upon her
name." But he tired of it in half an hour, and the schooner went on her
way with an incongruous patch of colour on the stern, and the word
_Farallone_ part obliterated and part looking through. He refused to
stand either the middle or morning watch. It was fine-weather sailing,
he said; and asked, with a laugh, "Who ever heard of the old man
standing watch himself?" To the dead reckoning which Herrick still tried
to keep, he would pay not the least attention nor afford the least
assistance.
"What do we want of dead reckoning?" he asked. "We get the sun all
right, don't we?"
"We mayn't get it always, though," objected Herrick. "And you told me
yourself you weren't sure of the chronometer."
"O, there ain't no flies in the chronometer!" cried Davis.
"Oblige me so far, captain," said Herrick stiffly. "I am anxious to keep
this reckoning, which is a part of my duty; I do not know what to allow
for current, nor how to allow for it. I am too inexperienced; and I beg
of you to help me."
"Never discourage zealous officer," said the captain, unrolling the
chart again, for Herrick had taken him over his day's work, and while
he was still partly sober. "Here it is: look for yourself; anything from
west to west no'thewest, and anyways from five to twenty-five miles.
That's what the A'm'ralty chart says; I guess you don't expect to get on
ahead of your own Britishers?"
"I am trying to do my duty, Captain Brown," said Herrick, with a dark
flush, "and I have the honour to inform you that I don't enjoy being
trifled with."
"What in thunder do you want?" roared Davis. "Go and look at the blamed
wake. If you're trying to do your duty, why don't you go and do it? I
guess it's no business of mine to go and stick my head over the ship's
rump? I guess it's yours. And I'll tell you what it is, my fine fellow,
I'll trouble you not to come the dude over me. You're insolent, that's
what's wrong with you. Don't you crowd me, Mr. Herrick, Esquire."
Herrick tore up his papers, threw them on the floor, and left the cabin.
"He's turned a bloomin' swot, ain't he?" sneered Huish.
"He thinks himself too good for his company, that's what ails Herrick,
Esquire," raged the captain. "He thinks I don't understand when he comes
the heavy swell. Won't sit down with us, won't he? won't say a civil
word? I'll serve the son of a gun as he deserves. By God, Huish, I'll
show him whether he's too good for John Davis!"
"Easy with the names, cap'," said Huish, who was always the more sober.
"Easy over the stones, my boy!"
"All right, I will. You're a good sort, Huish. I didn't take to you at
first, but I guess you're right enough. Let's open another bottle," said
the captain; and that day, perhaps because he was excited by the
quarrel, he drank more recklessly, and by four o'clock was stretched
insensible upon the locker.
Herrick and Huish supped alone, one after the other, opposite his
flushed and snorting body. And if the sight killed Herrick's hunger,
the isolation weighed so heavily on the clerk's spirit that he was
scarce risen from table ere he was currying favour with his former
comrade.
Herrick was at the wheel when he approached, and Huish leaned
confidentially across the binnacle.
"I say, old chappie," he said, "you and me don't seem to be such pals
somehow."
Herrick gave her a spoke or two in silence; his eye, as it skirted from
the needle to the luff of the foresail, passed the man by without
speculation. But Huish was really dull, a thing he could support with
difficulty, having no resources of his own. The idea of a private talk
with Herrick, at this stage of their relations, held out particular
inducements to a person of his character. Drink besides, as it renders
some men hyper-sensitive, made Huish callous. And it would almost have
required a blow to make him quit his purpose.
"Pretty business, ain't it?" he continued; "Dyvis on the lush? Must say
I thought you gave it 'im A1 to-day. He didn't like it a bit; took on
hawful after you were gone.--' 'Ere,' says I, ''old on, easy on the
lush,' I says. ''Errick was right and you know it. Give 'im a chanst,' I
says.--' 'Uish,' sezee, 'don't you gimme no more of your jaw, or I'll
knock your bloomin' eyes out.' Well, wot can I do, 'Errick? But I tell
you, I don't 'arf like it. It looks to me like the _Sea Rynger_ over
again."
Still Herrick was silent.
"Do you 'ear me speak?" asked Huish sharply. "You're pleasant, ain't
you?"
"Stand away from that binnacle," said Herrick.
The clerk looked at him long and straight and black; his figure seemed
to writhe like that of a snake about to strike; then he turned on his
heel, went back to the cabin and opened a bottle of champagne. When
eight bells were cried he slept on the floor beside the captain on the
locker; and of the whole starboard watch only Sally Day appeared upon
the summons. The mate proposed to stand the watch with him, and let
Uncle Ned lie down; it would make twelve hours on deck, and probably
sixteen, but in this fair-weather sailing he might safely sleep between
his tricks of wheel, leaving orders to be called on any sign of squalls.
So far he could trust the men, between whom and himself a close relation
had sprung up. With Uncle Ned he held long nocturnal conversations, and
the old man told him his simple and hard story of exile, suffering, and
injustice among cruel whites. The cook, when he found Herrick messed
alone, produced for him unexpected and sometimes unpalatable dainties,
of which he forced himself to eat. And one day, when he was forward, he
was surprised to feel a caressing hand run down his shoulder, and to
hear the voice of Sally Day crooning in his ear: "You gootch man!" He
turned, and, choking down a sob, shook hands with the negrito. They were
kindly, cheery, childish souls. Upon the Sunday each brought forth his
separate Bible--for they were all men of alien speech, even to each
other, and Sally Day communicated with his mates in English only; each
read or made-believe to read his chapter, Uncle Ned with spectacles on
his nose; and they would all join together in the singing of missionary
hymns. It was thus a cutting reproof to compare the islanders and the
whites aboard the _Farallone_. Shame ran in Herrick's blood to remember
what employment he was on, and to see these poor souls--and even Sally
Day, the child of cannibals, in all likelihood a cannibal himself--so
faithful to what they knew of good. The fact that he was held in
grateful favour by these innocents served like blinders to his
conscience, and there were times when he was inclined, with Sally Day,
to call himself a good man. But the height of his favour was only now to
appear. With one voice, the crew protested; ere Herrick knew what they
were doing, the cook was aroused and came a willing volunteer; all hands
clustered about their mate with expostulations and caresses; and he was
bidden to lie down and take his customary rest without alarm.
"He tell you tlue," said Uncle Ned. "You sleep. Evely man hea he do all
light. Evely man he like you too much."
Herrick struggled, and gave way; choked upon some trivial words of
gratitude; and walked to the side of the house, against which he leaned,
struggling with emotion.
Uncle Ned presently followed him and begged him to lie down.
"It's no use, Uncle Ned," he replied. "I couldn't sleep. I'm knocked
over with all your goodness."
"Ah, no call me Uncle Ned no mo'!" cried the old man. "No my name! My
name Taveeta, all-e-same Taveeta King of Islael. Wat for he call that
Hawaii? I think no savvy nothing--all-e-same Wise-a-mana."
It was the first time the name of the late captain had been mentioned,
and Herrick grasped the occasion. The reader shall be spared Uncle Ned's
unwieldy dialect, and learn in less embarrassing English the sum of what
he now communicated. The ship had scarce cleared the Golden Gates before
the captain and mate had entered on a career of drunkenness, which was
scarcely interrupted by their malady and only closed by death. For days
and weeks they had encountered neither land nor ship; and seeing
themselves lost on the huge deep with their insane conductors, the
natives had drunk deep of terror.
At length they made a low island and went in; and Wiseman and Wishart
landed in the boat.
There was a great village, a very fine village, and plenty Kanakas in
that place; but all mighty serious; and from every here and there in the
back parts of the settlement, Taveeta heard the sounds of island
lamentation. "I no savvy _talk_ that island," said he. "I savvy hear um
_cly_. I think, Hum! too many people die here!" But upon Wiseman and
Wishart the significance of that barbaric keening was lost. Full of
bread and drink, they rollicked along unconcerned, embraced the girls,
who had scarce energy to repel them, took up and joined (with drunken
voices) in the death-wail, and at last (on what they took to be an
invitation) entered under the roof of a house in which was a
considerable concourse of people sitting silent. They stooped below the
eaves, flushed and laughing; within a minute they came forth again with
changed faces and silent tongues; and as the press severed to make way
for them, Taveeta was able to perceive, in the deep shadow of the house,
the sick man raising from his mat a head already defeatured by disease.
The two tragic triflers fled without hesitation for their boat,
screaming on Taveeta to make haste; they came aboard with all speed of
oars, raised anchor and crowded sail upon the ship with blows and
curses, and were at sea again--and again drunk--before sunset. A week
after, and the last of the two had been committed to the deep. Herrick
asked Taveeta where that island was, and he replied that, by what he
gathered of folks' talk as they went up together from the beach, he
supposed it must be one of the Paumotus. This was in itself probable
enough, for the Dangerous Archipelago had been swept that year from east
to west by devastating small-pox; but Herrick thought it a strange
course to lie from Sydney. Then he remembered the drink.
"Were they not surprised when they made the island?" he asked.
"Wise-a-mana he say, 'damn! what this?'" was the reply.
"O, that's it, then," said Herrick. "I don't believe they knew where
they were."
"I think so too," said Uncle Ned. "I think no savvy. This one mo'
betta," he added, pointing to the house, where the drunken captain
slumbered: "Take-a-sun all-e-time."
The implied last touch completed Herrick's picture of the life and death
of his two predecessors; of their prolonged, sordid, sodden sensuality
as they sailed, they knew not whither, on their last cruise. He held but
a twinkling and unsure belief in any future state; the thought of one of
punishment he derided; yet for him (as for all) there dwelt a horror
about the end of the brutish man. Sickness fell upon him at the image
thus called up; and when he compared it with the scene in which he
himself was acting, and considered the doom that seemed to brood upon
the schooner, a horror that was almost superstitious fell upon him. And
yet the strange thing was, he did not falter. He who had proved his
incapacity in so many fields, being now falsely placed amid duties which
he did not understand, without help, and it might be said without
countenance, had hitherto surpassed expectation; and even the shameful
misconduct and shocking disclosures of that night seemed but to nerve
and strengthen him. He had sold his honour; he vowed it should not be in
vain; "it shall be no fault of mine if this miscarry," he repeated. And
in his heart he wondered at himself. Living rage no doubt supported him;
no doubt also, the sense of the last cast, of the ships burned, of all
doors closed but one, which is so strong a tonic to the merely weak, and
so deadly a depressent to the merely cowardly.
For some time the voyage went otherwise well. They weathered Fakarava
with one board; and the wind holding well to the southward, and blowing
fresh, they passed between Ranaka and Ratiu, and ran some days
north-east by east-half-east under the lee of Takume and Honden, neither
of which they made. In about 14° south, and between 134° and 135° west,
it fell a dead calm, with rather a heavy sea. The captain refused to
take in sail, the helm was lashed, no watch was set, and the _Farallone_
rolled and banged for three days, according to observation, in almost
the same place. The fourth morning, a little before day, a breeze sprang
up and rapidly freshened. The captain had drunk hard the night before;
he was far from sober when he was roused; and when he came on deck for
the first time at half-past eight, it was plain he had already drunk
deep again at breakfast. Herrick avoided his eye; and resigned the deck
with indignation to a man more than half-seas-over.
By the loud commands of the captain and the singing out of fellows at
the ropes, he could judge from the house that sail was being crowded on
the ship; relinquished his half-eaten breakfast; and came on deck
again, to find the main and the jib topsails set, and both watches and
the cook turned out to hand the staysail. The _Farallone_ lay already
far over; the sky was obscured with misty scud; and from the windward an
ominous squall came flying up, broadening and blackening as it rose.
Fear thrilled in Herrick's vitals. He saw death hard by; and if not
death, sure ruin. For if the _Farallone_ lived through the coming
squall, she must surely be dismasted. With that their enterprise was at
an end, and they themselves bound prisoners to the very evidence of
their crime. The greatness of the peril and his own alarm sufficed to
silence him. Pride, wrath, and shame raged without issue in his mind;
and he shut his teeth and folded his arms close.
The captain sat in the boat to windward, bellowing orders and insults,
his eyes glazed, his face deeply congested; a bottle set between his
knees, a glass in his hand half empty. His back was to the squall, and
he was at first intent upon the setting of the sail. When that was done,
and the great trapezium of canvas had begun to draw and to trail the
lee-rail of the _Farallone_ level with the foam, he laughed out an empty
laugh, drained his glass, sprawled back among the lumber in the boat,
and fetched out a crumpled novel.
Herrick watched him, and his indignation glowed red-hot. He glanced to
windward where the squall already whitened the near sea and heralded its
coming with a singular and dismal sound. He glanced at the steersman,
and saw him clinging to the spokes with a face of a sickly blue. He saw
the crew were running to their stations without orders. And it seemed as
if something broke in his brain; and the passion of anger, so long
restrained, so long eaten in secret, burst suddenly loose and shook him
like a sail. He stepped across to the captain, and smote his hand
heavily on the drunkard's shoulder.
"You brute," he said, in a voice that tottered, "look behind you!"
"Wha's that?" cried Davis, bounding in the boat and upsetting the
champagne.
"You lost the _Sea Ranger_ because you were a drunken sot," said
Herrick. "Now you're going to lose the _Farallone_. You're going to
drown here the same way as you drowned others, and be damned. And your
daughter shall walk the streets, and your sons be thieves like their
father."
For the moment the words struck the captain white and foolish. "My God!"
he cried, looking at Herrick as upon a ghost; "my God, Herrick!"
"Look behind you, then!" reiterated the assailant.
The wretched man, already partly sobered, did as he was told, and in the
same breath of time leaped to his feet. "Down staysail!" he trumpeted.
The hands were thrilling for the order, and the great sail came with a
run, and fell half overboard among the racing foam. "Jib top-sail
halyards! Let the stays'l be," he said again.
But before it was well uttered, the squall shouted aloud and fell, in a
solid mass of wind and rain commingled, on the _Farallone_; and she
stooped under the blow, and lay like a thing dead. From the mind of
Herrick reason fled; he clung in the weather rigging, exulting; he was
done with life, and he gloried in the release; he gloried in the wild
noises of the wind and the choking onslaught of the rain; he gloried to
die so, and now, amid this coil of the elements. And meanwhile, in the
waist, up to his knees in water--so low the schooner lay--the captain
was hacking at the fore-sheet with a pocket-knife. It was a question of
seconds, for the _Farallone_ drank deep of the encroaching seas. But the
hand of the captain had the advance; the foresail boom tore apart the
last strands of the sheet and crashed to lee-ward; the _Farallone_
leaped up into the wind and righted; and the peak and throat halyards,
which had long been let go, began to run at the same instant.
For some ten minutes more she careered under the impulse of the squall;
but the captain was now master of himself and of his ship, and all
danger at an end. And then, sudden as a trick-change upon the stage,
the squall blew by, the wind dropped into light airs, the sun beamed
forth again upon the tattered schooner; and the captain, having secured
the foresail boom and set a couple of hands to the pump, walked aft,
sober, a little pale, and with the sodden end of a cigar still stuck
between his teeth even as the squall had found it. Herrick followed him;
he could scarce recall the violence of his late emotions, but he felt
there was a scene to go through, and he was anxious and even eager to go
through with it.
The captain, turning at the house-end, met him face to face, and averted
his eyes. "We've lost the two tops'ls, and the stays'l," he gabbled.
"Good business we didn't lose any sticks. I guess you think we're all
the better without the kites."
"That's not what I'm thinking," said Herrick, in a voice strangely
quiet, that yet echoed confusion in the captain's mind.
"I know that," he cried, holding up his hand. "I know what you're
thinking. No use to say it now. I'm sober."
"I have to say it, though," returned Herrick.
"Hold on, Herrick; you've said enough," said Davis. "You've said what I
would take from no man breathing but yourself; only I know it's true."
"I have to tell you, Captain Brown," pursued Herrick, "that I resign my
position as mate. You can put me in irons or shoot me, as you please; I
will make no resistance--only, I decline in any way to help or to obey
you; and I suggest you should put Mr. Huish in my place. He will make a
worthy first officer to your captain, sir." He smiled, bowed, and turned
to walk forward.
"Where are you going, Herrick?" cried the captain, detaining him by the
shoulder.
"To berth forward with the men, sir," replied Herrick, with the same
hateful smile. "I've been long enough aft here with you--gentlemen."
"You're wrong there," said Davis. "Don't you be too quick with me;
there ain't nothing wrong but the drink--it's the old story, man! Let me
get sober once and then you'll see," he pleaded.
"Excuse me, I desire to see no more of you," said Herrick.
The captain groaned aloud. "You know what you said about my children?"
he broke out.
"By rote. In case you wish me to say it to you again?" asked Herrick.
"Don't!" cried the captain clapping his hands to his ears. "Don't make
me kill a man I care for! Herrick, if you see me put a glass to my lips
again till we're ashore, I give you leave to put a bullet through me; I
beg you to do it! You're the only man aboard whose carcase is worth
losing; do you think I don't know that? do you think I ever went back on
you? I always knew you were in the right of it--drunk or sober, I knew
that. What do you want?--an oath? Man, you're clever enough to see that
this is sure-enough earnest."
"Do you mean there shall be no more drinking?" asked Herrick, "neither
by you nor Huish? that you won't go on stealing my profits and drinking
my champagne that I gave my honour for? and that you'll attend to your
duties, and stand watch and watch, and bear your proper share of the
ship's work, instead of leaving it all on the shoulders of a landsman,
and making yourself the butt and scoff of native seamen? Is that what
you mean? If it is, be so good as to say it categorically."
"You put these things in a way hard for a gentleman to swallow," said
the captain. "You wouldn't have me say I was ashamed of myself? Trust me
this once; I'll do the square thing, and there's my hand on it."
"Well, I'll try it once," said Herrick. "Fail me again...."
"No more now!" interrupted Davis. "No more, old man! Enough said. You've
a riling tongue when your back's up, Herrick. Just be glad we're friends
again, the same as what I am; and go tender on the raws; I'll see as
you don't repent it. We've been mighty near death this day--don't say
whose fault it was!--pretty near hell, too, I guess. We're in a mighty
bad line of life, us two, and ought to go easy with each other."
He was maundering; yet it seemed as if he were maundering with some
design, beating about the bush of some communication that he feared to
make, or perhaps only talking against time in terror of what Herrick
might say next. But Herrick had now spat his venom; his was a kindly
nature, and, content with his triumph, he had now begun to pity. With a
few soothing words he sought to conclude the interview, and proposed
that they should change their clothes.
"Not right yet," said Davis. "There's another thing I want to tell you
first. You know what you said about my children? I want to tell you why
it hit me so hard; I kind of think you'll feel bad about it too. It's
about my little Adar. You hadn't ought to have quite said that--but of
course I know you didn't know. She--she's dead, you see."
"Why, Davis!" cried Herrick. "You've told me a dozen times she was
alive! Clear your head, man! This must be the drink."
"No, _sir_," said Davis. "She's dead. Died of a bowel complaint. That
was when I was away in the brig _Oregon_. She lies in Portland, Maine.
'Adar, only daughter of Captain John Davis and Mariar his wife, aged
five.' I had a doll for her on board. I never took the paper off'n that
doll, Herrick; it went down the way it was with the _Sea Ranger_, that
day I was damned."
The captain's eyes were fixed on the horizon; he talked with an
extraordinary softness, but a complete composure; and Herrick looked
upon him with something that was almost terror.
"Don't think I'm crazy neither," resumed Davis. "I've all the cold sense
that I know what to do with. But I guess a man that's unhappy's like a
child; and this is a kind of a child's game of mine. I never could act
up to the plain-cut truth, you see; so I pretend. And I warn you square;
as soon as we're through with this talk, I'll start in again with the
pretending. Only, you see, she can't walk no streets," added the
captain, "couldn't even make out to live and get that doll!"
Herrick laid a tremulous hand upon the captain's shoulder.
"Don't do that!" cried Davis, recoiling from the touch. "Can't you see
I'm all broken up the way it is? Come along, then; come along, old man;
you can put your trust in me right through; come along and get dry
clothes."
They entered the cabin, and there was Huish on his knees prizing open a
case of champagne.
"'Vast there!" cried the captain. "No more of that. No more drinking on
this ship."
"Turned teetotal, 'ave you?" inquired Huish. "I'm agreeable. About time,
eh? Bloomin' nearly lost another ship, I fancy." He took out a bottle
and began calmly to burst the wire with the spike of a corkscrew.
"Do you hear me speak?" cried Davis.
"I suppose I do. You speak loud enough," said Huish. "The trouble is
that I don't care."
Herrick plucked the captain's sleeve. "Let him free now," he said.
"We've had all we want this morning."
"Let him have it, then," said the captain. "It's his last."
By this time the wire was open, the string was cut, the head of gilded
paper was torn away; and Huish waited, mug in hand, expecting the usual
explosion. It did not follow. He eased the cork with his thumb; still
there was no result. At last he took the screw and drew it. It came out
very easy and with scarce a sound.
"'Illo!" said Huish. "'Ere's a bad bottle."
He poured some of the wine into the mug; it was colourless and still. He
smelt and tasted it.
"W'y, wot's this?" he said. "It's water!"
If the voice of trumpets had suddenly sounded about the ship in the
midst of the sea, the three men in the house could scarcely have been
more stunned than by this incident. The mug passed round; each sipped,
each smelt of it; each stared at the bottle in its glory of gold paper
as Crusoe may have stared at the footprint; and their minds were swift
to fix upon a common apprehension. The difference between a bottle of
champagne and a bottle of water is not great; between a shipload of one
or of the other lay the whole scale from riches to ruin.
A second bottle was broached. There were two cases standing ready in a
state-room; these two were brought out, broken open, and tested. Still
with the same result: the contents were still colourless and tasteless,
and dead as the rain in a beached fishing-boat.
"Crikey!" said Huish.
"Here, let's sample the hold," said the captain, mopping his brow with a
back-handed sweep; and the three stalked out of the house, grim and
heavy-footed.
All hands were turned out; two Kanakas were sent below, another
stationed at a purchase; and Davis, axe in hand, took his place beside
the coamings.
"Are you going to let the men know?" whispered Herrick.
"Damn the men!" said Davis. "It's beyond that. We've got to know
ourselves."
Three cases were sent on deck and sampled in turn; from each bottle, as
the captain smashed it with the axe, the champagne ran bubbling and
creaming.
"Go deeper, can't you?" cried Davis to the Kanakas in the hold.
The command gave the signal for a disastrous change. Case after case
came up, bottle after bottle was burst, and bled mere water. Deeper yet,
and they came upon a layer where there was scarcely so much as the
intention to deceive; where the cases were no longer branded, the
bottles no longer wired or papered, where the fraud was manifest and
stared them in the face.
"Here's about enough of this foolery!" said Davis. "Stow back the cases
in the hold, Uncle, and get the broken crockery overboard. Come with
me," he added to his co-adventurers, and led the way back into the
cabin.
CHAPTER VI
THE PARTNERS
Each took a side of the fixed table; it was the first time they had sat
down at it together; but now all sense of incongruity, all memory of
differences, was quite swept away by the presence of the common ruin.
"Gentlemen," said the captain, after a pause, and with very much the air
of a chairman opening a board meeting, "we're sold."
Huish broke out in laughter. "Well, if this ain't the 'ighest old rig!"
he cried. "And Dyvis 'ere, who thought he had got up so bloomin' early
in the mornin'! We've stolen a cargo of spring water! O, my crikey!" and
he squirmed with mirth.
The captain managed to screw out a phantom smile.
"Here's Old Man Destiny again," said he to Herrick, "but this time I
guess he's kicked the door right in."
Herrick only shook his head.
"O Lord, it's rich!" laughed Huish. "It would really be a scrumptious
lark if it 'ad 'appened to somebody else! And what are we to do next? O,
my eye! with this bloomin' schooner, too?"
"That's the trouble," said Davis. "There's only one thing certain: it's
no use carting this old glass and ballast to Peru. No, _sir_, we're in a
hole."
"O my, and the merchant!" cried Huish; "the man that made this shipment!
He'll get the news by the mail brigantine; and he'll think of course
we're making straight for Sydney."
"Yes, he'll be a sick merchant," said the captain. "One thing: this
explains the Kanaka crew. If you're going to lose a ship, I would ask no
better myself than a Kanaka crew. But there's one thing it don't
explain; it don't explain why she came down Tahitiways."
"W'y, to lose her, you byby!" said Huish.
"A lot you know," said the captain. "Nobody wants to lose a schooner;
they want to lose her _on her course_, you skeericks! You seem to think
underwriters haven't got enough sense to come in out of the rain."
"Well," said Herrick, "I can tell you (I am afraid) why she came so far
to the eastward. I had it of Uncle Ned. It seems these two unhappy
devils, Wiseman and Wishart, were drunk on the champagne from the
beginning--and died drunk at the end."
The captain looked on the table.
"They lay in their two bunks, or sat here in this damned house," he
pursued, with rising agitation, "filling their skins with the accursed
stuff, till sickness took them. As they sickened and the fever rose,
they drank the more. They lay here howling and groaning, drunk and
dying, all in one. They didn't know where they were; they didn't care.
They didn't even take the sun, it seems."
"Not take the sun?" cried the captain, looking up. "Sacred Billy! what a
crowd!"
"Well, it don't matter to Joe!" said Huish. "Wot are Wiseman and t'other
buffer to us?"
"A good deal, too," said the captain. "We're their heirs, I guess."
"It is a great inheritance," said Herrick.
"Well, I don't know about that," returned Davis. "Appears to me as if it
might be worse. 'Tain't worth what the cargo would have been, of course,
at least not money down. But I'll tell you what it appears to figure up
to. Appears to me as if it amounted to about the bottom dollar of the
man in 'Frisco."
"'Old on," said Huish. "Give a fellow time; 'ow's this, umpire?"
"Well, my sons," pursued the captain, who seemed to have recovered his
assurance, "Wiseman and Wishart were to be paid for casting away this
old schooner and its cargo. We're going to cast away the schooner right
enough; and I'll make it my private business to see that we get paid.
What were W. and W. to get? That's more'n I can tell. But W. and W. went
into this business themselves, they were on the crook. Now _we're_ on
the square, _we_ only stumbled into it; and that merchant has just got
to squeal, and I'm the man to see that he squeals good. No, _sir_!
there's some stuffing to this _Farallone_ racket after all."
"Go it, cap'!" cried Huish. "Yoicks! Forrard! 'Old 'ard! There's your
style for the money! Blow me if I don't prefer this to the hother."
"I do not understand," said Herrick. "I have to ask you to excuse me; I
do not understand."
"Well, now, see here, Herrick," said Davis. "I'm going to have a word
with you anyway upon a different matter, and it's good that Huish should
hear it too. We're done with this boozing business, and we ask your
pardon for it right here and now. We have to thank you for all you did
for us while we were making hogs of ourselves; you'll find me turn-to
all right in future; and as for the wine, which I grant we stole from
you, I'll take stock and see you paid for it. That's good enough, I
believe. But what I want to point out to you is this. The old game was a
risky game. The new game's as safe as running a Vienna bakery. We just
put this _Farallone_ before the wind, and run till we're well to looard
of our port of departure, and reasonably well up with some other place
where they have an American consul. Down goes the _Farallone_, and
good-bye to her! A day or so in the boat; the consul packs us home, at
Uncle Sam's expense, to 'Frisco; and if that merchant don't put the
dollars down, you come to me!"
"But I thought--" began Herrick; and then broke out: "O, let's get on to
Peru!"
"Well, if you're going to Peru for your health, I won't say no!"
replied the captain. "But for what other blame shadow of a reason you
should want to go there gets me clear. We don't want to go there with
this cargo; I don't know as old bottles is a lively article anywheres;
leastways, I'll go my bottom cent, it ain't Peru. It was always a doubt
if we could sell the schooner; I never rightly hoped to, and now I'm
sure she ain't worth a hill of beans; what's wrong with her I don't
know; I only know it's something, or she wouldn't be here with this
truck in her inside. Then again, if we lose her, and land in Peru, where
are we? We can't declare the loss, or how did we get to Peru? In that
case the merchant can't touch the insurance; most likely he'll go bust;
and don't you think you see the three of us on the beach of Callao?"
"There's no extradition there," said Herrick.
"Well, my son, and we want to be extraded," said the captain. "What's
our point? We want to have a consul extrade us as far as San Francisco
and that merchant's office door. My idea is that Samoa would be found an
eligible business centre. It's dead before the wind; the States have a
consul there, and 'Frisco steamers call, so's we could skip right back
and interview the merchant."
"Samoa?" said Herrick. "It will take us for ever to get there."
"O, with a fair wind!" said the captain.
"No trouble about the log, eh?" asked Huish.
"No, _sir_," said Davis. "_Light airs and baffling winds. Squalls and
calms. D.R.: five miles. No obs. Pumps attended._ And fill in the
barometer and thermometer off of last year's trip. 'Never saw such a
voyage,' says you to the consul. 'Thought I was going to run short...'"
He stopped in mid career. "'Say," he began again, and once more stopped.
"Beg your pardon, Herrick," he added with undisguised humility, "but did
you keep the run of the stores?"
"Had I been told to do so it should have been done, as the rest was
done, to the best of my little ability," said Herrick. "As it was, the
cook helped himself to what he pleased."
Davis looked at the table.
"I drew it rather fine, you see," he said at last. "The great thing was
to clear right out of Papeete before the consul could think better of
it. Tell you what: I guess I'll take stock."
And he rose from the table and disappeared with a lamp in the lazarette.
"'Ere's another screw loose," observed Huish.
"My man," said Herrick, with a sudden gleam of animosity, "it is still
your watch on deck, and surely your wheel also?"
"You come the 'eavy swell, don't you, ducky?" said Huish. "Stand away
from that binnacle. Surely your w'eel, my man. Yah."
He lit a cigar ostentatiously, and strolled into the waist with his
hands in his pockets.
In a surprisingly short time the captain reappeared; he did not look at
Herrick, but called Huish back and sat down.
"Well," he began, "I've taken stock--roughly." He paused as if for
somebody to help him out; and none doing so, both gazing on him instead
with manifest anxiety, he yet more heavily resumed: "Well, it won't
fight. We can't do it; that's the bed-rock. I'm as sorry as what you can
be, and sorrier. But the game's up. We can't look near Samoa. I don't
know as we could get to Peru."
"Wot-ju mean?" asked Huish brutally.
"I can't 'most tell myself," replied the captain. "I drew it fine; I
said I did; but what's been going on here gets me! Appears as if the
devil had been around. That cook must be the holiest kind of fraud. Only
twelve days too! Seems like craziness. I'll own up square to one thing:
I seem to have figured too fine upon the flour. But the rest--my land!
I'll never understand it! There's been more waste on this twopenny ship
than what there is to an Atlantic Liner." He stole a glance at his
companions: nothing good was to be gleaned from their dark faces; and he
had recourse to rage. "You wait till I interview that cook!" he roared,
and smote the table with his fist. "I'll interview the son of a gun so's
he's never been spoken to before. I'll put a bead upon the--!"
"You will not lay a finger on the man," said Herrick. "The fault is
yours, and you know it. If you turn a savage loose in your storeroom,
you know what to expect. I will not allow the man to be molested."
It is hard to say how Davis might have taken this defiance; but he was
diverted to a fresh assailant.
"Well," drawled Huish, "you're a plummy captain, ain't you? You're a
blooming captain! Don't you set up any of your chat to me, John Dyvis: I
know you now; you ain't any more use than a blooming dawl! O, you 'don't
know,' don't you? O, it 'gets you,' do it? O, I dessay! W'y, weren't you
'owling for fresh tins every blessed day? 'Ow often 'ave I 'eard you
send the 'ole bloomin' dinner off and tell the man to chuck it in the
swill-tub? And breakfast? O, my crikey! breakfast for ten, and you
'ollerin' for more! And now you 'can't 'most tell'! Blow me if it ain't
enough to make a man write an insultin' letter to Gawd! You dror it
mild, John Dyvis: don't 'andle me; I'm dyngerous."
Davis sat like one bemused; it might even have been doubted if he heard,
but the voice of the clerk rang about the cabin like that of a cormorant
among the ledges of the cliff.
"That will do, Huish," said Herrick.
"O, so you tyke his part, do you? you stuck-up, sneerin' snob. Tyke it
then. Come on, the pair of you. But as for John Dyvis, let him look out!
He struck me the first night aboard, and I never took a blow yet but wot
I gave as good. Let him knuckle down on his marrow-bones and beg my
pardon. That's my last word."
"I stand by the captain," said Herrick. "That makes us two to one, both
good men; and the crew will all follow me. I hope I shall die very soon;
but I have not the least objection to killing you before I go. I should
prefer it so; I should do it with no more remorse than winking. Take
care--take care--you little cad!"
The animosity with which these words were uttered was so marked in
itself, and so remarkable in the man who uttered them, that Huish
stared, and even the humiliated Davis reared up his head and gazed at
his defender. As for Herrick, the successive agitations and
disappointments of the day had left him wholly reckless; he was
conscious of a pleasant glow, an agreeable excitement; his head seemed
empty, his eyeballs burned as he turned them, his throat was dry as a
biscuit; the least dangerous man by nature, except in so far as the weak
are always dangerous, at that moment he was ready to slay or to be slain
with equal unconcern.
Here at least was the gage thrown down, and battle offered; he who
should speak next would bring the matter to an issue there and then; all
knew it to be so and hung back; and for many seconds by the cabin clock
the trio sat motionless and silent.
Then came an interruption, welcome as the flowers in May.
"Land ho!" sang out a voice on deck. "Land a weatha bow!"
"Land!" cried Davis, springing to his feet. "What's this? There ain't no
land here."
And as men may run from the chamber of a murdered corpse, the three ran
forth out of the house and left their quarrel behind them undecided.
The sky shaded down at the sea-level to the white of opals; the sea
itself, insolently, inkily blue, drew all about them the uncompromising
wheel of the horizon. Search it as they pleased, not even the practised
eye of Captain Davis could descry the smallest interruption. A few filmy
clouds were slowly melting overhead; and about the schooner, as around
the only point of interest, a tropic bird, white as a snow-flake, hung,
and circled, and displayed, as it turned, the long vermilion feather of
its tail. Save the sea and the heaven, that was all.
"Who sang out land?" asked Davis. "If there's any boy playing funny-dog
with me, I'll teach him skylarking!"
But Uncle Ned contentedly pointed to a part of the horizon where a
greenish, filmy iridescence could be discerned floating like smoke on
the pale heavens.
Davis applied his glass to it, and then looked at the Kanaka. "Call that
land?" said he. "Well, it's more than I do."
"One time long ago," said Uncle Ned, "I see Anaa all-e-same that, four
five hours befo' we come up. Capena he say sun go down, sun go up again;
he say lagoon all-e-same milla."
"All-e-same _what_?" asked Davis.
"Milla, sah," said Uncle Ned.
"O, ah! mirror," said Davis. "I see; reflection from the lagoon. Well,
you know, it is just possible, though it's strange I never heard of it.
Here, let's look at the chart."
They went back to the cabin, and found the position of the schooner well
to windward of the archipelago in the midst of a white field of paper.
"There! you see for yourselves," said Davis.
"And yet I don't know," said Herrick; "I somehow think there's something
in it. I'll tell you one thing too, captain: that's all right about the
reflection; I heard it in Papeete."
"Fetch up that Findlay, then!" said Davis. "I'll try it all ways. An
island wouldn't come amiss the way we're fixed."
The bulky volume was handed up to him, broken-backed as is the way with
Findlay; and he turned to the place and began to run over the text,
muttering to himself and turning over the pages with a wetted finger.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "How's this?" And he read aloud: "'_New Island_.
According to M. Delille this island, which from private interests would
remain unknown, lies, it is said, in lat. 12° 49' 10'' S., long. 133° 6'
W. In addition to the position above given, Commander Matthews, H.M.S.
_Scorpion_, states that an island exists in lat. 12° 0' S., long. 133°
16' W. This must be the same, if such an island exists, which is very
doubtful, and totally disbelieved in by South Sea traders.'"
"Golly!" said Huish.
"It's rather in the conditional mood," said Herrick.
"It's anything you please," cried Davis, "only there it is! That's our
place, and don't you make any mistake."
"'Which from private interests would remain unknown,'" read Herrick,
over his shoulder. "What may that mean?"
"It should mean pearls," said Davis. "A pearling island the Government
don't know about. That sounds like real estate. Or suppose it don't mean
anything. Suppose it's just an island; I guess we could fill up with
fish, and cocoa-nuts, and native stuff, and carry out the Samoa scheme
hand over fist. How long did he say it was before they raised Anaa? Five
hours, I think?"
"Four or five," said Herrick.
Davis stepped to the door. "What breeze had you that time you made Anaa,
Uncle Ned?" said he.
"Six or seven knots," was the reply.
"Thirty or thirty-five miles," said Davis. "High time we were shortening
sail, then. If it is an island, we don't want to be butting our head
against it in the dark; and if it isn't an island, we can get through it
just as well by daylight. Ready about!" he roared.
And the schooner's head was laid for that elusive glimmer in the sky,
which began already to pale in lustre and diminish in size, as the stain
of breath vanishes from a window pane. At the same time she was reefed
close down.
PART II
THE QUARTETTE
CHAPTER VII
THE PEARL-FISHER
About four in the morning, as the captain and Herrick sat together on
the rail, there arose from the midst of the night in front of them the
voice of breakers. Each sprang to his feet and stared and listened. The
sound was continuous, like the passing of a train; no rise or fall could
be distinguished; minute by minute the ocean heaved with an equal
potency against the invisible isle; and as time passed, and Herrick
waited in vain for any vicissitude in the volume of that roaring, a
sense of the eternal weighed upon his mind. To the expert eye the isle
itself was to be inferred from a certain string of blots along the
starry heaven. And the schooner was laid to and anxiously observed till
daylight.
There was little or no morning bank. A brightening came in the east;
then a wash of some ineffable, faint, nameless hue between crimson and
silver; and then coals of fire. These glimmered a while on the sea-line,
and seemed to brighten and darken and spread out, and still the night
and the stars reigned undisturbed; it was as though a spark should catch
and glow and creep along the foot of some heavy and almost incombustible
wall-hanging, and the room itself be scarce menaced. Yet a little after,
and the whole east glowed with gold and scarlet, and the hollow of
heaven was filled with the daylight.
The isle--the undiscovered, the scarce-believed in--now lay before them
and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he
beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently
white, the continuous barrier of trees inimitably green; the land
perhaps ten feet high, the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as
the schooner coasted northward, the wood was intermitted; and he could
see clear over the inconsiderable strip of land (as a man looks over a
wall) to the lagoon within--and clear over that again to where the far
side of the atoll prolonged its pencilling of trees against the morning
sky. He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was like the rim of
a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an
annular railway grown upon with wood: so slender it seemed amidst the
outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wondered
to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves close
smoothly over its descent.
Meanwhile the captain was in the four cross-trees, glass in hand, his
eyes in every quarter, spying for an entrance, spying for signs of
tenancy. But the isle continued to unfold itself in joints, and to run
out in indeterminate capes, and still there was neither house nor man,
nor the smoke of fire. Here a multitude of sea-birds soared and
twinkled, and fished in the blue waters; and there, and for miles
together, the fringe of coco-palm and pandanus extended desolate, and
made desirable green bowers for nobody to visit, and the silence of
death was only broken by the throbbing of the sea.
The airs were very light, their speed was small; the heat intense. The
decks were scorching underfoot, the sun flamed overhead, brazen, out of
a brazen sky; the pitch bubbled in the seams, and the brains in the
brain-pan. And all the while the excitement of the three adventurers
glowed about their bones like a fever. They whispered, and nodded, and
pointed, and put mouth to ear, with a singular instinct of secrecy,
approaching that island underhand like eavesdroppers and thieves; and
even Davis from the cross-trees gave his orders mostly by gestures. The
hands shared in this mute strain, like dogs, without comprehending it;
and through the roar of so many miles of breakers, it was a silent ship
that approached an empty island.
At last they drew near to the break in that interminable gangway. A spur
of coral sand stood forth on the one hand; on the other a high and thick
tuft of trees cut off the view; between was the mouth of the huge laver.
Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow entrance and was heaped
between these frail walls; twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the
mighty surplusage of water must struggle to escape. The hour in which
the _Farallone_ came there was the hour of the flood. The sea turned (as
with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept
eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as it did so, into a wonder
of watery and silken hues, and brimmed into the inland sea beyond. The
schooner looked up close-hauled, and was caught and carried away by the
influx like a toy. She skimmed; she flew; a momentary shadow touched her
decks from the shoreside trees; the bottom of the channel showed up for
a moment and was in a moment gone; the next, she floated on the bosom of
the lagoon, and below, in the transparent chamber of waters, a myriad of
many-coloured fishes were sporting, a myriad pale flowers of coral
diversified the floor.
Herrick stood transported. In the gratified lust of his eye he forgot
the past and the present; forgot that he was menaced by a prison on the
one hand and starvation on the other; forgot that he was come to that
island, desperately foraging, clutching at expedients. A drove of
fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots, hovered up in
the shadow of the schooner, and passed clear of it, and glinted in the
submarine sun. They were beautiful, like birds, and their silent passage
impressed him like a strain of song.
Meanwhile, to the eye of Davis in the cross-trees, the lagoon continued
to expand its empty waters, and the long succession of the shoreside
trees to be paid out like fishing-line off a reel. And still there was
no mark of habitation. The schooner, immediately on entering, had been
kept away to the nor'ard where the water seemed to be the most deep; and
she was now skimming past the tall grove of trees, which stood on that
side of the channel and denied further view. Of the whole of the low
shores of the island only this bight remained to be revealed. And
suddenly the curtain was raised; they began to open out a haven, snugly
elbowed there, and beheld, with an astonishment beyond words, the roofs
of men.
The appearance, thus "instantaneously disclosed" to those on the deck of
the _Farallone_, was not that of a city, rather of a substantial country
farm with its attendant hamlet: a long line of sheds and store-houses;
apart, upon the one side, a deep-verandah'd dwelling-house; on the
other, perhaps a dozen native huts; a building with a belfry and some
rude offer at architectural features that might be thought to mark it
out for a chapel; on the beach in front some heavy boats drawn up, and a
pile of timber running forth into the burning shallows of the lagoon.
From a flagstaff at the pierhead the red ensign of England was
displayed. Behind, about, and over, the same tall grove of palms, which
had masked the settlement in the beginning, prolonged its roof of
tumultuous green fans, and turned and ruffled overhead, and sang its
silver song all day in the wind. The place had the indescribable but
unmistakable appearance of being in commission; yet there breathed from
it a sense of desertion that was almost poignant, no human figure was to
be observed going to and fro about the houses, and there was no sound of
human industry or enjoyment. Only, on the top of the beach, and hard by
the flagstaff, a woman of exorbitant stature and as white as snow was to
be seen beckoning with uplifted arm. The second glance identified her as
a piece of naval sculpture, the flgure-head of a ship that had long
hovered and plunged into so many running billows, and was now brought
ashore to be the ensign and presiding genius of that empty town.
The _Farallone_ made a soldier's breeze of it; the wind, besides, was
stronger inside than without under the lee of the land; and the stolen
schooner opened out successive objects with the swiftness of a panorama,
so that the adventurers stood speechless. The flag spoke for itself; it
was no frayed and weathered trophy that had beaten itself to pieces on
the post, flying over desolation; and to make assurance stronger, there
was to be descried in the deep shade of the verandah a glitter of
crystal and the fluttering of white napery. If the figure-head at the
pier-end, with its perpetual gesture and its leprous whiteness, reigned
alone in that hamlet as it seemed to do, it would not have reigned long.
Men's hands had been busy, men's feet stirring there, within the circuit
of the clock. The _Farallones_ were sure of it; their eyes dug in the
deep shadow of the palms for some one hiding; if intensity of looking
might have prevailed, they would have pierced the walls of houses; and
there came to them, in these pregnant seconds, a sense of being watched
and played with, and of a blow impending, that was hardly bearable.
The extreme point of palms they had just passed enclosed a creek, which
was thus hidden up to the last moment from the eyes of those on board;
and from this a boat put suddenly and briskly out, and a voice hailed.
"Schooner ahoy!" it cried. "Stand in for the pier! In two cables'
lengths you'll have twenty fathoms water and good holding-ground."
The boat was manned with a couple of brown oarsmen in scanty kilts of
blue. The speaker, who was steering, wore white clothes, the full dress
of the tropics; a wide hat shaded his face; but it could be seen that he
was of stalwart size, and his voice sounded like a gentleman's. So much
could be made out. It was plain, besides, that the _Farallone_ had been
descried some time before at sea, and the inhabitants were prepared for
its reception.
Mechanically the orders were obeyed, and the ship berthed; and the three
adventurers gathered aft beside the house and waited, with galloping
pulses and a perfect vacancy of mind, the coming of the stranger who
might mean so much to them. They had no plan, no story prepared; there
was no time to make one; they were caught red-handed and must stand
their chance. Yet this anxiety was chequered with hope. The island being
undeclared, it was not possible the man could hold any office or be in a
position to demand their papers. And beyond that, if there was any truth
in Findlay, as it now seemed there should be, he was the representative
of the "private reasons," he must see their coming with a profound
disappointment; and perhaps (hope whispered) he would be willing and
able to purchase their silence.
The boat was by that time forging alongside, and they were able at last
to see what manner of man they had to do with. He was a huge fellow, six
feet four in height, and of a build proportionately strong, but his
sinews seemed to be dissolved in a listlessness that was more than
languor. It was only the eye that corrected this impression; an eye of
an unusual mingled brilliancy and softness, sombre as coal and with
lights that outshone the topaz; an eye of unimpaired health and
virility; an eye that bid you beware of the man's devastating anger. A
complexion, naturally dark, had been tanned in the island to a hue
hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian; only his manners and
movements, and the living force that dwelt in him, like fire in flint,
betrayed the European. He was dressed in white drill, exquisitely made;
his scarf and tie were of tender-coloured silks; on the thwart beside
him there leaned a Winchester rifle.
