Читать книгу The Island Providence - Frederick Niven - Страница 11

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The din of the sea drowned their voices. From the top of the little pyramid of granite that juts up, sentinel (or sphinx-like observer) over the east end of the cove, Uncle strove to hail the wreckers. Upcott was anxious to know, but did not know, could not read on the old man's face, whether or no Uncle was afraid. There was a wild look on that Socrates-mask; the eyes were bright as eyes of one in a fever and shone with a red light in the very whites of them. But afraid? John could not tell. Afraid or unafraid they were to go through with the business.

Leaning against the wall of that little natural fort Uncle cried and halloed, but the wind snatched his words away with the sound of the wash and the roar and the explosion of the seas, and his cries were quenched in the foam-wet air. At last he was perceived, if not heard, by one, then by another. His wind-blown, gesticulating figure, once descried, became a source of curiosity. Up from the shingle came climbing one and then, on his heels, others. They were anxious to know the cause of the old dotterel's excitement and why he stood there like a lively scarecrow with fluttering arms. Even those who had recollection of his condemnation of these wreckings had no guess at the business that brought Uncle thither. They had no idea of the madness of the old man and the high folly of the youth by his side. Perhaps the old man had sighted other spoil elsewhere, other sea offerings, and had come to inform them: he was mad enough for that! He was the kind of man to do others a good turn! Half expectant of some such folly they clambered. The first man came within cry, through the sea's din.

"What's ado?" came up his voice, thin and quick and sharp, a kind of a pin-prick in the gale.

"I say," cried Uncle, "that if you do not lend a hand to assist these seamen we shall—open fire on you!"

"Eh?"

Uncle repeated. The man had not heard amiss, though there were grounds for him fancying he had done so. He stared. Then he laughed, bellowed, loosened hold of the wild, agitated bush to which he clung, and turned, slithering back to those who followed. And presently, dotted on the cliff side, were the discs of a score of gibbering faces turned up to the rock summit. The faces were a-grin, red tongues showing as the lusty throats bayed. Uncle was furious. He had a dislike of mocking laughter falling on his supremest moment, of his glory being greeted with derision. He raised his fowling-piece and pointed to the trigger, pointed to the breaking wreck where still could be seen three men clinging—assuredly between the devil and the deep sea. Then these two madmen, the young and the old, saw the seaman on the rock, torn away, clutching again, torn away. On the high verge of the pebbles was laughter, but only John Upcott saw its cause. The old man, in his pitch of excitement and fury, thought all the laughter was for him. The sound of it was inaudible; but the faces showed, the heads thrown back; in some places the bodies were a-sway with convulsive merriment.

"I shall go down," cried Uncle in John's wet face.

Then he saw where John's gaze was directed tensely, looked thence likewise and his ugly and lovable mouth puckered and bulged. He looked quick again to the throng on the beach. Yes; he was forgotten. The laughter was for the baffled seaman. So a new rage, a rage not of emotion but of mind, filled him.

All around that little amphitheatre there was a pause in the toil to laugh at a man's struggle with powers beyond him!

"I shall go down!" roared Uncle with new force, and made to clamber over his bastion.

"It would be the death of you," began John.

"I care not!" cried Uncle.

"And do no good," shouted Upcott.

Uncle frowned into the wind. "There is nothing left us but to fire a shot and let them see we mean what we say. Do you signal to them, point to the men there, signal to them to help. Let us both fire and then signal to them. That fellow who came up will understand. He will explain. If they laugh again—Ah, God! that other man is off. He is lost!"

For just then there was visible the lean man battling with the waves, borne on a crest, flung from the rock to which he had clung close as a limpet and so far unperceived from the cliff. Then he leapt shoreward, clutched a rock. The wave swung back and he leapt, in a wild endeavour, for the pebbles and ran tottering.

