Читать книгу The Island Providence - Frederick Niven - Страница 3
ОглавлениеTHE SECOND ADVENT
In the year of grace, 1675, the seventh day of September, John Upcott, being that day breeched for the first time, contemplated his shadow with no small pride. And his appetite for applause being now but whetted by the fond and jesting admiration of mother, sister, brother, he set off to West Abbotsham to preen himself before the eyes of Cassandra Gifford. His admiration of himself, crossing the stile from the lane into the cart-track, was immense. Gilford's dog, sighting him from the barn-end, had a moment's doubt, muzzle forward, ears twitching, legs taut, scrutinizing the new playmate. Only with children did the dog renounce the staid, taciturn manner that he had learnt in work with his colleague, old Gifford. With children he renewed his youth, and every new child was of interest. Then he recognised his friend, came bounding—and snuffed. So again John had joy of his breeches; for they had again assuredly been remarked.
This is no milk-and-water tale, but a tale of salt seas; let no one deem otherwise, despite the following picture, nor be deceived by it into fearing that kisses are to be the burden of my narrative. For my narrative is not precisely of lilac and lavender. But the world is not all of one colour; there be grey of rocks for purple of the heather, green of the sea for white of its foam; and though I can tell you of the old painted women of the Isle Providence I can tell you (in my heart had rather tell you) of the Devon child with the wistful eyes, slant-set beneath her pensive brows—already pensive—and her hair, red then, let me say, and have done with it; though to be sure it turned auburn with the years.
Long years after Upcott remembered her tiny, erect figure, her bent head, chin on flat little breast, slender arms pendant, as she welcomed him that day of second summer. Of her words he remembered but one phrase; of their play, that afternoon, in that high upland farm-close, nothing. He did remember that he was hot with playing, and cold with the after chill, when Cassandra's mother came to him with some sweet morsel from the pantry and suggested that it was time for him to be going home to his own mother, the breeches notwithstanding. Cassandra was to see him upon his way; for though her youth and his were equal it is an unwritten law that the girl in such case, and at that age, must play mother. Of where she left him he retained no recollection. It was by the white-washed wall at the barn that he, seeing their shadows cast there by the slanting sun of late afternoon, manlike, so-so pleased with his companion's lean, spindle shadow, and intensely occupied with his own—with the legs gloriously shadowed—cried out: "Ah, I am a man."
One forgets one's childhood; Upcott forgot much of his; but there was some special emotion surely felt, passing by that sunlit wall.
"Cassandra," he cried, contemplating his swinging shadow, "I shall go to the wars and be a shoulder."
"You mean a soldier," Cassandra corrected.
"Yes," he said, "shoulder, soldier; and carry a musket on my shoulder," trying to dissemble, child-like—and adult-like—his faulty speech.
Perhaps it was at the stile that she left him; for one fancies he would lure her at least so far to behold the grown-up method of swinging a leg across the bars.
There she fades, at any rate, out of that picture of the day, and the child is left alone.
The lane wound through a wilderness of nettles and thistles and spiked briar with great spiders' webs trailed from twig to twig; and at that time hundreds of crane-flies staggered over grass and hedge. They had bounced in his face on his journey upward to the farm but, full then with the sense of his manliness, he had blown them aside grandly, although daddies have a notable fad for going head to wind, for fluttering against the mouth that blows them away.
Now he faced the lane with a sense of distaste. Not that he feared daddy-long-legs. But there were also wasps. Not that he feared wasps, exactly. But it was a long lane and tangled.
After all, no daddy-long-legs, no wasps, annoyed him. They seemed to be all asleep. He marched on with regular stride, eyes twitching to left and right. The spiders' webs were still there; but there was no spider moving. Each spider sat bloated and motionless in the centre of his grey winding-sheet. He saw one slow beetle as it strolled under a stone from the muddy centre of the lane. A little further on he saw a solitary daddy-long-legs feebly crawling, and falling, and fluttering, and dancing creepily downward, into the abyss of a blackberry bush. And both these living things seemed exhausted.
There was not another sign of life; and the lane suddenly wore to him such an aspect that almost he would have welcomed the golden flash and the spiteful hum of just one wasp. He felt so utterly alone. Overhead was the blue, glittering sky, without a single high tenant: here was the lane, forsaken, with not so much as a perennial wind passing through its drear sunlit and shadowed chaos. At last he came to its end, and mounting the hither stile and holding the topmost projecting post, standing so, perilously, on tip-toe, he saw the hills wavering round the bays, yearning up to the sky, rolling down to the sea in abrupt declivities, broken here and there by the "mouths," cut off here and there by sheer cliffs.
On the outjutting points he could see the white of breaking waves; for though you could not have counted, on that day of calm, six white flashes of foam in all those blue acres of confronting sea, yet the verge of land and water was marked with the white breakers from Hartland Point to Baggy Bay. And in all that vastness there was no sail of any ship.
