Читать книгу The Master of Man - Hall Sir Caine - Страница 11

A long series of these reckless lampoons Victor fired off weekly over the worm-eaten table at Mount Murray, to the delirious delight of the clubmen, who, learning them by heart, carried them to their little world outside, with the result that they ran over the island like a fiery cross and set the Manx people aroar with laughter.

The good and the unco' good were scandalized, but the victims were scarified. And to put an end to their enemy, and terminate his hostilities, these latter, laying their heads together to tar him with his own brush, found a hopeful agency to their hand in the person of a good-looking young woman of doubtful reputation called Fanny, who kept a house of questionable fame in the unlit reaches of the harbour south of the bridge.

One early morning word went through the town like a searching wind that Fanny's house had been raided by the police, in the middle of the night, about the hour when the Clubmen usually clattered back to Douglas. The raid had been intended to capture Stowell, but had failed in its chief object—that young gentleman having gone on, when some of his comrades had stopped, put up his horse at his job-master's and proceeded to Gell's chambers where he slept on his nights in town. Others of his company had also escaped by means of a free fight, in which they had used their hunting crops and the police their truncheons. But Alick Gell, with his supernatural capacity for getting into a scrape, had been arrested and carried off, with Fanny herself, to the Douglas lock-up.

Next day these two were brought up in the Magistrate's Court, which was presided over by his Worship the Colonel of the "Nunnery," a worthy and dignified man, to whom the turn of recent events was shocking. The old Court-house was crowded with the excited townspeople, and as many of the Clubmen were present as dare show their bandaged heads out of their bedrooms.

When the case was called, and the two defendants entered the dock, they made a grotesque and rather pitiful contrast—Gell in his tall, slim, fair-haired gentlemanliness, and Fanny in her warm fat comeliness, decked out in some gaudy finery which she had sent home for, having been carried off in the night with streaming locks and naked bosom.

In the place of the Attorney-General, the prosecutor was a full-bodied, elderly advocate named Hudgeon, who had been the subject of one of the most withering of the lampoons. He opened with bitter severity, spoke of the case as the worst of the kind the island had known; referred to the "most unholy hour of the morning" which had lately been selected for scenes of unseemly riot; said his "righteous indignation" was roused at such disgraceful doings, and finally hoped the Court would, for the credit of lawyers "hereafter" make an example, "without respect of persons," of the representative of a group of young roysterers, who were a disgrace to the law, and had nothing better to do (so rumour and report were saying) than to traduce the good names of their elders and betters.

When he had examined the constables and closed his case it looked as if Gell were in danger of Castle Rushen, and the consequent wrecking of his career at the Bar, and that nothing was before Fanny but banishment from the island, with such solace as the bribe of her employers might bring her.

But then, to a rustle of whispering, Stowell, who was in wig and gown for the first time, got up for the defence. It had been expected that he would do so, and many old advocates who had heard much of him, had left their offices, and filled the advocates' box, to see for themselves what mettle he was made of.

They had not long to wait. In five minutes he had made such play with his "learned friend's" "unholy hour of the morning," "his righteous indignation" and his "hereafter" for lawyers (not without reference to a traditional personage with horns and a fork) that the merriment of the people in Court rose from a titter to a roar, which the ushers were powerless to suppress. Again and again the writhing prosecutor, with flaming face and foaming and spluttering mouth, appealed in vain to the Bench, until at length, getting no protection, and being lashed by a wit more cutting than a whip, he gathered up his papers and, leaving the case to his clerk, fled from the Court like an infuriated bat, saying he would never again set foot in it.

Then Stowell, calling back the constables, confused them, made them contradict themselves, and each other, and step down at last like men whose brains had fallen into their boots. After that he called Gell and caused him to look like a harmless innocent who had strayed out of a sheepfold into a shambles. And finally he called Fanny, and getting quickly on the woman's side of her, he so coaxed and cajoled and flattered and then frightened her, that she seemed to be on the point of blurting out the whole plot, and giving away the names of half the big men in the island.

His Worship of the Nunnery closed up the case quickly, saying "young men will be young men," but regretting that the eminent talents exhibited in the defence were not being employed in the service of the island.