"Is the doctor on board?" he cried as he came up. "Dr. Symonds, I mean?
You never heard of him? Nor yet of the _Trinity Hall_? Ah!"
He did not look surprised, seemed rather to affect it in politeness; but
his eye rested on each of the three white men in succession with a
sudden weight of curiosity that was almost savage. "Ah, _then_!" said
he, "there is some small mistake, no doubt, and I must ask you to what
I am indebted for this pleasure?"
He was by this time on the deck, but he had the art to be quite
unapproachable; the friendliest vulgarian, three parts drunk, would have
known better than take liberties; and not one of the adventurers so much
as offered to shake hands.
"Well," said Davis, "I suppose you may call it an accident. We had heard
of your island, and read that thing in the Directory about the _private
reasons_, you see; so when we saw the lagoon reflected in the sky, we
put her head for it at once, and so here we are."
"'Ope we don't intrude!" said Huish.
The stranger looked at Huish with an air of faint surprise, and looked
pointedly away again. It was hard to be more offensive in dumb show.
"It may suit me, your coming here," he said. "My own schooner is
overdue, and I may put something in your way in the meantime. Are you
open to a charter?"
"Well, I guess so," said Davis; "it depends."
"My name is Attwater," continued the stranger. "You, I presume, are the
captain?"
"Yes, sir. I am the captain of this ship: Captain Brown," was the reply.
"Well, see 'ere!" said Huish; "better begin fair! 'E's skipper on deck
right enough, but not below. Below, we're all equal, all got a lay in
the adventure; when it comes to business I'm as good as 'e; and what I
say is, let's go into the 'ouse and have a lush, and talk it over among
pals. We've some prime fizz," he said, and winked.
The presence of the gentleman lighted up like a candle the vulgarity of
the clerk; and Herrick instinctively, as one shields himself from pain,
made haste to interrupt.
"My name is Hay," said he, "since introductions are going. We shall be
very glad if you will step inside."
Attwater leaned to him swiftly. "University man?" said he.
"Yes, Merton," said Herrick, and the next moment blushed scarlet at his
indiscretion.
"I am of the other lot," said Attwater: "Trinity Hall, Cambridge. I
called my schooner after the old shop. Well! this is a queer place and
company for us to meet in, Mr. Hay," he pursued, with easy incivility to
the others. "But do you bear out ... I beg this gentleman's pardon, I
really did not catch his name."
"My name is 'Uish, sir," returned the clerk, and blushed in turn.
"Ah!" said Attwater. And then turning again to Herrick, "Do you bear out
Mr. Whish's description of your vintage? or was it only the unaffected
poetry of his own nature bubbling up?"
Herrick was embarrassed; the silken brutality of their visitor made him
blush; that he should be accepted as an equal, and the others thus
pointedly ignored, pleased him in spite of himself, and then ran through
his veins in a recoil of anger.
"I don't know," he said. "It's only California; it's good enough, I
believe."
Attwater seemed to make up his mind. "Well, then, I'll tell you what:
you three gentlemen come ashore this evening and bring a basket of wine
with you; I'll try and find the food," he said. "And by the by, here is
a question I should have asked you when I came on board: have you had
small-pox?"
"Personally, no," said Herrick. "But the schooner had it."
"Deaths?" from Attwater.
"Two," said Herrick.
"Well, it is a dreadful sickness," said Attwater.
"'Ad you any deaths?" asked Huish, "'ere on the island?"
"Twenty-nine," said Attwater. "Twenty-nine deaths and thirty-one cases,
out of thirty-three souls upon the island.--That's a strange way to
calculate, Mr. Hay, is it not? Souls! I never say it but it startles
me."
"O, so that's why everything's deserted?" said Huish.
"That is why, Mr. Whish," said Attwater; "that is why the house is empty
and the graveyard full."
"Twenty-nine out of thirty-three!" exclaimed Herrick. "Why, when it came
to burying--or did you bother burying?"
"Scarcely," said Attwater; "or there was one day at least when we gave
up. There were five of the dead that morning, and thirteen of the dying,
and no one able to go about except the sexton and myself. We held a
council of war, took the ... empty bottles ... into the lagoon, and ...
buried them." He looked over his shoulder, back at the bright water.
"Well, so you'll come to dinner, then? Shall we say half-past six? So
good of you!"
His voice, in uttering these conventional phrases, fell at once into the
false measure of society; and Herrick unconsciously followed the
example.
"I am sure we shall be very glad," he said. "At half-past six? Thank you
so very much."
"'For my voice has been tuned to the note of the gun
That startles the deep when the combat's begun,'"
quoted Attwater, with a smile, which instantly gave way to an air of
funereal solemnity. "I shall particularly expect Mr. Whish," he
continued.--"Mr. Whish, I trust you understand the invitation?"
"I believe you, my boy!" replied the genial Huish.
"That is right, then; and quite understood, is it not?" said Attwater.
"Mr. Whish and Captain Brown at six-thirty without fault--and you, Hay,
at four sharp."
And he called his boat.
During all this talk a load of thought or anxiety had weighed upon the
captain. There was no part for which nature had so liberally endowed him
as that of the genial ship-captain. But to-day he was silent and
abstracted. Those who knew him could see that he hearkened close to
every syllable, and seemed to ponder and try it in balances. It would
have been hard to say what look there was, cold, attentive, and
sinister, as of a man maturing plans, which still brooded over the
unconscious guest; it was here, it was there, it was nowhere; it was now
so little that Herrick chid himself for an idle fancy; and anon it was
so gross and palpable that you could say every hair on the man's head
talked mischief.
He woke up now, as with a start. "You were talking of a charter," said
he.
"Was I?" said Attwater. "Well, let's talk of it no more at present."
"Your own schooner is overdue, I understand?" continued the captain.
"You understand perfectly, Captain Brown," said Attwater; "thirty-three
days overdue at noon to-day."
"She comes and goes, eh? plies between here and ...?" hinted the
captain.
"Exactly; every four months; three trips in the year," said Attwater.
"You go in her ever?" asked Davis.
"No; one stops here," said Attwater; "one has plenty to attend to."
"Stop here, do you?" cried Davis. "Say, how long?"
"How long, O Lord," said Attwater, with perfect, stern gravity. "But it
does not seem so," he added, with a smile.
"No, I daresay not," said Davis. "No, I suppose not. Not with all your
gods about you, and in as snug a berth as this. For it is a pretty snug
berth," said he, with a sweeping look.
"The spot, as you are good enough to indicate, is not entirely
intolerable," was the reply.
"Shell, I suppose?" said Davis.
"Yes, there was shell," said Attwater.
"This is a considerable big beast of a lagoon, sir," said the captain.
"Was there a--was the fishing--would you call the fishing anyways
_good_?"
"I don't know that I would call it anyways anything," said Attwater, "if
you put it to me direct."
"There were pearls, too?" said Davis.
"Pearls too," said Attwater.
"Well, I give out!" laughed Davis, and his laughter rang cracked like a
false piece. "If you're not going to tell, you're not going to tell, and
there's an end to it."
"There can be no reason why I should affect the least degree of secrecy
about my island," returned Attwater; "that came wholly to an end with
your arrival; and I am sure, at any rate, that gentlemen like you and
Mr. Whish I should have always been charmed to make perfectly at home.
The point on which we are now differing--if you can call it a
difference--is one of times and seasons. I have some information which
you think I might impart, and I think not. Well, we'll see to-night!
By-by, Whish!" He stepped into his boat and shoved off. "All understood,
then?" said he. "The captain and Mr. Whish at six-thirty, and you, Hay,
at four precise. You understand that, Hay? Mind, I take no denial. If
you're not there by the time named, there will be no banquet; no song,
no supper, Mr. Whish!"
White birds whisked in the air above, a shoal of parti-coloured fishes
in the scarce denser medium below; between, like Mahomet's coffin, the
boat drew away briskly on the surface, and its shadow followed it over
the glittering floor of the lagoon. Attwater looked steadily back over
his shoulders as he sat; he did not once remove his eyes from the
_Farallone_ and the group on her quarter-deck beside the house, till his
boat ground upon the pier. Thence, with an agile pace, he hurried
ashore, and they saw his white clothes shining in the chequered dusk of
the grove until the house received him.
The captain, with a gesture and a speaking countenance, called the
adventurers into the cabin.
"Well," he said to Herrick, when they were seated, "there's one good job
at least. He's taken to you in earnest."
"Why should that be a good job?" said Herrick.
"O, you'll see how it pans out presently," returned Davis. "You go
ashore and stand in with him, that's all! You'll get lots of pointers;
you can find out what he has, and what the charter is, and who's the
fourth man--for there's four of them, and we're only three."
"And suppose I do, what next?" cried Herrick. "Answer me that!"
"So I will, Robert Herrick," said the captain. "But first, let's see all
clear. I guess you know," he said, with imperious solemnity, "I guess
you know the bottom is out of this _Farallone_ speculation? I guess you
know it's _right_ out? and if this old island hadn't been turned up
right when it did, I guess you know where you and I and Huish would have
been?"
"Yes, I know that," said Herrick. "No matter who's to blame, I know it.
And what next?"
"No matter who's to blame, you know it, right enough," said the captain,
"and I'm obliged to you for the reminder. Now, here's this Attwater:
what do you think of him?"
"I do not know," said Herrick. "I am attracted and repelled. He was
insufferably rude to you."
"And you, Huish?" said the captain.
Huish sat cleaning a favourite briar-root; he scarce looked up from that
engrossing task. "Don't ast me what I think of him!" he said. "There's a
day comin', I pray Gawd, when I can tell it him myself."
"Huish means the same as what I do," said Davis. "When that man came
stepping around, and saying, 'Look here, I'm Attwater'--and you knew it
was so, by God!--I sized him right straight up. He's the real article, I
said, and I don't like it; here's the real, first-rate, copper-bottomed
aristocrat. '_Aw! don't know ye, do I? God damn ye, did God make ye?_'
No, that couldn't be nothing but genuine; a man's got to be born to
that; and notice! smart as champagne and hard as nails; no kind of a
fool; no, _sir_! not a pound of him! Well, what's he here upon this
beastly island for? I said. _He's_ not here collecting eggs. He's a
palace at home, and powdered flunkeys; and if he don't stay there, you
bet he knows the reason why! Follow?"
"O yes, I 'ear you," said Huish.
"He's been doing good business here, then," continued the captain. "For
ten years he's been doing a great business. It's pearl and shell, of
course; there couldn't be nothing else in such a place, and no doubt the
shell goes off regularly by this _Trinity Hall_, and the money for it
straight into the bank, so that's no use to us. But what else is there?
Is there nothing else he would be likely to keep here? Is there nothing
else he would be bound to keep here? Yes, sir; the pearls! First,
because they're too valuable to trust out of his hands. Second, because
pearls want a lot of handling and matching; and the man who sells his
pearls as they come in one here, one there, instead of hanging back and
holding up--well, that man's a fool, and it's not Attwater."
"Likely," said Huish, "that's w'at it is; not proved, but likely."
"It's proved," said Davis bluntly.
"Suppose it was?" said Herrick. "Suppose that was all so, and he had
these pearls--a ten years' collection of them?--Suppose he had? There's
my question."
The captain drummed with his thick hands on the board in front of him;
he looked steadily in Herrick's face, and Herrick as steadily looked
upon the table and the pattering fingers; there was a gentle oscillation
of the anchored ship, and a big patch of sunlight travelled to and fro
between the one and the other.
"Hear me!" Herrick burst out suddenly.
"No, you better hear me first," said Davis. "Hear me and understand me.
We've got no use for that fellow, whatever you may have. He's your kind,
he's not ours; he's took to you, and he's wiped his boots on me and
Huish. Save him if you can!"
"Save him?" repeated Herrick.
"Save him, if you're able!" reiterated Davis, with a blow of his
clenched fist. "Go ashore, and talk him smooth; and if you get him and
his pearls aboard, I'll spare him. If you don't, there's going to be a
funeral. Is that so, Huish? does that suit you?"
"I ain't a forgiving man," said Huish, "but I'm not the sort to spoil
business neither. Bring the bloke on board and bring his pearls along
with him, and you can have it your own way; maroon him where you
like,--I'm agreeable."
"Well, and if I can't?" cried Herrick, while the sweat streamed upon his
face. "You talk to me as if I was God Almighty, to do this and that! But
if I can't?"
"My son," said the captain, "you better do your level best, or you'll
see sights!"
"O yes," said Huish. "O crikey, yes!" He looked across at Herrick with a
toothless smile that was shocking in its savagery; and, his ear caught
apparently by the trivial expression he had used, broke into a piece of
the chorus of a comic song which he must have heard twenty years before
in London: meaningless gibberish that, in that hour and place, seemed
hateful as a blasphemy: "Hikey, pikey, crikey, fikey, chillingawallaba
dory."
The captain suffered him to finish; his face was unchanged.
"The way things are, there's many a man that wouldn't let you go
ashore," he resumed. "But I'm not that kind. I know you'd never go back
on me, Herrick! Or if you choose to,--go, and do it, and be damned!" he
cried, and rose abruptly from the table.
He walked out of the house; and as he reached the door turned and called
Huish, suddenly and violently, like the barking of a dog. Huish
followed, and Herrick remained alone in the cabin.
"Now, see here!" whispered Davis. "I know that man. If you open your
mouth to him again, you'll ruin all."
CHAPTER VIII
BETTER ACQUAINTANCE
The boat was gone again, and already half-way to the _Farallone_, before
Herrick turned and went unwillingly up the pier. From the crown of the
beach, the figure-head confronted him with what seemed irony, her
helmeted head tossed back, her formidable arm apparently hurling
something, whether shell or missile, in the direction of the anchored
schooner. She seemed a defiant deity from the island, coming forth to
its threshold with a rush as of one about to fly, and perpetuated in
that dashing attitude. Herrick looked up at her, where she towered above
him head and shoulders, with singular feelings of curiosity and romance,
and suffered his mind to travel to and fro in her life-history. So long
she had been the blind conductress of a ship among the waves; so long
she had stood here idle in the violent sun, that yet did not avail to
blister her; and was even this the end of so many adventures? he
wondered, or was more behind? And he could have found it in his heart to
regret that she was not a goddess, nor yet he a pagan, that he might
have bowed down before her in that hour of difficulty.
When he now went forward, it was cool with the shadow of many well-grown
palms; draughts of the dying breeze swung them together overhead; and on
all sides, with a swiftness beyond dragon-flies or swallows, the spots
of sunshine flitted, and hovered, and returned. Underfoot, the sand was
fairly solid and quite level, and Herrick's steps fell there noiseless
as in new-fallen snow. It bore the marks of having been once weeded like
a garden alley at home; but the pestilence had done its work, and the
weeds were returning. The buildings of the settlement showed here and
there through the stems of the colonnade, fresh painted, trim and dandy,
and all silent as the grave. Only here and there in the crypt, there was
a rustle and scurry and some crowing of poultry; and from behind the
house with the verandahs he saw smoke arise and heard the crackling of a
fire.
The stone houses were nearest him upon his right. The first was locked;
in the second he could dimly perceive, through a window, a certain
accumulation of pearl-shell piled in the far end; the third, which stood
gaping open on the afternoon, seized on the mind of Herrick with its
multiplicity and disorder of romantic things. Therein were cables,
windlasses, and blocks of every size and capacity; cabin-windows and
ladders; rusty tanks, a companion hutch; a binnacle with its brass
mountings and its compass idly pointing, in the confusion and dusk of
that shed, to a forgotten pole; ropes, anchors, harpoons: a
blubber-dipper of copper, green with years; a steering-wheel, a
tool-chest with the vessel's name upon the top, the _Asia_: a whole
curiosity-shop of sea-curios, gross and solid, heavy to lift, ill to
break, bound with brass and shod with iron. Two wrecks at the least must
have contributed to this random heap of lumber; and as Herrick looked
upon it, it seemed to him as if the two ships' companies were there on
guard, and he heard the tread of feet and whisperings, and saw with the
tail of his eye the commonplace ghosts of sailor men.
This was not merely the work of an aroused imagination, but had
something sensible to go upon; sounds of a stealthy approach were no
doubt audible; and while he still stood staring at the lumber, the voice
of his host sounded suddenly, and with even more than the customary
softness of enunciation, from behind.
"Junk," it said, "only old junk! And does Mr. Hay find a parable?"
"I find at least a strong impression," replied Herrick, turning
quickly, lest he might be able to catch, on the face of the speaker,
some commentary on the words.
Attwater stood in the doorway, which he almost wholly filled; his hands
stretched above his head and grasping the architrave. He smiled when
their eyes met, but the expression was inscrutable.
"Yes, a powerful impression. You are like me; nothing so affecting as
ships!" said he. "The ruins of an empire would leave me frigid, when a
bit of an old rail that an old shellback leaned on in the middle watch,
would bring me up all standing. But come, let's see some more of the
island. It's all sand and coral and palm-trees; but there's a kind of a
quaintness in the place."
"I find it heavenly," said Herrick, breathing deep, with head bared in
the shadow.
"Ah, that's because you're new from sea," said Attwater. "I daresay,
too, you can appreciate what one calls it. It's a lovely name. It has a
flavour, it has a colour, it has a ring and fall to it; it's like its
author--it's half Christian! Remember your first view of the island, and
how it's only woods and woods and water; and suppose you had asked
somebody for the name, and he had answered--_nemorosa Zacynthos_."
"_Jam medio apparet fluctu!_" exclaimed Herrick. "Ye gods, yes, how
good!"
"If it gets upon the chart, the skippers will make nice work of it,"
said Attwater. "But here, come and see the diving-shed."
He opened a door, and Herrick saw a large display of apparatus neatly
ordered: pumps and pipes, and the leaded boots, and the huge snouted
helmets shining in rows along the wall; ten complete outfits.
"The whole eastern half of my lagoon is shallow, you must understand,"
said Attwater; "so we were able to get in the dress to great advantage.
It paid beyond belief, and was a queer sight when they were at it, and
these marine monsters"--tapping the nearest of the helmets--"kept
appearing and reappearing in the midst of the lagoon. Fond of
parables?" he asked abruptly.
"O yes!" said Herrick.
"Well, I saw these machines come up dripping and go down again, and come
up dripping and go down again, and all the while the fellow inside as
dry as toast!" said Attwater; "and I thought we all wanted a dress to go
down into the world in, and come up scatheless. What do you think the
name was?" he inquired.
"Self-conceit," said Herrick.
"Ah, but I mean seriously!" said Attwater.
"Call it self-respect, then!" corrected Herrick, with a laugh.
"And why not Grace? Why not God's Grace, Hay?" asked Attwater. "Why not
the grace of your Maker and Redeemer, He who died for you, He who
upholds you, He whom you daily crucify afresh? There is nothing
here"--striking on his bosom,--"nothing there"--smiting the wall,--"and
nothing there,"--stamping--"nothing but God's Grace! We walk upon it, we
breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the
universe; and a puppy in pyjamas prefers self-conceit!" The huge dark
man stood over against Herrick by the line of the divers' helmets, and
seemed to swell and glow; and the next moment the life had gone from
him--"I beg your pardon," said he; "I see you don't believe in God?"
"Not in your sense, I am afraid," said Herrick.
"I never argue with young atheists or habitual drunkards," said Attwater
flippantly.--"Let us go across the island to the outer beach."
It was but a little way, the greatest width of that island scarce
exceeding a furlong, and they walked gently. Herrick was like one in a
dream. He had come there with a mind divided; come prepared to study
that ambiguous and sneering mask, drag out the essential man from
underneath, and act accordingly; decision being till then postponed.
Iron cruelty, an iron insensibility to the suffering of others, the
uncompromising pursuit of his own interests, cold culture, manners
without humanity: these he had looked for, these he still thought he
saw. But to find the whole machine thus glow with the reverberation of
religious zeal surprised him beyond words; and he laboured in vain, as
he walked, to piece together into any kind of whole his odds and ends of
knowledge--to adjust again into any kind of focus with itself his
picture of the man beside him.
"What brought you here to the South Seas?" he asked presently.
"Many things," said Attwater. "Youth, curiosity, romance, the love of
the sea, and (it will surprise you to hear) an interest in missions.
That has a good deal declined, which will surprise you less. They go the
wrong way to work; they are too parsonish, too much of the old wife, and
even the old apple-wife. _Clothes_, _clothes_, are their idea; but
clothes are not Christianity, any more than they are the sun in heaven,
or could take the place of it! They think a parsonage with roses, and
church bells, and nice old women bobbing in the lanes, are part and
parcel of religion. But religion is a savage thing, like the universe it
illuminates; savage, cold, and bare, but infinitely strong."
"And you found this island by an accident?" said Herrick.
"As you did!" said Attwater. "And since then I have had a business, and
a colony, and a mission of my own. I was a man of the world before I was
a Christian; I'm a man of the world still, and I made my mission pay. No
good ever came of coddling. A man has to stand up in God's sight and
work up to his weight avoirdupois: then I'll talk to him, but not
before. I gave these beggars what they wanted: a judge in Israel, the
bearer of the sword and scourge; I was making a new people here; and
behold, the angel of the Lord smote them and they were not!"
With the very uttering of the words, which were accompanied by a
gesture, they came forth out of the porch of the palm wood by the margin
of the sea and full in front of the sun, which was near setting. Before
them the surf broke slowly. All around, with an air of imperfect wooden
things inspired with wicked activity, the crabs trundled and scuttled
into holes. On the right, whither Attwater pointed and abruptly turned,
was the cemetery of the island, a field of broken stones from the
bigness of a child's hand to that of his head, diversified by many
mounds of the same material, and walled by a rude rectangular enclosure.
Nothing grew there but a shrub or two with some white flowers; nothing
but the number of the mounds, and their disquieting shape, indicated the
presence of the dead.
"The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep!"
quoted Attwater, as he entered by the open gateway into that unholy
close. "Coral to coral, pebbles to pebbles," he said; "this has been the
main scene of my activity in the South Pacific. Some were good, and some
bad, and the majority (of course and always) null. Here was a fellow,
now, that used to frisk like a dog; if you had called him he came like
an arrow from a bow; if you had not, and he came unbidden, you should
have seen the deprecating eye and the little intricate dancing step.
Well, his trouble is over now, he has lain down with kings and
councillors; the rest of his acts, are they not written in the book of
the chronicles? That fellow was from Penrhyn; like all the Penrhyn
islanders he was ill to manage; heady, jealous, violent: the man with
the nose! He lies here quiet enough. And so they all lie.
'And darkness was the burier of the dead!'"
He stood, in the strong glow of the sunset, with bowed head; his voice
sounded now sweet and now bitter with the varying sense.
"You loved these people?" cried Herrick, strangely touched.
"I?" said Attwater. "Dear no! Don't think me a philanthropist. I dislike
men, and hate women. If I like the islanders at all, it is because you
see them here plucked of their lendings, their dead birds and cocked
hats, their petticoats and coloured hose. Here was one I liked though,"
and he set his foot upon a mound. "He was a fine savage fellow; he had a
dark soul; yes, I liked this one. I am fanciful," he added, looking hard
at Herrick, "and I take fads. I like you."
Herrick turned swiftly and looked far away to where the clouds were
beginning to troop together and amass themselves round the obsequies of
day. "No one can like me," he said.
"You are wrong there," said the other, "as a man usually is about
himself. You are attractive, very attractive."
"It is not me," said Herrick; "no one can like me. If you knew how I
despised myself--and why!" His voice rang out in the quiet graveyard.
"I knew that you despised yourself," said Attwater. "I saw the blood
come into your face to-day when you remembered Oxford. And I could have
blushed for you myself, to see a man, a gentleman, with these two vulgar
wolves."
Herrick faced him with a thrill. "Wolves?" he repeated.
"I said wolves, and vulgar wolves," said Attwater. "Do you know that
to-day, when I came on board, I trembled?"
"You concealed it well," stammered Herrick.
"A habit of mine," said Attwater. "But I was afraid, for all that: I was
afraid of the two wolves." He raised his hand slowly. "And now, Hay, you
poor lost puppy, what do you do with the two wolves?"
"What do I do? I don't do anything," said Herrick. "There is nothing
wrong; all is above-board; Captain Brown is a good soul; he is a ... he
is...." The phantom voice of Davis called in his ear: "There's going to
be a funeral"; and the sweat burst forth and streamed on his brow. "He
is a family man," he resumed again, swallowing; "he has children at home
and a wife."
"And a very nice man?" said Attwater. "And so is Mr. Whish, no doubt?"
"I won't go so far as that," said Herrick. "I do not like Huish. And yet
... he has his merits too."
"And, in short, take them for all in all, as good a ship's company as
one would ask?" said Attwater.
"O yes," said Herrick, "quite."
"So then we approach the other point of why you despise yourself?" said
Attwater.
"Do we not all despise ourselves?" cried Herrick. "Do not you?"
"Oh, I say I do. But do I?" said Attwater. "One thing I know at least: I
never gave a cry like yours. Hay! it came from a bad conscience! Ah,
man, that poor diving-dress of self-conceit is sadly tattered! To-day,
if ye will hear my voice. To-day, now, while the sun sets, and here in
this burying-place of brown innocents, fall on your knees and cast your
sins and sorrows on the Redeemer. Hay----"
"Not Hay!" interrupted the other, strangling. "Don't call me that! I
mean.... For God's sake, can't you see I'm on the rack?"
"I see it, I know it, I put and keep you there; my fingers are on the
screws!" said Attwater. "Please God, I will bring a penitent this night
before His throne. Come, come to the mercy-seat! He waits to be
gracious, man--waits to be gracious!"
He spread out his arms like a crucifix; his face shone with the
brightness of a seraph's; in his voice, as it rose to the last word, the
tears seemed ready.
Herrick made a vigorous call upon himself. "Attwater," he said, "you
push me beyond bearing. What am I to do? I do not believe. It is living
truth to you: to me, upon my conscience, only folk-lore. I do not
believe there is any form of words under heaven by which I can lift the
burthen from my shoulders. I must stagger on to the end with the pack of
my responsibility; I cannot shift it; do you suppose I would not if I
thought I could? I cannot--cannot--cannot--and let that suffice."
The rapture was all gone from Attwater's countenance; the dark apostle
had disappeared; and in his place there stood an easy, sneering
gentleman, who took off his hat and bowed. It was pertly done, and the
blood burned in Herrick's face.
"What do you mean by that?" he cried.
"Well, shall we go back to the house?" said Attwater. "Our guests will
soon be due."
Herrick stood his ground a moment with clenched fists and teeth; and as
he so stood, the fact of his errand there slowly swung clear in front of
him, like the moon out of clouds. He had come to lure that man on board;
he was failing, even if it could be said that he had tried; he was sure
to fail now, and knew it, and knew it was better so. And what was to be
next?
With a groan he turned to follow his host, who was standing with polite
smile, and instantly and somewhat obsequiously led the way in the now
darkened colonnade of palms. There they went in silence, the earth gave
up richly of her perfume, the air tasted warm and aromatic in the
nostrils; and from a great way forward in the wood, the brightness of
lights and fire marked out the house of Attwater.
Herrick meanwhile resolved and resisted an immense temptation to go up,
to touch him on the arm and breathe a word in his ear: "Beware, they are
going to murder you." There would be one life saved; but what of the two
others? The three lives went up and down before him like buckets in a
well, or like the scales of balances. It had come to a choice, and one
that must be speedy. For certain invaluable minutes, the wheels of life
ran before him, and he could still divert them with a touch to the one
side or the other, still choose who was to live and who was to die. He
considered the men. Attwater intrigued, puzzled, dazzled, enchanted and
revolted him; alive, he seemed but a doubtful good; and the thought of
him lying dead was so unwelcome that it pursued him, like a vision, with
every circumstance of colour and sound. Incessantly he had before him
the image of that great mass of man stricken down in varying attitudes
and with varying wounds; fallen prone, fallen supine, fallen on his
side; or clinging to a doorpost with the changing face and the relaxing
fingers of the death-agony. He heard the click of the trigger, the thud
of the ball, the cry of the victim; he saw the blood flow. And this
building up of circumstance was like a consecration of the man, till he
seemed to walk in sacrificial fillets. Next he considered Davis, with
his thick-fingered, coarse-grained, oat-bread commonness of nature, his
indomitable valour and mirth in the old days of their starvation, the
endearing blend of his faults and virtues, the sudden shining forth of a
tenderness that lay too deep for tears; his children, Ada and her bowel
complaint, and Ada's doll. No, death could not be suffered to approach
that head even in fancy; with a general heat and a bracing of his
muscles, it was borne in on Herrick that Ada's father would find in him
a son to the death. And even Huish showed a little in that sacredness;
by the tacit adoption of daily life they were become brothers; there was
an implied bond of loyalty in their cohabitation of the ship and their
past miseries; to which Herrick must be a little true or wholly
dishonoured. Horror of sudden death for horror of sudden death, there
was here no hesitation possible: it must be Attwater. And no sooner was
the thought formed (which was a sentence) than his whole mind of man ran
in a panic to the other side: and when he looked within himself, he was
aware only of turbulence and inarticulate outcry.
In all this there was no thought of Robert Herrick. He had complied with
the ebb-tide in man's affairs, and the tide had carried him away; he
heard already the roaring of the maelstrom that must hurry him under.
And in his bedevilled and dishonoured soul there was no thought of self.
For how long he walked silent by his companion Herrick had no guess.
The clouds rolled suddenly away; the orgasm was over; he found himself
placid with the placidity of despair; there returned to him the power of
commonplace speech; and he heard with surprise his own voice say: "What
a lovely evening!"
"Is it not?" said Attwater. "Yes, the evenings here would be very
pleasant if one had anything to do. By day, of course, one can shoot."
"You shoot?" asked Herrick.
"Yes, I am what you would call a fine shot," said Attwater. "It is
faith; I believe my balls will go true; if I were to miss once, it would
spoil me for nine months."
"You never miss, then?" said Herrick.
"Not unless I mean to," said Attwater. "But to miss nicely is the art.
There was an old king one knew in the western islands, who used to empty
a Winchester all round a man, and stir his hair or nick a rag out of his
clothes with every ball except the last; and that went plump between the
eyes. It was pretty practice."
"You could do that?" asked Herrick, with a sudden chill.
"O, I can do anything," returned the other. "You do not understand: what
must be, must."
They were now come near to the back part of the house. One of the men
was engaged about the cooking-fire, which burned with the clear, fierce,
essential radiance of cocoa-nut shells. A fragrance of strange meats was
in the air. All round in the verandahs lamps were lighted, so that the
place shone abroad in the dusk of the trees with many complicated
patterns of shadow.
"Come and wash your hands," said Attwater, and led the way into a clean,
matted room with a cot bed, a safe, a shelf or two of books in a glazed
case, and an iron washing-stand. Presently he cried in the native, and
there appeared for a moment in the doorway a plump and pretty young
woman with a clean towel.
"Hullo!" cried Herrick, who now saw for the first time the fourth
survivor of the pestilence, and was startled by the recollection of the
captain's orders.
"Yes," said Attwater, "the whole colony lives about the house, what's
left of it. We are all afraid of devils, if you please! and Taniera and
she sleep in the front parlour, and the other boy on the verandah."
"She is pretty," said Herrick.
"Too pretty," said Attwater. "That was why I had her married. A man
never knows when he may be inclined to be a fool about women; so when we
were left alone I had the pair of them to the chapel and performed the
ceremony. She made a lot of fuss. I do not take at all the romantic view
of marriage," he explained.
"And that strikes you as a safeguard?" asked Herrick with amazement.
"Certainly. I am a plain man and very literal. _Whom God hath joined
together_ are the words, I fancy. So one married them, and respects the
marriage," said Attwater.
"Ah!" said Herrick.
"You see, I may look to make an excellent marriage when I go home,"
began Attwater confidentially. "I am rich. This safe alone"--laying his
hand upon it--"will be a moderate fortune, when I have the time to place
the pearls upon the market. Here are ten years' accumulation from a
lagoon, where I have had as many as ten divers going all day long; and I
went further than people usually do in these waters, for I rotted a lot
of shell and did splendidly. Would you like to see them?"
This confirmation of the captain's guess hit Herrick hard, and he
contained himself with difficulty. "No, thank you, I think not," said
he. "I do not care for pearls. I am very indifferent to all these...."
"Gewgaws?" suggested Attwater. "And yet I believe you ought to cast
an eye on my collection, which is really unique, and which--O! it is
the case with all of us and everything about us!--hangs by a hair.
To-day it groweth up and flourisheth; to-morrow it is cut down and
cast into the oven. To-day it is here and together in this safe;
to-morrow--to-night!--it may be scattered. Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee."
"I do not understand you," said Herrick.
"Not?" said Attwater.
"You seem to speak in riddles," said Herrick unsteadily. "I do not
understand what manner of man you are, nor what you are driving at."
Attwater stood with his hands upon his hips, and his head bent forward.
"I am a fatalist," he replied, "and just now (if you insist on it) an
experimentalist. Talking of which, by the by, who painted out the
schooner's name?" he said, with mocking softness, "because, do you know?
one thinks it should be done again. It can still be partly read; and
whatever is worth doing is surely worth doing well. You think with me?
That is so nice! Well, shall we step on the verandah? I have a dry
sherry that I would like your opinion of."
Herrick followed him forth to where, under the light of the hanging
lamps, the table shone with napery and crystal; followed him as the
criminal goes with the hangman, or the sheep with the butcher; took the
sherry mechanically, drank it, and spoke mechanical words of praise. The
object of his terror had become suddenly inverted; till then he had seen
Attwater trussed and gagged, a helpless victim, and had longed to run in
and save him; he saw him now tower up mysterious and menacing, the angel
of the Lord's wrath, armed with knowledge and threatening judgment. He
set down his glass again, and was surprised to see it empty.
"You go always armed?" he said, and the next moment could have plucked
his tongue out.
"Always," said Attwater. "I have been through a mutiny here; that was
one of my incidents of missionary life."
And just then the sound of voices reached them, and looking forth from
the verandah they saw Huish and the captain drawing near.
CHAPTER IX
THE DINNER PARTY
They sat down to an island dinner, remarkable for its variety and
excellence: turtle-soup and steak, fish, fowls, a sucking-pig, a
cocoa-nut salad, and sprouting cocoa-nut roasted for dessert. Not a tin
had been opened; and save for the oil and vinegar in the salad, and some
green spears of onion which Attwater cultivated and plucked with his own
hand, not even the condiments were European. Sherry, hock, and claret
succeeded each other, and the _Farallone_ champagne brought up the rear
with the dessert.
It was plain that, like so many of the extremely religious in the days
before teetotalism, Attwater had a dash of the epicure. For such
characters it is softening to eat well; doubly so to have designed and
had prepared an excellent meal for others; and the manners of their host
were agreeably mollified in consequence. A cat of huge growth sat on his
shoulder purring, and occasionally, with a deft paw, capturing a morsel
in the air. To a cat he might be likened himself, as he lolled at the
head of his table, dealing out attentions and innuendoes, and using the
velvet and the claw indifferently. And both Huish and the captain fell
progressively under the charm of his hospitable freedom.
Over the third guest the incidents of the dinner may be said to have
passed for long unheeded. Herrick accepted all that was offered him, ate
and drank without tasting, and heard without comprehension. His mind was
singly occupied in contemplating the horror of the circumstances in
which he sat. What Attwater knew, what the captain designed, from which
side treachery was to be first expected, these were the ground of his
thoughts. There were times when he longed to throw down the table and
flee into the night. And even that was debarred him; to do anything, to
say anything, to move at all, were only to precipitate the barbarous
tragedy; and he sat spellbound, eating with white lips. Two of his
companions observed him narrowly, Attwater with raking, sidelong glances
that did not interrupt his talk, the captain with a heavy and anxious
consideration.
"Well, I must say this sherry is a really prime article," said Huish.
"'Ow much does it stand you in, if it's a fair question?"
"A hundred and twelve shillings in London, and the freight to
Valparaiso, and on again," said Attwater. "It strikes one as really not
a bad fluid."
"A 'undred and twelve!" murmured the clerk, relishing the wine and the
figures in a common ecstasy: "O my!"
"So glad you like it," said Attwater. "Help yourself, Mr. Whish, and
keep the bottle by you."
"My friend's name is Huish and not Whish, sir," said the captain, with a
flush.
"I beg your pardon, I am sure. Huish and not Whish; certainly," said
Attwater. "I was about to say that I have still eight dozen," he added,
fixing the captain with his eye.
"Eight dozen what?" said Davis.
"Sherry," was the reply. "Eight dozen excellent sherry. Why, it seems
almost worth it in itself--to a man fond of wine."
The ambiguous words struck home to guilty consciences, and Huish and the
captain sat up in their places and regarded him with a scare.
"Worth what?" said Davis.
"A hundred and twelve shillings," replied Attwater.
The captain breathed hard for a moment. He reached out far and wide to
find any coherency in these remarks; then, with a great effort, changed
the subject.
"I allow we are about the first white men upon this island, sir," said
he.
Attwater followed him at once, and with entire gravity, to the new
ground. "Myself and Dr. Symonds excepted, I should say the only ones,"
he returned. "And yet who can tell? In the course of the ages some one
may have lived here, and we sometimes think that some one must. The
coco-palms grow all round the island, which is scarce like nature's
planting. We found besides, when we landed, an unmistakable cairn upon
the beach; use unknown; but probably erected in the hope of gratifying
some mumbo-jumbo whose very name is forgotten, by some thick-witted
gentry whose very bones are lost. Then the island (witness the
Directory) has been twice reported; and since my tenancy, we have had
two wrecks, both derelict. The rest is conjecture."
"Dr. Symonds is your partner, I guess?" said Davis.
"A dear fellow, Symonds! How he would regret it, if he knew you had been
here!" said Attwater.
"'E's on the _Trinity 'All_, ain't he?" asked Huish.
"And if you could tell me where the _Trinity 'All_ was, you would confer
a favour, Mr. Whish!" was the reply.
"I suppose she has a native crew?" said Davis.
"Since the secret has been kept ten years, one would suppose she had,"
replied Attwater.
"Well, now, see 'ere!" said Huish. "You have everythink about you in no
end style, and no mistake, but I tell you it wouldn't do for me. Too
much of 'the old rustic bridge by the mill'; too retired by 'alf. Give
me the sound of Bow Bells!"
"You must not think it was always so," replied Attwater. "This was once
a busy shore, although now, hark! you can hear the solitude. I find it
stimulating. And talking of the sound of bells, kindly follow a little
experiment of mine in silence." There was a silver bell at his right
hand to call the servants; he made them a sign to stand still, struck
the bell with force, and leaned eagerly forward. The note rose clear and
strong; it rang out clear and far into the night and over the deserted
island; it died into the distance until there only lingered in the
porches of the ear a vibration that was sound no longer. "Empty houses,
empty sea, solitary beaches!" said Attwater. "And yet God hears the
bell! And yet we sit in this verandah on a lighted stage with all heaven
for spectators! And you call that solitude?"
There followed a bar of silence, during which the captain sat
mesmerised.
Then Attwater laughed softly. "These are the diversions of a lonely
man," he resumed, "and possibly not in good taste. One tells oneself
these little fairy tales for company. If there _should_ happen to be
anything in folk-lore, Mr. Hay? But here comes the claret. One does not
offer you Lafitte, captain, because I believe it is all sold to the
railroad dining-cars in your great country; but this Brâne-Mouton is of
a good year, and Mr. Whish will give me news of it."
"That's a queer idea of yours!" cried the captain, bursting with a sigh
from the spell that had bound him. "So you mean to tell me now, that you
sit here evenings and ring up ... well, ring on the angels ... by
yourself?"
"As a matter of historic fact, and since you put it directly, one does
not," said Attwater. "Why ring a bell, when there flows out from oneself
and everything about one a far more momentous silence? the least beat of
my heart and the least thought in my mind echoing into eternity for ever
and for ever and for ever."
"O, look 'ere," said Huish, "turn down the lights at once, and the Band
of 'Ope will oblige! This ain't a spiritual séance."
"No folk-lore about Mr. Whish--I beg your pardon, captain: Huish, not
Whish, of course," said Attwater.
As the boy was filling Huish's glass, the bottle escaped from his hand
and was shattered, and the wine spilt on the verandah floor. Instant
grimness as of death appeared in the face of Attwater; he smote the bell
imperiously, and the two brown natives fell into the attitude of
attention and stood mute and trembling. There was just a moment of
silence and hard looks; then followed a few savage words in the native;
and, upon a gesture of dismissal, the service proceeded as before.
None of the party had as yet observed upon the excellent bearing of the
two men. They were dark, undersized, and well set up; stepped softly,
waited deftly, brought on the wines and dishes at a look, and their eyes
attended studiously on their master.
"Where do you get your labour from anyway?" asked Davis.
"Ah, where not?" answered Attwater.
"Not much of a soft job, I suppose?" said the captain.
"If you will tell me where getting labour is!" said Attwater, with a
shrug. "And of course, in our case, as we could name no destination, we
had to go far and wide and do the best we could. We have gone as far
west as the Kingsmills and as far south as Rapa-iti. Pity Symonds isn't
here! He is full of yarns. That was his part, to collect them. Then
began mine, which was the educational."
"You mean to run them?" said Davis.
"Ay! to run them," said Attwater.
"Wait a bit," said Davis; "I'm out of my depth. How was this? Do you
mean to say you did it single-handed?"
"One did it single-handed," said Attwater, "because there was nobody to
help one."
"By God, but you must be a holy terror!" cried the captain, in a glow of
admiration.
"One does one's best," said Attwater.
"Well, now!" said Davis, "I have seen a lot of driving in my time, and
been counted a good driver myself. I fought my way, third mate, round
the Cape Horn with a push of packet-rats that would have turned the
devil out of hell and shut the door on him; and I tell you, this racket
of Mr. Attwater's takes the cake. In a ship, why, there ain't nothing to
it! You've got the law with you, that's what does it. But put me down
on this blame' beach alone, with nothing but a whip and a mouthful of
bad words, and ask me to ... no, _sir_! it's not good enough! I haven't
got the sand for that!" cried Davis. "It's the law behind," he added;
"it's the law does it, every time!"
"The beak ain't as black as he's sometimes pynted," observed Huish
humorously.
"Well, one got the law after a fashion," said Attwater. "One had to be a
number of things. It was sometimes rather a bore."
"I should smile!" said Davis. "Rather lively, I should think!"
"I daresay we mean the same thing," said Attwater. "However, one way or
another, one got it knocked into their heads that they _must_ work, and
they _did_ ... until the Lord took them!"
"'Ope you made 'em jump," said Huish.
"When it was necessary, Mr. Whish, I made them jump," said Attwater.
"You bet you did," cried the captain. He was a good deal flushed, but
not so much with wine as admiration; and his eyes drank in the huge
proportions of the other with delight. "You bet you did, and you bet
that I can see you doing it! By God, you're a man, and you can say I
said so."
"Too good of you, I'm sure," said Attwater.
"Did you--did you ever have crime here?" asked Herrick, breaking his
silence with a pungent voice.
"Yes," said Attwater, "we did."
"And how did you handle that, sir?" cried the eager captain.
"Well, you see, it was a queer case," replied Attwater. "It was a case
that would have puzzled Solomon. Shall I tell it you? yes?"
The captain rapturously accepted.
"Well," drawled Attwater, "here is what it was. I daresay you know two
types of natives, which may be called the obsequious and the sullen?
Well, one had them, the types themselves, detected in the fact; and one
had them together. Obsequiousness ran out of the first like wine out of
a bottle, sullenness congested in the second. Obsequiousness was all
smiles; he ran to catch your eye, he loved to gabble; and he had about a
dozen words of beach English, and an eighth-of-an-inch veneer of
Christianity. Sullens was industrious; a big down-looking bee. When he
was spoken to, he answered with a black look and a shrug of one
shoulder, but the thing would be done. I don't give him to you for a
model of manners; there was nothing showy about Sullens; but he was
strong and steady, and ungraciously obedient. Now Sullens got into
trouble; no matter how; the regulations of the place were broken, and he
was punished accordingly--without effect. So, the next day, and the
next, and the day after, till I began to be weary of the business, and
Sullens (I am afraid) particularly so. There came a day when he was in
fault again, for the--O perhaps the thirtieth time; and he rolled a dull
eye upon me, with a spark in it, and appeared to speak. Now the
regulations of the place are formal upon one point: we allow no
explanations; none are received, none allowed to be offered. So one
stopped him instantly, but made a note of the circumstance. The next day
he was gone from the settlement. There could be nothing more annoying;
if the labour took to running away, the fishery was wrecked. There are
sixty miles of this island, you see, all in length like the Queen's
highway; the idea of pursuit in such a place was a piece of
single-minded childishness, which one did not entertain. Two days later,
I made a discovery; it came in upon me with a flash that Sullens had
been unjustly punished from beginning to end, and the real culprit
throughout had been Obsequiousness. The native who talks, like the woman
who hesitates, is lost. You set him talking and lying; and he talks, and
lies, and watches your face to see if he has pleased you; till, at last,
out comes the truth! It came out of Obsequiousness in the regular
course. I said nothing to him; I dismissed him; and late as it was, for
it was already night, set off to look for Sullens. I had not far to go:
about two hundred yards up the island the moon showed him to me. He was
hanging in a coco-palm--I'm not botanist enough to tell you how--but
it's the way, in nine cases out of ten, these natives commit suicide.
His tongue was out, poor devil, and the birds had got at him. I spare
you details: he was an ugly sight! I gave the business six good hours of
thinking in this verandah. My justice had been made a fool of; I don't
suppose that I was ever angrier. Next day, I had the conch sounded and
all hands out before sunrise. One took one's gun, and led the way, with
Obsequiousness. He was very talkative; the beggar supposed that all was
right now he had confessed; in the old schoolboy phrase he was plainly
'sucking up' to me; full of protestations of good-will and good
behaviour; to which one answered one really can't remember what.
