Читать книгу Children of Tempest - Munro Neil - Страница 3

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There was a woman years ago in Uist who had two sons, one to her first husband, one to his successor. They dwelt in Corodale. That place, remote and little, is like the enormous world and life itself—a mingling of meaningless hills and hollows, suffering the fury of eternal seas incomprehensible; to-night, it may be, wet with tears, to-morrow smiled on by the most jovial sun, and once, though now forlorn, it was exceeding busy with betrothals and bridals and births, and blythe-meats, and burials in Lamasay yard, strife among the folk of it as well as great love. Two mountains stand behind the house where dwelt the widow and her sons—Hecla and Benmore the names of them; close beside in Usinish Glen is a lake so blue that no other water in the Long Isle can compare with it for loveliness. A prince well known in story fled here once from his enemies and hid him in a cave. He came out on a morning, as the story goes, and looked all round him at a wild wan sea and a dripping land, crossed himself, and “Mon Dieu!” said he; “how dolorous!” and shivered, poor lad! in his plaid, and looked again at the mist on Hecla, and hearkened, all abashed, to the roll of waves in the creek of the Virgin Mary, the plash of breakers on the rocks of Hellisdale. “What a place for a right tragedy,” said he, “if here were people capable of a passion!” Beside him as he spoke was a huge, dark, silent man who understood, and smiled to himself, but said nothing to his prince, for whose poor cause a twelvemonth later he was doomed to die. He was father to her that lived in Corodale. In this man’s mind there slept a score of old fierce tales about the place the prince was looking on; from his own loins was yet to come a story of passion that till now but half-revealed, has made Corodale memorable for many generations. I walked in Uist yesterday, on what were once this dark man’s acres; I found Usinish silent, except for the belling of red deer. Corodale House was gone completely but for the lintels seeking out among the nettles. I cried, with half a hope of something to be manifest—what, I knew not—“Duncan! Duncan!” between the bushes one time coaxed to make a Hebridean garden for Anna, the girl of fortune, but there was no answer. Duncan is departed, and the girl that loved him; and gone too is Col the brave and wicked: there has been no dance in Corodale for two generations. Still the crash of seas, and Corodale Loch in sunshine blue as an angel’s eye: still the mountains, but never again the men! Love and avarice, that sought the Treasure of MacNeil, blazed high and furious (it seemed), but brief like fires on autumn moors, and all that is left is this tale of the widow’s sons, sometimes yet to be heard, half-guessed at, in the shealings, the matter of a song chanted by the fishermen of the Outer Isles.

Not in the neighbourhood of Corodale itself, but on the other side of the island, upon a rock that rose above the sandy macharland, a church-bell rang one morning in September. The scream of sea-fowl and the sound of waters mingled with the summons to Mass in Our Lady Star of the Sea. A high wind blew. The bay was full of idle boats. No shuttle clacked in the looms of the little black town-land houses. From all sides came the people for the Mass of this St Michael’s Day, clambering up the narrow paths to the church upon the rock. The men were all fishers, or tillers of the grudging soil, built large, blue-eyed, and slow; the women, almost without exception, wore the gaudiest of plaids and kerchiefs, stepped like hinds, subdued their rover glances from a sense of the decorum due to the occasion, and yet in every roll of the haunches, every gesture, gave a hint of fires.

A porringer half full of holy water, brown from some mossy well, stood in a nook at the entrance: they dipped their fingers in it, muttering an invocation, and went into a sanctuary where the odour of peat and new-baked bread was incense, and knelt to their Gaelic Aves. All in this chapel of Stella Maris had with them the St Michael’s cake—the Michael morning food, seven cornered for the seven mysteries, and later these were blessed by Father Ludovick. Throughout that peaceful service in the chapel on the hill the sound of the quarrelsome sea intruded. Within was calm, one common heart in harmony subdued before the Mystery; outside in the world warred the unregenerate elements, winds unelect by Heaven blustering from Hecla and Benmore, waves thrashing on the little isle of Oronsay and striving among the skiffs.

There was one in the congregation who thought of this in the intervals of her priest-brother’s exhortations to his people to praise Michael for his guidance and God for His bounty of corn and fruit. She sat in the front of the church, close up on the altar, a figure for daintiness and dress wholly foreign in that assemblage of tartan plaids and kerchiefs, running the beads of her rosary through fingers white as milk and fine as satin, though she was now her brother Ludovick’s housekeeper, spinner, darner, baker, and cook. Now and again his glance would fall upon her upturned and abstracted face, and never without a momentary glow of keen affection. He loved his people; but still the very core of his regard was for Little Anna, who was little in their language only because her brother was uncommon tall.