The Court-house emptied to a babel of talking and a burst of irrepressible laughter, and that was the end of the "Ellan Vannin." But the one ineffaceable effect of the incident, most material to this story, was that Alick Gell, who was still as innocent as the baby of a girl, had acquired a reputation for dark misdoings (especially with women) whereof anything might be expected in the future.

After the insular newspapers had dwelt with becoming severity on this aspect of the "distressing proceedings," the Speaker walked over in full-bearded dignity to remonstrate with the Deemster.

"Your son is dragging my lad down to the dirt," he said, "and before long I shall not be able to show my face anywhere."

"What do you wish me to do, Mr. Speaker?" asked the Deemster.

"Do? Do? I don't know what I want you to do," said the Speaker.

"I thought you didn't," said the Deemster, and then the full-bearded dignity disappeared.

Concerning Victor, although he had made the island laugh (the shortest cut to popularity), opinions were widely divided.

"There's only the breadth of a hair between that young man and a scoundrel," said Hudgeon, the advocate.

"Lave him rope and he'll hang himself," said Cæsar Qualtrough, from behind his pipe in the smoking-room of the Keys.

"Clever! Clever uncommon! But you'll see, you'll see," said the Speaker.

"I've not lost faith in that young fellow yet," said the Governor. "Some great fact will awaken a sense of responsibility and make a man of him."

The great fact was not long in coming, but few could have foreseen the source from which it came.

III

With the first breath of the first summer after their return to the island Stowell and Gell went up into the glen to camp. They had no tent; two hammocks swung from neighbouring trees served them for beds and the horizontal boughs of other trees for wardrobes.

There, for a long month, amidst the scent of the honeysuckle, the gorse and the heather, and the smell of the bracken and the pine, they fished, they shot, they smoked, they talked. Late in the evening, after they had rolled themselves into their hammocks, they heard the murmuring of the trees down the length of the glen, like near and distant sea-waves, and saw, above the soaring pine-trunks, the gleaming of the sky with its stars. As they shouted their last "Good-night" to each other from the depths of their swaying beds the dogs would be barking at Dan Baldromma's mill at the bottom of the glen and the water would be plashing in the topmost fall of it. And then night would come, perfect night, and the silence of unbroken sleep.

Awaking with the dawn they would see the last stars pale out and hear the first birds begin to call; then the cock would crow at old Will Skillicorne's croft on the "brough," the sheep would bleat in the fields beyond, the squirrels would squeak in the branches over their heads and the fish would leap in the river below. And then, as the sun came striding down on them from the hilltops to the east, they would tumble out of their hammocks, strip and plunge into the glen stream—the deep, round, blue dubs of it, in which the glistening water would lash their bodies like a living element. And then they would run up to the headland (still in the state of nature) and race over the heather like wild horses in the fresh and nipping air.

They were doing this one midsummer morning when they had an embarrassing experience, which, in the devious ways of destiny, was not to be without its results. Flying headlong down the naked side of the glen (for sake of the faster run) they suddenly became aware of somebody coming up. It was a young woman in a sunbonnet. She was driving four or five heifers to the mountain. Swishing a twig in her hand and calling to her cattle, she was making straight for their camping-place.

The young men looked around, but there was no escape on any side, so down they went full length on their faces in the long grass (how short!) and buried their noses in the earth.

In that position of blind helplessness, there was nothing to do but wait until the girl and her cattle had passed, and hope to be unobserved. They could hear the many feet of the heifers, the flapping of their tails (the flies must be pestering them) and the frequent calls of the girl. On she came, with a most deliberate slowness, and her voice, which had been clear and sharp when she was lower down the glen, seemed to them to have a gurgling note in it as she came nearer to where they lay.

"Come out of that, you gawk, and get along, will you?" she cried, and Victor could not be quite sure that it was only the cattle she was calling to.

At one moment, when they thought the girl and the cattle must be very close, there was a sickening silence, and then the young men remembered their breeches which were hanging open over a bough and their shirts which were dangling at the end of it.

"Get up, stupid! What are you lying there for?" cried the girl, and then came another swish of the twig and a further thudding of the feet of the heifers.

"The devil must be in that girl," thought Victor, and he would have given something to look up, but dare not, so he lay still and listened, telling himself that never before had two poor men been in such an unfair and ridiculous predicament.