Presently the tree came in sight, and the hanged man. They all burst out
lamenting for their comrade in the island way, and Obsequiousness was
the loudest of the mourners. He was quite genuine; a noxious creature
without any consciousness of guilt. Well, presently--to make a long
story short--one told him to go up the tree. He stared a bit, looked at
one with a trouble in his eye, and had rather a sickly smile; but went.
He was obedient to the last; he had all the pretty virtues, but the
truth was not in him. So soon as he was up he looked down, and there was
the rifle covering him; and at that he gave a whimper like a dog. You
could hear a pin drop; no more keening now. There they all crouched upon
the ground with bulging eyes; there was he in the tree-top, the colour
of lead; and between was the dead man, dancing a bit in the air. He was
obedient to the last, recited his crime, recommended his soul to God.
And then...."
Attwater paused, and Herrick, who had been listening attentively, made a
convulsive movement which upset his glass.
"And then?" said the breathless captain.
"Shot," said Attwater. "They came to the ground together."
Herrick sprang to his feet with a shriek and an insensate gesture.
"It was a murder!" he screamed, "a cold-hearted, bloody-minded murder!
You monstrous being! Murderer and hypocrite--murderer and
hypocrite--murderer and hypocrite----" he repeated, and his tongue
stumbled among the words.
The captain was by him in a moment. "Herrick!" he cried, "behave
yourself! Here, don't be a blame' fool!"
Herrick struggled in his embrace like a frantic child, and suddenly
bowing his face in his hands, choked into a sob, the first of many,
which now convulsed his body silently, and now jerked from him
indescribable and meaningless sounds.
"Your friend appears over-excited," remarked Attwater, sitting unmoved
but all alert at table.
"It must be the wine," replied the captain. "He ain't no drinking man,
you see. I--I think I'll take him away. A walk'll sober him up, I
guess."
He led him without resistance out of the verandah and into the night, in
which they soon melted; but still for some time, as they drew away, his
comfortable voice was to be heard soothing and remonstrating, and
Herrick answering, at intervals, with the mechanical noises of hysteria.
"'E's like a bloomin' poultry yard!" observed Huish, helping himself to
wine (of which he spilled a good deal) with gentlemanly ease. "A man
should learn to beyave at table," he added.
"Rather bad form, is it not?" said Attwater. "Well, well, we are left
_tête-à-tête_. A glass of wine with you, Mr. Whish!"
CHAPTER X
THE OPEN DOOR
The captain and Herrick meanwhile turned their back upon the lights in
Attwater's verandah, and took a direction towards the pier and the beach
of the lagoon.
The isle, at this hour, with its smooth floor of sand, the pillared roof
overhead, and the prevalent illumination of the lamps, wore an air of
unreality, like a deserted theatre or a public garden at midnight. A man
looked about him for the statues and tables. Not the least air of wind
was stirring among the palms, and the silence was emphasised by the
continuous clamour of the surf from the seashore, as it might be of
traffic in the next street.
Still talking, still soothing him, the captain hurried his patient on,
brought him at last to the lagoon side, and leading him down the beach,
laved his head and face with the tepid water. The paroxysm gradually
subsided, the sobs became less convulsive and then ceased; by an odd but
not quite unnatural conjunction, the captain's soothing current of talk
died away at the same time and by proportional steps, and the pair
remained sunk in silence. The lagoon broke at their feet in petty
wavelets, and with a sound as delicate as a whisper; stars of all
degrees looked down on their own images in that vast mirror; and the
more angry colour of the _Farallone's_ riding lamp burned in the middle
distance. For long they continued to gaze on the scene before them, and
hearken anxiously to the rustle and tinkle of that miniature surf, or
the more distant and loud reverberations from the outer coast. For long
speech was denied them; and when the words came at last, they came to
both simultaneously.
"Say, Herrick ..." the captain was beginning.
But Herrick, turning swiftly towards his companion, bent him down with
the eager cry: "Let's up anchor, captain, and to sea!"
"Where to, my son?" said the captain. "Up anchor's easy saying. But
where to?"
"To sea," responded Herrick. "The sea's big enough! To sea--away from
this dreadful island and that, O! that sinister man!"
"O, we'll see about that," said Davis. "You brace up, and we'll see
about that. You're all run down, that's what's wrong with you; you're
all nerves, like Jemimar; you've got to brace up good and be yourself
again, and then we'll talk."
"To sea," reiterated Herrick, "to sea to-night--now--this moment!"
"It can't be, my son," replied the captain firmly. "No ship of mine puts
to sea without provisions; you can take that for settled."
"You don't seem to understand," said Herrick. "The whole thing is over,
I tell you. There is nothing to do here, when he knows all. That man
there with the cat knows all; can't you take it in?"
"All what?" asked the captain, visibly discomposed. "Why, he received us
like a perfect gentleman and treated us real handsome, until you began
with your foolery--and I must say I seen men shot for less, and nobody
sorry! What more do you expect anyway?"
Herrick rocked to and fro upon the sand, shaking his head.
"Guying us," he said; "he was guying us--only guying us; it's all we're
good for."
"There was one queer thing, to be sure," admitted the captain, with a
misgiving of the voice; "that about the sherry. Damned if I caught on
to that. Say, Herrick, you didn't give me away?"
"O! give you away!" repeated Herrick with weary, querulous scorn. "What
was there to give away? We're transparent; we've got rascal branded on
us: detected rascal--detected rascal! Why, before he came on board,
there was the name painted out, and he saw the whole thing. He made sure
we would kill him there and then, and stood guying you and Huish on the
chance. He calls that being frightened! Next he had me ashore; a fine
time I had! _The two wolves_, he calls you and Huish. _What is the puppy
doing with the two wolves?_ he asked. He showed me his pearls; he said
they might be dispersed before morning, and _all hung by a hair_--and
smiled as he said it, such a smile! O, it's no use, I tell you! He knows
all, he sees through all; we only make him laugh with our pretences--he
looks at us and laughs like God!"
There was a silence. Davis stood with contorted brows, gazing into the
night.
"The pearls?" he said suddenly. "He showed them to you? He has them?"
"No, he didn't show them; I forgot: only the safe they were in," said
Herrick. "But you'll never get them!"
"I've two words to say to that," said the captain.
"Do you think he would have been so easy at table, unless he was
prepared?" cried Herrick. "The servants were both armed. He was armed
himself; he always is; he told me. You will never deceive his vigilance.
Davis, I know it! It's all up, I tell you, and keep telling you and
proving it. All up; all up. There's nothing for it, there's nothing to
be done: all gone: life, honour, love. O my God, my God, why was I
born?"
Another pause followed upon this outburst.
The captain put his hands to his brow.
"Another thing!" he broke out. "Why did he tell you all this? Seems like
madness to me!"
Herrick shook his head with gloomy iteration. "You wouldn't understand
if I were to tell you," said he.
"I guess I can understand any blame' thing that you can tell me," said
the captain.
"Well, then, he's a fatalist," said Herrick.
"What's that? a fatalist?" said Davis.
"O, it's a fellow that believes a lot of things," said Herrick;
"believes that his bullets go true; believes that all falls out as God
chooses, do as you like to prevent it; and all that."
"Why, I guess I believe right so myself," said Davis.
"You do?" said Herrick.
"You bet I do!" says Davis.
Herrick shrugged his shoulders. "Well, you must be a fool," said he, and
he leaned his head upon his knees.
The captain stood biting his hands.
"There's one thing sure," he said at last. "I must get Huish out of
that. _He's_ not fit to hold his end up with a man like you describe."
And he turned to go away. The words had been quite simple; not so the
tone; and the other was quick to catch it.
"Davis!" he cried, "no! Don't do it. Spare _me_, and don't do it--spare
yourself, and leave it alone--for God's sake, for your children's sake!"
His voice rose to a passionate shrillness; another moment, and he might
be overheard by their not distant victim. But Davis turned on him with a
savage oath and gesture; and the miserable young man rolled over on his
face on the sand, and lay speechless and helpless.
The captain meanwhile set out rapidly for Attwater's house. As he went,
he considered with himself eagerly, his thoughts racing. The man had
understood, he had mocked them from the beginning; he would teach him to
make a mockery of John Davis! Herrick thought him a god; give him a
second to aim in, and the god was overthrown. He chuckled as he felt the
butt of his revolver. It should be done now, as he went in. From
behind? It was difficult to get there. From across the table? No, the
captain preferred to shoot standing, so as you could be sure to get your
hand upon your gun. The best would be to summon Huish, and when Attwater
stood up and turned--ah, then would be the moment. Wrapped in this
ardent prefiguration of events, the captain posted towards the house
with his head down.
"Hands up! Halt!" cried the voice of Attwater.
And the captain, before he knew what he was doing, had obeyed. The
surprise was complete and irremediable. Coming on the top crest of his
murderous intentions, he had walked straight into an ambuscade, and now
stood, with his hands impotently lifted, staring at the verandah.
The party was now broken up. Attwater leaned on a post, and kept Davis
covered with a Winchester. One of the servants was hard by with a second
at the port arms, leaning a little forward, round-eyed with eager
expectancy. In the open space at the head of the stair, Huish was partly
supported by the other native; his face wreathed in meaningless smiles,
his mind seemingly sunk in the contemplation of an unlighted cigar.
"Well," said Attwater, "you seem to me to be a very twopenny pirate!"
The captain uttered a sound in his throat for which we have no name;
rage choked him.
"I am going to give you Mr. Whish--or the wine-sop that remains of him,"
continued Attwater. "He talks a great deal when he drinks, Captain Davis
of the _Sea Ranger_. But I have quite done with him--and return the
article with thanks. Now," he cried sharply; "another false movement
like that, and your family will have to deplore the loss of an
invaluable parent; keep strictly still, Davis."
Attwater said a word in the native, his eye still undeviatingly fixed on
the captain; and the servant thrust Huish smartly forward from the brink
of the stair. With an extraordinary simultaneous dispersion of his
members, that gentleman bounded forth into space, struck the earth,
ricocheted, and brought up with his arms about a palm. His mind was
quite a stranger to these events; the expression of anguish that
deformed his countenance at the moment of the leap was probably
mechanical; and he suffered these convulsions in silence; clung to the
tree like an infant; and seemed, by his dips, to suppose himself engaged
in the pastime of bobbing for apples. A more finely sympathetic mind or
a more observant eye might have remarked, a little in front of him on
the sand and still quite beyond reach, the unlighted cigar.
"There is your Whitechapel carrion!" said Attwater. "And now you might
very well ask me why I do not put a period to you at once, as you
deserve. I will tell you why, Davis. It is because I have nothing to do
with the _Sea Ranger_ and the people you drowned, or the _Farallone_ and
the champagne that you stole. That is your account with God; He keeps
it, and He will settle it when the clock strikes. In my own case, I have
nothing to go on but suspicion, and I do not kill on suspicion, not even
vermin like you. But understand: if ever I see any of you again, it is
another matter, and you shall eat a bullet. And now take yourself off.
March! and as you value what you call your life, keep your hands up as
you go!"
The captain remained as he was, his hands up, his mouth open: mesmerised
with fury.
"March!" said Attwater. "One--two--three!"
And Davis turned and passed slowly away. But even as he went, he was
meditating a prompt, offensive return. In the twinkling of an eye he had
leaped behind a tree; and was crouching there, pistol in hand, peering
from either side of his place of ambush with bared teeth; a serpent
already poised to strike. And already he was too late. Attwater and his
servants had disappeared; and only the lamps shone on the deserted table
and the bright sand about the house, and threw into the night in all
directions the strong and tall shadows of the palms.
Davis ground his teeth. Where were they gone, the cowards? to what hole
had they retreated beyond reach? It was in vain he should try anything,
he, single and with a second-hand revolver, against three persons, armed
with Winchesters, and who did not show an ear out of any of the
apertures of that lighted and silent house? Some of them might have
already ducked below it from the rear, and be drawing a bead upon him at
that moment from the low-browed crypt, the receptacle of empty bottles
and broken crockery. No, there was nothing to be done but to bring away
(if it were still possible) his shattered and demoralised forces.
"Huish," he said, "come along."
"'S lose my ciga'," said Huish, reaching vaguely forward.
The captain let out a rasping oath. "Come right along here," said he.
"'S all righ'. Sleep here 'th Atty-Attwa. Go boar' t'morr'," replied the
festive one.
"If you don't come, and come now, by the living God, I'll shoot you!"
cried the captain.
It is not to be supposed that the sense of these words in any way
penetrated to the mind of Huish; rather that, in a fresh attempt upon
the cigar, he overbalanced himself and came flying erratically forward:
a course which brought him within reach of Davis.
"Now you walk straight," said the captain, clutching him, "or I'll know
why not!"
"'S lose my ciga'," replied Huish.
The captain's contained fury blazed up for a moment. He twisted Huish
round, grasped him by the neck of the coat, ran him in front of him to
the pier-end, and flung him savagely forward on his face.
"Look for your cigar then, you swine!" said he, and blew his boat-call
till the pea in it ceased to rattle.
An immediate activity responded on board the _Farallone_; far-away
voices, and soon the sound of oars, floated along the surface of the
lagoon; and at the same time, from nearer hand, Herrick aroused himself
and strolled languidly up. He bent over the insignificant figure of
Huish, where it grovelled, apparently insensible, at the base of the
figure-head.
"Dead?" he asked.
"No, he's not dead," said Davis.
"And Attwater?" asked Herrick.
"Now you just shut your head!" replied Davis. "You can do that, I fancy,
and by God, I'll show you how! I'll stand no more of your drivel."
They waited accordingly in silence till the boat bumped on the farthest
piers; then raised Huish, head and heels, carried him down the gangway,
and flung him summarily in the bottom. On the way out he was heard
murmuring of the loss of his cigar; and after he had been handed up the
side like baggage, and cast down in the alleyway to slumber, his last
audible expression was: "Splen'l fl' Attwa'!" This the expert construed
into "Splendid fellow, Attwater"; with so much innocence had this great
spirit issued from the adventures of the evening.
The captain went and walked in the waist with brief irate turns; Herrick
leaned his arms on the taffrail; the crew had all turned in. The ship
had a gentle, cradling motion; at times a block piped like a bird. On
shore, through the colonnade of palm stems, Attwater's house was to be
seen shining steadily with many lamps. And there was nothing else
visible, whether in the heaven above or in the lagoon below, but the
stars and their reflections. It might have been minutes, or it might
have been hours, that Herrick leaned there, looking in the glorified
water and drinking peace. "A bath of stars," he was thinking; when a
hand was laid at last on his shoulder.
"Herrick," said the captain, "I've been walking off my trouble."
A sharp jar passed through the young man, but he neither answered nor so
much as turned his head.
"I guess I spoke a little rough to you on shore," pursued the captain;
"the fact is, I was real mad; but now it's over, and you and me have to
turn to and think."
"I will _not_ think," said Herrick.
"Here, old man!" said Davis kindly; "this won't fight, you know! You've
got to brace up and help me get things straight. You're not going back
on a friend? That's not like you, Herrick!"
"O yes, it is," said Herrick.
"Come, come!" said the captain, and paused as if quite at a loss. "Look
here," he cried, "you have a glass of champagne. _I_ won't touch it, so
that'll show you if I'm in earnest. But it's just the pick-me-up for
you; it'll put an edge on you at once."
"O, you leave me alone!" said Herrick, and turned away.
The captain caught him by the sleeve; and he shook him off and turned on
him, for the moment like a demoniac.
"Go to hell in your own way!" he cried.
And he turned away again, this time unchecked, and stepped forward to
where the boat rocked alongside and ground occasionally against the
schooner. He looked about him. A corner of the house was interposed
between the captain and himself; all was well; no eye must see him in
that last act. He slid silently into the boat; thence, silently, into
the starry water. Instinctively he swam a little; it would be time
enough to stop by and by.
The shock of the immersion brightened his mind immediately. The events
of the ignoble day passed before him in a frieze of pictures, and he
thanked "whatever Gods there be" for that open door of suicide. In such
a little while he would be done with it, the random business at an end,
the prodigal son come home. A very bright planet shone before him and
drew a trenchant wake along the water. He took that for his line and
followed it.
That was the last earthly thing that he should look upon; that radiant
speck, which he had soon magnified into a City of Laputa, along whose
terraces there walked men and women of awful and benignant features,
who viewed him with distant commiseration. These imaginary spectators
consoled him; he told himself their talk, one to another; it was of
himself and his sad destiny.
From such flights of fancy he was aroused by the growing coldness of the
water. Why should he delay? Here, where he was now, let him drop the
curtain, let him seek the ineffable refuge, let him lie down with all
races and generations of men in the house of sleep. It was easy to say,
easy to do. To stop swimming: there was no mystery in that, if he could
do it. Could he? And he could not. He knew it instantly. He was aware
instantly of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invincible,
clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger,
sinew by sinew; something that was at once he and not he--at once within
and without him; the shutting of some miniature valve in his brain,
which a single manly thought should suffice to open--and the grasp of an
external fate ineluctable as gravity. To any man there may come at times
a consciousness that there blows, through all the articulations of his
body, the wind of a spirit not wholly his; that his mind rebels; that
another girds him and carries him whither he would not. It came now to
Herrick, with the authority of a revelation. There was no escape
possible. The open door was closed in his recreant face. He must go back
into the world and amongst men without illusion. He must stagger on to
the end with the pack of his responsibility and his disgrace, until a
cold, a blow, a merciful chance ball, or the more merciful hangman,
should dismiss him from his infamy. There were men who could commit
suicide; there were men who could not; and he was one who could not.
For perhaps a minute there raged in his mind the coil of this discovery;
then cheerless certitude followed; and, with an incredible simplicity of
submission to ascertained fact, he turned round and struck out for
shore. There was a courage in this which he could not appreciate; the
ignobility of his cowardice wholly occupying him. A strong current set
against him like a wind in his face; he contended with it heavily,
wearily, without enthusiasm, but with substantial advantage; marking his
progress the while, without pleasure, by the outline of the trees. Once
he had a moment of hope. He heard to the southward of him, towards the
centre of the lagoon, the wallowing of some great fish, doubtless a
shark, and paused for a little, treading water. Might not this be the
hangman? he thought. But the wallowing died away; mere silence
succeeded; and Herrick pushed on again for the shore, raging as he went
at his own nature. Ay, he would wait for the shark; but if he had heard
him coming!... His smile was tragic. He could have spat upon himself.
About three in the morning, chance, and the set of the current, and the
bias of his own right-handed body so decided it between them that he
came to shore upon the beach in front of Attwater's. There he sat down,
and looked forth into a world without any of the lights of hope. The
poor diving-dress of self-conceit was sadly tattered! With the fairy
tale of suicide, of a refuge always open to him, he had hitherto
beguiled and supported himself in the trials of life; and behold! that
also was only a fairy tale, that also was folk-lore. With the
consequences of his acts he saw himself implacably confronted for the
duration of life: stretched upon a cross, and nailed there with the iron
bolts of his own cowardice. He had no tears; he told himself no stories.
His disgust with himself was so complete, that even the process of
apologetic mythology had ceased. He was like a man cast down from a
pillar, and every bone broken. He lay there, and admitted the facts, and
did not attempt to rise.
Dawn began to break over the far side of the atoll, the sky brightened,
the clouds became dyed with gorgeous colours, the shadows of the night
lifted. And, suddenly, Herrick was aware that the lagoon and the trees
wore again their daylight livery; and he saw, on board the _Farallone_,
Davis extinguishing the lantern, and smoke rising from the galley.
Davis, without doubt, remarked and recognised the figure on the beach;
or perhaps hesitated to recognise it; for after he had gazed a long
while from under his hand, he went into the house and fetched a glass.
It was very powerful; Herrick had often used it. With an instinct of
shame he hid his face in his hands.
"And what brings you here, Mr. Herrick-Hay, or Mr. Hay-Herrick?" asked
the voice of Attwater. "Your back view from my present position is
remarkably fine, and I would continue to present it. We can get on very
nicely as we are, and if you were to turn round, do you know? I think it
would be awkward."
Herrick slowly rose to his feet; his heart throbbed hard, a hideous
excitement shook him, but he was master of himself. Slowly he turned and
faced Attwater and the muzzle of a pointed rifle. "Why could I not do
that last night?" he thought.
"Well, why don't you fire?" he said aloud, in a voice that trembled.
Attwater slowly put his gun under his arm, then his hands in his
pockets.
"What brings you here?" he repeated.
"I don't know," said Herrick; and then, with a cry: "Can you do anything
with me?"
"Are you armed?" said Attwater. "I ask for the form's sake."
"Armed? No!" said Herrick. "O yes, I am, too!"
And he flung upon the beach a dripping pistol.
"You are wet," said Attwater.
"Yes, I am wet," said Herrick. "Can you do anything with me?"
Attwater read his face attentively.
"It would depend a good deal upon what you are," said he.
"What I am? A coward!" said Herrick.
"There is very little to be done with that," said Attwater. "And yet the
description hardly strikes one as exhaustive."
"O, what does it matter?" cried Herrick. "Here I am. I am broken
crockery; I am a burst drum; the whole of my life is gone to water; I
have nothing left that I believe in, except my living horror of myself.
Why do I come to you? I don't know; you are cold, cruel, hateful; and I
hate you, or I think I hate you. But you are an honest man, an honest
gentleman. I put myself, helpless, in your hands. What must I do? If I
can't do anything, be merciful and put a bullet through me; it's only a
puppy with a broken leg!"
"If I were you, I would pick up that pistol, come up to the house, and
put on some dry clothes," said Attwater.
"If you really mean it?" said Herrick. "You know they--we--they.... But
you know all."
"I know quite enough," said Attwater. "Come up to the house."
And the captain, from the deck of the _Farallone_, saw the two men pass
together under the shadow of the grove.
CHAPTER XI
DAVID AND GOLIATH
Huish had bundled himself up from the glare of the day--his face to the
house, his knees retracted. The frail bones in the thin tropical raiment
seemed scarce more considerable than a fowl's; and Davis, sitting on the
rail with his arm about a stay, contemplated him with gloom, wondering
what manner of counsel that insignificant figure should contain. For
since Herrick had thrown him off and deserted to the enemy, Huish, alone
of mankind, remained to him to be a helper and oracle.
He considered their position with a sinking heart. The ship was a stolen
ship; the stores, whether from initial carelessness or ill
administration during the voyage, were insufficient to carry them to any
port except back to Papeete; and there retribution waited in the shape
of a gendarme, a judge with a queer-shaped hat, and the horror of
distant Noumea. Upon that side there was no glimmer of hope. Here, at
the island, the dragon was roused; Attwater with his men and his
Winchesters watched and patrolled the house; let him who dare approach
it. What else was then left but to sit there, inactive, pacing the
decks, until the _Trinity Hall_ arrived and they were cast into irons,
or until the food came to an end, and the pangs of famine succeeded? For
the _Trinity Hall_ Davis was prepared; he would barricade the house, and
die there defending it, like a rat in a crevice. But for the other? The
cruise of the _Farallone_, into which he had plunged, only a fortnight
before, with such golden expectations, could this be the nightmare end
of it? The ship rotting at anchor, the crew stumbling and dying in the
scuppers? It seemed as if any extreme of hazard were to be preferred to
so grisly a certainty; as if it would be better to up-anchor after all,
put to sea at a venture, and, perhaps, perish at the hands of cannibals
on one of the more obscure Paumotus. His eye roved swiftly over sea and
sky in quest of any promise of wind, but the fountains of the Trade were
empty. Where it had run yesterday and for weeks before, a roaring blue
river charioting clouds, silence now reigned; and the whole height of
the atmosphere stood balanced. On the endless ribbon of island that
stretched out to either hand of him its array of golden and green and
silvery palms, not the most volatile frond was to be seen stirring; they
drooped to their stable images in the lagoon like things carved of
metal, and already their long line began to reverberate heat. There was
no escape possible that day, none probable on the morrow. And still the
stores were running out!
Then came over Davis, from deep down in the roots of his being, or at
least from far back among his memories of childhood and innocence, a
wave of superstition. This run of ill-luck was something beyond natural;
the chances of the game were in themselves more various: it seemed as if
the devil must serve the pieces. The devil? He heard again the clear
note of Attwater's bell ringing abroad into the night, and dying away.
How if God...?
Briskly he averted his mind. Attwater: that was the point. Attwater had
food and a treasure of pearls; escape made possible in the present,
riches in the future. They must come to grips with Attwater; the man
must die. A smoky heat went over his face, as he recalled the impotent
figure he had made last night, and the contemptuous speeches he must
bear in silence. Rage, shame, and the love of life, all pointed the one
way; and only invention halted: how to reach him? had he strength
enough? was there any help in that misbegotten packet of bones against
the house?
His eyes dwelled upon him with a strange avidity, as though he would
read into his soul; and presently the sleeper moved, stirred uneasily,
turned suddenly round, and threw him a blinking look. Davis maintained
the same dark stare, and Huish looked away again and sat up.
"Lord, I've an 'eadache on me!" said he. "I believe I was a bit swipey
last night. W'ere's that cry-byby 'Errick?"
"Gone," said the captain.
"Ashore?" cried Huish. "O, I say! I'd 'a gone too."
"Would you?" said the captain.
"Yes, I would," replied Huish. "I like Attwater. 'E's all right; we got
on like one o'clock when you were gone. And ain't his sherry in it,
rather? It's like Spiers and Pond's Amontillado! I wish I 'ad a drain of
it now." He sighed.
"Well, you'll never get no more of it--that's one thing," said Davis
gravely.
"'Ere, wot's wrong with you, Dyvis? Coppers 'ot? Well, look at _me_! _I_
ain't grumpy," said Huish; "I'm as plyful as a canary-bird, I am."
"Yes," said Davis, "you're playful; I own that; and you were playful
last night, I believe, and a damned fine performance you made of it."
"'Allo!" said Huish. "'Ow's this? Wot performance?"
"Well, I'll tell you," said the captain, getting slowly off the rail.
And he did: at full length, with every wounding epithet and absurd
detail repeated and emphasised; he had his own vanity and Huish's upon
the grill, and roasted them; and as he spoke he inflicted and endured
agonies of humiliation. It was a plain man's masterpiece of the
sardonic.
"What do you think of it?" said he, when he had done, and looked down at
Huish, flushed and serious, and yet jeering.
"I'll tell you wot it is," was the reply: "you and me cut a pretty dicky
figure."
"That's so," said Davis, "a pretty measly figure, by God! And, by God,
I want to see that man at my knees."
"Ah!" said Huish. "'Ow to get him there?"
"That's it!" cried Davis. "How to get hold of him! They're four to two;
though there's only one man among them to count, and that's Attwater.
Get a bead on Attwater, and the others would cut and run and sing out
like frightened poultry--and old man Herrick would come round with his
hat for a share of the pearls. No, _sir_! it's how to get hold of
Attwater! And we daren't even go ashore; he would shoot us in the boat
like dogs."
"Are you particular about having him dead or alive?" asked Huish.
"I want to see him dead," said the captain.
"Ah, well!" said Huish, "then I believe I'll do a bit of breakfast."
And he turned into the house.
The captain doggedly followed him.
"What's this?" he asked. "What's your idea, anyway?"
"O, you let me alone, will you?" said Huish, opening a bottle of
champagne. "You'll 'ear my idea soon enough. Wyte till I pour some cham
on my 'ot coppers." He drank a glass off, and affected to listen.
"'Ark!" said he, "'ear it fizz. Like 'am frying, I declyre. 'Ave a
glass, do, and look sociable."
"No!" said the captain, with emphasis; "no, I will not! there's
business."
"You p'ys your money and you tykes your choice, my little man," returned
Huish. "Seems rather a shyme to me to spoil your breakfast for wot's
really ancient 'istory."
He finished three parts of a bottle of champagne, and nibbled a corner
of biscuit, with extreme deliberation; the captain sitting opposite and
champing the bit like an impatient horse. Then Huish leaned his arms on
the table and looked Davis in the face.
"W'en you're ready!" said he.
"Well, now, what's your idea?" said Davis, with a sigh.
"Fair play!" said Huish. "What's yours?"
"The trouble is that I've got none," replied Davis; and wandered for
some time in aimless discussion of the difficulties of their path, and
useless explanations of his own fiasco.
"About done?" said Huish.
"I'll dry up right here," replied Davis.
"Well, then," said Huish, "you give me your 'and across the table, and
say, 'Gawd strike me dead if I don't back you up.'"
His voice was hardly raised, yet it thrilled the hearer. His face seemed
the epitome of cunning, and the captain recoiled from it as from a blow.
"What for?" said he.
"Luck," said Huish. "Substantial guarantee demanded."
And he continued to hold out his hand.
"I don't see the good of any such tomfoolery," said the other.
"I do, though," returned Huish. "Gimme your 'and and say the words; then
you'll 'ear my view of it. Don't, and you don't."
The captain went through the required form, breathing short, and gazing
on the clerk with anguish. What to fear he knew not, yet he feared
slavishly what was to fall from the pale lips.
"Now, if you'll excuse me 'alf a second," said Huish, "I'll go and fetch
the byby."
"The baby?" said Davis. "What's that?"
"Fragile. With care. This side up," replied the clerk with a wink, as he
disappeared.
He returned, smiling to himself, and carrying in his hand a silk
handkerchief. The long stupid wrinkles ran up Davis's brow as he saw it.
What should it contain? He could think of nothing more recondite than a
revolver.
Huish resumed his seat.
"Now," said he, "are you man enough to take charge of 'Errick and the
niggers? Because I'll take care of Hattwater."
"How?" cried Davis. "You can't!"
"Tut, tut!" said the clerk. "You gimme time. Wot's the first point? The
first point is that we can't get ashore, and I'll make you a present of
that for a 'ard one. But 'ow about a flag of truce? Would that do the
trick, d'ye think? or would Attwater simply blyze aw'y at us in the
bloomin' boat like dawgs?"
"No," said Davis, "I don't believe he would."
"No more do I," said Huish; "I don't believe he would either; and I'm
sure I 'ope he won't! So then you can call us ashore. Next point is to
get near the managin' direction. And for that I'm going to 'ave you
write a letter, in w'ich you s'y you're ashymed to meet his eye, and
that the bearer, Mr. J. L. 'Uish, is empowered to represent you. Armed
with w'ich seemin'ly simple expedient, Mr. J. L. 'Uish will proceed to
business."
He paused, like one who had finished, but still held Davis with his eye.
"How?" said Davis. "Why?"
"Well, you see, you're big," returned Huish; "'e knows you 'ave a gun in
your pocket, and anybody can see with 'alf an eye that you ain't the man
to 'esitate about usin' it. So it's no go with you, and never was;
you're out of the runnin', Dyvis. But he won't be afryde of me, I'm such
a little 'un! I'm unarmed--no kid about that--and I'll hold my 'ands up
right enough." He paused. "If I can manage to sneak up nearer to him as
we talk," he resumed, "you look out and back me up smart. If I don't, we
go aw'y again, and nothink to 'urt. See?"
The captain's face was contorted by the frenzied effort to comprehend.
"No, I don't see," he cried; "I can't see. What do you mean?"
"I mean to do for the beast!" cried Huish, in a burst of venomous
triumph. "I'll bring the 'ulkin' bully to grass. He's 'ad his larks out
of me; I'm goin' to 'ave my lark out of 'im, and a good lark too!"
"What is it?" said the captain, almost in a whisper.
"Sure you want to know?" asked Huish.
Davis rose and took a turn in the house.
"Yes, I want to know," he said at last with an effort.
"W'en your back's at the wall, you do the best you can, don't you?"
began the clerk. "I s'y that, because I 'appen to know there's a
prejudice against it; it's considered vulgar, awf'ly vulgar." He
unrolled the handkerchief and showed a four-ounce jar. "This 'ere's
vitriol, this is," said he.
The captain stared upon him with a whitening face.
"This is the stuff!" he pursued, holding it up. "This'll burn to the
bone; you'll see it smoke upon 'im like 'ell-fire! One drop upon 'is
bloomin' heyesight, and I'll trouble you for Attwater!"
"No, no, by God!" exclaimed the captain.
"Now, see 'ere, ducky," said Huish, "this is my bean-feast, I believe?
I'm goin' up to that man single-'anded, I am. 'E's about seven foot
high, and I'm five foot one. 'E's a rifle in his 'and, 'e's on the
look-out, 'e wasn't born yesterday. This is Dyvid and Goliar, I tell
you! If I'd ast you to walk up and face the music I could understand.
But I don't. I on'y ast you to stand by and spifflicate the niggers.
It'll all come in quite natural; you'll see, else! Fust thing, you know,
you'll see him running round and 'owling like a good 'un...."
"Don't!" said Davis. "Don't talk of it!"
"Well, you _are_ a juggins!" exclaimed Huish. "What did you want? You
wanted to kill him, and tried to last night. You wanted to kill the 'ole
lot of them, and tried to, and 'ere I show you 'ow; and because there's
some medicine in a bottle you kick up this fuss!"
"I suppose that's so," said Davis. "It don't seem someways reasonable,
only there it is."
"It's the happlication of science, I suppose?" sneered Huish.
"I don't know what it is," cried Davis, pacing the floor; "it's there! I
draw the line at it. I can't put a finger to no such piggishness. It's
too damned hateful!"
"And I suppose it's all your fancy pynted it," said Huish, "w'en you
take a pistol and a bit o' lead, and copse a man's brains all over him?
No accountin' for tystes."
"I'm not denying it," said Davis; "it's something here, inside of me.
It's foolishness; I daresay it's dam foolishness. I don't argue; I just
draw the line. Isn't there no other way?"
"Look for yourself," said Huish. "I ain't wedded to this, if you think I
am; I ain't ambitious; I don't make a point of playin' the lead; I offer
to, that's all, and if you can't show me better, by Gawd, I'm goin' to!"
"Then the risk!" cried Davis.
"If you ast me straight, I should say it was a case of seven to one, and
no takers," said Huish. "But that's my look-out, ducky, and I'm gyme.
Look at me, Dyvis, there ain't any shilly-shally about me. I'm gyme,
that's wot I am: gyme all through."
The captain looked at him. Huish sat there preening his sinister vanity,
glorying in his precedency in evil; and the villainous courage and
readiness of the creature shone out of him like a candle from a lantern.
Dismay and a kind of respect seized hold on Davis in his own despite.
Until that moment he had seen the clerk always hanging back, always
listless, uninterested, and openly grumbling at a word of anything to
do; and now, by the touch of an enchanter's wand, he beheld him sitting
girt and resolved, and his face radiant. He had raised the devil, he
thought; and asked who was to control him, and his spirits quailed.
"Look as long as you like," Huish was going on. "You don't see any green
in my eye! I ain't afryde of Attwater, I ain't afryde of you, and I
ain't afryde of words. You want to kill people, that's wot _you_ want;
but you want to do it in kid gloves, and it can't be done that w'y.
Murder ain't genteel, it ain't easy, it ain't safe, and it tykes a man
to do it. 'Ere's the man."
"Huish!" began the captain with energy; and then stopped, and remained
staring at him with corrugated brows.
"Well, hout with it!" said Huish. "'Ave you anythink else to put up? Is
there any other chanst to try?"
The captain held his peace.
"There you are then!" said Huish, with a shrug.
Davis fell again to his pacing.
"O, you may do sentry-go till you're blue in the mug, you won't find
anythink else," said Huish.
There was a little silence; the captain, like a man launched on a swing,
flying dizzily among extremes of conjecture and refusal.
"But see," he said, suddenly pausing. "Can you? Can the thing be done?
It--it can't be easy."
"If I get within twenty foot of 'im it'll be done; so you look out,"
said Huish, and his tone of certainty was absolute.
"How can you know that?" broke from the captain in a choked cry. "You
beast, I believe you've done it before!"
"O, that's private affyres," returned Huish; "I ain't a talking man."
A shock of repulsion struck and shook the captain; a scream rose almost
to his lips; had he uttered it, he might have cast himself at the same
moment on the body of Huish, might have picked him up, and flung him
down, and wiped the cabin with him, in a frenzy of cruelty that seemed
half moral. But the moment passed; and the abortive crisis left the man
weaker. The stakes were so high--the pearls on the one hand--starvation
and shame on the other. Ten years of pearls! the imagination of Davis
translated them into a new, glorified existence for himself and his
family. The seat of this new life must be in London; there were deadly
reasons against Portland, Maine; and the pictures that came to him were
of English manners. He saw his boys marching in the procession of a
school, with gowns on, an usher marshalling them and reading as he
walked in a great book. He was installed in a villa, semi-detached; the
name, "Rosemore," on the gateposts. In a chair on the gravel walk he
seemed to sit smoking a cigar, a blue ribbon in his buttonhole, victor
over himself and circumstances and the malignity of bankers. He saw the
parlour, with red curtains, and shells on the mantelpiece--and, with the
fine inconsistency of visions, mixed a grog at the mahogany table ere he
turned in. With that the _Farallone_ gave one of the aimless and
nameless movements which (even in an anchored ship, and even in the most
profound calm) remind one of the mobility of fluids; and he was back
again under the cover of the house, the fierce daylight besieging it all
round and glaring in the chinks, and the clerk in a rather airy
attitude, awaiting his decision.
He began to walk again. He aspired after the realisation of these
dreams, like a horse nickering for water; the lust of them burned in his
inside. And the only obstacle was Attwater, who had insulted him from
the first. He gave Herrick a full share of the pearls, he insisted on
it; Huish opposed him, and he trod the opposition down; and praised
himself exceedingly. He was not going to use vitriol himself; was he
Huish's keeper? It was a pity he had asked, but after all! ... he saw the
boys again in the school procession, with the gowns he had thought to be
so "tony" long since.... And at the same time the incomparable shame of
the last evening blazed up in his mind.
"Have it your own way!" he said hoarsely.
"O, I knew you would walk up," said Huish. "Now for the letter. There's
paper, pens, and ink. Sit down and I'll dictyte."
The captain took a seat and the pen, looked a while helplessly at the
paper, then at Huish. The swing had gone the other way; there was a blur
upon his eyes. "It's a dreadful business," he said, with a strong twitch
of his shoulders.
"It's rather a start, no doubt," said Huish. "Tyke a dip of ink. That's
it. _William John Hattwater, Esq. Sir:_" he dictated.
"How do you know his name is William John?" asked Davis.
"Saw it on a packing-case," said Huish. "Got that?"
"No," said Davis. "But there's another thing. What are we to write?"
"O my golly!" cried the exasperated Huish. "Wot kind of man do _you_
call yourself? _I'm_ goin' to tell you wot to write; that's _my_ pitch;
if you'll just be so bloomin' condescendin' as to write it down!
_William John Attwater, Esq., Sir:_" he reiterated. And, the captain at
last beginning half mechanically to move his pen, the dictation
proceeded: "_It is with feelings of shyme and 'artfelt contrition that I
approach you after the yumiliatin' events of last night. Our Mr. 'Errick
has left the ship, and will have doubtless communicated to you the
nature of our 'opes. Needless to s'y, these are no longer possible: Fate
'as declyred against us, and we bow the 'ead. Well awyre as I am of the
just suspicions with w'ich I am regarded, I do not venture to solicit
the fyvour of an interview for myself, but in order to put an end to a
situytion w'ich must be equally pyneful to all, I 'ave deputed my friend
and partner, Mr. J. L. Huish, to l'y before you my proposals, and w'ich
by their moderytion, will, I trust, be found to merit your attention.
Mr. J. L. Huish is entirely unarmed, I swear to Gawd! and will 'old 'is
'ands over 'is 'ead from the moment he begins to approach you. I am your
fytheful servant, John Dyvis._"
Huish read the letter with the innocent joy of amateurs, chuckled
gustfully to himself, and reopened it more than once after it was
folded, to repeat the pleasure, Davis meanwhile sitting inert and
heavily frowning.
Of a sudden he rose; he seemed all abroad. "No!" he cried. "No! it can't
be! It's too much; it's damnation. God would never forgive it."
"Well, and 'oo wants Him to?" returned Huish, shrill with fury. "You
were damned years ago for the _Sea Rynger_, and said so yourself. Well
then, be damned for something else, and 'old your tongue."
The captain looked at him mistily. "No," he pleaded, "no, old man! don't
do it."
"'Ere now," said Huish, "I'll give you my ultimytum. Go or st'y w'ere
you are; I don't mind; I'm goin' to see that man and chuck this vitriol
in his eyes. If you st'y I'll go alone; the niggers will likely knock me
on the 'ead, and a fat lot you'll be the better! But there's one thing
sure: I'll 'ear no more of your moonin' mullygrubbin' rot, and tyke it
stryte."
The captain took it with a blink and a gulp. Memory, with phantom
voices, repeated in his ears something similar, something he had once
said to Herrick--years ago it seemed.
"Now, gimme over your pistol," said Huish. "I 'ave to see all clear. Six
shots, and mind you don't wyste them."
The captain, like a man in a nightmare, laid down his revolver on the
table, and Huish wiped the cartridges and oiled the works.
It was close on noon, there was no breath of wind, and the heat was
scarce bearable, when the two men came on deck, had the boat manned, and
passed down, one after another, into the stern-sheets. A white shirt at
the end of an oar served as flag of truce; and the men, by direction,
and to give it the better chance to be observed, pulled with extreme
slowness. The isle shook before them like a place incandescent; on the
face of the lagoon blinding copper suns, no bigger than sixpences,
danced and stabbed them in the eyeballs: there went up from sand and
sea, and even from the boat, a glare of scathing brightness; and as they
could only peer abroad from between closed lashes, the excess of light
seemed to be changed into a sinister darkness, comparable to that of a
thundercloud before it bursts.
The captain had come upon this errand for any one of a dozen reasons,
the last of which was desire for its success. Superstition rules all
men; semi-ignorant and gross natures, like that of Davis, it rules
utterly. For murder he had been prepared; but this horror of the
medicine in the bottle went beyond him, and he seemed to himself to be
parting the last strands that united him to God. The boat carried him on
to reprobation, to damnation; and he suffered himself to be carried
passively consenting, silently bidding farewell to his better self and
his hopes.
Huish sat by his side in towering spirits that were not wholly genuine.
Perhaps as brave a man as ever lived, brave as a weasel, he must still
reassure himself with the tones of his own voice; he must play his part
to exaggeration, he must out-Herod Herod, insult all that was
respectable, and brave all that was formidable, in a kind of desperate
wager with himself.
"Golly, but it's 'ot!" said he. "Cruel 'ot, I call it. Nice d'y to get
your gruel in! I s'y, you know, it must feel awf'ly peculiar to get
bowled over on a d'y like this. I'd rather 'ave it on a cowld and frosty
morning, wouldn't you? (Singing) ''_Ere we go round the mulberry bush on
a cowld and frosty mornin'._' (Spoken) Give you my word, I 'aven't
thought o' that in ten year; used to sing it at a hinfant school in
'Ackney, 'Ackney Wick it was. (Singing) '_This is the way the tyler
does, the tyler does._' (Spoken) Bloomin' 'umbug.--'Ow are you off now,
for the notion of a future styte? Do you cotton to the tea-fight views,
or the old red-'ot bogey business?"
"O, dry up!" said the captain.
"No, but I want to know," said Huish. "It's within the sp'ere of
practical politics for you and me, my boy; we may both be bowled over,
one up, t'other down, within the next ten minutes. It would be rather a
lark, now, if you only skipped across, came up smilin' t'other side, and
a hangel met you with a B. and S. under his wing. 'Ullo, you'd s'y:
come, I tyke this kind."
The captain groaned. While Huish was thus airing and exercising his
bravado, the man at his side was actually engaged in prayer. Prayer,
what for? God knows. But out of his inconsistent, illogical, and
agitated spirit, a stream of supplication was poured forth, inarticulate
as himself, earnest as death and judgment.
"Thou Gawd seest me!" continued Huish. "I remember I had that written in
my Bible. I remember the Bible too, all about Abinadab and
parties.--Well, Gawd!" apostrophising the meridian, "you're goin' to see
a rum start presently, I promise you that!"
The captain bounded.
"I'll have no blasphemy!" he cried, "no blasphemy in my boat."
"All right, cap'," said Huish. "Anythink to oblige. Any other topic you
would like to sudgest, the ryne-gyge, the lightnin'-rod, Shykespeare, or
the musical glasses? 'Ere's conversation on tap. Put a penny in the
slot, and ... 'ullo! 'ere they are!" he cried. "Now or never! is 'e
goin' to shoot?"
And the little man straightened himself into an alert and dashing
attitude, and looked steadily at the enemy.
But the captain rose half up in the boat with eyes protruding.
"What's that?" he cried.
"Wot's wot?" said Huish.
"Those--blamed things," said the captain.
And indeed it was something strange. Herrick and Attwater, both armed
with Winchesters, had appeared out of the grove behind the figure-head;
and to either hand of them, the sun glistened upon two metallic objects,
locomotory like men, and occupying in the economy of these creatures the
places of heads--only the heads were faceless. To Davis, between wind
and water, his mythology appeared to have come alive and Tophet to be
vomiting demons. But Huish was not mystified a moment.
"Divers' 'elmets, you ninny. Can't you see?" he said.
"So they are," said Davis, with a gasp. "And why? O, I see, it's for
armour."
"Wot did I tell you?" said Huish. "Dyvid and Goliar all the w'y and
back."
The two natives (for they it was that were equipped in this unusual
panoply of war) spread out to right and left, and at last lay down in
the shade, on the extreme flank of the position. Even now that the
mystery was explained, Davis was hatefully preoccupied, stared at the
flame on their crests, and forgot, and then remembered with a smile, the
explanation.
Attwater withdrew again into the grove, and Herrick, with his gun under
his arm, came down the pier alone.
About halfway down he halted and hailed the boat.