For a little way the boy's path led by a cliff whence he could hear the sea on that day even, of calm, in a multitude of ceaseless sounds. For groundwork was the eternal sigh, as of silk drawn through the hand. Then would come a crack, as when one is struck on the cheek with the flat of a hand. Again—-you have seen women of a washing-day in the near field, stretching a wet blanket, one at either end, arms extended; then you have seen them give that quick, decisive flip and heard the flack of it. A sound of that kind, but of infinitely greater volume, ever and again burst deeply in the midst of the lesser sounds, burst with an awesome detonation. These were the only sounds on all that shore.
Searching now, with your bird's-eye view, over that sweep of wild North Devon land aslant to the sea, you can just pick out our five-year-old, a mere dot, child and shadow, shadow by him forgotten now, marching home.
It was here that a gripping alarm assailed his mind, open, as you may guess, by the loneliness, to any vagrant and disturbing thought.
He had heard rumours of the Second Advent; for rectors and lecturers, in those days of transition, had thoughtful and critical, if (like themselves) superstitious hearers. Men delved in the Bible as they quested to the Spanish main, to Madagascar, to the kingdom of the great Mogul—-quested how naïvely, with what incongruities!
And here was a child of a dissolute father and a pious mother, and none could tell what such a child might weave in his mind out of the loose ends of talks of elder people and his own infantile observations of life.
So now, when the utter loneliness embraced him, in his prepared mind echoed the words: "Like a thief in the night." Quite clearly then he perceived that his ideas regarding the Second Advent had lacked breadth. At least his mind was developing, as minds with any developing capacity do, in loneliness. A thief in the night would come quietly; that was probably all that the phrase implied. By day, or by night, that coming would be quiet.
Upcott swept with his eye the visible world, and imagination showed him also a little farther, beyond the hill-verges and the sea-rim. His heart leaped and swelled, and he began to run.
There was cause for haste. If, while he had come down that silent lane—-he remembered now the slow beetle, the failing crane-fly as cumulative evidence—-the Christ had come and snatched viewless all the good into the blue, limitless heavens, as he feared, why did he run now? Of what avail running home—home?
What he sought was certainty. Many a time in his tormented future was he to go questing so, but never again perhaps with such a cold helplessness. Later he was to learn stoic and callous aids. Yet already, to-day, till he knew the worst he would not weep; but his heart, he felt, was full of tears bubbling in a spring, rising, filling, bursting.
At last, after what seemed a run of half the world, he reached the gate into the yard.
"Mother!" he cried. And there was no reply.
"Sis!" But there was no reply.
"Tom!" But no elder brother answered to his call.
Then he squared his shoulders. He was cold. His heart was fluttering. And in a high, quavering voice with an insinuated hardness, as betokening preparedness for aught:
"Father!"
There was no reply.
He crept terrified indoors and the wag-at-the-wall, ticking in the shadowy kitchen and filling the house with its furtive, fearful, lonely echo, told him that there was no one there. The white-faced clock was but counting out inexorably the brief moments between the departure of the good and the first outcry of the almost lost (for he thought he had heard some rumour of a hint the Book proferred, that even then there would be a frail, final hope) when they should discover that the world was theirs, for a space.
He blubbered once and then gulped down the next sob.
To whom could he go? To whom, left behind, yet possessing a remnant of kindliness, might he fly, to be beside in that dread hour when the evil of the earth came grinning and halloing over the hills? He bethought him of the old man of the bees, he who lived a little way east above the clover lands; and thither he continued his broken trot. He had but little hope left now, for he thought that the old man of the bees was a man likely to be fit for transportation ere the inundation of the rioters.
On the way he fell several times. The wonder is that his heart did not burst. But at length he arrived at the tiny cot, standing solitary in a fold of the hill with the two rows of beehives close by in the wild little garden. Below waved the clover in the clover lands. There was froth on the child's lips as he opened the gate into the garden.
The place was loud with bees but he had passed beyond any far-fetched hope that their humming might have given, had he heard it. He did not hear.
"Uncle!" he called, or strove to call.
There was no answer. He whom all the children called "uncle" was not there.
That was final. He need go no farther. He had settled his fate. But, to make absolutely sure, he crept to the cot door and looked into the tiny place; one could see both its rooms from the low entrance. Uncle was not there. He turned back and prepared for the worst. In that little buzzing garden, in that hollow of the sweeping hills, under the high infinite dome he stood preparing for he knew not what; feeble before the unknown, yet not utterly cast down. There was fight in the little devil yet.
His eyes, with the sweat running into them, blinked ahead of him into the nothingness as he waited. His ears were alert for the terrors behind, for all sounds that might come. His chin twitched for all that he pursed his lips together. In a word, at one and the same time (pardon me, gentlemen) erect and trembling, he squared his shoulders and piddled in his new breeches.
And then a voice, with an Irish brogue, said:
"Why! God bless the boy!"