"Ah, my God!" cried Uncle, and his hand fumbled on his musket; for as he leant over his bastion, peering on the scene, he saw the newcomer thrust aside, saw him fall. In his eagerness, watching the man to see him rise, Uncle tarried. But John Upcott, who had been passing through all stages of distress, from cold fear to twitching resolution, from bravery with relapses to fear and fresh recoveries, and anon taken with a kind of hilarity as of the damned, so that he laughed to himself as they may, or as all might at a hideous dream, on awakening—John Upcott saw nothing but the pathetic and majestic now. He saw the broken man on the shingle drawn up in his supreme contempt, centre of the world. The crowd on the beach was a haze, the cliffs were but a scenic background. To his dying day he could picture that scene so; and always the sinking splendour of the sailor was centre of the scene.

He threw up his gun as steady as the rock against which he leant, laid his cheek to the damp stock, cuddled the butt to his shoulder. At that very moment he felt a glorious sense of the fitness of what he was doing, the manner in which it was being done. Was it not proper that the unwieldy wretch who felled the seaman should be shot in the back? It was there that John's shot entered. The smoke of the charge flew in a gust back in his face; but he saw only that his aim had been true. The hulking coward was down, sprawled on the beach in the attitude of death. John looked on the picture he had changed as one looks on the kaleidoscope that he turns. And it was good.

For a moment the picture had been magnificent, a brief moment; then it had been hideous; then it could not be magnificent again, the hideous having entered; but it was fitting. It was not hideous. Justice had been done. John Upcott, musket in hand on the high rock, had a thrill as of the angel at Eden's gate. The picture had been spoiled, but the sword was drawn. It was all that could be done, things being as they are.

Then the faces were again turned upward toward the two madmen, and now John Upcott surveyed the scene with impeccable clarity of vision. The flying spindrift was in his eyes but his brows were puckered in concentration. There was no thought of retreat in his mind. The first excitement also was gone, the excitement that had made his neck to twitch and the reins of his legs to quiver. He looked down on the faces with a great vindictive calm. Mind had taken control of will so that he even pictured himself and Uncle in the scene—it was beyond himself. The whole thing was a picture to him and the mind of John Upcott was busy planning and explaining to John Upcott's body how to conduct itself in this perilous pass.

He saw a fowling-piece aimed on him and stretched back, told himself to stretch a hand to Uncle for the musket and did so, taking it for granted somehow that Uncle was but as his lieutenant, or aged retainer! But Uncle had seen the danger and the crack of his piece sounded and was briskly killed on the wind and the man on the pebbles fell.

"They are coming," said John. "You load and I shall——"

"No! you load, lad, and I——"

Then John Upcott's mind ceased to observe. After all, one cannot perhaps expect a dignified calm in a youth at such a time. We never learn all our lessons, only a part.

"Do as I tell you!" he cried. "Is this a time for bickering? Load you and I'll fire. We cannot both fire, damn you!"

Uncle flashed up a look on the lad and did as he was told, his inscrutable face fallen again over his task.

It was a supreme moment for John. He gathered his whole consciousness again, as it were, into his eyes.

He showed but his shoulders above the rock's breast; and the way it mounted, with these two in the cup of it, he had its other and higher rim behind him, instead of sky. Besides, pistols were the main armament on the beach and the cliff.

Here was a good cause! Be slain? He be slain? He knew he should not be slain!

He fired again and then stretched back, as his man fell, for the loaded gun that was thrust in his hand. And then he fired again. He was doing his work with the precision, with the "dead-sure" hand of a consummate artist. The wreckers nevertheless came crowding upward. They gained the little platform below and just as they won so far a pistol ball grazed John's cheek. And then, beside him, he felt Uncle against the bastion and at his side was a flash—and another—and a third, the three in quick succession: and three men staggered from the platform and lurched to the beach and the surf, and Uncle had ducked back again and then a pistol butt was in John's hand.

There was a pause then on the cliff.