"What do you want?" he cried.
"I'll tell that to Mr. Attwater," replied Huish, stepping briskly on the
ladder. "I don't tell it to you, because you played the trucklin' sneak.
Here's a letter for him: tyke it, and give it, and be 'anged to you!"
"Davis, is this all right?" said Herrick.
Davis raised his chin, glanced swiftly at Herrick and away again, and
held his peace. The glance was charged with some deep emotion, but
whether of hatred or of fear, it was beyond Herrick to divine.
"Well," he said, "I'll give the letter." He drew a score with his foot
on the boards of the gangway. "Till I bring the answer, don't move a
step past this."
And he returned to where Attwater leaned against a tree, and gave him
the letter. Attwater glanced it through.
"What does that mean?" he asked, passing it to Herrick. "Treachery?"
"O, I suppose so!" said Herrick.
"Well, tell him to come on," said Attwater. "One isn't a fatalist for
nothing. Tell him to come on and to look out."
Herrick returned to the figure-head. Half-way down the pier the clerk
was waiting, with Davis by his side.
"You are to come along, Huish," said Herrick. "He bids you to look
out--no tricks."
Huish walked briskly up the pier, and paused face to face with the young
man.
"W'ere is 'e?" said he, and to Herrick's surprise, the low-bred,
insignificant face before him flushed suddenly crimson and went white
again.
"Right forward," said Herrick, pointing. "Now, your hands above your
head."
The clerk turned away from him and towards the figure-head, as though he
were about to address to it his devotions; he was seen to heave a deep
breath; and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy
physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and
broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was
nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily
forward on his mission.
Herrick at first followed. Then a noise in his rear startled him, and he
turned about to find Davis already advanced as far as the figure-head.
He came, crouching and open-mouthed, as the mesmerised may follow the
mesmeriser; all human considerations, and even the care of his own life,
swallowed up in one abominable and burning curiosity.
"Halt!" cried Herrick, covering him with his rifle. "Davis, what are you
doing, man? You are not to come."
Davis instinctively paused, and regarded him with a dreadful vacancy of
eye.
"Put your back to that figure-head--do you hear me?--and stand fast!"
said Herrick.
The captain fetched a breath, stepped back against the figure-head, and
instantly redirected his glances after Huish.
There was a hollow place of the sand in that part, and, as it were, a
glade among the coco-palms in which the direct noonday sun blazed
intolerably. At the far end, in the shadow, the tall figure of Attwater
was to be seen leaning on a tree; towards him, with his hands over his
head, and his steps smothered in the sand, the clerk painfully waded.
The surrounding glare threw out and exaggerated the man's smallness; it
seemed no less perilous an enterprise, this that he was gone upon, than
for a whelp to besiege a citadel.
"There, Mr. Whish. That will do," cried Attwater. "From that distance,
and keeping your hands up, like a good boy, you can very well put me in
possession of the skipper's views."
The interval betwixt them was perhaps forty feet; and Huish measured it
with his eye, and breathed a curse. He was already distressed with
labouring in the loose sand, and his arms ached bitterly from their
unnatural position. In the palm of his right hand the jar was ready; and
his heart thrilled, and his voice choked, as he began to speak.
"Mr. Hattwater," said he, "I don't know if ever you 'ad a mother...."
"I can set your mind at rest: I had," returned Attwater; "and
henceforth, if I may venture to suggest it, her name need not recur in
our communications. I should perhaps tell you that I am not amenable to
the pathetic."
"I am sorry, sir, if I 'ave seemed to tresparse on your private
feelin's," said the clerk, cringing and stealing a step. "At least, sir,
you will never pe'suade me that you are not a perfec' gentleman; I know
a gentleman when I see him; and as such, I 'ave no 'esitation in
throwin' myself on your merciful consideration. It _is_ 'ard lines, no
doubt; it's 'ard lines to have to hown yourself beat; it's 'ard lines to
'ave to come and beg to you for charity."
"When, if things had only gone right, the whole place was as good as
your own?" suggested Attwater. "I can understand the feeling."
"You are judging me, Mr. Attwater," said the clerk, "and God knows how
unjustly! _Thou Gawd seest me_, was the tex' I 'ad in my Bible, w'ich my
father wrote it in with 'is own 'and upon the fly-leaft."
"I am sorry I have to beg your pardon once more," said Attwater; "but,
do you know, you seem to me to be a trifle nearer, which is entirely
outside of our bargain. And I would venture to suggest that you take
one--two--three--steps back; and stay there."
The devil, at this staggering disappointment, looked out of Huish's
face, and Attwater was swift to suspect. He frowned, he stared on the
little man, and considered. Why should he be creeping nearer? The next
moment his gun was at his shoulder.
"Kindly oblige me by opening your hands. Open your hands wide--let me
see the fingers spread, you dog--throw down that thing you're holding!"
he roared, his rage and certitude increasing together.
And then, at almost the same moment, the indomitable Huish decided to
throw, and Attwater pulled a trigger. There was scarce the difference of
a second between the two resolves, but it was in favour of the man with
the rifle; and the jar had not yet left the clerk's hand, before the
ball shattered both. For the twinkling of an eye the wretch was in
hell's agonies, bathed in liquid flames, a screaming bedlamite; and then
a second and more merciful bullet stretched him dead.
The whole thing was come and gone in a breath. Before Herrick could turn
about, before Davis could complete his cry of horror, the clerk lay in
the sand, sprawling and convulsed.
Attwater ran to the body; he stooped and viewed it; he put his finger in
the vitriol, and his face whitened and hardened with anger.
Davis had not yet moved; he stood astonished, with his back to the
figure-head, his hands clutching it behind him, his body inclined
forward from the waist.
Attwater turned deliberately and covered him with his rifle.
"Davis," he cried, in a voice like a trumpet, "I give you sixty seconds
to make your peace with God!"
Davis looked, and his mind awoke. He did not dream of self-defence, he
did not reach for his pistol. He drew himself up instead to face death,
with a quivering nostril.
"I guess I'll not trouble the Old Man," he said; "considering the job I
was on, I guess it's better business to just shut my face."
Attwater fired; there came a spasmodic movement of the victim, and
immediately above the middle of his forehead a black hole marred the
whiteness of the figure-head. A dreadful pause; then again the report,
and the solid sound and jar of the bullet in the wood; and this time the
captain had felt the wind of it along his cheek. A third shot, and he
was bleeding from one ear; and along the levelled rifle Attwater smiled
like a red Indian.
The cruel game of which he was the puppet was now clear to Davis; three
times he had drunk of death, and he must look to drink of it seven times
more before he was despatched. He held up his hand.
"Steady!" he cried; "I'll take your sixty seconds."
"Good!" said Attwater.
The captain shut his eyes tight like a child: he held his hands up at
last with a tragic and ridiculous gesture.
"My God, for Christ's sake, look after my two kids," he said; and then,
after a pause and a falter, "for Christ's sake. Amen."
And he opened his eyes and looked down the rifle with a quivering mouth.
"But don't keep fooling me long!" he pleaded.
"That's all your prayer?" asked Attwater, with a singular ring in his
voice.
"Guess so," said Davis.
"So?" said Attwater, resting the butt of his rifle on the ground, "is
that done? Is your peace made with Heaven? Because it is with me. Go,
and sin no more, sinful father. And remember that whatever you do to
others, God shall visit it again a thousandfold upon your innocents."
The wretched Davis came staggering forward from his place against the
figure-head, fell upon his knees, and waved his hands, and fainted.
When he came to himself again, his head was on Attwater's arm, and
close by stood one of the men in diver's helmets, holding a bucket of
water, from which his late executioner now laved his face. The memory of
that dreadful passage returned upon him in a clap; again he saw Huish
lying dead, again he seemed to himself to totter on the brink of an
unplumbed eternity. With trembling hands he seized hold of the man whom
he had come to slay; and his voice broke from him like that of a child
among the nightmares of fever: "O! isn't there no mercy? O! what must I
do to be saved?"
"Ah!" thought Attwater, "here is the true penitent."
CHAPTER XII
A TAIL-PIECE
On a very bright, hot, lusty, strongly-blowing noon, a fortnight after
the events recorded, and a month since the curtain rose upon this
episode, a man might have been spied praying on the sand by the lagoon
beach. A point of palm-trees isolated him from the settlement; and from
the place where he knelt, the only work of man's hand that interrupted
the expanse was the schooner _Farallone_, her berth quite changed, and
rocking at anchor some two miles to windward in the midst of the lagoon.
The noise of the Trade ran very boisterous in all parts of the island;
the nearer palm-trees crashed and whistled in the gusts, those farther
off contributed a humming bass like the roar of cities; and yet, to any
man less absorbed, there must have risen at times over this turmoil of
the winds the sharper note of the human voice from the settlement. There
all was activity. Attwater, stripped to his trousers, and lending a
strong hand of help, was directing and encouraging five Kanakas; from
his lively voice, and their more lively efforts, it was to be gathered
that some sudden and joyful emergency had set them in this bustle; and
the Union Jack floated once more on its staff. But the suppliant on the
beach, unconscious of their voices, prayed on with instancy and fervour,
and the sound of his voice rose and fell again, and his countenance
brightened and was deformed with changing moods of piety and terror.
Before his closed eyes the skiff had been for some time tacking towards
the distant and deserted _Farallone_; and presently the figure of
Herrick might have been observed to board her, to pass for a while into
the house, thence forward to the forecastle, and at last to plunge into
the main hatch. In all these quarters his visit was followed by a coil
of smoke; and he had scarce entered his boat again and shoved off,
before flames broke forth upon the schooner. They burned gaily; kerosene
had not been spared, and the bellows of the Trade incited the
conflagration. About half-way on the return voyage, when Herrick looked
back, he beheld the _Farallone_ wrapped to the topmasts in leaping arms
of fire, and the voluminous smoke pursuing him along the face of the
lagoon. In one hour's time, he computed, the waters would have closed
over the stolen ship.
It so chanced that, as his boat flew before the wind with much vivacity,
and his eyes were continually busy in the wake, measuring the progress
of the flames, he found himself embayed to the northward of the point of
palms, and here became aware at the same time of the figure of Davis
immersed in his devotion. An exclamation, part of annoyance, part of
amusement, broke from him: and he touched the helm and ran the prow upon
the beach not twenty feet from the unconscious devotee. Taking the
painter in his hand, he landed, and drew near, and stood over him. And
still the voluble and incoherent stream of prayer continued unabated. It
was not possible for him to overhear the suppliant's petitions, which he
listened to some while in a very mingled mood of humour and pity: and it
was only when his own name began to occur and to be conjoined with
epithets, that he at last laid his hand on the captain's shoulder.
"Sorry to interrupt the exercise," said he; "but I want you to look at
the _Farallone_."
The captain scrambled to his feet, and stood gasping and staring. "Mr.
Herrick, don't startle a man like that!" he said. "I don't seem someways
rightly myself since...." He broke off. "What did you say anyway? O, the
_Farallone_," and he looked languidly out.
"Yes," said Herrick. "There she burns! and you may guess from that what
the news is."
"The _Trinity Hall_, I guess," said the captain.
"The same," said Herrick; "sighted half an hour ago, and coming up hand
over fist."
"Well, it don't amount to a hill of beans," said the captain, with a
sigh.
"O, come, that's rank ingratitude!" cries Herrick.
"Well," replied the captain meditatively, "you mayn't just see the way
that I view it in, but I'd 'most rather stay here upon this island. I
found peace here, peace in believing. Yes, I guess this island is about
good enough for John Davis."
"I never heard such nonsense!" cried Herrick. "What! with all turning
out in your favour the way it does, the _Farallone_ wiped out, the crew
disposed of, a sure thing for your wife and family, and you, yourself,
Attwater's spoiled darling and pet penitent!"
"Now, Mr. Herrick, don't say that," said the captain gently; "when you
know he don't make no difference between us. But, O! why not be one of
us? why not come to Jesus right away, and let's meet in yon beautiful
land? That's just the one thing wanted; just say, 'Lord, I believe, help
Thou mine unbelief!' and He'll fold you in His arms. You see, I know! I
been a sinner myself!"
WEIR OF HERMISTON
A FRAGMENT
_TO MY WIFE_
_I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again
In my precipitous city beaten bells
Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar,
Intent on my own race and place, I wrote.
Take thou the writing: thine it is. For who
Burnished the sword, blew on the drowsy coal,
Held still the target higher, chary of praise
And prodigal of counsel--who but thou?
So now, in the end, if this the least be good,
If any deed be done, if any fire
Burn in the imperfect page, the praise be thine._
R. L. S.
WEIR OF HERMISTON
INTRODUCTORY
In the wild end of a moorland parish, far out of the sight of any house,
there stands a cairn among the heather, and a little by east of it, in
the going down of the braeside, a monument with some verses half
defaced. It was here that Claverhouse shot with his own hand the Praying
Weaver of Balweary, and the chisel of Old Mortality has clinked on that
lonely gravestone. Public and domestic history have thus marked with a
bloody finger this hollow among the hills; and since the Cameronian gave
his life there, two hundred years ago, in a glorious folly, and without
comprehension or regret, the silence of the moss has been broken once
again by the report of firearms and the cry of the dying.
The Deil's Hags was the old name. But the place is now called Francie's
Cairn. For a while it was told that Francie walked. Aggie Hogg met him
in the gloaming by the cairnside, and he spoke to her, with chattering
teeth, so that his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if any one
could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with pitiful
entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious
decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like
the bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and
imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of
winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet
in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and
the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk
and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge; of
the two Kirsties and the four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and
of Frank Innes, "the young fool advocate," that came into these moorland
parts to find his destiny.
CHAPTER I
LIFE AND DEATH OF MRS. WEIR
The Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but
his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before
her. The old "riding Rutherfords of Hermiston," of whom she was the last
descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill subjects,
and ill husbands to their wives, though not their properties. Tales of
them were rife for twenty miles about; and their name was even printed
in the page of our Scots histories, not always to their credit. One bit
the dust at Flodden; one was hanged at his peel door by James the Fifth;
another fell dead in a carouse with Tom Dalyell; while a fourth (and
that was Jean's own father) died presiding at a Hell-Fire Club, of which
he was the founder. There were many heads shaken in Crossmichael at that
judgment; the more so as the man had a villainous reputation among high
and low, and both with the godly and the worldly. At that very hour of
his demise he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them
oppressive. And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve,
that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business, being cast
from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag on the Kye-skairs;
and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons) surviving him not
long, and dying on a sudden in a bloody flux.
In all these generations, while a male Rutherford was in the saddle with
his lads, or brawling in a change-house, there would be always a
white-faced wife immured at home in the old peel or the later
mansion-house. It seemed this succession of martyrs bided long, but took
their vengeance in the end, and that was in the person of the last
descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the
daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly
without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin
wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning
gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the
growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her
mothers) came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no
blood of life in her, no grasp or gaiety; pious, anxious, tender,
tearful, and incompetent.
It was a wonder to many that she had married--seeming so wholly of the
stuff that makes old maids. But chance cast her in the path of Adam
Weir, then the new Lord Advocate, a recognised, risen man, the conqueror
of many obstacles, and thus late in the day beginning to think upon a
wife. He was one who looked rather to obedience than beauty, yet it
would seem he was struck with her at the first look. "Wha's she?" he
said, turning to his host; and, when he had been told, "Ay," says he,
"she looks menseful. She minds me----"; and then, after a pause (which
some have been daring enough to set down to sentimental recollections),
"Is she releegious?" he asked, and was shortly after, at his own
request, presented. The acquaintance, which it seems profane to call a
courtship, was pursued with Mr. Weir's accustomed industry, and was long
a legend, or rather a source of legends, in the Parliament House. He was
described coming, rosy with much port, into the drawing-room, walking
direct up to the lady, and assailing her with pleasantries to which the
embarrassed fair one responded, in what seemed a kind of agony, "Eh, Mr.
Weir!" or "O, Mr. Weir!" or "Keep me, Mr. Weir!" On the very eve of
their engagement, it was related that one had drawn near to the tender
couple, and had overheard the lady cry out, with the tones of one who
talked for the sake of talking, "Keep me, Mr. Weir, and what became of
him?" and the profound accents of the suitor reply, "Haangit, mem,
haangit." The motives upon either side were much debated. Mr. Weir must
have supposed his bride to be somewhat suitable; perhaps he belonged to
that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of women--an
opinion invariably punished in this life. Her descent and her estate
were beyond question. Her wayfaring ancestors and her litigious father
had done well by Jean. There was ready money and there were broad acres,
ready to fall wholly to the husband, to lend dignity to his descendants,
and to himself a title, when he should be called upon the Bench. On the
side of Jean, there was perhaps some fascination of curiosity as to this
unknown male animal that approached her with the roughness of a
ploughman and the _aplomb_ of an advocate. Being so trenchantly opposed
to all she knew, loved, or understood, he may well have seemed to her
the extreme, if scarcely the ideal, of his sex. And besides, he was an
ill man to refuse. A little over forty at the period of his marriage, he
looked already older, and to the force of manhood added the senatorial
dignity of years; it was, perhaps, with an unreverend awe, but he was
awful. The Bench, the Bar, and the most experienced and reluctant
witness, bowed to his authority--and why not Jeannie Rutherford?
The heresy about foolish women is always punished, I have said, and Lord
Hermiston began to pay the penalty at once. His house in George Square
was wretchedly ill-guided; nothing answerable to the expense of
maintenance but the cellar, which was his own private care. When things
went wrong at dinner, as they continually did, my lord would look up the
table at his wife: "I think these broth would be better to sweem in than
to sup." Or else to the butler: "Here, M'Killop, awa' wi' this Raadical
gigot--tak' it to the French, man, and bring me some puddocks! It seems
rather a sore kind of business that I should be all day in Court
haanging Radicals, and get nawthing to my denner." Of course this was
but a manner of speaking, and he had never hanged a man for being a
Radical in his life; the law, of which he was the faithful minister,
directing otherwise. And of course these growls were in the nature of
pleasantry, but it was of a recondite sort; and uttered as they were in
his resounding voice, and commented on by that expression which they
called in the Parliament House "Hermiston's hanging face"--they struck
mere dismay into the wife. She sat before him speechless and fluttering;
at each dish, as at a fresh ordeal, her eye hovered toward my lord's
countenance and fell again; if he but ate in silence, unspeakable relief
was her portion; if there were complaint, the world was darkened. She
would seek out the cook, who was always her _sister in the Lord_. "O, my
dear, this is the most dreidful thing that my lord can never be
contented in his own house!" she would begin; and weep and pray with the
cook; and then the cook would pray with Mrs. Weir; and the next day's
meal would never be a penny the better--and the next cook (when she
came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often
wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical
old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there
were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the
history of his married life--"Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece
of bread and kebbuck!" he had exclaimed, with an appalling explosion of
his voice and rare gestures. None thought to dispute or to make excuses;
the service was arrested; Mrs. Weir sat at the head of the table
whimpering without disguise; and his lordship opposite munched his bread
and cheese in ostentatious disregard. Once only Mrs. Weir had ventured
to appeal. He was passing her chair on his way into the study.
"O, Edom!" she wailed, in a voice tragic with tears, and reaching out to
him both hands, in one of which she held a sopping pocket-handkerchief.
He paused and looked upon her with a face of wrath, into which there
stole, as he looked, a twinkle of humour.
"Noansense!" he said. "You and your noansense! What do I want with a
Christian faim'ly? I want Christian broth! Get me a lass that can
plain-boil a potato, if she was a whüre off the streets." And with
these words, which echoed in her tender ears like blasphemy, he had
passed on to his study and shut the door behind him.
Such was the housewifery in George Square. It was better at Hermiston,
where Kirstie Elliott, the sister of a neighbouring bonnet-laird, and an
eighteenth cousin of the lady's, bore the charge of all, and kept a trim
house and a good country table. Kirstie was a woman in a thousand,
clean, capable, notable; once a moorland Helen, and still comely as a
blood horse and healthy as the hill wind. High in flesh and voice and
colour, she ran the house with her whole intemperate soul, in a bustle,
not without buffets. Scarce more pious than decency in those days
required, she was the cause of many an anxious thought and many a
tearful prayer to Mrs. Weir. Housekeeper and mistress renewed the parts
of Martha and Mary; and though with a pricking conscience, Mary reposed
on Martha's strength as on a rock. Even Lord Hermiston held Kirstie in a
particular regard. There were few with whom he unbent so gladly, few
whom he favoured with so many pleasantries. "Kirstie and me maun have
our joke," he would declare, in high good-humour, as he buttered
Kirstie's scones, and she waited at table. A man who had no need either
of love or of popularity, a keen reader of men and of events, there was
perhaps only one truth for which he was quite unprepared: he would have
been quite unprepared to learn that Kirstie hated him. He thought maid
and master were well matched; hard, handy, healthy, broad Scots folk,
without a hair of nonsense to the pair of them. And the fact was that
she made a goddess and an only child of the effete and tearful lady; and
even as she waited at table her hands would sometimes itch for my lord's
ears.
Thus, at least, when the family were at Hermiston, not only my lord, but
Mrs. Weir too, enjoyed a holiday. Free from the dreadful looking-for of
the miscarried dinner, she would mind her seam, read her piety books,
and take her walk (which was my lord's orders), sometimes by herself,
sometimes with Archie, the only child of that scarce natural union. The
child was her next bond to life. Her frosted sentiment bloomed again,
she breathed deep of life, she let loose her heart, in that society. The
miracle of her motherhood was ever new to her. The sight of the little
man at her skirt intoxicated her with the sense of power, and froze her
with the consciousness of her responsibility. She looked forward, and,
seeing him in fancy grow up and play his diverse part on the world's
theatre, caught in her breath and lifted up her courage with a lively
effort. It was only with the child that she forgot herself and was at
moments natural; yet it was only with the child that she had conceived
and managed to pursue a scheme of conduct. Archie was to be a great man
and a good; a minister if possible, a saint for certain. She tried to
engage his mind upon her favourite books, Rutherford's "Letters,"
Scougal's "Grace Abounding," and the like. It was a common practice of
hers (and strange to remember now) that she would carry the child to the
Deil's Hags, sit with him on the Praying Weaver's Stone, and talk of the
Covenanters till their tears ran down. Her view of history was wholly
artless, a design in snow and ink; upon the one side, tender innocents
with psalms upon their lips; upon the other, the persecutors, booted,
bloody-minded, flushed with wine: a suffering Christ, a raging
Beelzebub. _Persecutor_ was a word that knocked upon the woman's heart;
it was her highest thought of wickedness, and the mark of it was on her
house. Her great-great-grandfather had drawn the sword against the
Lord's anointed on the field of Rullion Green, and breathed his last
(tradition said) in the arms of the detestable Dalyell. Nor could she
blind herself to this, that had they lived in those old days, Hermiston
himself would have been numbered alongside of Bloody Mackenzie and the
politic Lauderdale and Rothes, in the band of God's immediate enemies.
The sense of this moved her to the more fervour; she had a voice for
that name of _persecutor_ that thrilled in the child's marrow; and when
one day the mob hooted and hissed them all in my lord's travelling
carriage, and cried, "Down with the persecutor! down with Hanging
Hermiston!" and mamma covered her eyes and wept, and papa let down the
glass and looked out upon the rabble with his droll formidable face,
bitter and smiling, as they said he sometimes looked when he gave
sentence, Archie was for the moment too much amazed to be alarmed, but
he had scarce got his mother by herself before his shrill voice was
raised demanding an explanation: why had they called papa a persecutor?
"Keep me, my precious!" she exclaimed. "Keep me, my dear! this is
poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical, Erchie. Your
faither is a great man, my dear, and it's no for me or you to be judging
him. It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves in our several
stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear
no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that--she kens it well,
dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of the
child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.
Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression--tenderness.
In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with a glow out of
the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind of ecstasy of
tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were here but for a
day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the immortal men, on what
black, downward path were many of them wending, and to what a horror of
an immortality! "Are not two sparrows," "Whosoever shall smite thee,"
"God sendeth His rain," "Judge not, that ye be not judged"--these texts
made her body of divinity; she put them on in the morning with her
clothes and lay down to sleep with them at night; they haunted her like
a favourite air, they clung about her like a favourite perfume. Their
minister was a marrowy expounder of the law, and my lord sat under him
with relish; but Mrs. Weir respected him from far off; heard him (like
the cannon of a beleaguered city) usefully booming outside on the
dogmatic ramparts; and meanwhile, within and out of shot, dwelt in her
private garden which she watered with grateful tears. It seems strange
to say of this colourless and ineffectual woman, but she was a true
enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine and the glory of a
cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be eloquent; perhaps
none but he had seen her--her colour raised, her hands clasped or
quivering--glow with gentle ardour. There is a corner of the policy of
Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the summit of Black Fell,
sometimes like the mere grass top of a hill, sometimes (and this is her
own expression) like a precious jewel in the heavens. On such days, upon
the sudden view of it, her hand would tighten on the child's fingers,
her voice rise like a song. "_I to the hills!_" she would repeat. "And
O, Erchie, arena these like the hills of Naphtali?" and her tears would
flow.
Upon an impressionable child the effect of this continual and pretty
accompaniment to life was deep. The woman's quietism and piety passed on
to his different nature undiminished; but whereas in her it was a native
sentiment, in him it was only an implanted dogma. Nature and the child's
pugnacity at times revolted. A cad from the Potterrow once struck him in
the mouth; he struck back, the pair fought it out in the back stable
lane towards the Meadows, and Archie returned with a considerable
decline in the number of his front teeth, and unregenerately boasting of
the losses of the foe. It was a sore day for Mrs. Weir; she wept and
prayed over the infant backslider until my lord was due from Court, and
she must resume that air of tremulous composure with which she always
greeted him. The judge was that day in an observant mood, and remarked
upon the absent teeth.
"I am afraid Erchie will have been fechting with some of thae blagyard
lads," said Mrs. Weir.
My lord's voice rang out as it did seldom in the privacy of his own
house. "I'll have nonn of that, sir!" he cried. "Do you hear me?--nonn
of that! No son of mine shall be speldering in the glaur with any dirty
raibble."
The anxious mother was grateful for so much support; she had even feared
the contrary. And that night when she put the child to bed--"Now, my
dear, ye see!" she said, "I told you what your faither would think of
it, if he heard ye had fallen into this dreidful sin; and let you and me
pray to God that ye may be keepit from the like temptation or
stren'thened to resist it!"
The womanly falsity of this was thrown away. Ice and iron cannot be
welded; and the points of view of the Justice-Clerk and Mrs. Weir were
not less unassimilable. The character and position of his father had
long been a stumbling-block to Archie, and with every year of his age
the difficulty grew more instant. The man was mostly silent; when he
spoke at all, it was to speak of the things of the world, always in a
worldly spirit, often in language that the child had been schooled to
think coarse, and sometimes with words that he knew to be sins in
themselves. Tenderness was the first duty, and my lord was invariably
harsh. God was love; the name of my lord (to all who knew him) was fear.
In the world, as schematised for Archie by his mother, the place was
marked for such a creature. There were some whom it was good to pity and
well (though very likely useless) to pray for; they were named
reprobates, goats, God's enemies, brands for the burning; and Archie
tallied every mark of identification, and drew the inevitable private
inference that the Lord Justice-Clerk was the chief of sinners.
The mother's honesty was scarce complete. There was one influence she
feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's;
and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to
undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent,
she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's
salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie
was seven, and beyond his years for curiosity and logic, when he brought
the case up openly. If judging were sinful and forbidden, how came papa
to be a judge? to have that sin for a trade? to bear the name of it for
a distinction?
"I can't see it," said the little Rabbi, and wagged his head.
Mrs. Weir abounded in commonplace replies.
"No, I canna see it," reiterated Archie. "And I'll tell you what, mamma,
I don't think you and me's justifeed in staying with him."
The woman awoke to remorse; she saw herself disloyal to her man, her
sovereign and bread-winner, in whom (with what she had of worldliness)
she took a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply on my lord's
honour and greatness; his useful services in this world of sorrow and
wrong, and the place in which he stood, far above where babes and
innocents could hope to see or criticise. But she had builded too
well--Archie had his answers pat: Were not babes and innocents the type
of the kingdom of heaven? Were not honour and greatness the badges of
the world? And at any rate, how about the mob that had once seethed
about the carriage?
"It's all very fine," he concluded, "but in my opinion, papa has no
right to be it. And it seems that's not the worst yet of it. It seems
he's called 'the Hanging Judge'--it seems he's crooool. I'll tell you
what it is, mamma, there's a tex' borne in upon me: It were better for
that man if a milestone were bound upon his back and him flung into the
deepestmost pairts of the sea."
"O my lamb, ye must never say the like of that!" she cried. "Ye're to
honour faither and mother, dear, that your days may be long in the land.
It's Atheists that cry out against him--French Atheists, Erchie! Ye
would never surely even yourself down to be saying the same thing as
French Atheists? It would break my heart to think that of you. And O,
Erchie, here arena _you_ setting up to _judge_? And have ye no forgot
God's plain command--the First with Promise, dear? Mind you upon the
beam and the mote!"
Having thus carried the war into the enemy's camp, the terrified lady
breathed again. And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with
catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An
instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He
will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this
simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are
multiplied.
When the Court rose that year and the family returned to Hermiston, it
was a common remark in all the country that the lady was sore failed.
She seemed to lose and seize again her touch with life, now sitting
inert in a sort of durable bewilderment, anon waking to feverish and
weak activity. She dawdled about the lasses at their work, looking
stupidly on; she fell to rummaging in old cabinets and presses, and
desisted when half through; she would begin remarks with an air of
animation and drop them without a struggle. Her common appearance was of
one who has forgotten something and is trying to remember; and when she
overhauled, one after another, the worthless and touching mementoes of
her youth, she might have been seeking the clue to that lost thought.
During this period she gave many gifts to the neighbours and house
lasses, giving them with a manner of regret that embarrassed the
recipients.
The last night of all she was busy on some female work, and toiled upon
it with so manifest and painful a devotion that my lord (who was not
often curious) inquired as to its nature.
She blushed to the eyes. "O, Edom, it's for you!" she said. "It's
slippers. I--I hae never made ye any."
"Ye daft auld wife!" returned his lordship. "A bonny figure I would be,
palmering about in bauchles!"
The next day, at the hour of her walk, Kirstie interfered. Kirstie took
this decay of her mistress very hard; bore her a grudge, quarrelled
with and railed upon her, the anxiety of a genuine love wearing the
disguise of temper. This day of all days she insisted disrespectfully,
with rustic fury, that Mrs. Weir should stay at home. But, "No, no," she
said, "it's my lord's orders," and set forth as usual. Archie was
visible in the acre bog, engaged upon some childish enterprise, the
instrument of which was mire; and she stood and looked at him a while
like one about to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook her
head, and proceeded on her rounds alone. The house lasses were at the
burn-side washing, and saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait.
"She's a terrible feckless wife the mistress!" said the one.
"Tut," said the other, "the wumman's seeck."
"Weel, I canna see nae differ in her," returned the first. "A
füshionless quean, a feckless carline."
The poor creature thus discussed rambled a while in the grounds without
a purpose. Tides in her mind ebbed and flowed, and carried her to and
fro like seaweed. She tried a path, paused, returned, and tried another;
questing, forgetting her quest; the spirit of choice extinct in her
bosom, or devoid of sequency. On a sudden, it appeared as though she had
remembered, or had formed a resolution, wheeled about, returned with
hurried steps, and appeared in the dining-room, where Kirstie was at the
cleaning, like one charged with an important errand.
"Kirstie!" she began, and paused; and then with conviction, "Mr. Weir
isna speeritually minded, but he has been a good man to me."
It was perhaps the first time since her husband's elevation that she had
forgotten the handle to his name, of which the tender, inconsistent
woman was not a little proud. And when Kirstie looked up at the
speaker's face, she was aware of a change.
"Godsake, what's the maitter wi' ye, mem?" cried the housekeeper,
starting from the rug.
"I do not ken," answered her mistress, shaking her head. "But he is not
speeritually minded, my dear."
"Here, sit down with ye! Godsake, what ails the wife?" cried Kirstie,
and helped and forced her into my lord's own chair by the cheek of the
hearth.
"Keep me, what's this?" she gasped. "Kirstie, what's this? I'm
frich'ened."
They were her last words.
It was the lowering nightfall when my lord returned. He had the sunset
in his back, all clouds and glory; and before him, by the wayside, spied
Kirstie Elliott waiting. She was dissolved in tears, and addressed him
in the high, false note of barbarous mourning, such as still lingers
modified among Scots heather.
"The Lord peety ye, Hermiston! the Lord prepare ye!" she keened out.
"Weary upon me, that I should have to tell it!"
He reined in his horse and looked upon her with the hanging face.
"Has the French landit?" cried he.
"Man, man," she said, "is that a' ye can think of? The Lord prepare ye:
the Lord comfort and support ye!"
"Is onybody deid?" says his lordship. "It's no Erchie?"
"Bethankit, no!" exclaimed the woman, startled into a more natural tone.
"Na, na, it's no sae bad as that. It's the mistress, my lord; she just
fair flittit before my e'en. She just gi'ed a sab and was by wi' it. Eh,
my bonny Miss Jeannie, that I mind sae weel!" And forth again upon that
pouring tide of lamentation in which women of her class excel and
over-abound.
Lord Hermiston sat in the saddle beholding her. Then he seemed to
recover command upon himself.
"Weel, it's something of the suddenest," said he. "But she was a dwaibly
body from the first."
And he rode home at a precipitate amble with Kirstie at his horse's
heels.
Dressed as she was for her last walk, they had laid the dead lady on her
bed. She was never interesting in life; in death she was not impressive;
and as her husband stood before her, with his hands crossed behind his
powerful back, that which he looked upon was the very image of the
insignificant.
"Her and me were never cut out for one another," he remarked at last.
"It was a daft-like marriage." And then, with a most unusual gentleness
of tone, "Puir bitch," said he, "puir bitch!" Then suddenly: "Where's
Erchie?"
Kirstie had decoyed him to her room and given him "a jeely-piece."
"Ye have some kind of gumption, too," observed the judge, and considered
his housekeeper grimly. "When all's said," he added, "I micht have done
waur--I micht have been marriet upon a skirling Jezebel like you!"
"There's naebody thinking of you, Hermiston!" cried the offended woman.
"We think of her that's out of her sorrows. And could _she_ have done
waur? Tell me that, Hermiston--tell me that before her clay-cauld corp!"
"Weel, there's some of them gey an' ill to please," observed his
lordship.
CHAPTER II
FATHER AND SON
My Lord Justice-Clerk was known to many; the man Adam Weir perhaps to
none. He had nothing to explain or to conceal; he sufficed wholly and
silently to himself; and that part of our nature which goes out (too
often with false coin) to acquire glory or love, seemed in him to be
omitted. He did not try to be loved, he did not care to be; it is
probable the very thought of it was a stranger to his mind. He was an
admired lawyer, a highly unpopular judge; and he looked down upon those
who were his inferiors in either distinction, who were lawyers of less
grasp or judges not so much detested. In all the rest of his days and
doings, not one trace of vanity appeared; and he went on through life
with a mechanical movement, as of the unconscious, that was almost
august.
He saw little of his son. In the childish maladies with which the boy
was troubled, he would make daily inquiries and daily pay him a visit,
entering the sick-room with a facetious and appalling countenance,
letting off a few perfunctory jests, and going again swiftly, to the
patient's relief. Once, a Court holiday falling opportunely, my lord had
his carriage, and drove the child himself to Hermiston, the customary
place of convalescence. It is conceivable he had been more than usually
anxious, for that journey always remained in Archie's memory as a thing
apart, his father having related to him from beginning to end, and with
much detail, three authentic murder cases. Archie went the usual round
of other Edinburgh boys, the High School and the College; and Hermiston
looked on, or rather looked away, with scarce an affectation of
interest in his progress. Daily, indeed, upon a signal after dinner, he
was brought in, given nuts and a glass of port, regarded sardonically,
sarcastically questioned. "Well, sir, and what have you donn with your
book to-day?" my lord might begin, and set him posers in law Latin. To a
child just stumbling into Corderius, Papinian and Paul proved quite
invincible. But papa had memory of no other. He was not harsh to the
little scholar, having a vast fund of patience learned upon the Bench,
and was at no pains whether to conceal or to express his disappointment.
"Well, ye have a long jaunt before ye yet!" he might observe, yawning,
and fall back on his own thoughts (as like as not) until the time came
for separation, and my lord would take the decanter and the glass, and
be off to the back chamber looking on the Meadows, where he toiled on
his cases till the hours were small. There was no "fuller man" on the
Bench; his memory was marvellous, though wholly legal; if he had to
"advise" extempore, none did it better; yet there was none who more
earnestly prepared. As he thus watched in the night, or sat at table and
forgot the presence of his son, no doubt but he tasted deeply of
recondite pleasures. To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise
is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher
mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without
reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement. This atmosphere
of his father's sterling industry was the best of Archie's education.
Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and
depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a
clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the boy's life.
But Hermiston was not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty toper;
he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from the
table to the Bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the third
bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross accent,
the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less
formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited
from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with
potential violence. In the playing-fields, and amongst his own
companions, he repaid a coarse expression with a blow; at his father's
table (when the time came for him to join these revels) he turned pale
and sickened in silence. Of all the guests whom he there encountered, he
had toleration for only one: David Keith Carnegie, Lord Glenalmond. Lord
Glenalmond was tall and emaciated, with long features and long delicate
hands. He was often compared with the statue of Forbes of Culloden in
the Parliament House; and his blue eye, at more than sixty, preserved
some of the fire of youth. His exquisite disparity with any of his
fellow-guests, his appearance as of an artist and an aristocrat stranded
in rude company, riveted the boy's attention; and as curiosity and
interest are the things in the world that are the most immediately and
certainly rewarded, Lord Glenalmond was attracted by the boy.
"And so this is your son, Hermiston?" he asked, laying his hand on
Archie's shoulder. "He's getting a big lad."
"Hout!" said the gracious father, "just his mother over again--daurna
say boo to a goose!"
But the stranger retained the boy, talked to him, drew him out, found in
him a taste for letters, and a fine, ardent, modest, youthful soul; and
encouraged him to be a visitor on Sunday evenings in his bare, cold,
lonely dining-room, where he sat and read in the isolation of a bachelor
grown old in refinement. The beautiful gentleness and grace of the old
judge, and the delicacy of his person, thoughts, and language, spoke to
Archie's heart in its own tongue. He conceived the ambition to be such
another; and, when the day came for him to choose a profession, it was
in emulation of Lord Glenalmond, not of Lord Hermiston, that he chose
the Bar. Hermiston looked on at this friendship with some secret pride,
but openly with the intolerance of scorn. He scarce lost an opportunity
to put them down with a rough jape; and, to say truth, it was not
difficult, for they were neither of them quick. He had a word of
contempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters, fiddlers, and their
admirers, the bastard race of amateurs, which was continually on his
lips. "Signor Feedle-eerie!" he would say. "O, for Goad's sake, no more
of the Signor!"
"You and my father are great friends, are you not?" asked Archie once.
"There is no man that I more respect, Archie," replied Lord Glenalmond.
"He is two things of price: he is a great lawyer, and he is upright as
the day."
"You and he are so different," said the boy, his eyes dwelling on those
of his old friend, like a lover's on his mistress's.
"Indeed so," replied the judge; "very different. And so I fear are you
and he. Yet I would like it very ill if my young friend were to misjudge
his father. He has all the Roman virtues: Cato and Brutus were such; I
think a son's heart might well be proud of such an ancestry of one."
"And I would sooner he were a plaided herd," cried Archie, with sudden
bitterness.
"And that is neither very wise, nor I believe entirely true," returned
Glenalmond. "Before you are done you will find some of these expressions
rise on you like a remorse. They are merely literary and decorative;
they do not aptly express your thought, nor is your thought clearly
apprehended, and no doubt your father (if he were here) would say,
'Signor Feedle-eerie!'"
With the infinitely delicate sense of youth, Archie avoided the subject
from that hour. It was perhaps a pity. Had he but talked--talked
freely--let himself gush out in words (the way youth loves to do, and
should), there might have been no tale to write upon the Weirs of
Hermiston. But the shadow of a threat of ridicule sufficed; in the
slight tartness of these words he read a prohibition; and it is likely
that Glenalmond meant it so.
Besides the veteran, the boy was without confidant or friend. Serious
and eager, he came through school and college, and moved among a crowd
of the indifferent, in the seclusion of his shyness. He grew up
handsome, with an open, speaking countenance, with graceful, youthful
ways; he was clever, he took prizes, he shone in the Speculative
Society. It should seem he must become the centre of a crowd of friends;
but something that was in part the delicacy of his mother, in part the
austerity of his father, held him aloof from all. It is a fact, and a
strange one, that among his contemporaries Hermiston's son was thought
to be a chip of the old block. "You're a friend of Archie Weir's?" said
one to Frank Innes; and Innes replied, with his usual flippancy and more
than his usual insight: "I know Weir, but I never met Archie." No one
had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons. He flew his private
signal, and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from
which the very hope of intimacy was banished; and he looked round about
him on the concourse of his fellow-students, and forward to the trivial
days and acquaintances that were to come, without hope or interest.
As time went on, the tough and rough old sinner felt himself drawn to
the son of his loins and sole continuator of his new family, with
softnesses of sentiment that he could hardly credit and was wholly
impotent to express. With a face, voice, and manner trained through
forty years to terrify and repel, Rhadamanthus may be great, but he will
scarce be engaging. It is a fact that he tried to propitiate Archie, but
a fact that cannot be too lightly taken; the attempt was so
unconspicuously made, the failure so stoically supported. Sympathy is
not due to these steadfast iron natures. If he failed to gain his son's
friendship, or even his son's toleration, on he went up the great, bare
staircase of his duty, uncheered and undepressed. There might have been
more pleasure in his relations with Archie, so much he may have
recognised at moments; but pleasure was a by-product of the singular
chemistry of life, which only fools expected.
An idea of Archie's attitude, since we are all grown up and have
forgotten the days of our youth, it is more difficult to convey. He made
no attempt whatsoever to understand the man with whom he dined and
breakfasted. Parsimony of pain, glut of pleasure, these are the two
alternating ends of youth; and Archie was of the parsimonious. The wind
blew cold out of a certain quarter--he turned his back upon it; stayed
as little as was possible in his father's presence; and when there,
averted his eyes as much as was decent from his father's face. The lamp
shone for many hundred days upon these two at table--my lord ruddy,
gloomy, and unreverend; Archie with a potential brightness that was
always dimmed and veiled in that society; and there were not, perhaps,
in Christendom two men more radically strangers. The father, with a
grand simplicity, either spoke of what interested himself, or maintained
an unaffected silence. The son turned in his head for some topic that
should be quite safe, that would spare him fresh evidences either of my
lord's inherent grossness or of the innocence of his inhumanity;
treading gingerly the ways of intercourse, like a lady gathering up her
skirts in a by-path. If he made a mistake, and my lord began to abound
in matter of offence, Archie drew himself up, his brow grew dark, his
share of the talk expired; but my lord would faithfully and cheerfully
continue to pour out the worst of himself before his silent and offended
son.
"Well, it's a poor hert that never rejoices!" he would say, at the
conclusion of such a nightmare interview. "But I must get to my
plew-stilts." And he would seclude himself as usual in the back room,
and Archie go forth into the night and the city quivering with animosity
and scorn.
CHAPTER III
IN THE MATTER OF THE HANGING OF DUNCAN JOPP
It chanced in the year 1813 that Archie strayed one day into the
Justiciary Court. The macer made room for the son of the presiding
judge. In the dock, the centre of men's eyes, there stood a
whey-coloured, misbegotten caitiff, Duncan Jopp, on trial for his life.
His story, as it was raked out before him in that public scene, was one
of disgrace and vice and cowardice, the very nakedness of crime; and the
creature heard, and it seemed at times as though he understood--as if at
times he forgot the horror of the place he stood in, and remembered the
shame of what had brought him there. He kept his head bowed and his
hands clutched upon the rail; his hair dropped in his eyes and at times
he flung it back; and now he glanced about the audience in a sudden
fellness of terror, and now looked in the face of his judge and gulped.
There was pinned about his throat a piece of dingy flannel; and this it
was perhaps that turned the scale in Archie's mind between disgust and
pity. The creature stood in a vanishing point; yet a little while, and
he was still a man, and had eyes and apprehension; yet a little longer,
and with a last sordid piece of pageantry, he would cease to be. And
here, in the meantime, with a trait of human nature that caught at the
beholder's breath, he was tending a sore throat.
Over against him, my Lord Hermiston occupied the Bench in the red robes
of criminal jurisdiction, his face framed in the white wig. Honest all
through, he did not affect the virtue of impartiality; this was no case
for refinement; there was a man to be hanged, he would have said, and
he was hanging him. Nor was it possible to see his lordship, and acquit
him of gusto in the task. It was plain he gloried in the exercise of his
trained faculties, in the clear sight which pierced at once into the
joint of fact, in the rude, unvarnished gibes with which he demolished
every figment of defence. He took his ease and jested, unbending in that
solemn place with some of the freedom of the tavern; and the rag of man
with the flannel round his neck was hunted gallowsward with jeers.
Duncan had a mistress, scarce less forlorn and greatly older than
himself, who came up, whimpering and curtseying, to add the weight of
her betrayal. My lord gave her the oath in his most roaring voice, and
added an intolerant warning.
"Mind what ye say now, Janet," said he. "I have an e'e upon ye, I'm ill
to jest with."
Presently, after she was tremblingly embarked on her story, "And what
made ye do this, ye auld runt?" the Court interposed. "Do ye mean to
tell me ye was the panel's mistress?"
"If you please, ma loard," whined the female.