At length the feet of the cattle sounded faint over the rippling of the river, and the girl's voice thin through the pattering of the leaves. And then the two sons of Adam rose cautiously from the grass, slithered down the glen-side and slipped into the essential part of their garments.

Half-an-hour later, the lark being loud in the sky, and the world astir and decent, they were cooking their breakfast (Gell holding a frying-pan over a crackling gorse fire, and Stowell, in his Wellington boots, striding about with a tea-pot) when they heard the girl coming back. And being now encased in the close armour of their clothes they felt that the offensive had changed its front and stepped boldly forward to face her.

She was a strapping girl of three or four and twenty, full-blooded and full-bosomed, with coal-black hair and gleaming black eyes under her sun-bonnet, which was turned back from her forehead, showing a comely face of a fresh complexion, with eager mouth and warm red lips. Her sleeves were rolled back above her elbows, leaving her round arms bare and sun-brown; her woollen petticoat was tucked up, at one side, into her waist, and as she came swinging down the glen with a jaunty step, her hips moved, with her whole body, to a rhythm of health and happiness.

"Attractive young person, eh?" said Victor.

But Gell, after a first glance, went back without a word to his frying-pan, leaving his comrade, who was still carrying his teapot, to meet the girl, who came on with an unconcerned and unconscious air, humming to herself at intervals, as if totally unaware of the presence of either of them.

"Nice morning, miss," said Victor, stepping out into the path.

The girl made a start of surprise, looked him over from head to foot, glanced at his companion, whose face was to the fire, recognised both, smiled and answered:

"Yes, Sir, nice, very nice."

Then followed a little fencing, which was intended by Victor to find out if the girl had seen them.

Came up this way a while ago, didn't she? Aw, yes, she did, to take last year's heifers to graze on the mountains. Seen anything hereabouts—that is to say on the tops? Aw, no, nothing at all—had he? Well, yes, he thought he'd seen something running on the ridge just over the waterfall.

The girl gave him a deliberate glance from her dark eyes, then dropped them demurely and said, with an innocent air,

"Must have been some of the young colts broken out of the top field, I suppose."

"That's all right," thought Victor, not knowing the ways of women though he thought himself so wise in them.

After that, feeling braver, he began to make play with the girl, asking her how far she had come, and if she wouldn't be lonesome going back without company.

She looked at him quizzically for a moment, and then said, with her eyes full of merriment,

"What sort of company, sir?"

"Well, mine for instance," he answered.

She laughed, a fresh and merry laugh from her throat, and said,

"You daren't come home with me, Sir."

"Why daren't I?"

"You'd be afraid of father. He's not used of young men coming about the place, and he'd frighten the life out of you."

Victor put down his tea-pot and made a stride forward. "Come on—where is he?"

But the girl swung away, with another laugh, crying over her shoulder,

"Aw, no, no, plaze, plaze!"

"Ah, then it's you that are afraid, eh?" said Victor.

"It's not that," replied the girl.

"What is it?" said Victor.

She gave him another deliberate glance from her dark eyes—he thought he could feel the warm glow of her body across the distance dividing them—and said,

"The old man might be sending somebody else up with the heifers next time, and then...."

"What then?"

She laughed again with eyes full of mischief, and seemed to prepare to fly.

"Then maybe I'd be missing seeing something," she said, and shot away at a bound.

Victor stood for a moment looking down the glen.

"God, what a girl!" he said. "I've a good mind to go after her."

"I shouldn't if I were you," said Gell. "You know who she is?"

"Who?"

"Bessie Collister."

"The little thing who was in Castletown?"

"Yes."

"Then I suppose she belongs to you?"

"Not a bit. I haven't spoken to her from that day to this," said Gell, and then he told of the promise he had made to his father.

"But Lord alive, that was when you were a lad."

"Maybe so, but 'as long as you live'—that was the word, and I mean to keep it. Besides, there's Dan Baldromma."

"That blatherskite?" said Victor.

"He'd be an ugly customer if anything went wrong, you know."

"But, good Lord, man, what is going to go wrong?"

When they had finished breakfast and Gell was washing up at the water's edge, Victor was on a boulder, looking down the glen again, and saying, as if to himself,

"My God, what a girl, though! Such lips, such flesh, such...."

"I say, old fellow!" cried Gell.

Victor leapt down and laughed to cover his confusion.

"Well, why not? We're all creatures of earth, aren't we?"