Then again beside him leant Uncle. But no—it could not be; for into John's hands was thrust, from behind, the other pistol. He turned his head. And what was this? Who was this beside him? Beside him leant a man with the most set and callous face he had ever seen. It called for no more than a glance and was impressed on his mind like a brand. It flashed on him that the Devil had come to their aid—to claim his own—to pick them off, leering down on them with that awful countenance. And the Devil himself was ramming fresh charges into his long-nosed pistol and leaving Uncle to tend Upcott solely. The Devil fired again and then suddenly threw out his arm stiffly so that the back of it, at the biceps, took John in the face; and in the arm's sweep John was sent sprawling on the ground a-top of the busy Uncle, whose face was strained, though he slacked not in his toil. And then roaring fiercely, "All hands to repel boarders! Out cutlasses!" the Devil sprang erect from his leaning position against the rock face, drew his cutlass with a sweep and swung it so that Uncle and John, rising stiffly and amazed, ducked again, shrank back.

The newcomer was more mad than they were, for there was no room there for such play.

They shrank back, half an eye on him, amazed, and loaded all their arms against what might come, for when the Devil leant out and swung his blade down in air and came back to the recover there was a hail of blood flung from his blade into the flying scud.

Gingerly they rose to the rock face.

"Ugh!" said Uncle and sank down again and clapped his hand to his throat. At that John went mad.

"You have killed him!" he cried, "Killed him and I wouldn't have him killed!"

The Devil looked round on him at the cry, looked with a kind of a glee on his face, a mocking grin, a look as of jeering comprehension, as of one who knows men and what may move them.

John had snatched the "Turk's sword" which Uncle had leant on the rock, and evading their helper's cutlass, seeing a boarder's head over the bastion, he leapt bodily out over the rock face and with the force of his leap, sword in hand, he felt the point on the man's breast, and threw his weight home so that the broad end was buried and half the blade, and only his fear of the next comer's cutlass gave him strength to lunge back the cruel weapon.

It was all just like his boyhood's game of "Hold the Castle."

Then the besiegers shrank back. But it was not solely from fear of these two that they so shrank—paused.

"Shebbeare!" they cried. "Shebbeare! He's leading 'em! Us had better go down."

They fell on their knees. They crawled backwards. They scuttled on the loose stones. They went down over cliff like frightened crabs.

And then the Devil, who had but been playing his cut and thrust within the cup and had not, for all his madness, been lured over the verge, folded his arms on the rock, spat a torn quid of Virginia leaf from his jaws and mocked them in their disordered and precipitous flight; blood, his own and others, flecking his jaws like patches on a lady's face.

But Upcott turned about, and there on the rock stood, sure enough, Richard Shebbeare of Shebbeare Towne, in their own parish of Abbotsham. The position he had taken in the country meant much, but I wonder how much the fact that he was a legal man may have meant, for legal men know how to get one to the gallows if they are so minded! It was true that he was even then negotiating through his Bristol agents for the sale of Shebbeare Towne; but no one knew of that, and he was still a good deal of a king on that windy, sea-beat frontage of wild Devon.

The old gentry, it was said, had taken their share of wrecks. The later gentry had looked the other way; then they had looked on with doubt. Now they had come to denounce such things. Not so long after, as with wrecking, so with smuggling, would they first share, and then look the other way. And again a little while, and lights would be set up on the coast to guide ships on their way; to say with their flash and sweep through the night, "Beware, pass on!" Or if, battling with the sea and the race of Harty they lost the day, along the cliffs there would be watchers, day and night, on the look out for such disaster, ready to succour the folk whom the sea scorned. The very descendants of these wreckers, two hundred years later, would risk their own lives in endeavour to save the shipwrecked, whatever flag fluttered and was torn to shreds at the tottering main.

The Devil stopped his jeering and looked around on Shebbeare. He did not straighten up, remained slouched against the rock; but he touched his hat jauntily in seaman fashion and, "Morning, cap'n," said he. "A brisk brush!"

But the fight was over and so Upcott sank to the aid of Uncle. Shebbeare knelt by his side and opened the old man's waistcoat. His hand was on the old man's heart. Upcott's madness ebbed from him as the sea ebbs from Torridge sands. He stared on Shebbeare; and then Shebbeare looked up and met his eyes, gazed directly in his a moment, nodded solemnly and raised his hat.