"Godsake! ye made a bonny couple," observed his lordship; and there was
something so formidable and ferocious in his scorn that not even the
galleries thought to laugh.
The summing up contained some jewels.
"These two peetiable creatures seem to have made up thegither, it's not
for us to explain why."--"The panel, who (whatever else he may be)
appears to be equally ill set-out in mind and boady."--"Neither the
panel nor yet the old wife appears to have had so much common sense as
even to tell a lie when it was necessary." And in the course of
sentencing, my lord had this _obiter dictum_: "I have been the means,
under God, of haanging a great number, but never just such a disjaskit
rascal as yourself." The words were strong in themselves; the light and
heat and detonation of their delivery, and the savage pleasure of the
speaker in his task, made them tingle in the ears.
When all was over, Archie came forth again into a changed world. Had
there been the least redeeming greatness in the crime, any obscurity,
any dubiety, perhaps he might have understood. But the culprit stood,
with his sore throat, in the sweat of his mortal agony, without defence
or excuse: a thing to cover up with blushes: a being so much sunk
beneath the zones of sympathy that pity might seem harmless. And the
judge had pursued him with a monstrous, relishing gaiety, horrible to be
conceived, a trait for nightmares. It is one thing to spear a tiger,
another to crush a toad; there are æsthetics even of the
slaughter-house; and the loathsomeness of Duncan Jopp enveloped and
infected the image of his judge.
Archie passed by his friends in the High Street with incoherent words
and gestures. He saw Holyrood in a dream, remembrance of its romance
awoke in him and faded; he had a vision of the old radiant stories, of
Queen Mary and Prince Charlie, of the hooded stag, of the splendour and
crime, the velvet and bright iron of the past; and dismissed them with a
cry of pain. He lay and moaned in the Hunter's Bog, and the heavens were
dark above him and the grass of the field an offence. "This is my
father," he said. "I draw my life from him; the flesh upon my bones is
his, the bread I am fed with is the wages of these horrors." He recalled
his mother, and ground his forehead in the earth. He thought of flight,
and where was he to flee to? of other lives, but was there any life
worth living in this den of savage and jeering animals?
The interval before the execution was like a violent dream. He met his
father; he would not look at him, he could not speak to him. It seemed
there was no living creature but must have been swift to recognise that
imminent animosity; but the hide of the Justice-Clerk remained
impenetrable. Had my lord been talkative, the truce could never have
subsisted; but he was by fortune in one of his humours of sour silence;
and under the very guns of his broadside, Archie nursed the enthusiasm
of rebellion. It seemed to him, from the top of his nineteen years'
experience, as if he were marked at birth to be the perpetrator of some
signal action, to set back fallen Mercy, to overthrow the usurping devil
that sat, horned and hoofed, on her throne. Seductive Jacobin figments,
which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and
startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk
accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties.
On the named morning he was at the place of execution. He saw the
fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced. He looked on for a while
at a certain parody of devotion, which seemed to strip the wretch of his
last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of extinction,
and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack. He
had been prepared for something terrible, not for this tragic meanness.
He stood a moment silent, and then--"I denounce this God-defying
murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have disclaimed the
sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with which it was
uttered.
Frank Innes dragged him from the spot. The two handsome lads followed
the same course of study and recreation, and felt a certain mutual
attraction, founded mainly on good looks. It had never gone deep; Frank
was by nature a thin, jeering creature, not truly susceptible whether of
feeling or inspiring friendship; and the relation between the pair was
altogether on the outside, a thing of common knowledge and the
pleasantries that spring from a common acquaintance. The more credit to
Frank that he was appalled by Archie's outburst, and at least conceived
the design of keeping him in sight, and, if possible, in hand for the
day. But Archie, who had just defied--was it God or Satan?--would not
listen to the word of a college companion.
"I will not go with you," he said. "I do not desire your company, sir; I
would be alone."
"Here, Weir, man, don't be absurd," said Innes, keeping a tight hold
upon his sleeve. "I will not let you go until I know what you mean to do
with yourself; it's no use brandishing that staff." For indeed at that
moment Archie had made a sudden--perhaps a warlike--movement. "This has
been the most insane affair; you know it has. You know very well that
I'm playing the good Samaritan. All I wish is to keep you quiet."
"If quietness is what you wish, Mr. Innes," said Archie, "and you will
promise to leave me entirely to myself, I will tell you so much, that I
am going to walk in the country and admire the beauties of nature."
"Honour bright?" asked Frank.
"I am not in the habit of lying, Mr. Innes," retorted Archie. "I have
the honour of wishing you good-day."
"You won't forget the Spec.?" asked Innes.
"The Spec.?" said Archie. "O no, I won't forget the Spec."
And the one young man carried his tortured spirit forth of the city and
all the day long, by one road and another, in an endless pilgrimage of
misery; while the other hastened smilingly to spread the news of Weir's
access of insanity, and to drum up for that night a full attendance at
the Speculative, where further eccentric developments might certainly be
looked for. I doubt if Innes had the least belief in his prediction; I
think it flowed rather from a wish to make the story as good and the
scandal as great as possible; not from any ill-will to Archie--from the
mere pleasure of beholding interested faces. But for all that his words
were prophetic. Archie did not forget the Spec.; he put in an appearance
there at the due time, and, before the evening was over, had dealt a
memorable shock to his companions. It chanced he was the president of
the night. He sat in the same room where the Society still meets--only
the portraits were not there: the men who afterwards sat for them were
then but beginning their careers. The same lustre of many tapers shed
its light over the meeting; the same chair, perhaps, supported him that
so many of us have sat in since. At times he seemed to forget the
business of the evening, but even in these periods he sat with a great
air of energy and determination. At times he meddled bitterly, and
launched with defiance those fines which are the precious and rarely
used artillery of the president. He little thought, as he did so, how he
resembled his father, but his friends remarked upon it, chuckling. So
far, in his high place above his fellow-students, he seemed set beyond
the possibility of any scandal; but his mind was made up--he was
determined to fulfil the sphere of his offence. He signed to Innes (whom
he had just fined and who had just impeached his ruling) to succeed him
in the chair, stepped down from the platform, and took his place by the
chimney-piece, the shine of many wax tapers from above illuminating his
pale face, the glow of the great red fire relieving from behind his slim
figure. He had to propose, as an amendment to the next subject in the
case-book, "Whether capital punishment be consistent with God's will or
man's policy?"
A breath of embarrassment, of something like alarm, passed round the
room, so daring did these words appear upon the lips of Hermiston's only
son. But the amendment was not seconded; the previous question was
promptly moved and unanimously voted, and the momentary scandal smuggled
by. Innes triumphed in the fulfilment of his prophecy. He and Archie
were now become the heroes of the night; but whereas every one crowded
about Innes, when the meeting broke up, but one of all his companions
came to speak to Archie.
"Weir, man! That was an extraordinary raid of yours!" observed this
courageous member, taking him confidentially by the arm as they went
out.
"I don't think it a raid," said Archie grimly. "More like a war. I saw
that poor brute hanged this morning, and my gorge rises at it yet."
"Hut-tut," returned his companion, and, dropping his arm like something
hot, he sought the less tense society of others.
Archie found himself alone. The last of the faithful--or was it only the
boldest of the curious?--had fled. He watched the black huddle of his
fellow-students draw off down and up the street, in whispering or
boisterous gangs. And the isolation of the moment weighed upon him like
an omen and an emblem of his destiny in life. Bred up in unbroken fear
himself, among trembling servants, and in a house which (at the least
ruffle in the master's voice) shuddered into silence, he saw himself on
the brink of the red valley of war, and measured the danger and length
of it with awe. He made a détour in the glimmer and shadow of the
streets, came into the back stable lane, and watched for a long while
the light burn steady in the judge's room. The longer he gazed upon that
illuminated window-blind, the more blank became the picture of the man
who sat behind it, endlessly turning over sheets of process, pausing to
sip a glass of port, or rising and passing heavily about his book-lined
walls to verify some reference. He could not combine the brutal judge
and the industrious, dispassionate student; the connecting link escaped
him; from such a dual nature it was impossible he should predict
behaviour; and he asked himself if he had done well to plunge into a
business of which the end could not be foreseen? and presently after,
with a sickening decline of confidence, if he had done loyally to strike
his father? For he had struck him--defied him twice over and before a
cloud of witnesses--struck him a public buffet before crowds. Who had
called him to judge his father in these precarious and high questions?
The office was usurped. It might have become a stranger; in a son--there
was no blinking it--in a son, it was disloyal. And now, between these
two natures so antipathetic, so hateful to each other, there was
depending an unpardonable affront: and the providence of God alone might
foresee the manner in which it would be resented by Lord Hermiston.
These misgivings tortured him all night and arose with him in the
winter's morning; they followed him from class to class, they made him
shrinkingly sensitive to every shade of manner in his companions, they
sounded in his ears through the current voice of the professor; and he
brought them home with him at night unabated and indeed increased. The
cause of this increase lay in a chance encounter with the celebrated Dr.
Gregory. Archie stood looking vaguely in the lighted window of a
book-shop, trying to nerve himself for the approaching ordeal. My lord
and he had met and parted in the morning as they had now done for long,
with scarcely the ordinary civilities of life; and it was plain to the
son that nothing had yet reached the father's ears. Indeed, when he
recalled the awful countenance of my lord, a timid hope sprang up in him
that perhaps there would be found no one bold enough to carry tales. If
this were so, he asked himself, would he begin again? and he found no
answer. It was at this moment that a hand was laid upon his arm, and a
voice said in his ear, "My dear Mr. Archie, you had better come and see
me."
He started, turned round, and found himself face to face with Dr.
Gregory. "And why should I come to see you?" he asked, with the defiance
of the miserable.
"Because you are looking exceedingly ill," said the doctor, "and you
very evidently want looking after, my young friend. Good folk are
scarce, you know; and it is not every one that would be quite so much
missed as yourself. It is not every one that Hermiston would miss."
And with a nod and a smile, the doctor passed on.
A moment after, Archie was in pursuit, and had in turn, but more
roughly, seized him by the arm.
"What do you mean? what did you mean by saying that? What makes you
think that Hermis--my father would have missed me?"
The doctor turned about and looked him all over with a clinical eye. A
far more stupid man than Dr. Gregory might have guessed the truth; but
ninety-nine out of a hundred, even if they had been equally inclined to
kindness, would have blundered by some touch of charitable exaggeration.
The doctor was better inspired. He knew the father well; in that white
face of intelligence and suffering, he divined something of the son; and
he told, without apology or adornment, the plain truth.
"When you had the measles, Mr. Archibald, you had them gey and ill; and
I thought you were going to slip between my fingers," he said. "Well,
your father was anxious. How did I know it? says you. Simply because I
am a trained observer. The sign that I saw him make, ten thousand would
have missed; and perhaps--_perhaps_, I say, because he's a hard man to
judge of--but perhaps he never made another. A strange thing to
consider! It was this. One day I came to him: 'Hermiston,' said I,
'there's a change.' He never said a word, just glowered at me (if ye'll
pardon the phrase) like a wild beast. 'A change for the better,' said I.
And I distinctly heard him take his breath."
The doctor left no opportunity for anti-climax; nodding his cocked hat
(a piece of antiquity to which he clung) and repeating "Distinctly" with
raised eyebrows, he took his departure, and left Archie speechless in
the street.
The anecdote might be called infinitely little, and yet its meaning for
Archie was immense. "I did not know the old man had so much blood in
him." He had never dreamed this sire of his, this aboriginal antique,
this adamantine Adam, had even so much of a heart as to be moved in the
least degree for another--and that other himself, who had insulted him!
With the generosity of youth, Archie was instantly under arms upon the
other side: had instantly created a new image of Lord Hermiston, that of
a man who was all iron without and all sensibility within. The mind of
the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly
insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so
long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his
misdeeds, impatient to throw himself on the mercy of this imaginary
character.
He was not to be long without a rude awakening. It was in the gloaming
when he drew near the doorstep of the lighted house, and was aware of
the figure of his father approaching from the opposite side. Little
daylight lingered; but on the door being opened, the strong yellow shine
of the lamp gushed out upon the landing and shone full on Archie, as he
stood, in the old-fashioned observance of respect, to yield precedence.
The judge came without haste, stepping stately and firm; his chin
raised, his face (as he entered the lamplight) strongly illumined, his
mouth set hard. There was never a wink of change in his expression;
without looking to the right or left, he mounted the stair, passed close
to Archie, and entered the house. Instinctively, the boy, upon his first
coming, had made a movement to meet him; instinctively he recoiled
against the railing, as the old man swept by him in a pomp of
indignation. Words were needless; he knew all--perhaps more than
all--and the hour of judgment was at hand.
It is possible that, in this sudden revulsion of hope and before these
symptoms of impending danger, Archie might have fled. But not even that
was left to him. My lord, after hanging up his cloak and hat, turned
round in the lighted entry, and made him an imperative and silent
gesture with his thumb, and with the strange instinct of obedience,
Archie followed him into the house.
All dinner-time there reigned over the judge's table a palpable silence,
and as soon as the solids were despatched he rose to his feet.
"M'Killop, tak' the wine into my room," said he; and then to his son:
"Archie, you and me has to have a talk."
It was at this sickening moment that Archie's courage, for the first and
last time, entirely deserted him. "I have an appointment," said he.
"It'll have to be broken, then," said Hermiston, and led the way into
his study.
The lamp was shaded, the fire trimmed to a nicety, the table covered
deep with orderly documents, the backs of law-books made a frame upon
all sides that was only broken by the window and the doors.
For a moment Hermiston warmed his hands at the fire, presenting his back
to Archie; then suddenly disclosed on him the terrors of the Hanging
Face.
"What's this I hear of ye?" he asked.
There was no answer possible to Archie.
"I'll have to tell ye, then," pursued Hermiston. "It seems ye've been
skirling against the father that begot ye, and one of his Maijesty's
judges in this land; and that in the public street, and while an order
of the Court was being executit. Forbye which, it would appear that
ye've been airing your opeenions in a Coallege Debatin' Society"; he
paused a moment: and then, with extraordinary bitterness, added: "Ye
damned eediot."
"I had meant to tell you," stammered Archie. "I see you are well
informed."
"Muckle obleeged to ye," said his lordship, and took his usual seat.
"And so you disapprove of caapital punishment?" he added.
"I am sorry, sir, I do," said Archie.
"I am sorry, too," said his lordship. "And now, if you please, we shall
approach this business with a little more parteecularity. I hear that at
the hanging of Duncan Jopp--and, man! ye had a fine client there--in the
middle of all the riffraff of the ceety, ye thought fit to cry out,
'This is a damned murder, and my gorge rises at the man that haangit
him.'"
"No, sir, these were not my words," cried Archie.
"What were yer words, then?" asked the judge.
"I believe I said, 'I denounce it as a murder!'" said the son. "I beg
your pardon--a God-defying murder. I have no wish to conceal the truth,"
he added, and looked his father for a moment in the face.
"God, it would only need that of it next!" cried Hermiston. "There was
nothing about your gorge rising, then?"
"That was afterwards, my lord, as I was leaving the Speculative. I said
I had been to see the miserable creature hanged, and my gorge rose at
it."
"Did ye, though?" said Hermiston. "And I suppose ye knew who haangit
him?"
"I was present at the trial; I ought to tell you that, I ought to
explain. I ask your pardon beforehand for any expression that may seem
undutiful. The position in which I stand is wretched," said the unhappy
hero, now fairly face to face with the business he had chosen. "I have
been reading some of your cases. I was present while Jopp was tried. It
was a hideous business. Father, it was a hideous thing! Grant he was
vile, why should you hunt him with a vileness equal to his own? It was
done with glee--that is the word--you did it with glee; and I looked on,
God help me! with horror."
"You're a young gentleman that doesna approve of caapital punishment,"
said Hermiston. "Weel, I'm an auld man that does. I was glad to get Jopp
haangit, and what for would I pretend I wasna? You're all for honesty,
it seems; you couldn't even steik your mouth on the public street. What
for should I steik mines upon the Bench, the King's officer, bearing the
sword, a dreid to evil-doers, as I was from the beginning, and as I will
be to the end! Mair than enough of it! Heedious! I never gave twa
thoughts to heediousness, I have no call to be bonny. I'm a man that
gets through with my day's business, and let that suffice."
The ring of sarcasm had died out of his voice as he went on; the plain
words became invested with some of the dignity of the Justice-seat.
"It would be telling you if you could say as much," the speaker resumed.
"But ye cannot. Ye've been reading some of my cases, ye say. But it was
not for the law in them, it was to spy out your faither's nakedness, a
fine employment in a son. You're splairging; you're running at lairge
in life like a wild nowt. It's impossible you should think any longer of
coming to the Bar. You're not fit for it; no splairger is. And another
thing: son of mines or no son of mines, you have flung fylement in
public on one of the Senators of the Coallege of Justice, and I would
make it my business to see that ye were never admitted there yourself.
There is a kind of a decency to be observit. Then comes the next of
it--what am I to do with ye next? Ye'll have to find some kind of a
trade, for I'll never support ye in idleset. What do ye fancy ye'll be
fit for? The pulpit? Na, they could never get diveenity into that
bloackhead. Him that the law of man whammles is no likely to do muckle
better by the law of God. What would ye make of hell? Wouldna your gorge
rise at that? Na, there's no room for splairgers under the fower
quarters of John Calvin. What else is there? Speak up. Have ye got
nothing of your own?"
"Father, let me go to the Peninsula," said Archie. "That's all I'm fit
for--to fight."
"All? quo' he!" returned the judge. "And it would be enough too, if I
thought it. But I'll never trust ye so near the French, you that's so
Frenchifeed."
"You do me injustice there, sir," said Archie. "I am loyal; I will not
boast; but any interest I may have ever felt in the French--"
"Have ye been so loyal to me?" interrupted his father.
There came no reply.
"I think not," continued Hermiston. "And I would send no man to be a
servant to the King, God bless him! that has proved such a shauchling
son to his own faither. You can splairge here on Edinburgh street, and
where's the hairm? It doesna play buff on me! And if there were twenty
thousand eediots like yourself, sorrow a Duncan Jopp would hang the
fewer. But there's no splairging possible in a camp; and if you were to
go to it, you would find out for yourself whether Lord Well'n'ton
approves of caapital punishment or not. You a sodger!" he cried, with a
sudden burst of scorn. "Ye auld wife, the sodgers would bray at ye like
cuddies!"
As at the drawing of a curtain, Archie was aware of some illogicality in
his position, and stood abashed. He had a strong impression, besides, of
the essential valour of the old gentleman before him, how conveyed it
would be hard to say.
"Well, have ye no other proposeetion?" said my lord again.
"You have taken this so calmly, sir, that I cannot but stand ashamed,"
began Archie.
"I'm nearer voamiting, though, than you would fancy," said my lord.
The blood rose to Archie's brow.
"I beg your pardon, I should have said that you had accepted my
affront.... I admit it was an affront; I did not think to apologise, but
I do, I ask your pardon; it will not be so again, I pass you my word of
honour.... I should have said that I admired your magnanimity
with--this--offender," Archie concluded with a gulp.
"I have no other son, ye see," said Hermiston. "A bonny one I have
gotten! But I must just do the best I can wi' him, and what am I to do?
If ye had been younger, I would have wheepit ye for this rideeculous
exhibeetion. The way it is, I have just to grin and bear. But one thing
is to be clearly understood. As a faither, I must grin and bear it; but
if I had been the Lord Advocate instead of the Lord Justice-Clerk, son
or no son, Mr. Erchibald Weir would have been in a jyle the night."
Archie was now dominated. Lord Hermiston was coarse and cruel; and yet
the son was aware of a bloomless nobility, an ungracious abnegation of
the man's self in the man's office. At every word, this sense of the
greatness of Lord Hermiston's spirit struck more home; and along with it
that of his own impotence, who had struck--and perhaps basely struck--at
his own father, and not reached so far as to have even nettled him.
"I place myself in your hands without reserve," he said.
"That's the first sensible word I've had of ye the night," said
Hermiston. "I can tell ye, that would have been the end of it, the one
way or the other; but it's better ye should come there yourself, than
what I would have had to hirstle ye. Weel, by my way of it--and my way
is the best--there's just the one thing it's possible that ye might be
with decency, and that's a laird. Ye'll be out of hairm's way at the
least of it. If ye have to rowt, ye can rowt amang the kye; and the
maist feck of the caapital punishment ye're like to come across'll be
guddling trouts. Now, I'm for no idle lairdies; every man has to work,
if it's only at peddling ballants; to work, or to be wheeped, or to be
haangit. If I set ye down at Hermiston, I'll have to see you work that
place the way it has never been workit yet; ye must ken about the sheep
like a herd; ye must be my grieve there, and I'll see that I gain by ye.
Is that understood?"
"I will do my best," said Archie.
"Well, then, I'll send Kirstie word the morn, and ye can go yourself the
day after," said Hermiston. "And just try to be less of an eediot!" he
concluded, with a freezing smile, and turned immediately to the papers
on his desk.
CHAPTER IV
OPINIONS OF THE BENCH
Late the same night, after a disordered walk, Archie was admitted into
Lord Glenalmond's dining-room, where he sat, with a book upon his knee,
beside three frugal coals of fire. In his robes upon the Bench,
Glenalmond had a certain air of burliness: plucked of these, it was a
may-pole of a man that rose unsteadily from his chair to give his
visitor welcome. Archie had suffered much in the last days, he had
suffered again that evening; his face was white and drawn, his eyes wild
and dark. But Lord Glenalmond greeted him without the least mark of
surprise or curiosity.
"Come in, come in," said he. "Come in and take a seat. Carstairs" (to
his servant), "make up the fire, and then you can bring a bit of
supper," and again to Archie, with a very trivial accent: "I was half
expecting you," he added.
"No supper," said Archie. "It is impossible that I should eat."
"Not impossible," said the tall old man, laying his hand upon his
shoulder, "and, if you will believe me, necessary."
"You know what brings me?" said Archie, as soon as the servant had left
the room.
"I have a guess, I have a guess," replied Glenalmond. "We will talk of
it presently--when Carstairs has come and gone, and you have had a piece
of my good Cheddar cheese and a pull at the porter tankard: not before."
"It is impossible I should eat," repeated Archie.
"Tut, tut!" said Lord Glenalmond. "You have eaten nothing to-day, and I
venture to add, nothing yesterday. There is no case that may not be made
worse; this may be a very disagreeable business, but if you were to
fall sick and die, it would be still more so, and for all concerned--for
all concerned."
"I see you must know all," said Archie. "Where did you hear it?"
"In the mart of scandal, in the Parliament House," said Glenalmond. "It
runs riot below among the Bar and the public, but it sifts up to us upon
the Bench, and rumour has some of her voices even in the divisions."
Carstairs returned at this moment, and rapidly laid out a little supper;
during which Lord Glenalmond spoke at large and a little vaguely on
indifferent subjects, so that it might be rather said of him that he
made a cheerful noise, than that he contributed to human conversation;
and Archie sat upon the other side, not heeding him, brooding over his
wrongs and errors.
But so soon as the servant was gone, he broke forth again at once. "Who
told my father? Who dared to tell him? Could it have been you?"
"No, it was not me," said the judge; "although--to be quite frank with
you, after I had seen and warned you--it might have been me. I believe
it was Glenkindie."
"That shrimp!" cried Archie.
"As you say, that shrimp," returned my lord; "although really it is
scarce a fitting mode of expression for one of the senators of the
College of Justice. We were hearing the parties in a long, crucial case,
before the fifteenth; Creech was moving at some length for an
infeftment; when I saw Glenkindie lean forward to Hermiston with his
hand over his mouth and make him a secret communication. No one could
have guessed its nature from your father; from Glenkindie, yes, his
malice sparked out of him a little grossly. But your father, no. A man
of granite. The next moment he pounced upon Creech. 'Mr. Creech,' says
he, 'I'll take a look of that sasine,' and for thirty minutes after,"
said Glenalmond, with a smile, "Messrs. Creech and Co. were fighting a
pretty uphill battle, which resulted, I need hardly add, in their total
rout. The case was dismissed. No, I doubt if ever I heard Hermiston
better inspired. He was literally rejoicing _in apicibus juris_."
Archie was able to endure no longer. He thrust his plate away and
interrupted the deliberate and insignificant stream of talk. "Here," he
said, "I have made a fool of myself, if I have not made something worse.
Do you judge between us--judge between a father and a son. I can speak
to you; it is not like ... I will tell you what I feel and what I mean
to do; and you shall be the judge," he repeated.
"I decline jurisdiction," said Glenalmond, with extreme seriousness.
"But, my dear boy, if it will do you any good to talk, and if it will
interest you at all to hear what I may choose to say when I have heard
you, I am quite at your command. Let an old man say it, for once, and
not need to blush: I love you like a son."
There came a sudden sharp sound in Archie's throat. "Ay," he cried, "and
there it is! Love! Like a son! And how do you think I love my father?"
"Quietly, quietly," says my lord.
"I will be very quiet," replied Archie. "And I will be baldly frank. I
do not love my father; I wonder sometimes if I do not hate him. There's
my shame; perhaps my sin; at least, and in the sight of God, not my
fault. How was I to love him? He has never spoken to me, never smiled
upon me; I do not think he ever touched me. You know the way he talks?
You do not talk so, yet you can sit and hear him without shuddering, and
I cannot. My soul is sick when he begins with it; I could smite him in
the mouth. And all that's nothing. I was at the trial of this Jopp. You
were not there, but you must have heard him often; the man's notorious
for it, for being--look at my position! he's my father and this is how I
have to speak of him--notorious for being a brute and cruel and a
coward. Lord Glenalmond, I give you my word, when I came out of that
Court, I longed to die--the shame of it was beyond my strength: but
I--I----" he rose from his seat and began to pace the room in a
disorder. "Well, who am I? A boy, who have never been tried, have never
done anything except this twopenny impotent folly with my father. But I
tell you, my lord, and I know myself, I am at least that kind of a
man--or that kind of a boy, if you prefer it--that I could die in
torments rather than that any one should suffer as that scoundrel
suffered. Well, and what have I done? I see it now. I have made a fool
of myself, as I said in the beginning; and I have gone back, and asked
my father's pardon, and placed myself wholly in his hands--and he has
sent me to Hermiston," with a wretched smile, "for life, I suppose--and
what can I say? he strikes me as having done quite right, and let me off
better than I had deserved."
"My poor, dear boy!" observed Glenalmond. "My poor, dear and, if you
will allow me to say so, very foolish boy! You are only discovering
where you are; to one of your temperament, or of mine, a painful
discovery. The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred
millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no
royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble. Don't think that
I am at all disposed to be surprised; don't suppose that I ever think of
blaming you; indeed I rather admire! But there fall to be offered one or
two observations on the case which occur to me and which (if you will
listen to them dispassionately) may be the means of inducing you to view
the matter more calmly. First of all, I cannot acquit you of a good deal
of what is called intolerance. You seem to have been very much offended
because your father talks a little sculduddery after dinner, which it is
perfectly licit for him to do, and which (although I am not very fond of
it myself) appears to be entirely an affair of taste. Your father, I
scarcely like to remind you, since it is so trite a commonplace, is
older than yourself. At least, he is _major_ and _sui juris_, and may
please himself in the matter of his conversation. And, do you know, I
wonder if he might not have as good an answer against you and me? We say
we sometimes find him _coarse_, but I suspect he might retort that he
finds us always dull. Perhaps a relevant exception."
He beamed on Archie, but no smile could be elicited.
"And now," proceeded the judge, "for 'Archibald on Capital Punishment.'
This is a very plausible academic opinion; of course I do not and I
cannot hold it; but that's not to say that many able and excellent
persons have not done so in the past. Possibly, in the past also, I may
have a little dipped myself in the same heresy. My third client, or
possibly my fourth, was the means of a return in my opinions. I never
saw the man I more believed in; I would have put my hand in the fire; I
would have gone to the cross for him; and when it came to trial he was
gradually pictured before me, by undeniable probation, in the light of
so gross, so cold-blooded, and so black-hearted a villain, that I had a
mind to have cast my brief upon the table. I was then boiling against
the man with even a more tropical temperature than I had been boiling
for him. But I said to myself: 'No, you have taken up his case; and
because you have changed your mind it must not be suffered to let drop.
All that rich tide of eloquence that you prepared last night with so
much enthusiasm is out of place, and yet you must not desert him, you
must say something.' So I said something, and I got him off. It made my
reputation. But an experience of that kind is formative. A man must not
bring his passions to the Bar--or to the Bench," he added.
The story had slightly rekindled Archie's interest. "I could never
deny," he began--"I mean I can conceive that some men would be better
dead. But who are we to know all the springs of God's unfortunate
creatures? Who are we to trust ourselves where it seems that God Himself
must think twice before He treads, and to do it with delight? Yes, with
delight. _Tigris ut aspera_."
"Perhaps not a pleasant spectacle," said Glenalmond. "And yet, do you
know, I think somehow a great one."
"I've had a long talk with him to-night," said Archie.
"I was supposing so," said Glenalmond.
"And he struck me--I cannot deny that he struck me as something very
big," pursued the son. "Yes, he is big. He never spoke about himself;
only about me. I suppose I admired him. The dreadful part----"
"Suppose we did not talk about that," interrupted Glenalmond. "You know
it very well, it cannot in any way help that you should brood upon it,
and I sometimes wonder whether you and I--who are a pair of
sentimentalists--are quite good judges of plain men."
"How do you mean?" asked Archie.
"_Fair_ judges, I mean," replied Glenalmond. "Can we be just to them? Do
we not ask too much? There was a word of yours just now that impressed
me a little when you asked me who we were to know all the springs of
God's unfortunate creatures. You applied that, as I understood, to
capital cases only. But does it--I ask myself--does it not apply all
through? Is it any less difficult to judge of a good man or of a
half-good man, than of the worst criminal at the bar? And may not each
have relevant excuses?"
"Ah, but we do not talk of punishing the good," cried Archie.
"No, we do not talk of it," said Glenalmond. "But I think we do it. Your
father, for instance."
"You think I have punished him?" cried Archie.
Lord Glenalmond bowed his head.
"I think I have," said Archie. "And the worst is, I think he feels it!
How much, who can tell, with such a being? But I think he does."
"And I am sure of it," said Glenalmond.
"Has he spoken to you, then?" cried Archie.
"O no," replied the judge.
"I tell you honestly," said Archie, "I want to make it up to him. I
will go, I have already pledged myself to go, to Hermiston. That was to
him. And now I pledge myself to you, in the sight of God, that I will
close my mouth on capital punishment and all other subjects where our
views may clash, for--how long shall I say? when shall I have sense
enough?--ten years. Is that well?"
"It is well," said my lord.
"As far as it goes," said Archie. "It is enough as regards myself, it is
to lay down enough of my conceit. But as regards him, whom I have
publicly insulted? What am I to do to him? How do you pay attentions to
a--an Alp like that?"
"Only in one way," replied Glenalmond. "Only by obedience, punctual,
prompt, and scrupulous."
"And I promise that he shall have it," answered Archie. "I offer you my
hand in pledge of it."
"And I take your hand as a solemnity," replied the judge. "God bless
you, my dear, and enable you to keep your promise. God guide you in the
true way, and spare your days, and preserve to you your honest heart."
At that, he kissed the young man upon the forehead in a gracious,
distant, antiquated way; and instantly launched, with a marked change of
voice, into another subject. "And now, let us replenish the tankard; and
I believe, if you will try my Cheddar again, you would find you had a
better appetite. The Court has spoken, and the case is dismissed."
"No, there is one thing I must say," cried Archie. "I must say it in
justice to himself. I know--I believe faithfully, slavishly, after our
talk--he will never ask me anything unjust. I am proud to feel it, that
we have that much in common, I am proud to say it to you."
The judge, with shining eyes, raised his tankard. "And I think perhaps
that we might permit ourselves a toast," said he. "I should like to
propose the health of a man very different from me and very much my
superior--a man from whom I have often differed, who has often (in the
trivial expression) rubbed me the wrong way, but whom I have never
ceased to respect and, I may add, to be not a little afraid of. Shall I
give you his name?"
"The Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Hermiston," said Archie, almost with
gaiety; and the pair drank the toast deeply.
It was not precisely easy to re-establish, after these emotional
passages, the natural flow of conversation. But the judge eked out what
was wanting with kind looks, produced his snuff-box (which was very
rarely seen) to fill in a pause, and at last, despairing of any further
social success, was upon the point of getting down a book to read a
favourite passage, when there came a rather startling summons at the
front door, and Carstairs ushered in my Lord Glenkindie, hot from a
midnight supper. I am not aware that Glenkindie was ever a beautiful
object, being short, and gross-bodied, and with an expression of
sensuality comparable to a bear's. At that moment, coming in hissing
from many potations, with a flushed countenance and blurred eyes, he was
strikingly contrasted with the tall, pale, kingly figure of Glenalmond.
A rush of confused thought came over Archie--of shame that this was one
of his father's elect friends; of pride, that at the least of it
Hermiston could carry his liquor; and last of all, of rage, that he
should have here under his eyes the man that had betrayed him. And then
that too passed away; and he sat quiet, biding his opportunity.
The tipsy senator plunged at once into an explanation with Glenalmond.
There was a point reserved yesterday, he had been able to make neither
head nor tail of it, and seeing lights in the house, he had just dropped
in for a glass of porter--and at this point he became aware of the third
person. Archie saw the cod's mouth and the blunt lips of Glenkindie gape
at him for a moment, and the recognition twinkle in his eyes.
"Who's this?" said he. "What? is this possibly you, Don Quickshot? And
how are ye? And how's your father? And what's all this we hear of you?
It seems you're a most extraordinary leveller, by all tales. No king,
no parliaments, and your gorge rises at the macers, worthy men! Hoot,
toot! Dear, dear me! Your father's son too! Most rideeculous!"
Archie was on his feet, flushing a little at the reappearance of his
unhappy figure of speech, but perfectly self-possessed. "My lord--and
you, Lord Glenalmond, my dear friend," he began, "this is a happy chance
for me, that I can make my confession and offer my apologies to two of
you at once."
"Ah, but I don't know about that. Confession? It'll be judeecial, my
young friend," cried the jocular Glenkindie. "And I'm afraid to listen
to ye. Think if ye were to make me a coanvert!"
"If you would allow me, my lord," returned Archie, "what I have to say
is very serious to me; and be pleased to be humorous after I am gone!"
"Remember, I'll hear nothing against the macers!" put in the
incorrigible Glenkindie.
But Archie continued as though he had not spoken. "I have played, both
yesterday and to-day, a part for which I can only offer the excuse of
youth. I was so unwise as to go to an execution; it seems I made a scene
at the gallows; not content with which, I spoke the same night in a
college society against capital punishment. This is the extent of what I
have done, and in case you hear more alleged against me, I protest my
innocence. I have expressed my regret already to my father, who is so
good as to pass my conduct over--in a degree, and upon the condition
that I am to leave my law studies." ...
CHAPTER V
WINTER ON THE MOORS
1. _At Hermiston_
The road to Hermiston runs for a great part of the way up the valley of
a stream, a favourite with anglers and with midges, full of falls and
pools, and shaded by willows and natural woods of birch. Here and there,
but at great distances, a byway branches off, and a gaunt farmhouse may
be descried above in a fold of the hill; but the more part of the time,
the road would be quite empty of passage and the hills of habitation.
Hermiston parish is one of the least populous in Scotland; and, by the
time you came that length, you would scarce be surprised at the
inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated for
fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score
gravestones. The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is
surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of
bees; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds
harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great
silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn,
and the bell on Sundays. A mile beyond the kirk the road leaves the
valley by a precipitous ascent, and brings you a little after to the
place of Hermiston, where it comes to an end in the back-yard before the
coach-house. All beyond and about is the great field of the hills; the
plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows
in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure; and the hill-tops huddle
one behind another, like a herd of cattle, into the sunset.
The house was sixty years old, unsightly, comfortable; a farmyard and a
kitchen-garden on the left, with a fruit wall where little hard green
pears came to their maturity about the end of October.
The policy (as who should say the park) was of some extent, but very ill
reclaimed; heather and moor-fowl had crossed the boundary wall and
spread and roosted within; and it would have tasked a landscape gardener
to say where policy ended and unpolicied nature began. My lord had been
led by the influence of Mr. Sheriff Scott into a considerable design of
planting; many acres were accordingly set out with fir, and the little
feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop
to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at
all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so
high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed
by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout,
beaten upon and buffeted by all the winds of heaven; and the prospect
would be often black with tempest, and often white with the snows of
winter. But the house was wind and weather proof, the hearths were kept
bright, and the rooms pleasant with live fires of peat; and Archie might
sit of an evening and hear the squalls bugle on the moorland, and watch
the fire prosper in the earthy fuel, and the smoke winding up the
chimney, and drink deep of the pleasures of shelter.
Solitary as the place was, Archie did not want neighbours. Every night,
if he chose, he might go down to the manse and share a "brewst" of toddy
with the minister--a hare-brained ancient gentleman, long and light and
still active, though his knees were loosened with age, and his voice
broke continually in childish trebles--and his lady wife, a heavy,
comely dame, without a word to say for herself beyond good-even and
good-day. Harum-scarum, clodpole young lairds of the neighbourhood paid
him the compliment of a visit. Young Hay of Romanes rode down to call,
on his crop-eared pony; young Pringle of Drumanno came up on his bony
grey. Hay remained on the hospitable field, and must be carried to bed;
Pringle got somehow to his saddle about 3 A.M., and (as Archie stood
with the lamp on the upper doorstep) lurched, uttered a senseless
view-holloa, and vanished out of the small circle of illumination like a
wraith. Yet a minute or two longer the clatter of his break-neck flight
was audible, then it was cut off by the intervening steepness of the
hill; and again, a great while after, the renewed beating of phantom
horsehoofs, far in the valley of the Hermiston, showed that the horse at
least, if not his rider, was still on the homeward way.
There was a Tuesday club at the "Crosskeys" in Crossmichael, where the
young bloods of the countryside congregated and drank deep on a
percentage of the expense, so that he was left gainer who should have
drunk the most. Archie had no great mind to this diversion, but he took
it like a duty laid upon him, went with a decent regularity, did his
manfullest with the liquor, held up his head in the local jests, and got
home again and was able to put up his horse, to the admiration of
Kirstie and the lass that helped her. He dined at Driffel, supped at
Windielaws. He went to the new year's ball at Huntsfield and was made
welcome, and thereafter rode to hounds with my Lord Muirfell, upon whose
name, as that of a legitimate Lord of Parliament, in a work so full of
Lords of Session, my pen should pause reverently. Yet the same fate
attended him here as in Edinburgh. The habit of solitude tends to
perpetuate itself, and an austerity of which he was quite unconscious,
and a pride which seemed arrogance, and perhaps was chiefly shyness,
discouraged and offended his new companions. Hay did not return more
than twice, Pringle never at all, and there came a time when Archie even
desisted from the Tuesday Club, and became in all things--what he had
had the name of almost from the first--the Recluse of Hermiston.
High-nosed Miss Pringle of Drumanno and high-stepping Miss Marshall of
the Mains were understood to have had a difference of opinion about him
the day after the ball--he was none the wiser, he could not suppose
himself to be remarked by these entrancing ladies. At the ball itself my
Lord Muirfell's daughter, the Lady Flora, spoke to him twice, and the
second time with a touch of appeal, so that her colour rose and her
voice trembled a little in his ear, like a passing grace in music. He
stepped back with a heart on fire, coldly and not ungracefully excused
himself, and a little after watched her dancing with young Drumanno of
the empty laugh, and was harrowed at the sight, and raged to himself
that this was a world in which it was given to Drumanno to please, and
to himself only to stand aside and envy. He seemed excluded, as of
right, from the favour of such society--seemed to extinguish mirth
wherever he came, and was quick to feel the wound, and desist, and
retire into solitude. If he had but understood the figure he presented,
and the impression he made on these bright eyes and tender hearts; if he
had but guessed that the Recluse of Hermiston, young, graceful, well
spoken, but always cold, stirred the maidens of the county with the
charm of Byronism when Byronism was new, it may be questioned whether
his destiny might not even yet have been modified. It may be questioned,
and I think it should be doubted. It was in his horoscope to be
parsimonious of pain to himself, or of the chance of pain, even to the
avoidance of any opportunity of pleasure; to have a Roman sense of duty,
an instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste; to be the son of Adam
Weir and Jean Rutherford.
2. _Kirstie_
Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of
limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her golden
hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had but
caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous
maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother
of their children; and behold, by the iniquity of fate, she had passed
through her youth alone, and drew near to the confines of age, a
childless woman. The tender ambitions that she had received at birth had
been, by time and disappointment, diverted into a certain barren zeal of
industry and fury of interference. She carried her thwarted ardours into
housework, she washed floors with her empty heart. If she could not win
the love of one with love, she must dominate all by her temper. Hasty,
wordy, and wrathful, she had a drawn quarrel with most of her
neighbours, and with the others not much more than armed neutrality. The
grieve's wife had been "sneisty"; the sister of the gardener who kept
house for him had shown herself "upsitten"; and she wrote to Lord
Hermiston about once a year demanding the discharge of the offenders,
and justifying the demand by much wealth of detail. For it must not be
supposed that the quarrel rested with the wife and did not take in the
husband also--or with the gardener's sister, and did not speedily
include the gardener himself. As the upshot of all this petty
quarrelling and intemperate speech, she was practically excluded (like a
lightkeeper on his tower) from the comforts of human association; except
with her own indoor drudge, who, being but a lassie and entirely at her
mercy, must submit to the shifty weather of "the mistress's" moods
without complaint, and be willing to take buffets or caresses according
to the temper of the hour. To Kirstie, thus situate and in the Indian
summer of her heart, which was slow to submit to age, the gods sent this
equivocal good thing of Archie's presence. She had known him in the
cradle and paddled him when he misbehaved; and yet, as she had not so
much as set eyes on him since he was eleven and had his last serious
illness, the tall, slender, refined, and rather melancholy young
gentleman of twenty came upon her with the shock of a new acquaintance.
He was "Young Hermiston," "the laird himsel'": he had an air of
distinctive superiority, a cold straight glance of his black eyes, that
abashed the woman's tantrums in the beginning, and therefore the
possibility of any quarrel was excluded. He was new, and therefore
immediately aroused her curiosity; he was reticent, and kept it awake.
And lastly he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female, the
everlasting fountains of interest.
Her feeling partook of the loyalty of a clanswoman, the hero-worship of
a maiden aunt, and the idolatry due to a god. No matter what he had
asked of her, ridiculous or tragic, she would have done it and joyed to
do it. Her passion, for it was nothing less, entirely filled her. It was
a rich physical pleasure to make his bed or light his lamp for him when
he was absent, to pull off his wet boots or wait on him at dinner when
he returned. A young man who should have so doted on the idea, moral and
physical, of any woman, might be properly described as being in love,
head and heels, and would have behaved himself accordingly. But
Kirstie--though her heart leaped at his coming footsteps--though, when
he patted her shoulder, her face brightened for the day--had not a hope
or thought beyond the present moment and its perpetuation to the end of
time. Till the end of time she would have had nothing altered, but still
continue delightedly to serve her idol, and be repaid (say twice in the
month) with a clap on the shoulder.
I have said her heart leaped--it is the accepted phrase. But rather,
when she was alone in any chamber of the house, and heard his foot
passing on the corridors, something in her bosom rose slowly until her
breath was suspended, and as slowly fell again with a deep sigh, when
the steps had passed and she was disappointed of her eyes' desire. This
perpetual hunger and thirst of his presence kept her all day on the
alert. When he went forth at morning, she would stand and follow him
with admiring looks. As it grew late and drew to the time of his return,
she would steal forth to a corner of the policy wall and be seen
standing there sometimes by the hour together, gazing with shaded eyes,
waiting the exquisite and barren pleasure of his view a mile off on the
mountains. When at night she had trimmed and gathered the fire, turned
down his bed, and laid out his night-gear--when there was no more to be
done for the king's pleasure, but to remember him fervently in her
usually very tepid prayers, and go to bed brooding upon his perfections,
his future career, and what she should give him the next day for
dinner--there still remained before her one more opportunity; she was
still to take in the tray and say good-night. Sometimes Archie would
glance up from his book with a preoccupied nod and a perfunctory
salutation which was in truth a dismissal; sometimes--and by degrees
more often--the volume would be laid aside, he would meet her coming
with a look of relief; and the conversation would be engaged, last out
the supper, and be prolonged till the small hours by the waning fire. It
was no wonder that Archie was fond of company after his solitary days;
and Kirstie, upon her side, exerted all the arts of her vigorous nature
to ensnare his attention. She would keep back some piece of news during
dinner to be fired off with the entrance of the supper tray, and form as
it were the _lever de rideau_ of the evening's entertainment. Once he
had heard her tongue wag, she made sure of the result. From one subject
to another she moved by insidious transitions, fearing the least
silence, fearing almost to give him time for an answer lest it should
slip into a hint of separation. Like so many people of her class, she
was a brave narrator; her place was on the hearthrug and she made it a
rostrum, miming her stories as she told them, fitting them with vital
detail, spinning them out with endless "quo' he's" and "quo' she's," her
voice sinking into a whisper over the supernatural or the horrific;
until she would suddenly spring up in affected surprise, and pointing to
the clock, "Mercy, Mr. Archie!" she would say, "whatten a time o' night
is this of it! God forgive me for a daft wife!" So it befell, by good
management, that she was not only the first to begin these nocturnal
conversations, but invariably the first to break them off; so she
managed to retire and not to be dismissed.
3. _A Border Family_
Such an unequal intimacy has never been uncommon in Scotland, where the
clan spirit survives; where the servant tends to spend her life in the
same service, a help-meet at first, then a tyrant, and at last a
pensioner; where, besides, she is not necessarily destitute of the pride
of birth, but is, perhaps, like Kirstie, a connection of her master's,
and at least knows the legend of her own family, and may count kinship
with some illustrious dead. For that is the mark of the Scot of all
classes: that he stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to
Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears,
good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the
dead even to the twentieth generation. No more characteristic instance
could be found than in the family of Kirstie Elliott. They were all, and
Kirstie the first of all, ready and eager to pour forth the particulars
of their genealogy, embellished with every detail that memory had handed
down or fancy fabricated; and, behold! from every ramification of that
tree there dangled a halter. The Elliotts themselves have had a
chequered history; but these Elliotts deduced, besides, from three of
the most unfortunate of the border clans--the Nicksons, the Ellwalds,
and the Crozers. One ancestor after another might be seen appearing a
moment out of the rain and the hill mist upon his furtive business,
speeding home, perhaps, with a paltry booty of lame horses and lean
kine, or squealing and dealing death in some moorland feud of the
ferrets and the wild cats. One after another closed his obscure
adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet or the
Baron's dule-tree. For the rusty blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice,
which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision for
the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. The exhilaration of their
exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their descendants alone, and
the shame to be forgotten. Pride glowed in their bosoms to publish their
relationship to "Andrew Ellwald of the Laverockstanes, called 'Unchancy
Dand,' who was justifeed wi' seeven mair of the same name at Jeddart in
the days of King James the Sax." In all this tissue of crime and
misfortune, the Elliotts of Cauldstaneslap had one boast which must
appear legitimate: the males were gallows-birds, born outlaws, petty
thieves, and deadly brawlers; but, according to the same tradition, the
females were all chaste and faithful. The power of ancestry on the
character is not limited to the inheritance of cells. If I buy ancestors
by the gross from the benevolence of Lyon King of Arms, my grandson (if
he is Scottish) will feel a quickening emulation of their deeds. The men
of the Elliotts were proud, lawless, violent as of right, cherishing and
prolonging a tradition. In like manner with the women. And the woman,
essentially passionate and reckless, who crouched on the rug, in the
shine of the peat fire, telling these tales, had cherished through life
a wild integrity of virtue.
Her father Gilbert had been deeply pious, a savage disciplinarian in the
antique style, and withal a notorious smuggler. "I mind when I was a
bairn getting mony a skelp and being shoo'd to bed like pou'try," she
would say. "That would be when the lads and their bit kegs were on the
road. We've had the riffraff of two-three counties in our kitchen,
mony's the time, betwix' the twelve and the three; and their lanterns
would be standing in the forecourt, ay, a score o' them at once. But
there was nae ungodly talk permitted at Cauldstaneslap; my faither was a
consistent man in walk and conversation; just let slip an aith, and
there was the door to ye! He had that zeal for the Lord, it was a fair
wonder to hear him pray, but the faim'ly has aye had a gift that way."
This father was twice married, once to a dark woman of the old Ellwald
stock, by whom he had Gilbert, presently of Cauldstaneslap; and,
secondly, to the mother of Kirstie. "He was an auld man when he married
her, a fell auld man wi' a muckle voice--you could hear him rowting from
the top o' the Kye-skairs," she said; "but for her, it appears she was a
perfit wonder. It was gentle blood she had, Mr. Archie, for it was your
ain. The country-side gaed gyte about her and her gowden hair. Mines is
no to be mentioned wi' it, and there's few weemen has mair hair than
what I have, or yet a bonnier colour. Often would I tell my dear Miss
Jeannie--that was your mother, dear, she was cruel ta'en up about her
hair, it was unco tender, ye see--'Hoots, Miss Jeannie,' I would say,
'just fling your washes and your French dentifrishes in the back o' the
fire, for that's the place for them; and awa' down to a burn side, and
wash yersel' in cauld hill water, and dry your bonny hair in the caller
wind o' the muirs, the way that my mother aye washed hers, and that I
have aye made it a practice to have wishen mines--just you do what I
tell ye, my dear, and ye'll give me news of it! Ye'll have hair, and
routh of hair, a pigtail as thick's my arm,' I said, 'and the bonniest
colour like the clear gowden guineas, so as the lads in kirk'll no can
keep their eyes off it!' Weel, it lasted out her time, puir thing! I
cuttit a lock of it upon her corp that was lying there sae cauld. I'll
show it ye some of thir days if ye're good. But, as I was sayin', my
mither----"
On the death of the father there remained golden-haired Kirstie, who
took service with her distant kinsfolk, the Rutherfords, and
black-a-vised Gilbert, twenty years older, who farmed the
Cauldstaneslap, married, and begot four sons between 1773 and 1784, and
a daughter, like a postscript, in '97, the year of Camperdown and Cape
St. Vincent. It seemed it was a tradition in the family to wind up with
a belated girl. In 1804, at the age of sixty, Gilbert met an end that
might be called heroic. He was due home from market any time from eight
at night till five in the morning, and in any condition from the
quarrelsome to the speechless, for he maintained to that age the goodly
customs of the Scots farmer. It was known on this occasion that he had a
good bit of money to bring home; the word had gone round loosely. The
laird had shown his guineas, and if anybody had but noticed it, there
was an ill-looking, vagabond crew, the scum of Edinburgh, that drew out
of the market long ere it was dusk and took the hill-road by Hermiston,
where it was not to be believed that they had lawful business. One of
the country-side, one Dickieson, they took with them to be their guide,
and dear he paid for it! Of a sudden, in the ford of the Broken Dykes,
this vermin clan fell on the laird, six to one, and him three parts
asleep, having drunk hard. But it is ill to catch an Elliott. For a
while, in the night and the black water that was deep as to his
saddle-girths, he wrought with his staff like a smith at his stithy, and
great was the sound of oaths and blows. With that the ambuscade was
burst, and he rode for home with a pistol-ball in him, three knife
wounds, the loss of his front teeth, a broken rib and bridle, and a
dying horse. That was a race with death that the laird rode. In the mirk
night, with his broken bridle and his head swimming, he dug his spurs to
the rowels in the horse's side, and the horse, that was even worse off
than himself, the poor creature! screamed out like a person as he went,
so that the hills echoed with it, and the folks at Cauldstaneslap got to
their feet about the table and looked at each other with white faces.
The horse fell dead at the yard gate, the laird won the length of the
house and fell there on the threshold. To the son that raised him he
gave the bag of money. "Hae," said he. All the way up the thieves had
seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination left him--he
saw them again in the place of the ambuscade--and the thirst of
vengeance seized on his dying mind. Raising himself and pointing with an
imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he uttered
the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted. He had never been
loved, but he had been feared in honour. At that sight, at that word,
gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old Elliott
spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons. "Wanting the hat," continues
my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told this tale
like one inspired, "wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o' pouder
in the house, wi' nae mair weepons than their sticks into their hands,
the fower o' them took the road. Only Hob, and that was the eldest,
hunkered at the door-sill where the blood had rin, fyled his hand wi'
it, and haddit it up to Heeven in the way o' the auld Border aith. 'Hell
shall have her ain again this nicht!' he raired, and rode forth upon his
earrand." It was three miles to Broken Dykes, down hill, and a sore
road. Kirstie had seen men from Edinburgh dismounting there in plain day
to lead their horses. But the four brothers rode it as if Auld Hornie
were behind and Heaven in front. Come to the ford, and there was
Dickieson. By all tales, he was not dead, but breathed and reared upon
his elbow, and cried out to them for help. It was at a graceless face
that he asked mercy. As soon as Hob saw, by the glint of the lantern,
the eyes shining and the whiteness of the teeth in the man's face, "Damn
you!" says he; "ye hae your teeth, hae ye?" and rode his horse to and
fro upon that human remnant. Beyond that, Dandie must dismount with the
lantern to be their guide; he was the youngest son, scarce twenty at the
time. "A' nicht long they gaed in the wet heath and jennipers, and whaur
they gaed they neither knew nor cared, but just followed the
bluid-stains and the footprints o' their faither's murderers. And a'
nicht Dandie had his nose to the grund like a tyke, and the ithers
followed and spak' naething, neither black nor white. There was nae
noise to be heard, but just the sough of the swalled burns, and Hob, the
dour yin, risping his teeth as he gaed." With the first glint of the
morning they saw they were on the drove-road, and at that the four
stopped and had a dram to their breakfasts, for they knew that Dand must
have guided them right, and the rogues could be but little ahead, hot
foot for Edinburgh by the way of the Pentland Hills. By eight o'clock
they had word of them--a shepherd had seen four men "uncoly mishandled"
go by in the last hour. "That's yin a piece," says Clem, and swung his
cudgel. "Five o' them!" says Hob. "God's death, but the faither was a
man! And him drunk!" And then there befell them what my author termed "a
sair misbegowk," for they were overtaken by a posse of mounted
neighbours come to aid in the pursuit. Four sour faces looked on the
reinforcement. "The Deil's broughten you!" said Clem, and they rode
thenceforward in the rear of the party with hanging heads. Before ten
they had found and secured the rogues, and by three of the afternoon, as
they rode up the Vennel with their prisoners, they were aware of a
concourse of people bearing in their midst something that dripped. "For
the boady of the saxt," pursued Kirstie, "wi' his head smashed like a
hazel-nit, had been a' that nicht in the chairge o' Hermiston Water, and
it dunting in on the stanes, and grunding it on the shallows, and
flinging the deid thing heels-ower-hurdie at the Fa's o' Spango; and in
the first o' the day, Tweed had got a hold o' him and carried him off
like a wind, for it was uncoly swalled, and raced wi' him, bobbing under
braesides, and was long playing with the creature in the drumlie lynns
under the castle, and at the hinder end of all cuist him up on the
sterling of Crossmichael brig. Sae there they were a'thegither at last
(for Dickieson had been brought in on a cart long syne), and folk could
see what mainner o' man my brither had been that had held his head again
sax and saved the siller, and him drunk!" Thus died of honourable
injuries and in the savour of fame Gilbert Elliott of the
Cauldstaneslap; but his sons had scarce less glory out of the business.
Their savage haste, the skill with which Dand had found and followed the
trail, the barbarity to the wounded Dickieson (which was like an open
secret in the county), and the doom which it was currently supposed they
had intended for the others, struck and stirred popular imagination.
Some century earlier the last of the minstrels might have fashioned the
last of the ballads out of that Homeric fight and chase; but the spirit
was dead, or had been reincarnated already in Mr. Sheriff Scott, and the
degenerate moorsmen must be content to tell the tale in prose, and to
make of the "Four Black Brothers" a unit after the fashion of the
"Twelve Apostles" or the "Three Musketeers."
Robert, Gilbert, Clement, and Andrew--in the proper Border diminutives,
Hob, Gib, Clem, and Dand Elliott--these ballad heroes, had much in
common; in particular, their high sense of the family and the family
honour; but they went diverse ways, and prospered and failed in
different businesses. According to Kirstie, "they had a' bees in their
bonnets but Hob." Hob the laird was, indeed, essentially a decent man.
An elder of the Kirk, nobody had heard an oath upon his lips, save,
perhaps, thrice or so at the sheep-washing, since the chase of his
father's murderers. The figure he had shown on that eventful night
disappeared as if swallowed by a trap. He who had ecstatically dipped
his hand in the red blood, he who had ridden down Dickieson, became,
from that moment on, a stiff and rather graceless model of the rustic
proprieties; cannily profiting by the high war prices, and yearly
stowing away a little nest-egg in the bank against calamity; approved of
and sometimes consulted by the greater lairds for the massive and placid
sense of what he said, when he could be induced to say anything; and
particularly valued by the minister, Mr. Torrance, as a right-hand man
in the parish, and a model to parents. The transfiguration had been for
the moment only; some Barbarossa, some old Adam of our ancestors, sleeps
in all of us till the fit circumstance shall call it into action; and,
for as sober as he now seemed, Hob had given once for all the measure of
the devil that haunted him. He was married, and, by reason of the
effulgence of that legendary night, was adored by his wife. He had a mob
of little lusty, barefoot children who marched in a caravan the long
miles to school, the stages of whose pilgrimage were marked by acts of
spoliation and mischief, and who were qualified in the country-side as
"fair pests." But in the house, if "faither was in," they were quiet as
mice. In short, Hob moved through life in a great peace--the reward of
any one who shall have killed his man, with any formidable and
figurative circumstance, in the midst of a country gagged and swaddled
with civilisation.
It was a current remark that the Elliotts were "guid and bad, like
sanguishes"; and certainly there was a curious distinction, the men of
business coming alternately with the dreamers. The second brother, Gib,
was a weaver by trade, had gone out early into the world to Edinburgh,
and come home again with his wings singed. There was an exaltation in
his nature which had led him to embrace with enthusiasm the principles
of the French Revolution, and had ended by bringing him under the hawse
of my Lord Hermiston in that furious onslaught of his upon the Liberals,
which sent Muir and Palmer into exile and dashed the party into chaff.
It was whispered that my lord, in his great scorn for the movement, and
prevailed upon a little by a sense of neighbourliness, had given Gib a
hint. Meeting him one day in the Potterrow, my lord had stopped in front
of him: "Gib, ye eediot," he had said, "what's this I hear of you?
Poalitics, poalitics, poalitics, weaver's poalitics, is the way of it, I
hear. If ye arena a'thegither dozened with eediocy, ye'll gang your ways
back to Cauldstaneslap, and ca' your loom, and ca' your loom, man!" And
Gilbert had taken him at the word and returned, with an expedition
almost to be called flight, to the house of his father. The clearest of
his inheritance was that family gift of prayer of which Kirstie had
boasted; and the baffled politician now turned his attention to
religious matters--or, as others said, to heresy and schism. Every
Sunday morning he was in Crossmichael, where he had gathered together,
one by one, a sect of about a dozen persons, who called themselves
"God's Remnant of the True Faithful," or, for short, "God's Remnant." To
the profane they were known as "Gib's Deils." Bailie Sweedie, a noted
humorist in the town, vowed that the proceedings always opened to the
tune of "The Deil Fly Away with the Exciseman," and that the sacrament
was dispensed in the form of hot whisky-toddy; both wicked hits at the
evangelist, who had been suspected of smuggling in his youth, and had
been overtaken (as the phrase went) on the streets of Crossmichael one
Fair day. It was known that every Sunday they prayed for a blessing on
the arms of Buonaparte. For this, "God's Remnant," as they were
"skailing" from the cottage that did duty for a temple, had been
repeatedly stoned by the bairns, and Gib himself hooted by a squadron of
Border volunteers in which his own brother, Dand, rode in a uniform and
with a drawn sword. The "Remnant" were believed, besides, to be
"antinomian in principle," which might otherwise have been a serious
charge, but the way public opinion then blew it was quite swallowed up
and forgotten in the scandal about Buonaparte. For the rest, Gilbert had
set up his loom in an outhouse at Cauldstaneslap, where he laboured
assiduously six days of the week. His brothers, appalled by his
political opinions, and willing to avoid dissension in the household,
spoke but little to him; he less to them, remaining absorbed in the
study of the Bible and almost constant prayer. The gaunt weaver was
dry-nurse at Cauldstaneslap, and the bairns loved him dearly. Except
when he was carrying an infant in his arms, he was rarely seen to
smile--as, indeed, there were few smilers in that family. When his
sister-in-law rallied him, and proposed that he should get a wife and
bairns of his own, since he was so fond of them, "I have no clearness of
mind upon that point," he would reply. If nobody called him in to
dinner, he stayed out. Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, once tried
the experiment. He went without food all day, but at dusk, as the light
began to fail him, he came into the house of his own accord, looking
puzzled. "I've had a great gale of prayer upon my speerit," said he. "I
canna mind sae muckle's what I had for denner." The creed of God's
Remnant was justified in the life of its founder. "And yet I dinna
ken," said Kirstie. "He's maybe no more stock-fish than his neeghbours!
He rode wi' the rest o' them, and had a good stamach to the work, by a'
that I hear! God's Remnant! The deil's clavers! There wasna muckle
Christianity in the way Hob guided Johnny Dickieson, at the least of it;
but Guid kens! Is he a Christian even? He might be a Mahommedan or a
Deevil or a Fireworshipper, for what I ken."
The third brother had his name on a door-plate, no less, in the city of
Glasgow, "Mr. Clement Elliott," as long as your arm. In this case, that
spirit of innovation which had shown itself timidly in the case of Hob
by the admission of new manures, and which had run to waste with Gilbert
in subversive politics and heretical religions, bore useful fruit in
many ingenious mechanical improvements. In boyhood, from his addiction
to strange devices of sticks and string, he had been counted the most
eccentric of the family. But that was all by now; and he was a partner
of his firm, and looked to die a bailie. He too had married, and was
rearing a plentiful family in the smoke and din of Glasgow; he was
wealthy, and could have bought out his brother, the cock-laird, six
times over, it was whispered; and when he slipped away to Cauldstaneslap
for a well-earned holiday, which he did as often as he was able, he
astonished the neighbours with his broadcloth, his beaver hat, and the
ample plies of his neckcloth. Though an eminently solid man at bottom,
after the pattern of Hob, he had contracted a certain Glasgow briskness
and _aplomb_ which set him off. All the other Elliotts were as lean as a
rake, but Clement was laying on fat, and he panted sorely when he must
get into his boots. Dand said, chuckling: "Ay, Clem has the elements of
a corporation." "A provost and corporation," returned Clem. And his
readiness was much admired.
The fourth brother, Dand, was a shepherd to his trade, and by starts,
when he could bring his mind to it, excelled in the business. Nobody
could train a dog like Dandie; nobody, through the peril of great storms
in the winter time, could do more gallantly. But if his dexterity were
exquisite, his diligence was but fitful; and he served his brother for
bed and board, and a trifle of pocket-money when he asked for it. He
loved money well enough, knew very well how to spend it, and could make
a shrewd bargain when he liked. But he preferred a vague knowledge that
he was well to windward to any counted coins in the pocket; he felt
himself richer so. Hob would expostulate: "I'm an amature herd." Dand
would reply, "I'll keep your sheep to you when I'm so minded, but I'll
keep my liberty too. Thir's no man can coandescend on what I'm worth."
Clem would expound to him the miraculous results of compound interest,
and recommend investments. "Ay, man?" Dand would say; "and do you think,
if I took Hob's siller, that I wouldna drink it or wear it on the
lassies? And, anyway, my kingdom is no of this world. Either I'm a poet
or else I'm nothing." Clem would remind him of old age. "I'll die young,
like Robbie Burns," he would say stoutly. No question but he had a
certain accomplishment in minor verse. His "Hermiston Burn," with its
pretty refrain--
"I love to gang thinking whaur ye gang linking,
Hermiston burn, in the howe";
his "Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of
auld," and his really fascinating piece about the Praying Weaver's
Stone, had gained him in the neighbourhood the reputation, still
possible in Scotland, of a local bard; and, though not printed himself,
he was recognised by others who were and who had become famous. Walter
Scott owed to Dandie the text of the "Raid of Wearie" in the
"Minstrelsy"; and made him welcome at his house, and appreciated his
talents, such as they were, with all his usual generosity. The Ettrick
Shepherd was his sworn crony; they would meet, drink to excess, roar out
their lyrics in each other's faces, and quarrel and make it up again
till bedtime. And besides these recognitions, almost to be called
official, Dandie was made welcome for the sake of his gift through the
farmhouses of several contiguous dales, and was thus exposed to manifold
temptations which he rather sought than fled. He had figured on the
stool of repentance, for once fulfilling to the letter the tradition of
his hero and model. His humorous verses to Mr. Torrance on that
occasion--"Kenspeckle here my lane I stand"--unfortunately too
indelicate for further citation, ran through the country like a fiery
cross; they were recited, quoted, paraphrased, and laughed over as far
away as Dumfries on the one hand and Dunbar on the other.
These four brothers were united by a close bond, the bond of that mutual
admiration--or rather mutual hero-worship--which is so strong among the
members of secluded families who have much ability and little culture.
Even the extremes admired each other. Hob, who had as much poetry as the
tongs, professed to find pleasure in Dand's verses; Clem, who had no
more religion than Claverhouse, nourished a heartfelt, at least an
open-mouthed, admiration of Gib's prayers; and Dandie followed with
relish the rise of Clem's fortunes. Indulgence followed hard on the
heels of admiration. The laird, Clem, and Dand, who were Tories and
patriots of the hottest quality, excused to themselves, with a certain
bashfulness, the radical and revolutionary heresies of Gib. By another
division of the family, the laird, Clem, and Gib, who were men exactly
virtuous, swallowed the dose of Dand's irregularities as a kind of clog
or drawback in the mysterious providence of God affixed to bards, and
distinctly probative of poetical genius. To appreciate the simplicity of
their mutual admiration it was necessary to hear Clem, arrived upon one
of his visits, and dealing in a spirit of continuous irony with the
affairs and personalities of that great city of Glasgow where he lived
and transacted business. The various personages, ministers of the
church, municipal officers, mercantile big-wigs, whom he had occasion
to introduce, were all alike denigrated, all served but as reflectors to
cast back a flattering side-light on the house of Cauldstaneslap. The
Provost, for whom Clem by exception entertained a measure of respect, he
would liken to Hob. "He minds me o' the laird there," he would say. "He
has some of Hob's grand, whunstane sense, and the same way with him of
steiking his mouth when he's no very pleased." And Hob, all unconscious,
would draw down his upper lip and produce, as if for comparison, the
formidable grimace referred to. The unsatisfactory incumbent of St.
Enoch's Kirk was thus briefly dismissed: "If he had but twa fingers o'
Gib's, he would waken them up." And Gib, honest man! would look down and
secretly smile. Clem was a spy whom they had sent out into the world of
men. He had come back with the good news that there was nobody to
compare with the Four Black Brothers, no position that they would not
adorn, no official that it would not be well they should replace, no
interest of mankind, secular or spiritual, which would not immediately
bloom under their supervision. The excuse of their folly is in two
words: scarce the breadth of a hair divided them from the peasantry. The
measure of their sense is this: that these symposia of rustic vanity
were kept entirely within the family, like some secret ancestral
practice. To the world their serious faces were never deformed by the
suspicion of any simper of self-contentment. Yet it was known. "They hae
a guid pride o' themsel's!" was the word in the country-side.
Lastly, in a Border story, there should be added their "two-names." Hob
was The Laird. "Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne"; he was the laird of
Cauldstaneslap--say fifty acres--_ipsissimus_. Clement was Mr. Elliott,
as upon his door-plate, the earlier Dafty having been discarded as no
longer applicable, and indeed only a reminder of misjudgment and the
imbecility of the public; and the youngest, in honour of his perpetual
wanderings, was known by the sobriquet of Randy Dand.
It will be understood that not all this information was communicated by
the aunt, who had too much of the family failing herself to appreciate
it thoroughly in others. But as time went on, Archie began to observe an
omission in the family chronicle.
"Is there not a girl too?" he asked.
"Ay: Kirstie. She was named for me, or my grandmother at least--it's the
same thing," returned the aunt, and went on again about Dand, whom she
secretly preferred by reason of his gallantries.
"But what is your niece like?" said Archie at the next opportunity.
"Her? As black's your hat! But I dinna suppose she would maybe be what
you would ca' _ill-looked_ a'thegither. Na, she's a kind of a handsome
jaud--a kind o' gipsy," said the aunt, who had two sets of scales for
men and women--or perhaps it would be more fair to say that she had
three, and the third and the most loaded was for girls.
"How comes it that I never see her in church?" said Archie.
"'Deed, and I believe she's in Glesgie with Clem and his wife. A heap
good she's like to get of it! I dinna say for men folk, but where weemen
folk are born, there let them bide. Glory to God, I was never far'er
from here than Crossmichael."
In the meanwhile it began to strike Archie as strange, that while she
thus sang the praises of her kinsfolk, and manifestly relished their
virtues and (I may say) their vices like a thing creditable to herself,
there should appear not the least sign of cordiality between the house
of Hermiston and that of Cauldstaneslap. Going to church of a Sunday, as
the lady housekeeper stepped with her skirts kilted, three tucks of her
white petticoat showing below, and her best India shawl upon her back
(if the day were fine) in a pattern of radiant dyes, she would sometimes
overtake her relatives preceding her more leisurely in the same
direction. Gib of course was absent: by skreigh of day he had been gone
to Crossmichael and his fellow-heretics; but the rest of the family
would be seen marching in open order: Hob and Dand, stiff-necked,
straight-backed six-footers, with severe dark faces, and their plaids
about their shoulders; the convoy of children scattering (in a state of
high polish) on the wayside, and every now and again collected by the
shrill summons of the mother; and the mother herself, by a suggestive
circumstance which might have afforded matter of thought to a more
experienced observer than Archie, wrapped in a shawl nearly identical
with Kirstie's, but a thought more gaudy and conspicuously newer. At the
sight, Kirstie grew more tall--Kirstie showed her classical profile,
nose in air and nostril spread, the pure blood came in her cheek evenly
in a delicate living pink.
"A braw day to ye, Mistress Elliott," said she, and hostility and
gentility were nicely mingled in her tones. "A fine day, mem," the
laird's wife would reply with a miraculous curtsey, spreading the while
her plumage--setting off, in other words, and with arts unknown to the
mere man, the pattern of her India shawl. Behind her, the whole
Cauldstaneslap contingent marched in closer order, and with an
indescribable air of being in the presence of the foe; and while Dandie
saluted his aunt with a certain familiarity as of one who was well in
court, Hob marched on in awful immobility. There appeared upon the face
of this attitude in the family the consequences of some dreadful feud.
Presumably the two women had been principals in the original encounter,
and the laird had probably been drawn into the quarrel by the ears, too
late to be included in the present skin-deep reconciliation.
"Kirstie," said Archie one day, "what is this you have against your
family?"
"I dinna complean," said Kirstie, with a flush. "I say naething."
"I see you do not--not even good-day to your own nephew," said he.
"I hae naething to be ashamed of," said she. "I can say the Lord's
Prayer with a good grace. If Hob was ill, or in preeson or poverty, I
would see to him blithely. But for curtchying and complimenting and
colloguing, thank ye kindly!"
Archie had a bit of a smile: he leaned back in his chair. "I think you
and Mrs. Robert are not very good friends," says he slily, "when you
have your India shawls on?"
She looked upon him in silence, with a sparkling eye but an
indecipherable expression; and that was all that Archie was ever
destined to learn of the battle of the India shawls.
"Do none of them ever come here to see you?" he inquired.
"Mr. Archie," said she, "I hope that I ken my place better. It would be
a queer thing, I think, if I was to clamjamfry up your faither's
house--that I should say it!--wi' a dirty, black-a-vised clan, no ane o'
them it was worth while to mar soap upon but just mysel'! Na, they're
all damnifeed wi' the black Ellwalds. I have nae patience wi' black
folk." Then, with a sudden consciousness of the case of Archie, "No that
it maitters for men sae muckle," she made haste to add, "but there's
naebody can deny that it's unwomanly. Long hair is the ornament o' woman
ony way; we've good warrandise for that--it's in the Bible--and wha can
doubt that the Apostle had some gowden-haired lassie in his
mind--Apostle and all, for what was he but just a man like yersel'?"
CHAPTER VI
A LEAF FROM CHRISTINA'S PSALM-BOOK
Archie was sedulous at church. Sunday after Sunday he sat down and stood
up with that small company, heard the voice of Mr. Torrance leaping like
an ill-played clarionet from key to key, and had an opportunity to study
his moth-eaten gown and the black thread mittens that he joined together
in prayer, and lifted up with a reverent solemnity in the act of
benediction. Hermiston pew was a little square box, dwarfish in
proportion with the kirk itself, and enclosing a table not much bigger
than a footstool. There sat Archie, an apparent prince, the only
undeniable gentleman and the only great heritor in the parish, taking
his ease in the only pew, for no other in the kirk had doors. Thence he
might command an undisturbed view of that congregation of solid plaided
men, strapping wives and daughters, oppressed children, and uneasy
sheep-dogs. It was strange how Archie missed the look of race; except
the dogs, with their refined foxy faces and inimitably curling tails,
there was no one present with the least claim to gentility. The
Cauldstaneslap party was scarcely an exception; Dandie perhaps, as he
amused himself making verses through the interminable burden of the
service, stood out a little by the glow in his eye and a certain
superior animation of face and alertness of body; but even Dandie
slouched like a rustic. The rest of the congregation, like so many
sheep, oppressed him with a sense of hob-nailed routine, day following
day--of physical labour in the open air, oatmeal porridge, peas bannock,
the somnolent fireside in the evening, and the night-long nasal slumbers
in a box-bed. Yet he knew many of them to be shrewd and humorous, men
of character, notable women, making a bustle in the world and radiating
an influence from their low-browed doors. He knew besides they were like
other men; below the crust of custom, rapture found a way; he had heard
them beat the timbrel before Bacchus--had heard them shout and carouse
over their whisky-toddy; and not the most Dutch-bottomed and severe
faces among them all, not even the solemn elders themselves, but were
capable of singular gambols at the voice of love. Men drawing near to an
end of life's adventurous journey--maids thrilling with fear and
curiosity on the threshold of entrance--women who had borne and perhaps
buried children, who could remember the clinging of the small dead hands
and the patter of the little feet now silent--he marvelled that among
all those faces there should be no face of expectation, none that was
mobile, none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O
for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady
Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with
despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless,
pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the
rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the
huge fiasco.
On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the
warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered and
tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth arrested
Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The grey,
Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from the
sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an
essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in
particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself by
a sudden impulse to write poetry--he did so sometimes, loose, galloping
octosyllabics in the vein of Scott--and when he had taken his place on a
boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was
already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he
should find nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some
vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a corner
of the valley and could see the kirk, he had so lingered by the way that
the first psalm was finishing. The nasal psalmody, full of turns and
trills and graceless graces, seemed the essential voice of the kirk
itself upraised in thanksgiving. "Everything's alive," he said; and
again cries it aloud, "thank God, everything's alive!" He lingered yet a
while in the kirkyard. A tuft of primroses was blooming hard by the leg
of an old, black table tombstone, and he stopped to contemplate the
random apologue. They stood forth on the cold earth with a trenchancy of
contrast; and he was struck with a sense of incompleteness in the day,
the season, and the beauty that surrounded him--the chill there was in
the warmth, the gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp
earthy smell that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice
of the aged Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if
Torrance also felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring
morning; Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must
come so soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his
rheumatisms, while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from
his own familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of
the grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with
lowered eyes, for he feared he had already offended the kind old
gentleman in the pulpit, and was sedulous to offend no further. He could
not follow the prayer, not even the heads of it. Brightnesses of azure,
clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling water and singing birds, rose
like exhalations from some deeper, aboriginal memory, that was not his,
but belonged to the flesh on his bones. His body remembered; and it
seemed to him that his body was in no way gross, but ethereal and
perishable like a strain of music; and he felt for it an exquisite
tenderness as for a child, an innocent, full of beautiful instincts and
destined to an early death. And he felt for old Torrance--of the many
supplications, of the few days--a pity that was near to tears. The
prayer ended. Right over him was a tablet in the wall, the only ornament
in the roughly masoned chapel--for it was no more; the tablet
commemorated, I was about to say the virtues, but rather the existence
of a former Rutherford of Hermiston; and Archie, under that trophy of
his long descent and local greatness, leaned back in the pew and
contemplated vacancy with the shadow of a smile between playful and sad,
that became him strangely. Dandie's sister, sitting by the side of Clem
in her new Glasgow finery, chose that moment to observe the young laird.
Aware of the stir of his entrance, the little formalist had kept her
eyes fastened and her face prettily composed during the prayer. It was
not hypocrisy, there was no one further from a hypocrite. The girl had
been taught to behave: to look up, to look down, to look unconscious, to
look seriously impressed in church, and in every conjuncture to look her
best. That was the game of female life, and she played it frankly.
Archie was the one person in church who was of interest, who was
somebody new, reputed eccentric, known to be young, and a laird, and
still unseen by Christina. Small wonder that, as she stood there in her
attitude of pretty decency, her mind should run upon him! If he spared a
glance in her direction, he should know she was a well-behaved young
lady who had been to Glasgow. In reason he must admire her clothes, and
it was possible that he should think her pretty. At that her heart beat
the least thing in the world; and she proceeded, by way of a corrective,
to call up and dismiss a series of fancied pictures of the young man who
should now, by rights, be looking at her. She settled on the plainest of
them--a pink short young man with a dish face and no figure, at whose
admiration she could afford to smile; but for all that, the
consciousness of his gaze (which was really fixed on Torrance and his
mittens) kept her in something of a flutter till the word Amen. Even
then, she was far too well-bred to gratify her curiosity with any
impatience. She resumed her seat languidly--this was a Glasgow
touch--she composed her dress, rearranged her nosegay of primroses,
looked first in front, then behind upon the other side, and at last
allowed her eyes to move, without hurry, in the direction of the
Hermiston pew. For a moment they were riveted. Next she had plucked her
gaze home again like a tame bird who should have meditated flight.
Possibilities crowded on her; she hung over the future and grew dizzy;
the image of this young man, slim, graceful, dark, with the inscrutable
half-smile, attracted and repelled her like a chasm. "I wonder, will I
have met my fate?" she thought, and her heart swelled.
Torrance was got some way into his first exposition, positing a deep
layer of texts as he went along, laying the foundations of his
discourse, which was to deal with a nice point in divinity, before
Archie suffered his eyes to wander. They fell first of all on Clem,
looking insupportably prosperous, and patronising Torrance with the
favour of a modified attention, as of one who was used to better things
in Glasgow. Though he had never before set eyes on him, Archie had no
difficulty in identifying him, and no hesitation in pronouncing him
vulgar, the worst of the family. Clem was leaning lazily forward when
Archie first saw him. Presently he leaned nonchalantly back; and that
deadly instrument, the maiden, was suddenly unmasked in profile. Though
not quite in the front of the fashion (had anybody cared!), certain
artful Glasgow mantua-makers, and her own inherent taste, had arrayed
her to great advantage. Her accoutrement was, indeed, a cause of
heart-burning, and almost of scandal, in that infinitesimal kirk
company. Mrs. Hob had said her say at Cauldstaneslap. "Daftlike!" she
had pronounced it. "A jaiket that'll no meet! Whaur's the sense of a
jaiket that'll no button upon you, if it should come to be weet? What
do ye ca' thir things? Demmy brokens, d'ye say? They'll be brokens wi' a
vengeance or ye can win back! Weel, I have naething to do wi' it--it's
no good taste." Clem, whose purse had thus metamorphosed his sister, and
who was not insensible to the advertisement, had come to the rescue with
a "Hoot, woman! What do you ken of good taste that has never been to the
ceety?" And Hob, looking on the girl with pleased smiles, as she timidly
displayed her finery in the midst of the dark kitchen, had thus ended
the dispute: "The cutty looks weel," he had said, "and it's no very like
rain. Wear them the day, hizzie; but it's no a thing to make a practice
o'." In the breasts of her rivals, coming to the kirk very conscious of
white under-linen, and their faces splendid with much soap, the sight of
the toilet had raised a storm of varying emotion, from the mere
unenvious admiration that was expressed in a long-drawn "Eh!" to the
angrier feeling that found vent in an emphatic "Set her up!" Her frock
was of straw-coloured jaconet muslin, cut low at the bosom and short at
the ankle, so as to display her _demi-broquins_ of Regency violet,
crossing with many straps upon a yellow cobweb stocking. According to
the pretty fashion in which our grandmothers did not hesitate to appear,
and our great-aunts went forth armed for the pursuit and capture of our
great-uncles, the dress was drawn up so as to mould the contour of both
breasts, and in the nook between, a cairngorm brooch maintained it.
Here, too, surely in a very enviable position, trembled the nosegay of
primroses. She wore on her shoulders--or rather, on her back and not her
shoulders, which it scarcely passed--a French coat of sarsenet, tied in
front with Margate braces, and of the same colour with her violet shoes.
About her face clustered a disorder of dark ringlets, a little garland
of yellow French roses surmounted her brow, and the whole was crowned by
a village hat of chipped straw. Amongst all the rosy and all the
weathered faces that surrounded her in church, she glowed like an open
flower--girl and raiment, and the cairngorm that caught the daylight
and returned it in a fiery flash, and the threads of bronze and gold
that played in her hair.
Archie was attracted by the bright thing like a child. He looked at her
again and yet again, and their looks crossed. The lip was lifted from
her little teeth. He saw the red blood work vividly under her tawny
skin. Her eye, which was great as a stag's, struck and held his gaze. He
knew who she must be--Kirstie, she of the harsh diminutive, his
housekeeper's niece, the sister of the rustic prophet, Gib--and he found
in her the answer to his wishes.
Christina felt the shock of their encountering glances, and seemed to
rise, clothed in smiles, into a region of the vague and bright. But the
gratification was not more exquisite than it was brief. She looked away
abruptly, and immediately began to blame herself for that abruptness.
She knew what she should have done, too late--turned slowly with her
nose in the air. And meantime his look was not removed, but continued to
play upon her like a battery of cannon constantly aimed, and now seemed
to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a
pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in
with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain,
and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft
of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of
primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake
with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose the girl.
And Christina was conscious of his gaze--saw it, perhaps, with the
dainty plaything of an ear that peeped among her ringlets; she was
conscious of changing colour, conscious of her unsteady breath. Like a
creature tracked, run down, surrounded, she sought in a dozen ways to
give herself a countenance. She used her handkerchief--it was a really
fine one--then she desisted in a panic: "He would only think I was too
warm." She took to reading in the metrical psalms, and then remembered
it was sermon-time. Last she put a "sugar-bool" in her mouth, and the
next moment repented of the step. It was such a homely-like thing! Mr.
Archie would never be eating sweeties in kirk; and, with a palpable
effort, she swallowed it whole, and her colour flamed high. At this
signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense of his ill-behaviour. What
had he been doing? He had been exquisitely rude in church to the niece
of his housekeeper; he had stared like a lackey and a libertine at a
beautiful and modest girl. It was possible, it was even likely, he would
be presented to her after service in the kirkyard, and then how was he
to look? And there was no excuse. He had marked the tokens of her shame,
of her increasing indignation, and he was such a fool that he had not
understood them. Shame bowed him down, and he looked resolutely at Mr.
Torrance: who little supposed, good, worthy man, as he continued to
expound justification by faith, what was his true business: to play the
part of derivative to a pair of children at the old game of falling in
love.
Christina was greatly relieved at first. It seemed to her that she was
clothed again. She looked back on what had passed. All would have been
right if she had not blushed, a silly fool! There was nothing to blush
at, if she _had_ taken a sugar-bool. Mrs. MacTaggart, the elder's wife
in St. Enoch's, took them often. And if he had looked at her, what was
more natural than that a young gentleman should look at the best-dressed
girl in church? And at the same time, she knew far otherwise, she knew
there was nothing casual or ordinary in the look, and valued herself on
its memory like a decoration. Well, it was a blessing he had found
something else to look at! And presently she began to have other
thoughts. It was necessary, she fancied, that she should put herself
right by a repetition of the incident, better managed. If the wish was
father to the thought, she did not know or she would not recognise it.
It was simply as a manoeuvre of propriety, as something called for to
lessen the significance of what had gone before, that she should a
second time meet his eyes, and this time without blushing. And at the
memory of the blush, she blushed again, and became one general blush
burning from head to foot. Was ever anything so indelicate, so forward,
done by a girl before? And here she was, making an exhibition of herself
before the congregation about nothing! She stole a glance upon her
neighbours, and behold! they were steadily indifferent, and Clem had
gone to sleep. And still the one idea was becoming more and more potent
with her, that in common prudence she must look again before the service
ended. Something of the same sort was going forward in the mind of
Archie, as he struggled with the load of penitence. So it chanced that,
in the flutter of the moment when the last psalm was given out, and
Torrance was reading the verse, and the leaves of every psalm-book in
church were rustling under busy fingers, two stealthy glances were sent
out like antennæ among the pews and on the indifferent and absorbed
occupants, and drew timidly nearer to the straight line between Archie
and Christina. They met, they lingered together for the least fraction
of time, and that was enough. A charge as of electricity passed through
Christina, and behold! the leaf of her psalm-book was torn across.
Archie was outside by the gate of the graveyard, conversing with Hob and
the minister and shaking hands all round with the scattering
congregation, when Clem and Christina were brought up to be presented.
The laird took off his hat and bowed to her with grace and respect.
Christina made her Glasgow curtsey to the laird, and went on again up
the road for Hermiston and Cauldstaneslap, walking fast, breathing
hurriedly with a heightened colour, and in this strange frame of mind,
that when she was alone she seemed in high happiness, and when any one
addressed her she resented it like a contradiction. A part of the way
she had the company of some neighbour girls and a loutish young man;
never had they seemed so insipid, never had she made herself so
disagreeable. But these struck aside to their various destinations or
were out-walked and left behind; and when she had driven off with sharp
words the proffered convoy of some of her nephews and nieces, she was
free to go on alone up Hermiston brae, walking on air, dwelling
intoxicated among clouds of happiness. Near to the summit she heard
steps behind her, a man's steps, light and very rapid. She knew the foot
at once and walked the faster. "If it's me he's wanting, he can run for
it," she thought, smiling.
Archie overtook her like a man whose mind was made up.
"Miss Kirstie," he began.
"Miss Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir," she interrupted. "I canna
bear the contraction."
"You forget it has a friendly sound for me. Your aunt is an old friend
of mine, and a very good one. I hope we shall see much of you at
Hermiston?"
"My aunt and my sister-in-law doesna agree very well. Not that I have
much ado with it. But still when I'm stopping in the house, if I was to
be visiting my aunt, it would not look considerate-like."
"I am sorry," said Archie.
"I thank you kindly, Mr. Weir," she said. "I whiles think myself it's a
great peety."
"Ah, I am sure your voice would always be for peace!" he cried.
"I wouldna be too sure of that," she said. "I have my days like other
folk, I suppose."
"Do you know, in our old kirk, among our good old grey dames, you made
an effect like sunshine."
"Ah, but that would be my Glasgow clothes!"
"I did not think I was so much under the influence of pretty frocks."
She smiled with a half look at him. "There's more than you!" she said.
"But you see I'm only Cinderella. I'll have to put all these things by
in my trunk; next Sunday I'll be as grey as the rest. They're Glasgow
clothes, you see, and it would never do to make a practice of it. It
would seem terrible conspicuous."
By that they were come to the place where their ways severed. The old
grey moors were all about them; in the midst a few sheep wandered; and
they could see on the one hand the straggling caravan scaling the braes
in front of them for Cauldstaneslap, and on the other, the contingent
from Hermiston bending off and beginning to disappear by detachments
into the policy gate. It was in these circumstances that they turned to
say farewell, and deliberately exchanged a glance as they shook hands.
All passed as it should, genteelly; and in Christina's mind, as she
mounted the first steep ascent for Cauldstaneslap, a gratifying sense of
triumph prevailed over the recollection of minor lapses and mistakes.
She had kilted her gown, as she did usually at that rugged pass; but
when she spied Archie still standing and gazing after her, the skirts
came down again as if by enchantment. Here was a piece of nicety for
that upland parish, where the matrons marched with their coats kilted in
the rain, and the lasses walked barefoot to kirk through the dust of
summer, and went bravely down by the burn-side, and sat on stones to
make a public toilet before entering! It was perhaps an air wafted from
Glasgow; or perhaps it marked a stage of that dizziness of gratified
vanity, in which the instinctive act passed unperceived. He was looking
after! She unloaded her bosom of a prodigious sigh that was all
pleasure, and betook herself to run. When she had overtaken the
stragglers of her family, she caught up the niece whom she had so
recently repulsed, and kissed and slapped her, and drove her away again,
and ran after her with pretty cries and laughter. Perhaps she thought
the laird might still be looking! But it chanced the little scene came
under the view of eyes less favourable; for she overtook Mrs. Hob
marching with Clem and Dand.
"You're shürely fey, lass!" quoth Dandie.
"Think shame to yersel', miss!" said the strident Mrs. Hob. "Is this the
gait to guide yersel' on the way hame frae kirk? You're shürely no
sponsible the day! And anyway I would mind my guid claes."
"Hoot!" said Christina, and went on before them, head in air, treading
the rough track with the tread of a wild doe.
She was in love with herself, her destiny, the air of the hills, the
benediction of the sun. All the way home, she continued under the
intoxication of these sky-scraping spirits. At table she could talk
freely of young Hermiston; gave her opinion of him off-hand and with a
loud voice, that he was a handsome young gentleman, real well-mannered
and sensible-like, but it was a pity he looked doleful. Only--the moment
after--a memory of his eyes in church embarrassed her. But for this
inconsiderable check, all through meal-time she had a good appetite, and
she kept them laughing at table, until Gib (who had returned before them
from Crossmichael and his separative worship) reproved the whole of them
for their levity.
Singing "in to herself" as she went, her mind still in the turmoil of a
glad confusion, she rose and tripped upstairs to a little loft, lighted
by four panes in the gable, where she slept with one of her nieces. The
niece, who followed her, presuming on "Auntie's" high spirits, was
flounced out of the apartment with small ceremony, and retired, smarting
and half tearful, to bury her woes in the byre among the hay. Still
humming, Christina divested herself of her finery, and put her treasures
one by one in her great green trunk. The last of these was the
psalm-book; it was a fine piece, the gift of Mistress Clem, in distinct
old-faced type, on paper that had begun to grow foxy in the
warehouse--not by service--and she was used to wrap it in a handkerchief
every Sunday after its period of service was over, and bury it end-wise
at the head of her trunk. As she now took it in hand the book fell open
where the leaf was torn, and she stood and gazed upon that evidence of
her bygone discomposure. There returned again the vision of the two
brown eyes staring at her, intent and bright, out of that dark corner
of the kirk. The whole appearance and attitude, the smile, the suggested
gesture of young Hermiston came before her in a flash at the sight of
the torn page. "I was surely fey!" she said, echoing the words of
Dandie, and at the suggested doom her high spirits deserted her. She
flung herself prone upon the bed, and lay there, holding the psalm-book
in her hands for hours, for the more part in a mere stupor of
unconsenting pleasure and unreasoning fear. The fear was superstitious;
there came up again and again in her memory Dandie's ill-omened words,
and a hundred grisly and black tales out of the immediate neighbourhood
read her a commentary on their force. The pleasure was never realised.