"A brave old man," said he.

So the old man had died as he would have wished to die, rather than in a bed between sheets striving to quiet his heart with brave lines, like passing bells, writ by the men whose gallant lives he loved.

"Oh, cruel time that takes in trust,

Our youth, our joys, our all we have,

And pays us but with earth and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days."

So it reads in the Hart manuscript, but in Raleigh's Bible, to be sure, the first words are not, "Oh, cruel time," but "Even such is time," as with resignation or acceptance, and there are the two lines more:

"But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

My God shall raise me up, I trust."

And Upcott leant back in the hollow and you could not say he wept in the active sense, as of giving oneself over to grief, but the tears welled and ran from his eyes.

"And my last word to him was an oath," he said huskily and brokenly. "And God knows I loved en."

"Sure it was spoke in the heat of the fight then, shipmate," said the callous and rugged seaman with the diabolic face, though his voice was full of compassion. "And a curse in the heat of the fight to a shipmate is like a word o' love. It brings you closer to en." He looked from the stripling to the dead man. "And I take it he understood," said he, "from the looks of en."

But Upcott sat staring, and when he had again the powers to face reality he found himself alone, Uncle's head upon his knee.

He rose, amazed at the stillness; for there is a stillness, a solitude, in the heart of a roaring and beating sea and volleying wind.

Beyond their natural fort the wild seaman was casting down into the sea the bodies of their slain assailants, spurning them with his foot. On the beach Richard Shebbeare had assisted one seaman to land and was now making signs to the other two on the wreck to leap into the waves and attempt a landing. Here and there, on the cliffs, the routed wreckers stood watching.

Shebbeare suddenly swung around and hailed them and they came scrambling in response to his imperious sign, circled about him, harkened to his words, and then Upcott looking on dully saw them join hands in two close ranks and march, two abreast, into the surf to be ready to aid the coming seamen.

Where the waves broke and then leapt, sprang, shouting, fifty feet, it was not easy to help. But in just that place it had been no easier to clutch wreckage! There was yet a difference. The right man had come on deck.

Upcott started then inertly out of his own broken world. There was no after glory from this fight. He was broken and desolate. And then a voice said: "Which of you here was it that fired the first shot?"

He looked round; and there stood friend Ravenning. John had forgotten, he did not then recollect the witch's prophecy, how she had described Ravenning accurately and declared that he was gone over the seas.

"I did, Will," said he, crestfallen, as one acknowledging a sin; and then a new thought gripped him, triumphing over the emotion, a thought of the hideous scene they had ended. "And I'd do the same again," said he, doggedly, though with no pride. And then: "But—oh, if they had not killed Uncle."

"You think more of him than o' your father?" asked Ravenning, his small eyes puckering as he tried afresh to fathom his incomprehensible friend. "Well, I suppose it's no wonder, maybe," he said sagaciously. "But by God! John, I don't know you. Times I ha' thought I did, times I ha' thought I'd never know you. I don't know you."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you know, then?"

"Know what?"

"You don't mean you don't know—you didn't see——"

"What, then?"

"Why, God, John; that man you shot i' the back was——"

"Eh?"

"Your father."

John Upcott leant back on the rock, slid down, sat collapsed, staring again. And the sound that came from his lips, the long-drawn hideous cry, froze Ravenning's heart, chilled him as when one touches ice.

In one particular the witch had not erred. John had indeed been the death of one near to him.

Then he began to taste the first faint beginning of what this meant. He conjured up the picture of that form, that back, that he had seen with dilated eyes in the first flurry of fight—and he knew Ravenning made no mistake. That thing had been his father and he had slain it. He sat staring. And from his mouth that trembled came that cry, rising and falling: "Ah—ah—ah—ah—ah!" and over him, sheevoing and crying, were the discordant gulls, and the whole wet, windy, disconsolate wold was full of the eternal laughter of the sea.