You might say the joints of her body thought and remembered, and were
gladdened, but her essential self, in the immediate theatre of
consciousness, talked feverishly of something else, like a nervous
person at a fire. The image that she most complacently dwelt on was that
of Miss Christina in her character of the Fair Lass of Cauldstaneslap,
carrying all before her in the straw-coloured frock, the violet mantle,
and the yellow cobweb stockings. Archie's image, on the other hand, when
it presented itself was never welcomed--far less welcomed with any
ardour, and it was exposed at times to merciless criticism. In the long
vague dialogues she held in her mind, often with imaginary, often with
unrealised interlocutors, Archie, if he were referred to at all, came in
for savage handling. He was described as "looking like a stirk,"
"staring like a caulf," "a face like a ghaist's." "Do you call that
manners?" she said; or, "I soon put him in his place." "'_Miss
Christina, if you please, Mr. Weir!_' says I, and just flyped up my
skirt tails." With gabble like this she would entertain herself long
whiles together, and then her eye would perhaps fall on the torn leaf,
and the eyes of Archie would appear again from the darkness of the wall,
and the voluble words deserted her, and she would lie still and stupid,
and think upon nothing with devotion, and be sometimes raised by a quiet
sigh. Had a doctor of medicine come into that loft, he would have
diagnosed a healthy, well-developed, eminently vivacious lass lying on
her face in a fit of the sulks; not one who had just contracted, or was
just contracting, a mortal sickness of the mind which should yet carry
her towards death and despair. Had it been a doctor of psychology, he
might have been pardoned for divining in the girl a passion of childish
vanity, self-love _in excelsis_, and no more. It is to be understood
that I have been painting chaos and describing the inarticulate. Every
lineament that appears is too precise, almost every word used too
strong. Take a finger-post in the mountains on a day of rolling mists; I
have but copied the names that appear upon the pointers, the names of
definite and famous cities far distant, and now perhaps basking in
sunshine; but Christina remained all these hours, as it were, at the
foot of the post itself, not moving, and enveloped in mutable and
blinding wreaths of haze.
The day was growing late and the sunbeams long and level, when she sat
suddenly up, and wrapped in its handkerchief and put by that psalm-book
which had already played a part so decisive in the first chapter of her
love-story. In the absence of the mesmerist's eye, we are told nowadays
that the head of a bright nail may fill his place, if it be steadfastly
regarded. So that torn page had riveted her attention on what might else
have been but little, and perhaps soon forgotten; while the ominous
words of Dandie--heard, not heeded, and still remembered--had lent to
her thoughts, or rather to her mood, a cast of solemnity, and that idea
of Fate--a pagan Fate, uncontrolled by any Christian deity, obscure,
lawless, and august--moving undissuadably in the affairs of Christian
men. Thus even that phenomenon of love at first sight, which is so rare
and seems so simple and violent, like a disruption of life's tissue, may
be decomposed into a sequence of accidents happily concurring.
She put on a grey frock and a pink kerchief, looked at herself a moment
with approval in the small square of glass that served her for a toilet
mirror, and went softly downstairs through the sleeping house that
resounded with the sound of afternoon snoring. Just outside the door,
Dandie was sitting with a book in his hand, not reading, only honouring
the Sabbath by a sacred vacancy of mind. She came near him and stood
still.
"I'm for off up the muirs, Dandie," she said.
There was something unusually soft in her tones that made him look up.
She was pale, her eyes dark and bright; no trace remained of the levity
of the morning.
"Ay, lass? Ye'll have yer ups and downs like me, I'm thinkin'," he
observed.
"What for do ye say that?" she asked.
"O, for naething," says Dand. "Only I think ye're mair like me than the
lave of them. Ye've mair of the poetic temper, tho' Guid kens little
enough of the poetic taalent. It's an ill gift at the best. Look at
yoursel'. At denner you were all sunshine and flowers and laughter, and
now you're like the star of evening on a lake."
She drank in this hackneyed compliment like wine, and it glowed in her
veins.
"But I'm saying, Dand"--she came nearer him--"I'm for the muirs. I must
have a braith of air. If Clem was to be speiring for me, try and quaiet
him, will ye no?"
"What way?" said Dandie. "I ken but the ae way, and that's leein'. I'll
say ye had a sair heed, if ye like."
"But I havena," she objected.
"I daursay no," he returned. "I said I would say ye had; and if ye like
to nay-say me when ye come back, it'll no mateerially maitter, for my
chara'ter's clean gane a'ready past reca'."
"O, Dand, are ye a leear?" she asked, lingering.
"Folks say sae," replied the bard.
"Wha says sae?" she pursued.
"Them that should ken the best," he responded. "The lassies, for ane."
"But, Dand, you would never lee to me?" she asked.
"I'll leave that for your pairt of it, ye girzie," said he. "Ye'll lee
to me fast eneuch, when ye hae gotten a jo. I'm tellin' ye and it's
true; when you have a jo, Miss Kirstie, it'll be for guid and ill. I
ken: I was made that way mysel', but the deil was in my luck! Here, gang
awa' wi' ye to your muirs, and let me be; I'm in an hour of
inspiraution, ye upsetting tawpie!"
But she clung to her brother's neighbourhood, she knew not why.
"Will ye no gie's a kiss, Dand?" she said. "I aye likit ye fine."
He kissed her and considered her a moment; he found something strange in
her. But he was a libertine through and through, nourished equal
contempt and suspicion of all womankind, and paid his way among them
habitually with idle compliments.
"Gae wa' wi' ye!" said he. "Ye're a dentie baby, and be content wi'
that!"
That was Dandie's way; a kiss and a comfit to Jenny--a bawbee and my
blessing to Jill--and good-night to the whole clan of ye, my dears! When
anything approached the serious, it became a matter for men, he both
thought and said. Women, when they did not absorb, were only children to
be shoo'd away. Merely in his character of connoisseur, however, Dandle
glanced carelessly after his sister as she crossed the meadow. "The
brat's no that bad!" he thought with surprise, for though he had just
been paying her compliments, he had not really looked at her. "Hey!
what's yon?" For the grey dress was cut with short sleeves and skirts,
and displayed her trim strong legs clad in pink stockings of the same
shade as the kerchief she wore round her shoulders, and that shimmered
as she went. This was not her way in undress; he knew her ways and the
ways of the whole sex in the country-side, no one better; when they did
not go barefoot, they wore stout "rig and furrow" woollen hose of an
invisible blue mostly, when they were not black outright; and Dandie,
at sight of this daintiness, put two and two together. It was a silk
handkerchief, then they would be silken hose; they matched--then the
whole outfit was a present of Clem's, a costly present, and not
something to be worn through bog and briar, or on a late afternoon of
Sunday. He whistled. "My denty May, either your heid's fair turned, or
there's some ongoings!" he observed, and dismissed the subject.
She went slowly at first, but ever straighter and faster for the
Cauldstaneslap, a pass among the hills to which the farm owed its name.
The Slap opened like a doorway between two rounded hillocks; and through
this ran the short cut to Hermiston. Immediately on the other side it
went down through the Deil's Hags, a considerable marshy hollow of the
hill tops, full of springs, and crouching junipers, and pools where the
black peat-water slumbered. There was no view from here. A man might
have sat upon the Praying Weaver's Stone a half-century, and seen none
but the Cauldstaneslap children twice in the twenty-four hours on their
way to the school and back again, an occasional shepherd, the irruption
of a clan of sheep, or the birds who haunted about the springs, drinking
and shrilly piping. So, when she had once passed the Slap, Kirstie was
received into seclusion. She looked back a last time at the farm. It
still lay deserted except for the figure of Dandie, who was now seen to
be scribbling in his lap, the hour of expected inspiration having come
to him at last. Thence she passed rapidly through the morass, and came
to the farther end of it, where a sluggish burn discharges, and the path
for Hermiston accompanies it on the beginning of its downward way. From
this corner a wide view was opened to her of the whole stretch of braes
upon the other side, still sallow and in places rusty with the winter,
with the path marked boldly, here and there by the burn-side a tuft of
birches, and--two miles off as the crow flies--from its enclosures and
young plantations, the windows of Hermiston glittering in the western
sun.
Here she sat down and waited, and looked for a long time at these
far-away bright panes of glass. It amused her to have so extended a
view, she thought. It amused her to see the house of Hermiston--to see
"folk"; and there was an indistinguishable human unit, perhaps the
gardener, visibly sauntering on the gravel paths.
By the time the sun was down and all the easterly braes lay plunged in
clear shadow, she was aware of another figure coming up the path at a
most unequal rate of approach, now half running, now pausing and seeming
to hesitate. She watched him at first with a total suspension of
thought. She held her thought as a person holds his breathing. Then she
consented to recognise him. "He'll no be coming here, he canna be; it's
no possible." And there began to grow upon her a subdued choking
suspense. He _was_ coming; his hesitations had quite ceased, his step
grew firm and swift; no doubt remained; and the question loomed up
before her instant: what was she to do? It was all very well to say that
her brother was a laird himself; it was all very well to speak of casual
intermarriages and to count cousinship, like Auntie Kirstie. The
difference in their social station was trenchant; propriety, prudence,
all that she had ever learned, all that she knew, bade her flee. But on
the other hand the cup of life now offered to her was too enchanting.
For one moment, she saw the question clearly, and definitely made her
choice. She stood up and showed herself an instant in the gap relieved
upon the sky line; and the next, fled trembling and sat down glowing
with excitement on the Weaver's Stone. She shut her eyes, seeking,
praying for composure. Her hand shook in her lap, and her mind was full
of incongruous and futile speeches. What was there to make a work about?
She could take care of herself, she supposed! There was no harm in
seeing the laird. It was the best thing that could happen. She would
mark a proper distance to him once and for all. Gradually the wheels of
her nature ceased to go round so madly, and she sat in passive
expectation, a quiet, solitary figure in the midst of the grey moss. I
have said she was no hypocrite, but here I am at fault. She never
admitted to herself that she had come up the hill to look for Archie.
And perhaps after all she did not know, perhaps came as a stone falls.
For the steps of love in the young, and especially in girls, are
instinctive and unconscious.
In the meantime Archie was drawing rapidly near, and he at least was
consciously seeking her neighbourhood. The afternoon had turned to ashes
in his mouth; the memory of the girl had kept him from reading and drawn
him as with cords; and at last, as the cool of the evening began to come
on, he had taken his hat and set forth, with a smothered ejaculation, by
the moor path to Cauldstaneslap. He had no hope to find her, he took the
off chance without expectation of result and to relieve his uneasiness.
The greater was his surprise, as he surmounted the slope and came into
the hollow of the Deil's Hags, to see there, like an answer to his
wishes, the little womanly figure in the grey dress and the pink
kerchief sitting little, and low, and lost, and acutely solitary, in
these desolate surroundings and on the weather-beaten stone of the dead
weaver. Those things that still smacked of winter were all rusty about
her, and those things that already relished of the spring had put forth
the tender and lively colours of the season. Even in the unchanging face
of the death-stone, changes were to be remarked; and in the channeled
lettering, the moss began to renew itself in jewels of green. By an
afterthought that was a stroke of art, she had turned up over her head
the back of the kerchief; so that it now framed becomingly her vivacious
and yet pensive face. Her feet were gathered under her on the one side,
and she leaned on her bare arm, which showed out strong and round,
tapered to a slim wrist, and shimmered in the fading light.
Young Hermiston was struck with a certain chill. He was reminded that he
now dealt in serious matters of life and death. This was a grown woman
he was approaching, endowed with her mysterious potencies and
attractions, the treasury of the continued race, and he was neither
better nor worse than the average of his sex and age. He had a certain
delicacy which had preserved him hitherto unspotted, and which (had
either of them guessed it) made him a more dangerous companion when his
heart should be really stirred. His throat was dry as he came near; but
the appealing sweetness of her smile stood between them like a guardian
angel.
For she turned to him and smiled, though without rising. There was a
shade in this cavalier greeting that neither of them perceived; neither
he, who simply thought it gracious and charming as herself; nor yet she,
who did not observe (quick as she was) the difference between rising to
meet the laird, and remaining seated to receive the expected admirer.
"Are ye stepping west, Hermiston?" said she, giving him his territorial
name after the fashion of the countryside.
"I was," said he, a little hoarsely, "but I think I will be about the
end of my stroll now. Are you like me, Miss Christina? The house would
not hold me. I came here seeking air."
He took his seat at the other end of the tombstone and studied her,
wondering what was she. There was infinite import in the question alike
for her and him.
"Ay," said she. "I couldna bear the roof either. It's a habit of mine to
come up here about the gloaming when it's quaiet and caller."
"It was a habit of my mother's also," he said gravely. The recollection
half startled him as he expressed it. He looked around. "I have scarce
been here since. It's peaceful," he said, with a long breath.
"It's no like Glasgow," she replied. "A weary place, yon Glasgow! But
what a day have I had for my hame-coming, and what a bonny evening!"
"Indeed, it was a wonderful day," said Archie. "I think I will remember
it years and years until I come to die. On days like this--I do not know
if you feel as I do--but everything appears so brief, and fragile, and
exquisite, that I am afraid to touch life. We are here for so short a
time; and all the old people before us--Rutherfords of Hermiston,
Elliotts of the Cauldstaneslap--that were here but a while since riding
about and keeping up a great noise in this quiet corner--making love
too, and marrying--why, where are they now? It's deadly commonplace,
but, after all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths."
He was sounding her, semi-consciously, to see if she could understand
him; to learn if she were only an animal the colour of flowers, or had a
soul in her to keep her sweet. She, on her part, her means well in hand,
watched, woman-like, for any opportunity to shine, to abound in his
humour, whatever that might be. The dramatic artist, that lies dormant
or only half awake in most human beings, had in her sprung to his feet
in a divine fury, and chance had served her well. She looked upon him
with a subdued twilight look that became the hour of the day and the
train of thought; earnestness shone through her like stars in the purple
west; and from the great but controlled upheaval of her whole nature
there passed into her voice, and ran in her lightest words, a thrill of
emotion.
"Have you mind of Dand's song?" she answered. "I think he'll have been
trying to say what you have been thinking."
"No, I never heard it," he said. "Repeat it to me, can you?"
"It's nothing wanting the tune," said Kirstie.
"Then sing it me," said he.
"On the Lord's Day? That would never do, Mr. Weir!"
"I am afraid I am not so strict a keeper of the Sabbath, and there is no
one in this place to hear us unless the poor old ancient under the
stone."
"No that I'm thinking that really," she said. "By my way of thinking,
it's just as serious as a psalm. Will I sooth it to ye, then?"
"If you please," said he, and, drawing near to her on the tombstone,
prepared to listen.
She sat up as if to sing. "I'll only can sooth it to ye," she explained.
"I wouldna like to sing out loud on the Sabbath. I think the birds would
carry news of it to Gilbert," and she smiled. "It's about the Elliotts,"
she continued, "and I think there's few bonnier bits in the book-poets,
though Dand has never got printed yet."
And she began, in the low, clear tones of her half voice, now sinking
almost to a whisper, now rising to a particular note which was her best,
and which Archie learned to wait for with growing emotion:--
"O they rade in the rain, in the days that are gane,
In the rain and the wind and the lave,
They shoutit in the ha' and they routit on the hill,
But they're a' quaitit noo in the grave.
Auld, auld Elliotts, clay-cauld Elliotts, dour, bauld Elliotts of auld!"
All the time she sang she looked steadfastly before her, her knees
straight, her hands upon her knee, head cast back and up. The expression
was admirable throughout, for had she not learned it from the lips and
under the criticism of the author? When it was done, she turned upon
Archie a face softly bright, and eyes gently suffused and shining in the
twilight, and his heart rose and went out to her with boundless pity and
sympathy. His question was answered. She was a human being tuned to a
sense of the tragedy of life; there were pathos and music and a great
heart in the girl.
He arose instinctively, she also; for she saw she had gained a point,
and scored the impression deeper, and she had wit enough left to flee
upon a victory. They were but commonplaces that remained to be
exchanged, but the low, moved voices in which they passed made them
sacred in the memory. In the falling greyness of the evening he watched
her figure winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave
a hand, and then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if
something went along with her out of the deepest of his heart. And
something surely had come, and come to dwell there. He had retained from
childhood a picture, now half obliterated by the passage of time and the
multitude of fresh impressions, of his mother telling him, with the
fluttered earnestness of her voice, and often with dropping tears, the
tale of the "Praying Weaver," on the very scene of his brief tragedy and
long repose. And now there was a companion piece; and he beheld, and he
should behold for ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in the grey
colours of the evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower, and she
also singing--
"Of old, unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago,"
of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their
weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their
descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be
gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of
the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together
in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes
indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being
something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of
things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all
ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor
pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made
ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.
In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie, there
opened before Kirstie's eyes the cup-like hollow in which the farm lay.
She saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself
bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they
were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship
which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the
relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be withinsides
at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in
his quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who
officiated. She made good time accordingly down the steep ascent, and
came up to the door panting as the three younger brothers, all roused at
last from slumber, stood together in the cool and the dark of the
evening with a fry of nephews and nieces about them, chatting and
awaiting the expected signal. She stood back; she had no mind to direct
attention to her late arrival or to her labouring breath.
"Kirstie, ye have shaved it this time, my lass," said Clem. "Whaur were
ye?"
"O, just taking a dander by mysel'," said Kirstie.
And the talk continued on the subject of the American War, without
further reference to the truant who stood by them in the covert of the
dusk, thrilling with happiness and the sense of guilt.
The signal was given, and the brothers began to go in one after another,
amid the jostle and throng of Hob's children.
Only Dandie, waiting till the last, caught Kirstie by the arm. "When did
ye begin to dander in pink hosen, Mistress Elliott?" he whispered slily.
She looked down; she was one blush. "I maun have forgotten to change
them," said she; and went in to prayers in her turn with a troubled
mind, between anxiety as to whether Dand should have observed her yellow
stockings at church, and should thus detect her in a palpable falsehood,
and shame that she had already made good his prophecy. She remembered
the words of it, how it was to be when she had gotten a jo, and that
that would be for good and evil. "Will I have gotten my jo now?" she
thought with a secret rapture.
And all through prayers, where it was her principal business to conceal
the pink stockings from the eyes of the indifferent Mrs. Hob--and all
through supper, as she made a feint of eating and sat at the table
radiant and constrained--and again when she had left them and come into
her chamber, and was alone with her sleeping niece, and could at last
lay aside the armour of society--the same words sounded within her, the
same profound note of happiness, of a world all changed and renewed, of
a day that had been passed in Paradise, and of a night that was to be
heaven opened. All night she seemed to be conveyed smoothly upon a
shallow stream of sleep and waking, and through the bowers of Beulah;
all night she cherished to her heart that exquisite hope; and if,
towards morning, she forgot it a while in a more profound
unconsciousness, it was to catch again the rainbow thought with her
first moment of awaking.
CHAPTER VII
ENTER MEPHISTOPHELES
Two days later a gig from Crossmichael deposited Frank Innes at the
doors of Hermiston. Once in a way, during the past winter, Archie, in
some acute phase of boredom, had written him a letter. It had contained
something in the nature of an invitation, or a reference to an
invitation--precisely what, neither of them now remembered. When Innes
had received it, there had been nothing further from his mind than to
bury himself in the moors with Archie; but not even the most acute
political heads are guided through the steps of life with unerring
directness. That would require a gift of prophecy which has been denied
to man. For instance, who could have imagined that, not a month after he
had received the letter, and turned it into mockery, and put off
answering it, and in the end lost it, misfortunes of a gloomy cast
should begin to thicken over Frank's career? His case may be briefly
stated. His father, a small Morayshire laird with a large family, became
recalcitrant and cut off the supplies; he had fitted himself out with
the beginnings of quite a good law library, which, upon some sudden
losses on the turf, he had been obliged to sell before they were paid
for; and his bookseller, hearing some rumour of the event, took out a
warrant for his arrest. Innes had early word of it, and was able to take
precautions. In this immediate welter of his affairs, with an unpleasant
charge hanging over him, he had judged it the part of prudence to be off
instantly, had written a fervid letter to his father at Inverauld, and
put himself in the coach for Crossmichael. Any port in a storm! He was
manfully turning his back on the Parliament House and its gay babble,
on porter and oysters, the racecourse and the ring; and manfully
prepared, until these clouds should have blown by, to share a living
grave with Archie Weir at Hermiston.
To do him justice, he was no less surprised to be going than Archie was
to see him come; and he carried off his wonder with an infinitely better
grace.
"Well, here I am!" said he, as he alighted. "Pylades has come to Orestes
at last. By the way, did you get my answer? No? How very provoking!
Well, here I am to answer for myself, and that's better still."
"I am very glad to see you, of course," said Archie. "I make you
heartily welcome, of course. But you surely have not come to stay, with
the Courts still sitting; is that not most unwise?"
"Damn the Courts!" says Frank. "What are the Courts to friendship and a
little fishing?"
And so it was agreed that he was to stay, with no term to the visit but
the term which he had privily set to it himself--the day, namely, when
his father should have come down with the dust, and he should be able to
pacify the bookseller. On such vague conditions there began for these
two young men (who were not even friends) a life of great familiarity
and, as the days drew on, less and less intimacy. They were together at
meal-times, together o' nights when the hour had come for whisky-toddy;
but it might have been noticed (had there been any one to pay heed) that
they were rarely so much together by day. Archie had Hermiston to attend
to, multifarious activities in the hills, in which he did not require,
and had even refused, Frank's escort. He would be off sometimes in the
morning and leave only a note on the breakfast-table to announce the
fact; and sometimes with no notice at all, he would not return for
dinner until the hour was long past. Innes groaned under these
desertions; it required all his philosophy to sit down to a solitary
breakfast with composure and all his unaffected good-nature to be able
to greet Archie with friendliness on the more rare occasions when he
came home late for dinner.
"I wonder what on earth he finds to do, Mrs. Elliott?" said he one
morning, after he had just read the hasty billet and sat down to table.
"I suppose it will be business, sir," replied the housekeeper drily,
measuring his distance off to him by an indicated curtsey.
"But I can't imagine what business!" he reiterated.
"I suppose it will be _his_ business," retorted the austere Kirstie.
He turned to her with that happy brightness that made the charm of his
disposition, and broke into a peal of healthy and natural laughter.
"Well played, Mrs. Elliott!" he cried; and the housekeeper's face
relaxed into the shadow of an iron smile. "Well played indeed!" said he.
"But you must not be making a stranger of me like that. Why, Archie and
I were at the High School together, and we've been to College together,
and we were going to the Bar together, when--you know! Dear, dear me!
what a pity that was! A life spoiled, a fine young fellow as good as
buried here in the wilderness with rustics; and all for what? A frolic,
silly, if you like, but no more. God, how good your scones are, Mrs.
Elliott!"
"They're no mines, it was the lassie made them," said Kirstie; "and,
saving your presence, there's little sense in taking the Lord's name in
vain about idle vivers that you fill your kyte wi'."
"I daresay you're perfectly right, ma'am," quoth the imperturbable
Frank. "But as I was saying, this is a pitiable business, this about
poor Archie; and you and I might do worse than put our heads together,
like a couple of sensible people, and bring it to an end. Let me tell
you, ma'am, that Archie is really quite a promising young man, and in my
opinion he would do well at the Bar. As for his father, no one can deny
his ability, and I don't fancy any one would care to deny that he has
the deil's own temper----"
"If you'll excuse me, Mr. Innes, I think the lass is crying on me," said
Kirstie, and flounced from the room.
"The damned, cross-grained, old broom-stick!" ejaculated Innes.
In the meantime, Kirstie had escaped into the kitchen, and before her
vassal gave vent to her feelings.
"Here, ettercap! Ye'll have to wait on yon Innes! I canna hand myself
in. 'Puir Erchie!' I'd 'puir Erchie' him, if I had my way! And Hermiston
with the deil's ain temper! God, let him take Hermiston's scones out of
his mouth first. There's no a hair on ayther o' the Weirs that hasna
mair spunk and dirdum to it than what he has in his hale dwaibly body!
Settin' up his snash to me! Let him gang to the black toon where he's
mebbe wantit--birling on a curricle--wi' pimatum on his heid--making a
mess o' himsel' wi' nesty hizzies--a fair disgrace!" It was impossible
to hear without admiration Kirstie's graduated disgust, as she brought
forth, one after another, these somewhat baseless charges. Then she
remembered her immediate purpose, and turned again on her fascinated
auditor. "Do ye no hear me, tawpie? Do ye no hear what I'm tellin' ye?
Will I have to shoo ye into him? If I come to attend to ye, mistress!"
And the maid fled the kitchen, which had become practically dangerous,
to attend on Innes's wants in the front parlour.
_Tantaene irae_? Has the reader perceived the reason? Since Frank's
coming there were no more hours of gossip over the supper-tray! All his
blandishments were in vain; he had started handicapped on the race for
Mrs. Elliott's favour.
But it was a strange thing how misfortune dogged him in his efforts to
be genial. I must guard the reader against accepting Kirstie's epithets
as evidence; she was more concerned for their vigour than for their
accuracy. Dwaibly, for instance; nothing could be more calumnious.
Frank was the very picture of good looks, good humour, and manly youth.
He had bright eyes with a sparkle and a dance to them, curly hair, a
charming smile, brilliant teeth, an admirable carriage of the head, the
look of a gentleman, the address of one accustomed to please at first
sight and to improve the impression. And with all these advantages, he
failed with every one about Hermiston; with the silent shepherd, with
the obsequious grieve, with the groom who was also the ploughman, with
the gardener and the gardener's sister--a pious, down-hearted woman with
a shawl over her ears--he failed equally and flatly. They did not like
him, and they showed it. The little maid, indeed, was an exception; she
admired him devoutly, probably dreamed of him in her private hours; but
she was accustomed to play the part of silent auditor to Kirstie's
tirades and silent recipient of Kirstie's buffets, and she had learned
not only to be a very capable girl of her years, but a very secret and
prudent one besides. Frank was thus conscious that he had one ally and
sympathiser in the midst of that general union of disfavour that
surrounded, watched, and waited on him in the house of Hermiston; but he
had little comfort or society from that alliance, and the demure little
maid (twelve on her last birthday) preserved her own counsel, and
tripped on his service, brisk, dumbly responsive, but inexorably
unconversational. For the others, they were beyond hope and beyond
endurance. Never had a young Apollo been cast among such rustic
barbarians. But perhaps the cause of his ill-success lay in one trait
which was habitual and unconscious with him, yet diagnostic of the man.
It was his practice to approach any one person at the expense of some
one else. He offered you an alliance against the some one else; he
flattered you by slighting him; you were drawn into a small intrigue
against him before you knew how. Wonderful are the virtues of this
process generally; but Frank's mistake was in the choice of the some one
else. He was not politic in that; he listened to the voice of
irritation. Archie had offended him at first by what he had felt to be
rather a dry reception, had offended him since by his frequent absences.
He was besides the one figure continually present in Frank's eye; and it
was to his immediate dependants that Frank could offer the snare of his
sympathy. Now the truth is that the Weirs, father and son, were
surrounded by a posse of strenuous loyalists. Of my lord they were
vastly proud. It was a distinction in itself to be one of the vassals of
the "Hanging Judge," and his gross, formidable joviality was far from
unpopular in the neighbourhood of his home. For Archie they had, one and
all, a sensitive affection and respect which recoiled from a word of
belittlement.
Nor was Frank more successful when he went farther afield. To the Four
Black Brothers, for instance, he was antipathetic in the highest degree.
Hob thought him too light, Gib too profane. Clem, who saw him but for a
day or two before he went to Glasgow, wanted to know what the fule's
business was, and whether he meant to stay here all session time! "Yon's
a drone," he pronounced. As for Dand, it will be enough to describe
their first meeting, when Frank had been whipping a river and the rustic
celebrity chanced to come along the path.
"I'm told you're quite a poet," Frank had said.
"Wha tell't ye that, mannie?" had been the unconciliating answer.
"O, everybody!" says Frank.
"God! Here's fame!" said the sardonic poet, and he had passed on his
way.
Come to think of it, we have here perhaps a truer explanation of Frank's
failures. Had he met Mr. Sheriff Scott, he could have turned a neater
compliment, because Mr. Scott would have been a friend worth making.
Dand, on the other hand, he did not value sixpence, and he showed it
even while he tried to flatter. Condescension is an excellent thing, but
it is strange how one-sided the pleasure of it is! He who goes fishing
among the Scots peasantry with condescension for a bait will have an
empty basket by evening.
In proof of this theory Frank made a great success of it at the
Crossmichael Club, to which Archie took him immediately on his arrival;
his own last appearance on that scene of gaiety. Frank was made welcome
there at once, continued to go regularly, and had attended a meeting (as
the members ever after loved to tell) on the evening before his death.
Young Hay and young Pringle appeared again. There was another supper at
Windielaws, another dinner at Driffel; and it resulted in Frank being
taken to the bosom of the county people as unreservedly as he had been
repudiated by the country folk. He occupied Hermiston after the manner
of an invader in a conquered capital. He was perpetually issuing from
it, as from a base, to toddy parties, fishing parties, and dinner
parties, to which Archie was not invited, or to which Archie would not
go. It was now that the name of The Recluse became general for the young
man. Some say that Innes invented it; Innes, at least, spread it abroad.
"How's all with your Recluse to-day?" people would ask.
"O, reclusing away!" Innes would declare, with his bright air of saying
something witty; and immediately interrupt the general laughter which he
had provoked much more by his air than his words, "Mind you, it's all
very well laughing, but I'm not very well pleased. Poor Archie is a good
fellow, an excellent fellow, a fellow I always liked. I think it small
of him to take his little disgrace so hard and shut himself up. 'Grant
that it is a ridiculous story, painfully ridiculous,' I keep telling
him. 'Be a man! Live it down, man!' But not he. Of course it's just
solitude, and shame, and all that. But I confess I'm beginning to fear
the result. It would be all the pities in the world if a really
promising fellow like Weir was to end ill. I'm seriously tempted to
write to Lord Hermiston, and put it plainly to him."
"I would if I were you," some of his auditors would say, shaking the
head, sitting bewildered and confused at this new view of the matter,
so deftly indicated by a single word. "A capital idea!" they would add,
and wonder at the _aplomb_ and position of this young man, who talked as
a matter of course of writing to Hermiston and correcting him upon his
private affairs.
And Frank would proceed, sweetly confidential: "I'll give you an idea,
now. He's actually sore about the way that I'm received and he's left
out in the county--actually jealous and sore. I've rallied him and I've
reasoned with him, told him that every one was most kindly inclined
towards him, told him even that _I_ was received merely because I was
his guest. But it's no use. He will neither accept the invitations he
gets, nor stop brooding about the ones where he's left out. What I'm
afraid of is that the wound's ulcerating. He had always one of those
dark, secret, angry natures--a little underhand and plenty of bile--you
know the sort. He must have inherited it from the Weirs, whom I suspect
to have been a worthy family of weavers somewhere; what's the cant
phrase?--sedentary occupation. It's precisely the kind of character to
go wrong in a false position like what his father's made for him, or
he's making for himself, whichever you like to call it. And for my part,
I think it a disgrace," Frank would say generously.
Presently the sorrow and anxiety of this disinterested friend took
shape. He began in private, in conversations of two, to talk vaguely of
bad habits and low habits. "I must say I'm afraid he's going wrong
altogether," he would say. "I'll tell you plainly, and between
ourselves, I scarcely like to stay there any longer; only, man, I'm
positively afraid to leave him alone. You'll see, I shall be blamed for
it later on. I'm staying at a great sacrifice. I'm hindering my chances
at the Bar, and I can't blind my eyes to it. And what I'm afraid of is,
that I'm going to get kicked for it all round before all's done. You
see, nobody believes in friendship nowadays."
"Well, Innes," his interlocutor would reply, "it's very good of you, I
must say that. If there's any blame going, you'll always be sure of _my_
good word, for one thing."
"Well," Frank would continue, "candidly, I don't say it's pleasant. He
has a very rough way with him; his father's son, you know. I don't say
he's rude--of course, I couldn't be expected to stand that--but he
steers very near the wind. No, it's not pleasant; but I tell ye, man, in
conscience I don't think it would be fair to leave him. Mind you, I
don't say there's anything actually wrong. What I say is that I don't
like the looks of it, man!" and he would press the arm of his momentary
confidant.
In the early stages I am persuaded there was no malice. He talked but
for the pleasure of airing himself. He was essentially glib, as becomes
the young advocate, and essentially careless of the truth, which is the
mark of the young ass; and so he talked at random. There was no
particular bias, but that one which is indigenous and universal, to
flatter himself and to please and interest the present friend. And by
thus milling air out of his mouth, he had presently built up a
presentation of Archie which was known and talked of in all corners of
the county. Wherever there was a residential house and a walled garden,
wherever there was a dwarfish castle and a park, wherever a quadruple
cottage by the ruins of a peel-tower showed an old family going down,
and wherever a handsome villa with a carriage approach and a shrubbery
marked the coming up of a new one--probably on the wheels of
machinery--Archie began to be regarded in the light of a dark, perhaps a
vicious mystery, and the future developments of his career to be looked
for with uneasiness and confidential whispering. He had done something
disgraceful, my dear. What, was not precisely known, and that good kind
young man, Mr. Innes, did his best to make light of it. But there it
was. And Mr. Innes was very anxious about him now; he was really uneasy,
my dear; he was positively wrecking his own prospects because he dared
not leave him alone. How wholly we all lie at the mercy of a single
prater, not needfully with any malign purpose! And if a man but talks
of himself in the right spirit, refers to his virtuous actions by the
way, and never applies to them the name of virtue, how easily his
evidence is accepted in the court of public opinion!
All this while, however, there was a more poisonous ferment at work
between the two lads, which came late indeed to the surface, but had
modified and magnified their dissensions from the first. To an idle,
shallow, easy-going customer like Frank, the smell of a mystery was
attractive. It gave his mind something to play with, like a new toy to a
child; and it took him on the weak side, for like many young men coming
to the Bar, and before they have been tried and found wanting, he
flattered himself he was a fellow of unusual quickness and penetration.
They knew nothing of Sherlock Holmes in those days, but there was a good
deal said of Talleyrand. And if you could have caught Frank off his
guard, he would have confessed with a smirk that, if he resembled any
one, it was the Marquis de Talleyrand-Périgord. It was on the occasion
of Archie's first absence that this interest took root. It was vastly
deepened when Kirstie resented his curiosity at breakfast, and that same
afternoon there occurred another scene which clinched the business. He
was fishing Swingleburn, Archie accompanying him, when the latter looked
at his watch.
"Well, good-bye," said he. "I have something to do. See you at dinner."
"Don't be in such a hurry," cries Frank. "Hold on till I get my rod up.
I'll go with you; I'm sick of flogging this ditch."
And he began to reel up his line.
Archie stood speechless. He took a long while to recover his wits under
this direct attack; but by the time he was ready with his answer, and
the angle was almost packed up, he had become completely Weir, and the
hanging face gloomed on his young shoulders. He spoke with a laboured
composure, a laboured kindness even; but a child could see that his mind
was made up.
"I beg your pardon, Innes; I don't want to be disagreeable, but let us
understand one another from the beginning. When I want your company,
I'll let you know."
"O!" cries Frank, "you don't want my company, don't you?"
"Apparently not just now," replied Archie. "I even indicated to you when
I did, if you'll remember--and that was at dinner. If we two fellows are
to live together pleasantly--and I see no reason why we should not--it
can only be by respecting each other's privacy. If we begin
intruding----"
"O, come! I'll take this at no man's hands. Is this the way you treat a
guest and an old friend?" cried Innes.
"Just go home and think over what I said by yourself," continued Archie,
"whether it's reasonable, or whether it's really offensive or not; and
let's meet at dinner as though nothing had happened. I'll put it this
way, if you like--that I know my own character, that I'm looking forward
(with great pleasure, I assure you) to a long visit from you, and that
I'm taking precautions at the first. I see the thing that we--that I, if
you like--might fall out upon, and I step in and _obsto principiis_. I
wager you five pounds you'll end by seeing that I mean friendliness, and
I assure you, Francie, I do," he added, relenting.
Bursting with anger, but incapable of speech, Innes shouldered his rod,
made a gesture of farewell, and strode off down the burn-side. Archie
watched him go without moving. He was sorry, but quite unashamed. He
hated to be inhospitable, but in one thing he was his father's son. He
had a strong sense that his house was his own and no man else's; and to,
lie at a guest's mercy was what he refused. He hated to seem harsh. But
that was Frank's look-out. If Frank had been commonly discreet, he would
have been decently courteous. And there was another consideration. The
secret he was protecting was not his own merely; it was hers: it
belonged to that inexpressible she who was fast taking possession of his
soul, and whom he would soon have defended at the cost of burning
cities. By the time he had watched Frank as far as the Swingleburnfoot,
appearing and disappearing in the tarnished heather, still stalking at a
fierce gait, but already dwindled in the distance into less than the
smallness of Lilliput, he could afford to smile at the occurrence.
Either Frank would go, and that would be a relief--or he would continue
to stay, and his host must continue to endure him. And Archie was now
free--by devious paths, behind hillocks and in the hollow of burns--to
make for the trysting-place where Kirstie, cried about by the curlew and
the plover, waited and burned for his coming by the Covenanter's Stone.
Innes went off down-hill in a passion of resentment, easy to be
understood, but which yielded progressively to the needs of his
situation. He cursed Archie for a cold-hearted, unfriendly, rude, rude
dog; and himself still more passionately for a fool in having come to
Hermiston when he might have sought refuge in almost any other house in
Scotland. But the step, once taken, was practically irretrievable. He
had no more ready money to go anywhere else; he would have to borrow
from Archie the next club-night; and ill as he thought of his host's
manners, he was sure of his practical generosity. Frank's resemblance to
Talleyrand strikes me as imaginary; but at least not Talleyrand himself
could have more obediently taken his lesson from the facts. He met
Archie at dinner without resentment, almost with cordiality. You must
take your friends as you find them, he would have said. Archie couldn't
help being his father's son, or his grandfather's, the hypothetical
weaver's, grandson. The son of a hunks, he was still a hunks at heart,
incapable of true generosity and consideration: but he had other
qualities with which Frank could divert himself in the meanwhile, and to
enjoy which it was necessary that Frank should keep his temper.
So excellently was it controlled that he awoke next morning with his
head full of a different, though a cognate subject. What was Archie's
little game? Why did he shun Frank's company? What was he keeping
secret? Was he keeping tryst with somebody, and was it a woman? It would
be a good joke and a fair revenge to discover. To that task he set
himself with a great deal of patience, which might have surprised his
friends, for he had been always credited not with patience so much as
brilliancy; and little by little, from one point to another, he at last
succeeded in piecing out the situation. First he remarked that, although
Archie set out in all the directions of the compass, he always came home
again from some point between the south and west. From the study of a
map, and in consideration of the great expanse of untenanted moorland
running in that direction towards the sources of the Clyde, he laid his
finger on Cauldstaneslap and two other neighbouring farms, Kingsmuirs
and Polintarf. But it was difficult to advance farther. With his rod for
a pretext, he vainly visited each of them in turn; nothing was to be
seen suspicious about this trinity of moorland settlements. He would
have tried to follow Archie, had it been the least possible, but the
nature of the land precluded the idea. He did the next best, ensconced
himself in a quiet corner, and pursued his movements with a telescope.
It was equally in vain, and he soon wearied of his futile vigilance,
left the telescope at home, and had almost given the matter up in
despair, when, on the twenty-seventh day of his visit, he was suddenly
confronted with the person whom he sought. The first Sunday Kirstie had
managed to stay away from kirk on some pretext of indisposition, which
was more truly modesty; the pleasure of beholding Archie seeming too
sacred, too vivid for that public place. On the two following, Frank had
himself been absent on some of his excursions among the neighbouring
families. It was not until the fourth, accordingly, that Frank had
occasion to set eyes on the enchantress. With the first look, all
hesitation was over. She came with the Cauldstaneslap party; then she
lived at Cauldstaneslap. Here was Archie's secret, here was the woman,
and more than that--though I have need here of every manageable
attenuation of language--with the first look, he had already entered
himself as rival. It was a good deal in pique, it was a little in
revenge, it was much in genuine admiration: the devil may decide the
proportions! I cannot, and it is very likely that Frank could not.
"Mighty attractive milkmaid," he observed, on the way home.
"Who?" said Archie.
"O, the girl you're looking at--aren't you? Forward there on the road.
She came attended by the rustic bard; presumably, therefore, belongs to
his exalted family. The single objection! for the Four Black Brothers
are awkward customers. If anything were to go wrong, Gib would gibber,
and Clem would prove inclement; and Dand fly in danders, and Hob blow up
in gobbets. It would be a Helliott of a business!"
"Very humorous, I am sure," said Archie.
"Well, I am trying to be so," said Frank. "It's none too easy in this
place, and with your solemn society, my dear fellow. But confess that
the milkmaid has found favour in your eyes, or resign all claim to be a
man of taste."
"It is no matter," returned Archie.
But the other continued to look at him, steadily and quizzically, and
his colour slowly rose and deepened under the glance, until not
impudence itself could have denied that he was blushing. And at this
Archie lost some of his control. He changed his stick from one hand to
the other, and--"O, for God's sake, don't be an ass!" he cried.
"Ass? That's the retort delicate without doubt," says Frank. "Beware of
the home-spun brothers, dear. If they come into the dance, you'll see
who's an ass. Think now, if they only applied (say) a quarter as much
talent as I have applied to the question of what Mr. Archie does with
his evening hours, and why he is so unaffectedly nasty when the
subject's touched on----"
"You are touching on it now," interrupted Archie, with a wince.
"Thank you. That was all I wanted, an articulate confession," said
Frank.
"I beg to remind you----" began Archie.
But he was interrupted in turn. "My dear fellow, don't. It's quite
needless. The subject's dead and buried."
And Frank began to talk hastily on other matters, an art in which he was
an adept, for it was his gift to be fluent on anything or nothing. But
although Archie had the grace or the timidity to suffer him to rattle
on, he was by no means done with the subject. When he came home to
dinner he was greeted with a sly demand, how things were looking
"Cauldstaneslap ways." Frank took his first glass of port out after
dinner to the toast of Kirstie, and later in the evening he returned to
the charge again.
"I say, Weir, you'll excuse me for returning again to this affair. I've
been thinking it over, and I wish to beg you very seriously to be more
careful. It's not a safe business. Not safe, my boy," said he.
"What?" said Archie.
"Well, it's your own fault if I must put a name on the thing; but
really, as a friend, I cannot stand by and see you rushing head down
into these dangers. My dear boy," said he, holding up a warning cigar,
"consider! What is to be the end of it?"
"The end of what?"--Archie, helpless with irritation, persisted in this
dangerous and ungracious guard.
"Well, the end of the milkmaid; or, to speak more by the card, the end
of Miss Christina Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap."
"I assure you," Archie broke out, "this is all a figment of your
imagination. There is nothing to be said against that young lady; you
have no right to introduce her name into the conversation."
"I'll make a note of it," said Frank. "She shall henceforth be nameless,
nameless, nameless, Gregarach! I make a note besides of your valuable
testimony to her character. I only want to look at this thing as a man
of the world. Admitted she's an angel--but, my good fellow, is she a
lady?"
This was torture to Archie. "I beg your pardon," he said, struggling to
be composed, "but because you have wormed yourself into my
confidence----"
"O, come!" cried Frank. "Your confidence? It was rosy but unconsenting.
Your confidence, indeed? Now, look! This is what I must say, Weir, for
it concerns your safety and good character, and therefore my honour as
your friend. You say I wormed myself into your confidence. Wormed is
good. But what have I done? I have put two and two together, just as the
parish will be doing to-morrow, and the whole of Tweeddale in two weeks,
and the Black Brothers--well, I won't put a date on that; it will be a
dark and stormy morning! Your secret, in other words, is poor Poll's.
And I want to ask of you as a friend whether you like the prospect?
There are two horns to your dilemma, and I must say for myself I should
look mighty ruefully on either. Do you see yourself explaining to the
Four Black Brothers? or do you see yourself presenting the milkmaid to
papa as the future lady of Hermiston? Do you? I tell you plainly, I
don't!"
Archie rose. "I will hear no more of this," he said, in a trembling
voice.
But Frank again held up his cigar. "Tell me one thing first. Tell me if
this is not a friend's part that I am playing?"
"I believe you think it so," replied Archie. "I can go as far as that. I
can do so much justice to your motives. But I will hear no more of it. I
am going to bed."
"That's right, Weir," said Frank heartily. "Go to bed and think over it;
and I say, man, don't forget your prayers! I don't often do the
moral--don't go in for that sort of thing--but when I do, there's one
thing sure, that I mean it."
So Archie marched off to bed, and Frank sat alone by the table for
another hour or so, smiling to himself richly. There was nothing
vindictive in his nature; but, if revenge came in his way, it might as
well be good, and the thought of Archie's pillow reflections that night
was indescribably sweet to him. He felt a pleasant sense of power. He
looked down on Archie as on a very little boy whose strings he
pulled--as on a horse whom he had backed and bridled by sheer power of
intelligence, and whom he might ride to glory or the grave at pleasure.
Which was it to be? He lingered long, relishing the details of schemes
that he was too idle to pursue. Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted that
night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the
strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer
waned.
CHAPTER VIII
A NOCTURNAL VISIT
Kirstie had many causes of distress. More and more as we grow old--and
yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of
age--we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul. Only
thus, in the curtailment of our means, can we relieve the straitened cry
of the passion within us; only thus, in the bitter and sensitive shyness
of advancing years, can we maintain relations with those vivacious
figures of the young that still show before us and tend daily to become
no more than the moving wall-paper of life. Talk is the last link, the
last relation. But with the end of the conversation, when the voice
stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away, solitude falls
again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her "cannie hour at e'en";
she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you will, but a happy
ghost, in fields Elysian. And to her it was as if the whole world had
fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of amusements. And she
raged to know it. The effervescency of her passionate and irritable
nature rose within her at times to bursting point.
This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling. It
must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when
she had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when
she trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but
annulled. For, with the clairvoyance of a genuine love, she had pierced
the mystery that had so long embarrassed Frank. She was conscious, even
before it was carried out, even on that Sunday night when it began, of
an invasion of her rights; and a voice told her the invader's name.
Since then, by arts, by accident, by small things observed, and by the
general drift of Archie's humour, she had passed beyond all possibility
of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied,
she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of
the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality
of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she
have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall,
powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her own image,
for whom she would have strewed the bride-bed with delight; and now she
could have wept to see the ambition falsified. But the gods had
pronounced, and her doom was otherwise.
She lay tossing in bed that night, besieged with feverish thoughts.
There were dangerous matters pending, a battle was toward, over the fate
of which she hung in jealousy, sympathy, fear, and alternate loyalty and
disloyalty to either side. Now she was reincarnated in her niece, and
now in Archie. Now she saw, through the girl's eyes, the youth on his
knees to her, heard his persuasive instances with a deadly weakness, and
received his overmastering caresses. Anon, with a revulsion, her temper
raged to see such utmost favours of fortune and love squandered on a
brat of a girl, one of her own house, using her own name--a deadly
ingredient--and that "didna ken her ain mind an' was as black's your
hat." Now she trembled lest her deity should plead in vain, loving the
idea of success for him like a triumph of nature; anon, with returning
loyalty to her own family and sex, she trembled for Kirstie and the
credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day
over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her
last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she
saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then
come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as
a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so;
and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides of the grave.
And she looked forward over a waste of hours, and saw herself go on to
rage, and tremble, and be softened, and rage again, until the day came
and the labours of the day must be renewed.
Suddenly she heard feet on the stairs--his feet, and soon after the
sound of a window-sash flung open. She sat up with her heart beating. He
had gone to his room alone, and he had not gone to bed. She might again
have one of her night cracks; and at the entrancing prospect, a change
came over her mind; with the approach of this hope of pleasure, all the
baser metal became immediately obliterated from her thoughts. She rose,
all woman, and all the best of woman, tender, pitiful, hating the wrong,
loyal to her own sex--and all the weakest of that dear miscellany,
nourishing, cherishing next her soft heart, voicelessly flattering,
hopes that she would have died sooner than have acknowledged. She tore
off her nightcap, and her hair fell about her shoulders in profusion.
Undying coquetry awoke. By the faint light of her nocturnal rush, she
stood before the looking-glass, carried her shapely arms above her head,
and gathered up the treasures of her tresses. She was never backward to
admire herself; that kind of modesty was a stranger to her nature; and
she paused, struck with a pleased wonder at the sight. "Ye daft auld
wife!" she said, answering a thought that was not; and she blushed with
the innocent consciousness of a child. Hastily she did up the massive
and shining coils, hastily donned a wrapper, and with the rushlight in
her hand, stole into the hall. Below stairs she heard the clock ticking
the deliberate seconds, and Frank jingling with the decanters in the
dining-room. Aversion rose in her, bitter and momentary. "Nesty tippling
puggy!" she thought; and the next moment she had knocked guardedly at
Archie's door and was bidden enter.
Archie had been looking out into the ancient blackness, pierced here and
there with a rayless star; taking the sweet air of the moors and the
night into his bosom deeply; seeking, perhaps finding, peace after the
manner of the unhappy. He turned round as she came in, and showed her a
pale face against the window-frame.
"Is that you, Kirstie?" he asked. "Come in!"
"It's unco late, my dear," said Kirstie, affecting unwillingness.
"No, no," he answered, "not at all. Come in, if you want a crack. I am
not sleepy, God knows!"
She advanced, took a chair by the toilet-table and the candle, and set
the rushlight at her foot. Something--it might be in the comparative
disorder of her dress, it might be the emotion that now welled in her
bosom--had touched her with a wand of transformation, and she seemed
young with the youth of goddesses.
"Mr. Erchie," she began, "what's this that's come to ye?"
"I am not aware of anything that has come," said Archie, and blushed,
and repented bitterly that he had let her in.
"O, my dear, that'll no dae!" said Kirstie. "It's ill to blend the eyes
of love. O, Mr. Erchie, tak' a thocht ere it's ower late. Ye shouldna be
impatient o' the braws o' life, they'll a' come in their saison, like
the sun and the rain. Ye're young yet; ye've mony cantie years afore ye.
See and dinna wreck yersel' at the outset like sae mony ithers! Hae
patience--they telled me aye that was the owercome o' life--hae
patience, there's a braw day coming yet. Gude kens it never cam' to me;
and here I am, wi' nayther man nor bairn to ca' my ain, wearying a'
folks wi' my ill tongue, and you just the first, Mr. Erchie!"
"I have a difficulty in knowing what you mean," said Archie.
"Weel, and I'll tell ye," she said. "It's just this, that I'm feared.
I'm feared for ye, my dear. Remember, your faither is a hard man,
reaping where he hasna sowed and gaithering where he hasna strawed. It's
easy speakin', but mind! Ye'll have to look in the gurley face o'm,
where it's ill to look, and vain to look for mercy. Ye mind me o' a
bonny ship pitten oot into the black and gowsty seas--ye're a' safe
still, sittin' quait and crackin' wi' Kirstie in your lown chalmer; but
whaur will ye be the morn, and in whatten horror o' the fearsome
tempest, cryin' on the hills to cover ye?"
"Why, Kirstie, you're very enigmatical to-night--and very eloquent,"
Archie put in.
"And, my dear Mr. Erchie," she continued, with a change of voice, "ye
maunna think that I canna sympathise wi' ye. Ye maunna think that I
havena been young mysel'. Lang syne, when I was a bit lassie, no twenty
yet----" She paused and sighed. "Clean and caller, wi' a fit like the
hinney bee," she continued. "I was aye big and buirdly, ye maun
understand; a bonny figure o' a woman, though I say it that
suldna--built to rear bairns--braw bairns they suld hae been, and grand
I would hae likit it! But I was young, dear, wi' the bonny glint o'
youth in my e'en, and little I dreamed I'd ever be tellin' ye this, an
auld, lanely, rudas wife! Weel, Mr. Erchie, there was a lad cam'
courtin' me, as was but naetural. Mony had come before, and I would nane
o' them. But this yin had a tongue to wile the birds frae the lift and
the bees frae the foxglove bells. Deary me, but it's lang syne. Folk
have dee'd sinsyne and been buried, and are forgotten, and bairns been
born and got merrit and got bairns o' their ain. Sinsyne woods have been
plantit, and have grawn up and are bonny trees, and the joes sit in
their shadow; and sinsyne auld estates have changed hands, and there
have been wars and rumours of wars on the face of the earth. And here
I'm still--like an auld droopit craw--lookin' on and craikin'! But, Mr.
Erchie, do ye no think that I have mind o' it a' still? I was dwalling
then in my faither's house; and it's a curious thing that we were whiles
trysted in the Deil's Hags. And do ye no think that I have mind of the
bonny simmer days, the lang miles o' the bluid-red heather, the cryin'
o' the whaups, and the lad and the lassie that was trysted? Do ye no
think that I mind how the hilly sweetness ran about my hairt? Ay, Mr.
Erchie, I ken the way o' it--fine do I ken the way--how the grace o' God
takes them, like Paul of Tarsus, when they think it least, and drives
the pair o' them into a land which is like a dream, and the world and
the folks in 't are nae mair than clouds to the puir lassie, and heeven
nae mair than windle-straes, if she can but pleesure him! Until Tam
dee'd--that was my story," she broke off to say, "he dee'd, and I wasna
at the buryin'. But while he was here, I could take care o' mysel'. And
can yon puir lassie?"
Kirstie, her eyes shining with unshed tears, stretched out her hand
towards him appealingly; the bright and the dull gold of her hair
flashed and smouldered in the coils behind her comely head, like the
rays of an eternal youth; the pure colour had risen in her face; and
Archie was abashed alike by her beauty and her story. He came towards
her slowly from the window, took up her hand in his and kissed it.
"Kirstie," he said hoarsely, "you have misjudged me sorely. I have
always thought of her, I wouldna harm her for the universe, my woman!"
"Eh, lad, and that's easy sayin'," cried Kirstie, "but it's nane sae
easy doin'! Man, do ye no comprehend that it's God's wull we should be
blendit and glamoured, and have nae command over our ain members at a
time like that? My bairn," she cried, still holding his hand, "think o'
the puir lass! have pity upon her, Erchie! and O, be wise for twa! Think
o' the risk she rins! I have seen ye, and what's to prevent ithers? I
saw ye once in the Hags, in my ain howf, and I was wae to see ye
there--in pairt for the omen, for I think there's a weird on the
place--and in pairt for pure nakit envy and bitterness o' hairt. It's
strange ye should forgather there tae! God! but yon puir, thrawn, auld
Covenanter's seen a heap o' human natur' since he lookit his last on the
musket-barrels, if he never saw nane afore," she added, with a kind of
wonder in her eyes.
"I swear by my honour I have done her no wrong," said Archie. "I swear
by my honour and the redemption of my soul that there shall none be done
her. I have heard of this before. I have been foolish, Kirstie, but not
unkind, and, above all, not base."
"There's my bairn!" said Kirstie, rising. "I'll can trust ye noo, I'll
can gang to my bed wi' an easy hairt." And then she saw in a flash how
barren had been her triumph. Archie had promised to spare the girl, and
he would keep it; but who had promised to spare Archie? What was to be
the end of it? Over a maze of difficulties she glanced, and saw, at the
end of every passage, the flinty countenance of Hermiston. And a kind of
horror fell upon her at what she had done. She wore a tragic mask.
"Erchie, the Lord peety you dear, and peety me! I have buildit on this
foundation"--laying her hand heavily on his shoulder--"and buildit hie,
and pit my hairt in the buildin' of it. If the hale hypothec were to
fa', I think, laddie, I would dee! Excuse a daft wife that loves ye, and
that kenned your mither. And for His name's sake keep yersel' frae
inordinate desires; hand your heart in baith your hands, carry it canny
and laigh; dinna send it up like a bairn's kite into the collieshangie
o' the wunds! Mind, Maister Erchie dear, that this life's a'
disappointment, and a mouthfu' o' mools is the appointed end."
"Ay, but Kirstie, my woman, you're asking me ower much at last," said
Archie, profoundly moved, and lapsing into the broad Scots. "Ye're
asking what nae man can grant ye, what only the Lord of heaven can grant
ye if He see fit. Ay! And can even He? I can promise ye what I shall
do, and you can depend on that. But how I shall feel--my woman, that is
long past thinking of!"
They were both standing by now opposite each other. The face of Archie
wore the wretched semblance of a smile; hers was convulsed for a moment.
"Promise me ae thing," she cried, in a sharp voice. "Promise me ye'll
never do naething without telling me."
"No, Kirstie, I canna promise ye that," he replied. "I have promised
enough, God kens!"
"May the blessing of God lift and rest upon ye, dear!" she said.
"God bless ye, my old friend," said he.
CHAPTER IX
AT THE WEAVER'S STONE
It was late in the afternoon when Archie drew near by the hill path to
the Praying Weaver's Stone. The Hags were in shadow. But still, through
the gate of the Slap, the sun shot a last arrow, which sped far and
straight across the surface of the moss, here and there touching and
shining on a tussock, and lighted at length on the gravestone and the
small figure awaiting him there. The emptiness and solitude of the great
moors seemed to be concentred there, and Kirstie pointed out by that
finger of sunshine for the only inhabitant. His first sight of her was
thus excruciatingly sad, like a glimpse of a world from which all light,
comfort, and society were on the point of vanishing. And the next
moment, when she had turned her face to him and the quick smile had
enlightened it, the whole face of nature smiled upon him in her smile of
welcome. Archie's slow pace was quickened; his legs hasted to her though
his heart was hanging back. The girl, upon her side, drew herself
together slowly and stood up, expectant; she was all languor, her face
was gone white; her arms ached for him, her soul was on tip-toes. But he
deceived her, pausing a few steps away, not less white than herself, and
holding up his hand with a gesture of denial.
"No, Christina, not to-day," he said. "To-day I have to talk to you
seriously. Sit ye down, please, there where you were. Please!" he
repeated.
The revulsion of feeling in Christina's heart was violent. To have
longed and waited these weary hours for him, rehearsing her
endearments--to have seen him at last come--to have been ready there,
breathless, wholly passive, his to do what he would with--and suddenly
to have found herself confronted with a grey-faced, harsh
schoolmaster--it was too rude a shock. She could have wept, but pride
withheld her. She sat down on the stone, from which she had arisen, part
with the instinct of obedience, part as though she had been thrust
there. What was this? Why was she rejected? Had she ceased to please?
She stood here offering her wares, and he would none of them! And yet
they were all his! His to take and keep, not his to refuse though! In
her quick petulant nature, a moment ago on fire with hope, thwarted love
and wounded vanity wrought. The schoolmaster that there is in all men,
to the despair of all girls and most women, was now completely in
possession of Archie. He had passed a night of sermons, a day of
reflection; he had come wound up to do his duty; and the set mouth,
which in him only betrayed the effort of his will, to her seemed the
expression of an averted heart. It was the same with his constrained
voice and embarrassed utterance; and if so--if it was all over--the pang
of the thought took away from her the power of thinking.
He stood before her some way off. "Kirstie, there's been too much of
this. We've seen too much of each other." She looked up quickly and her
eyes contracted. "There's no good ever comes of these secret meetings.
They're not frank, not honest truly, and I ought to have seen it. People
have begun to talk; and it's not right of me. Do you see?"
"I see somebody will have been talking to ye," she said sullenly.
"They have--more than one of them," replied Archie.
"And whae were they?" she cried. "And what kind o' love do ye ca' that,
that's ready to gang round like a whirligig at folk talking? Do ye think
they havena talked to me?"
"Have they indeed?" said Archie, with a quick breath. "That is what I
feared. Who were they? Who has dare----?"
Archie was on the point of losing his temper.
As a matter of fact, not any one had talked to Christina on the matter;
and she strenuously repeated her own first question in a panic of
self-defence.
"Ah, well! what does it matter?" he said. "They were good folk that
wished well to us, and the great affair is that there are people
talking. My dear girl, we have to be wise. We must not wreck our lives
at the outset. They may be long and happy yet, and we must see to it,
Kirstie, like God's rational creatures and not like fool children. There
is one thing we must see to before all. You're worth waiting for,
Kirstie! worth waiting for a generation; it would be enough
reward."--And here he remembered the schoolmaster again, and very
unwisely took to following wisdom. "The first thing that we must see to
is that there shall be no scandal about for my father's sake. That would
ruin all; do ye no see that?"
Kirstie was a little pleased, there had been some show of warmth of
sentiment in what Archie had said last. But the dull irritation still
persisted in her bosom; with the aboriginal instinct, having suffered
herself, she wished to make Archie suffer.
And besides, there had come out the word she had always feared to hear
from his lips, the name of his father. It is not to be supposed that,
during so many days with a love avowed between them, some reference had
not been made to their conjoint future. It had in fact been often
touched upon, and from the first had been the sore point. Kirstie had
wilfully closed the eye of thought; she would not argue even with
herself; gallant, desperate little heart, she had accepted the command
of that supreme attraction like the call of fate, and marched blindfold
on her doom. But Archie, with his masculine sense of responsibility,
must reason; he must dwell on some future good, when the present good
was all in all to Kirstie; he must talk--and talk lamely, as necessity
drove him--of what was to be. Again and again he had touched on
marriage; again and again been driven back into indistinctness by a
memory of Lord Hermiston. And Kirstie had been swift to understand and
quick to choke down and smother the understanding; swift to leap up in
flame at a mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity and
her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also,
to recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of
these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded
madness, to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But these
unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his
memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well
uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up and dashed down
again bleeding. The recurrence of the subject forced her, for however
short a time, to open her eyes on what she did not wish to see; and it
had invariably ended in another disappointment. So now again, at the
mere wind of its coming, at the mere mention of his father's name--who
might seem indeed to have accompanied them in their whole moorland
courtship, an awful figure in a wig with an ironical and bitter smile,
present to guilty consciousness--she fled from it head down.
"Ye havena told me yet," she said, "who was it spoke?"
"Your aunt for one," said Archie.
"Auntie Kirstie?" she cried. "And what do I care for my Auntie Kirstie?"
"She cares a great deal for her niece," replied Archie, in kind reproof.
"Troth, and it's the first I've heard of it," retorted the girl.
"The question here is not who it is, but what they say, what they have
noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmaster. "That is what we have to think
of in self-defence."
"Auntie Kirstie, indeed! A bitter, thrawn auld maid that's fomented
trouble in the country before I was born, and will be doing it still, I
daur say, when I'm deid! It's in her nature; it's as natural for her as
it's for a sheep to eat."
"Pardon me, Kirstie, she was not the only one," interposed Archie. "I
had two warnings, two sermons, last night, both most kind and
considerate. Had you been there, I promise you you would have grat, my
dear! And they opened my eyes. I saw we were going a wrong way."
"Who was the other one?" Kirstie demanded.
By this time Archie was in the condition of a hunted beast. He had come,
braced and resolute; he was to trace out a line of conduct for the pair
of them in a few cold, convincing sentences; he had now been there some
time, and he was still staggering round the outworks and undergoing what
he felt to be a savage cross-examination.
"Mr. Frank!" she cried. "What nex', I would like to ken?"
"He spoke most kindly and truly."
"What like did he say?"
"I am not going to tell you; you have nothing to do with that," cried
Archie, startled to find he had admitted so much.
"O, I have naething to do with it!" she repeated, springing to her feet.
"A'body at Hermiston's free to pass their opinions upon me, but I have
naething to do wi' it! Was this at prayers like? Did ye ca' the grieve
into the consultation? Little wonder if a'body's talking, when ye make
a'body yer confidants! But as you say, Mr. Weir, most kindly, most
considerately, most truly, I'm sure--I have naething to do with it. And
I think I'll better be going. I'll be wishing you good evening, Mr.
Weir." And she made him a stately curtsey, shaking as she did so from
head to foot, with the barren ecstasy of temper.
Poor Archie stood dumbfounded. She had moved some steps away from him
before he recovered the gift of articulate speech.
"Kirstie!" he cried. "O, Kirstie woman!"
There was in his voice a ring of appeal, a clang of mere astonishment
that showed the schoolmaster was vanquished.
She turned round on him. "What do ye Kirstie me for?" she retorted.
"What have ye to do wi' me? Gang to your ain freends and deave them!"
He could only repeat the appealing "Kirstie!"
"Kirstie, indeed!" cried the girl, her eyes blazing in her white face.
"My name is Miss Christina Elliott, I would have ye to ken, and I daur
ye to ca' me out of it. If I canna get love, I'll have respect, Mr.
Weir. I'm come of decent people, and I'll have respect. What have I done
that ye should lightly me? What have I done? What have I done? O, what
have I done?" and her voice rose upon the third repetition. "I thocht--I
thocht--I thocht I was sae happy!" and the first sob broke from her like
the paroxysm of some mortal sickness.
Archie ran to her. He took the poor child in his arms, and she nestled
to his breast as to a mother's, and clasped him in hands that were
strong like vices. He felt her whole body shaken by the throes of
distress, and had pity upon her beyond speech. Pity, and at the same
time a bewildered fear of this explosive engine in his arms, whose works
he did not understand, and yet had been tampering with. There arose from
before him the curtains of boyhood, and he saw for the first time the
ambiguous face of woman as she is. In vain he looked back over the
interview; he saw not where he had offended. It seemed unprovoked, a
wilful convulsion of brute nature....
SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S NOTE
With the words last printed, "a wilful convulsion of brute nature," the
romance of "Weir of Hermiston" breaks off. They were dictated, I
believe, on the very morning of the writer's sudden seizure and death.
"Weir of Hermiston" thus remains in the work of Stevenson what "Edwin
Drood" is in the work of Dickens or "Denis Duval" in that of Thackeray:
or rather it remains relatively more, for if each of those fragments
holds an honourable place among its author's writings, among Stevenson's
the fragment of "Weir" holds, at least to my mind, certainly the
highest.
Readers may be divided in opinion on the question whether they would or
they would not wish to hear more of the intended course of the story and
destinies of the characters. To some, silence may seem best, and that
the mind should be left to its own conjectures as to the sequel, with
the help of such indications as the text affords. I confess that this is
the view which has my sympathy. But since others, and those almost
certainly a majority, are anxious to be told all they can, and since
editors and publishers join in the request, I can scarce do otherwise
than comply. The intended argument, then, so far as it was known at the
time of the writer's death to his step-daughter and devoted amanuensis,
Mrs. Strong, was nearly as follows:--
* * * * *
Archie persists in his good resolution of avoiding further conduct
compromising to young Kirstie's good name. Taking advantage of the
situation thus created, and of the girl's unhappiness and wounded
vanity, Frank Innes pursues his purpose of seduction; and Kirstie,
though still caring for Archie in her heart, allows herself to become
Frank's victim. Old Kirstie is the first to perceive something amiss
with her, and believing Archie to be the culprit, accuses him, thus
making him aware for the first time that mischief has happened. He does
not at once deny the charge, but seeks out and questions young Kirstie,
who confesses the truth to him; and he, still loving her, promises to
protect and defend her in her trouble. He then has an interview with
Frank Innes on the moor, which ends in a quarrel, and in Archie killing
Frank beside the Weaver's Stone. Meanwhile the Four Black Brothers,
having become aware of their sister's betrayal, are bent on vengeance
against Archie as her supposed seducer. But their vengeance is
forestalled by his arrest for the murder of Frank. He is tried before
his own father, the Lord Justice-Clerk, found guilty, and condemned to
death. Meanwhile the elder Kirstie, having discovered from the girl how
matters really stand, informs her nephews of the truth; and they, in a
great revulsion of feeling in Archie's favour, determine on an action
after the ancient manner of their house. They gather a following, and
after a great fight break the prison where Archie lies confined, and
rescue him. He and young Kirstie thereafter escape to America. But the
ordeal of taking part in the trial of his own son has been too much for
the Lord Justice-Clerk, who dies of the shock. "I do not know," adds the
amanuensis, "what becomes of old Kirstie, but that character grew and
strengthened so in the writing that I am sure he had some dramatic
destiny for her."
* * * * *
The plan of every imaginative work is subject, of course, to change
under the artist's hand as he carries it out; and not merely the
character of the elder Kirstie, but other elements of the design no
less, might well have deviated from the lines originally traced. It
seems certain, however, that the next stage in the relations of Archie
and the younger Kirstie would have been as above foreshadowed; and this
conception of the lover's unconventional chivalry and unshaken devotion
to his mistress after her fault is very characteristic of the writer's
mind. The vengeance to be taken on the seducer beside the Weaver's Stone
is prepared for in the first words of the Introduction; and in the
spring of 1894 the author rehearsed in conversation with a visitor (Mr.
Sidney Lysaght) a scene where the girl was to confess to her lover in
prison that she was with child by the man he had killed. The situation
and fate of the judge, confronting like a Brutus, but unable to survive,
the duty of sending his own son to the gallows, seem clearly to have
been destined to furnish the climax and essential tragedy of the tale.
How this last circumstance was to have been brought about, within the
limits of legal usage and possibility, seems hard to conjecture; but it
was a point to which the author had evidently given careful
consideration. Mrs. Strong says simply that the Lord Justice-Clerk, like
an old Roman, condemns his son to death; but I am assured on the best
legal authority of Scotland that no judge, however powerful either by
character or office, could have insisted on presiding at the trial of a
near kinsman of his own. The Lord Justice-Clerk was head of the criminal
justiciary of the country; he might have insisted on his right of being
present on the bench when his son was tried; but he would never have
been allowed to preside or to pass sentence. Now in a letter of
Stevenson's to Mr. Baxter, of October 1892, I find him asking for
materials in terms which seem to indicate that he knew this quite
well:--"I wish Pitcairn's 'Criminal Trials,' _quam primum_. Also an
absolutely correct text of the Scots judiciary oath. Also, in case
Pitcairn does not come down late enough, I wish as full a report as
possible of a Scots murder trial between 1790-1820. Understand, _the
fullest possible_. Is there any book which would guide me to the
following facts? The Justice-Clerk tries some people capitally on
circuit. Certain evidence cropping up, the charge is transferred to the
Justice-Clerk's own son. Of course in the next trial the Justice-Clerk
is excluded, and the case is called before the Lord Justice-General.
Where would this trial have to be? I fear in Edinburgh, which would not
suit my view. Could it be again at the circuit town?" The point was
referred to a quondam fellow-member with Stevenson of the Edinburgh
Speculative Society, Mr. Graham Murray, the present Lord Advocate for
Scotland, whose reply was to the effect that there would be no
difficulty in making the new trial take place at the circuit town; that
it would have to be held there in spring or autumn, before two Lords of
Justiciary; and that the Lord Justice-General would have nothing to do
with it, this title being at the date in question only a nominal one
held by a layman (which is no longer the case). On this Stevenson
writes, "Graham Murray's note _re_ the venue was highly satisfactory,
and did me all the good in the world." The terms of his inquiry imply
clearly that he intended other persons before Archie to have fallen
under suspicion of the murder (what other persons?); and also--doubtless
in order to make the rescue by the Black Brothers possible--that he
wanted Archie to be imprisoned not in Edinburgh but in the circuit town.
Can it have been that Lord Hermiston's part was to have been limited to
presiding at the _first_ trial, where the persons wrongly suspected were
to have been judged, and to directing that the law should take its
course when evidence incriminating his own son was unexpectedly brought
forward?
Whether the final escape and union of Archie and Christina would have
proved equally essential to the plot may perhaps to most readers seem
questionable. They may rather feel that a tragic destiny is foreshadowed
from the beginning for all concerned, and is inherent in the very
conditions of the tale. But on this point, and other matters of general
criticism connected with it, I find an interesting discussion by the
author himself in his correspondence. Writing to Mr. J. M. Barrie,
under date November 1, 1892, and criticising that author's famous story
of "The Little Minister," Stevenson says:--
"Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully
unconscientious.... 'The Little Minister' ought to have ended badly; we
all know it _did_, and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace
and good feeling with which you have lied about it. If you had told the
truth, I for one could never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and
written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably
true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord, in
art. If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from
the beginning. Now, your book began to end well. You let yourself fall
in love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets. Once you had done
that, your honour was committed: at the cost of truth to life you were
bound to save them. It is the blot on 'Richard Feverel,' for instance,
that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in
this case, there is worse behind, for the ill ending does not inherently
issue from the plot--the story had, in fact, ended well after the great
last interview between Richard and Lucy--and the blind, illogical bullet
which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to
do with a room into whose open window it comes buzzing. It might have so
happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain
our readers. I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind
about my Braxfield story. Braxfield--only his name is Hermiston--has a
son who is condemned to death; plainly there is a fine tempting fitness
about this; and I meant he was to hang. But on considering my minor
characters, I saw there were five people who would--in a sense, who
must--break prison and attempt his rescue. They are capable hardy folks
too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not then? Why should
not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he
could, with his--but soft! I will not betray my secret nor my
heroine...."
To pass, now, from the question how the story would have ended to the
question how it originated and grew in the writer's mind. The character
of the hero, Weir of Hermiston, is avowedly suggested by the historical
personality of Robert Macqueen, Lord Braxfield. This famous judge has
been for generations the subject of a hundred Edinburgh tales and
anecdotes. Readers of Stevenson's essay on the Raeburn exhibition, in
"Virginibus Puerisque," will remember how he is fascinated by Raeburn's
portrait of Braxfield, even as Lockhart had been fascinated by a
different portrait of the same worthy sixty years before (see "Peter's
Letters to His Kinsfolk"); nor did his interest in the character
diminish in later life.
Again, the case of a judge involved by the exigencies of his office in a
strong conflict between public duty and private interest or affection,
was one which had always attracted and exercised Stevenson's
imagination. In the days when he and Mr. Henley were collaborating with
a view to the stage, Mr. Henley once proposed a plot founded on the
story of Mr. Justice Harbottle in Sheridan Le Fanu's "In a Glass
Darkly," in which the wicked judge goes headlong _per fas et nefas_ to
his object of getting the husband of his mistress hanged. Some time
later Stevenson and his wife together drafted a play called _The Hanging
Judge_. In this, the title character is tempted for the first time in
his life to tamper with the course of justice, in order to shield his
wife from persecution by a former husband who reappears after being
supposed dead. Bulwer's novel of "Paul Clifford," with its final
situation of the worldly-minded judge, Sir William Brandon, learning
that the highwayman whom he is in the act of sentencing is his own son,
and dying of the knowledge, was also well known to Stevenson, and
probably counted for something in the suggestion of the present story.
Once more, the difficulties often attending the relation of father and
son in actual life had pressed heavily on Stevenson's mind and
conscience from the days of his youth, when in obeying the law of his
own nature he had been constrained to disappoint, distress, and for a
time to be much misunderstood by, a father whom he justly loved and
admired with all his heart. Difficulties of this kind he had already
handled in a lighter vein once or twice in fiction--as for instance in
"The Story of a Lie," "The Misadventures of John Nicholson," and "The
Wrecker"--before he grappled with them in the acute and tragic phase in
which they occur in the present story.
These three elements, then, the interest of the historical personality
of Lord Braxfield, the problems and emotions arising from a violent
conflict between duty and nature in a judge, and the difficulties due to
incompatibility and misunderstanding between father and son, lie at the
foundations of the present story. To touch on minor matters, it is
perhaps worth notice, as Mr. Henley reminds me, that the name of Weir
had from of old a special significance for Stevenson's imagination, from
the horrible and true tale of the burning in Edinburgh of Major Weir,
the warlock, and his sister. Another name, that of the episodical
personage of Mr. Torrance the minister, is borrowed direct from life, as
indeed are the whole figure and its surroundings--kirkyard, kirk, and
manse--down even to the black thread mittens: witness the following
passage from a letter of the early seventies:--"I've been to church and
am not depressed--a great step. It was at that beautiful church" [of
Glencorse in the Pentlands, three miles from his father's country house
at Swanston]. "It is a little cruciform place, with a steep slate roof.
The small kirkyard is full of old gravestones; one of a Frenchman from
Dunkerque, I suppose he died prisoner in the military prison hard by.
And one, the most pathetic memorial I ever saw: a poor school-slate, in
a wooden frame, with the inscription cut into it evidently by the
father's own hand. In church, old Mr. Torrance preached, over eighty and
a relic of times forgotten, with his black thread gloves and mild old
face." A side hint for a particular trait in the character of Mrs. Weir
we can trace in some family traditions concerning the writer's own
grandmother, who is reported to have valued piety much more than
efficiency in her domestic servants. I know of no original for that new
and admirable incarnation of the eternal feminine in the elder Kirstie.
The little that Stevenson says about her himself is in a letter written
a few days before his death to Mr. Gosse. The allusions are to the
various views and attitudes of people in regard to middle age, and are
suggested by Mr. Gosse's volume of poems, "In Russet and Silver." "It
seems rather funny," he writes, "that this matter should come up just
now, as I am at present engaged in treating a severe case of middle age
in one of my stories, 'The Justice-Clerk.' The case is that of a woman,
and I think I am doing her justice. You will be interested, I believe,
to see the difference in our treatments. 'Secreta Vitae' [the title of
one of Mr. Gosse's poems] comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie."
From the quality of the midnight scene between her and Archie, we may
judge what we have lost in those later scenes where she was to have
taxed him with the fault that was not his--to have presently learned his
innocence from the lips of his supposed victim--to have then vindicated
him to her kinsmen and fired them to the action of his rescue. The scene
of the prison-breaking here planned by Stevenson would have gained
interest (as will already have occurred to readers) from comparison with
the two famous precedents in Scott, the Porteous mob and the breaking of
Portanferry gaol.
The best account of Stevenson's methods of imaginative work is in the
following sentences from a letter of his own to Mr. W. Craibe Angus of
Glasgow:--"I am still 'a slow study,' and sit for a long while silent on
my eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your
subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there
your stuff is--good or bad." The several elements above noted having
been left to work for many years in his mind, it was in the autumn of
1892 that he was moved to "take the lid off and look in,"--under the
influence, it would seem, of a special and overmastering wave of that
feeling for the romance of Scottish scenery and character which was at
all times so strong in him, and which his exile did so much to
intensify. I quote again from his letter to Mr. Barrie on November 1st
in that year:--"It is a singular thing that I should live here in the
South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my
imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills
from which we come. I have finished 'David Balfour,' I have another book
on the stocks, 'The Young Chevalier,' which is to be part in France and
part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince Charlie about the year 1749;
and now what have I done but begun a third, which is to be all moorland
together, and is to have for a centre-piece a figure that I think you
will appreciate--that of the immortal Braxfield. Braxfield himself is my
grand premier--or since you are so much involved in the British drama,
let me say my heavy lead."
Writing to me at the same date he makes the same announcement more
briefly, with a list of the characters and an indication of the scene
and date of the story. To Mr. Baxter he writes a month later, "I have a
novel on the stocks to be called 'The Justice-Clerk.' It is pretty
Scotch; the grand premier is taken from Braxfield (O, by the by, send me
Cockburn's 'Memorials'), and some of the story is, well, queer. The
heroine is seduced by one man, and finally disappears with the other man
who shot him.... Mind you, I expect 'The Justice-Clerk' to be my
masterpiece. My Braxfield is already a thing of beauty and a joy for
ever, and so far as he has gone far my best character." From the last
extract it appears that he had already at this date drafted some of the
earlier chapters of the book. He also about the same time composed the
dedication to his wife, who found it pinned to her bed-curtains one
morning on awaking. It was always his habit to keep several books in
progress at the same time, turning from one to another as the fancy took
him, and finding relief in the change of labour; and for many months
after the date of this letter, first illness,--then a voyage to
Auckland,--then work on "The Ebb-Tide," on a new tale called "St. Ives,"
which was begun during an attack of influenza, and on his projected book
of family history,--prevented his making any continuous progress with
"Weir." In August 1893 he says he has been recasting the beginning. A
year later, still only the first four or five chapters had been drafted.
Then, in the last weeks of his life, he attacked the task again, in a
sudden heat of inspiration, and worked at it ardently and without
interruption until the end came. No wonder if during these weeks he was
sometimes aware of a tension of the spirit difficult to sustain. "How
can I keep this pitch?" he is reported to have said after finishing one
of the chapters; and all the world knows how that frail organism,
overtaxed so long, in fact betrayed him in mid effort.
With reference to the speech and manners of the Hanging Judge himself:
that they are not a whit exaggerated, in comparison with what is
recorded of his historic prototype, Lord Braxfield, is certain. The
_locus classicus_ in regard to this personage is in Lord Cockburn's
"Memorials of his Time." "Strong built and dark, with rough eyebrows,
powerful eyes, threatening lips, and a low growling voice, he was like a
formidable blacksmith. His accent and dialect were exaggerated Scotch;
his language, like his thoughts, short, strong, and conclusive.
Illiterate and without any taste for any refined enjoyment, strength of
understanding, which gave him power without cultivation, only encouraged
him to a more contemptuous disdain of all natures less coarse than his
own. It may be doubted if he was ever so much in his element as when
tauntingly repelling the last despairing claim of a wretched culprit,
and sending him to Botany Bay or the gallows with an insulting jest. Yet
this was not from cruelty, for which he was too strong and too jovial,
but from cherished coarseness." Readers, nevertheless, who are at all
acquainted with the social history of Scotland will hardly have failed
to make the observation that Braxfield's is an extreme case of
eighteenth-century manners, as he himself was an eighteenth-century
personage (he died in 1799, in his seventy-eighth year); and that for
the date in which the story is cast (1814) such manners are somewhat of
an anachronism. During the generation contemporary with the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars--or, to put it another way, the
generation that elapsed between the days when Scott roamed the country
as a High School and University student and those when he settled in the
fulness of fame and prosperity at Abbotsford,--or again (the allusions
will appeal to readers of the admirable Galt) during the interval
between the first and the last provostry of Bailie Pawkie in the borough
of Gudetown, or between the earlier and final ministrations of Mr.
Balwhidder in the parish of Dalmailing,--during this period a great
softening had taken place in Scottish manners generally, and in those of
the Bar and Bench not least. "Since the death of Lord Justice-Clerk
Macqueen of Braxfield," says Lockhart, writing about 1817, "the whole
exterior of judicial deportment has been quite altered." A similar
criticism may probably hold good on the picture of border life contained
in the chapter concerning the Four Black Brothers of Cauldstaneslap,
namely, that it rather suggests the ways of an earlier generation; nor
have I any clue to the reasons which led Stevenson to choose this
particular date, in the year preceding Waterloo, for a story which, in
regard to some of its features at least, might seem more naturally
placed some quarter or even half a century earlier.
If the reader seeks, further, to know whether the scenery of Hermiston
can be identified with any one special place familiar to the writer's
early experience, the answer, I think, must be in the negative. Rather
it is distilled from a number of different haunts and associations among
the moorlands of southern Scotland. In the dedication and in a letter
to me he indicates the Lammermuirs as the scene of his tragedy. And Mrs.
Stevenson (his mother) told me that she thought he was inspired by
recollections of a visit paid in boyhood to an uncle living at a remote
farmhouse in that district called Overshiels, in the parish of Stow. But
though he may have thought of the Lammermuirs in the first instance, we
have already found him drawing his description of the kirk and manse
from another haunt of his youth, namely, Glencorse in the Pentlands;
while passages in chapters v. and viii. point explicitly to a third
district, that is, Upper Tweeddale, with the country stretching thence
towards the wells of Clyde. With this country also holiday rides and
excursions from Peebles had made him familiar as a boy: and on the whole
it is this which best answers the geographical indications of the story.
Some of the place-names are clearly not meant to furnish literal
indications. The Spango, for instance, is a water running, I believe,
not into the Tweed but into the Nith. Crossmichael as the name of a town
is borrowed from Galloway; but it may be taken to all intents and
purposes as standing for Peebles, where I am told by Sir George Douglas
there existed in the early years of the century a well-known club of the
same character as that described in the story. Lastly, the name
Hermiston itself is taken from a farm on the Water of Ale, between
Ettrick and Teviotdale, and close to the proper country of the Elliotts.
But it is with the general and essential that the artist deals, and
questions of strict historical perspective or local definition are
beside the mark in considering his work. Nor will any reader expect, or
be grateful for, comment in this place on matters which are more
properly to the point--on the seizing and penetrating power of the
author's ripened art as exhibited in the foregoing pages, his vital
poetry of vision and magic of presentment. Surely no son of Scotland has
died leaving with his last breath a worthier tribute to the land he
loved.
S. C.
GLOSSARY
ae, _one_.
antinomian, _one of a sect which holds that under the gospel
dispensation the moral law is not obligatory_.
Auld Hornie, _the Devil_.
ballant, _ballad_.
bauchles, _brogues, old shoes_.
bauld, _bold_.
bees in their bonnet, _eccentricities_.
birling, _whirling_.
black-a-vised, _dark-complexioned_.
bonnet-laird, cock-laird, _small landed proprietor, yeoman_.
bool, _ball, technically marble, here = sugar-plum_.
brae, _rising ground_.
brig, _bridge_.
buff, play buff on, _to make a fool of, to deceive_.
burn, _stream_.
butt end, _end of a cottage_.
byre, _cow-house_.
ca', _drive_.
caller, _fresh_.
canna, _cannot_.
canny, _careful, shrewd_.
cantie, _cheerful_.
carline, _old woman_.
cauld, _cold_.
chalmer, _chamber_.
claes, _clothes_.
clamjamfry, _crowd_.
clavers, _idle talk_.
cock-laird. _See_ bonnet-laird.
collieshangie, _turmoil_.
crack, _to converse_.
cuddy, _donkey_.
cuist, _cast_.
cutty, _jade, also used playfully = brat_.
daft, _mad, frolicsome_.
dander, _to saunter_.
danders, _cinders_.
daurna, _dare not_.
deave, _to deafen_.
denty, _dainty_.
dirdum, _vigour_.
disjaskit, _worn out, disreputable-looking_.
doer, _law agent_.
dour, _hard_.
drumlie, _dark_.
dule-tree, _the tree of lamentation, the hanging tree_.
dunting, _knocking_.
dwaibly, _infirm, rickety_.
earrand, _errand_.
ettercap, _vixen_.
fechting, _fighting_.
feck, _quantity, portion_.
feckless, _feeble, powerless_.
fell, _strong and fiery_.
fey, _unlike yourself, strange, as if urged on by fate, or as persons
are observed to be in the hour of approaching death or disaster_.
fit, _foot_.
flit, _to depart_.
flyped, _turned, up, turned inside out_.
forbye, in _addition to_.
forgather, _to fall in with_.
fower, _four_.
füshionless, _pithless, weak_.
fyle, _to soil, to defile_.
fylement, _obloquy, defilement_.
gaed, _went_.
gang, _to go_.
gey an, _very_.
gigot, _leg of mutton_.
girzie, _lit. diminutive of Grizel, here a playful nickname_.
glaur, _mud_.
glint, _glance, sparkle_.
gloaming, _twilight_.
glower, _to scowl_.
gobbets, _small lumps_.
gowden, _golden_.
gowsty, _gusty_.
grat, _wept_.
grieve, _land-steward_.
guddle, _to catch fish with the hands by groping under the stones or
banks_.
guid, _good_.
gumption, _common-sense, judgment_.
gurley, _stormy, surly_.
gyte, _beside itself_.
hae, _have, take_.
haddit, _held_.
hale, _whole_.
heels-ower-hurdie, _heels over head_.
hinney, _honey_.
hirstle, _to bustle_.
hizzie, _wench_.
howe, _hollow_.
howf, _haunt_.
hunkered, _crouched_.
hypothec, _lii. in Scots law the furnishings of a house, and formerly
the produce and stock of a farm hypothecated by law to the landlord
as security for rent; colloquially "the whole structure," "the whole
concern."_
idleset, _idleness_.
infeftment, a _term in Scots law originally synonymous with
investiture_.
jaud, _jade_.
jeely-piece, _a slice of bread and jelly_.
jennipers, _juniper_.
jo, _sweetheart_.
justifeed, _executed, made the victim of justice_.
jyle, _jail_.
kebbuck, _cheese_.
ken, _to know_.
kenspeckle, _conspicuous_.
kilted, _tucked up_.
kyte, _belly_.
laigh, _low_.
laird, _landed proprietor_.
lane, _alone_.
lave, _rest, remainder_.
linking, _tripping_.
lown, _lonely, still_.
lynn, _cataract_.
Lyon King of Arms, _the chief of the Court of Heraldry in Scotland_.
macers, _officers of the supreme court_. [_Cf._ "Guy Mannering," last
chapter.]
maun, _must_.
menseful, _of good manners_.
mirk, _dark_.
misbegowk, _deception, disappointment_.
mools, _mould, earth_.
muckle, _much, great, big_.
my lane, _by myself_.
nowt, _black cattle_.
palmering, _walking infirmly_.
panel, in _Scots law, the accused person in a criminal action, the
prisoner_.
peel, _fortified watch-tower_.
plew-stilts, _plough-handles_.
policy, _ornamental grounds of a country mansion_.
puddock, _frog_.
quean, _wench_.
rair, _to roar_.
riffraff, _rabble_.
risping, _grating_.
rout, rowt, _to roar, to rant_.
rowth, _abundance_.
rudas, _haggard old woman_.
runt, _an old cow past breeding; opprobriously, an old woman_.
sab, _sob_.
sanguishes, _sandwiches_.
sasine, _in Scots law, the act of giving legal possession of feudal
property, or, colloquially, the deed by which that possession is
proved_.
sclamber, _to scramble_.
sculduddery, _impropriety, grossness_.
session, _the Court of Session, the supreme court of Scotland_.
shauchling, _shuffling, slipshod_.
shoo, _to chase gently_.
siller, _money_.
sinsyne, _since then_.
skailing, _dispersing_.
skelp, _slap_.
skirling, _screaming_.
skreigh-o'-day, _daybreak_.
snash, _abuse_.
sneisty, _supercilious_.
sooth, _to hum_.
sough, _sound, murmur_.
Spec., _The Speculative Society, a debating Society connected with
Edinburgh University_.
speir, to _ask_.
speldering, _sprawling_.
splairge, _to splash_.
spunk, _spirit, fire_.
steik, _to shut_.
stirk, _a young bullock_.
stockfish, _hard, savourless_.
sugar-bool, _sugar-plum_.
syne, _since, then_.
tawpie, _a slow foolish slut, also used playfully = monkey_.
telling you, _a good thing for you_.
thir, _these_.
thrawn, _cross-grained_.
toon, _farm, town_.
two-names, _local sobriquets in addition to patronymic_.
tyke, _dog_.
unchancy, _unlucky_.
unco, _strange, extraordinary, very_.
upsitten, _impertinent_.
vennel, _alley, lane_. The Vennel, _a narrow lane in Edinburgh running
out of the Grassmarket_.
vivers, _victuals_.
wac, _sad, unhappy_.
waling, _choosing_.
warrandise, _warranty_.
waur, _worse_.
weird, _destiny_.
whammle, _to upset_.
whaup, _curlew_.
whiles, _sometimes_.
windlestrae, _crested dog's-tail grass_.
wund, _wind_.
yin, _one_.
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