To her alone perhaps of all the congregation came some secular influence with the invading sound of wind and sea; bringing a thought of the wide, noisy, battling, restless world whereof these Outer Isles are but a wind-blown fringe. A Michaelmas in another land was in her recollection; she heard the morning carol of the birds in the garden of St Teresa; Sister Agnes took her through the streets of Paris again, and the clamour of the pavements, the cries about the booths, were like the throb and shout of seas in the land of her heredity. A wistfulness was in her face: she thought of idle worldly things remote from this high Stella Maris on the rock, filled with humble folk prostrate in their faith, redolent of peats and new-baked morning bread of good St Michael, Neptune of the Gael, patron saint of boats and horses.

It was the chimes of Notre Dame she heard above the tinkling bell that marked the sanctus, sanctus, sanctus of the Preface; at the chanting of her brother there came to her the air of a careless song heard on the packet from Calais, when a mariner stood out upon the bows, strong figure of eternal quest and hope, looking for land, and she, the child, the voyager from home, was all agog for new experiences.

And then the Mass was over, the people went forth eagerly with their cakes into the windy world of vacant spaces, of peat-stacks, promontories, dead and crumbling castles, ancient huts of lichened stone that seemed a part of nature, so much in harmony were they with nooks of earth they sheltered in; along the stony footpaths; by the verge of perilous cliffs. On the outer rocks Atlantic burst with thunder or retched through the three Sounds eastward; Hecla and Benmore smoked with mist about their bases. A bleak land it might seem to them that have no inward fires, and yet a land most brave, often most beautiful, acceptable to God, and edifying extremely. On the edge of Kinavreck a piper stood who knew it so, and threw his instrument into his arm, and, full of pride and happiness, charmed the uproarious sea with mountain songs.

Father Ludovick took his sister’s hand unconsciously in his as he came out of the church a little behind his people, and they walked together towards the presbytery house that sheltered to the south of Stella Maris. They were, perhaps, the only ones in all the congregation to speak English, though it was not their mother nor their favourite tongue.

“Anna,” said he, reflecting, “I think every priest should have a sister. Only one; two would be for any sober cleric’s detriment.”

“Why?” said she, smiling at his limitation, as she looked up into his face.

He glanced vaguely after his dispersing people hurrying with the Michaelmas cakes to the poor; at the contending sea, at the threat of the horizon. He was a man about thirty-five years old, tall and spare, beloved of his folk, who called him playfully behind his back “Lord of the Isles,” half for his mother’s name that had been Macdonald, half for his attributes of lovable wise command. A king in some respects, and yet a child in his simplicities.

“Why?” asked his sister Anna again, the wind in her hair, the blue of the sea in her eyes.

“It brings him nearer to the world,” said Father Ludovick. “God bless the Long Isle! God bless my dear own people! their very follies make me fonder of them. And yet—mochree!—they are somehow, sometimes, so far from me that I need a little sinful sister to make my love for human nature something more than a spiritual passion for the universal.”

“Indeed, and thank you, Father Ludovick, for the ‘sinful,’ ” said Anna, and stopped to drop a mocking curtsey. “What a mercy I came back from France to keep my brother from taking wings and flying! Another month of bad baking and a perpetual diet of meagre soup would have made him into an angel!”

“But I wish the sister would not smile to herself when she should be deep in her devotions. It disconcerts her brother the priest.”

“I thought of Paris just for some moments,” said she contritely.

“I know, I know,” said Father Ludovick, “and I, poor dust!—infected through a worldly eye and a Paris cap, thought at the same moment of Valladolid. I heard the wind in its steeples. It was the smell of new-baked cakes, perhaps, as much as my sister Anna’s eyes. Valladolid and the guitar—Heaven help me!—and morning in a wayside wine-shop at breakfast. How glad we should be to have escaped the world with all its distractions, and find peace here and the simple way!”

“Yes,” said Anna, yet not with heartiness. She loved the Isles for reasons less austere. Her brother did not notice the absence of enthusiasm. With a bent head now, and hands clasped behind his back, he picked his way over the rough path that led to his home. “I heard the sound of the sea come in yonder,” he went on, “and it seemed the threat of the outer world far away from these little islands, and we so snug and safe here, with not even a lover to steal away my sister.”

“Y-yes,” said Anna, even less heartily than before. So much less heartily that her brother looked up, awakened from his reverie, caught a fleeting glimpse of some suppressed amusement. He laughed softly, and pinched her slightly on a finger.

“Well, at least, he has not come yet,” said he.

“There is no hurry, I declare to you,” said Anna. “Why should we talk nonsense?”

“Because we are the children of men,” said Father Ludovick. He stopped, and drew her up beside him, and looked at her, dashed upon with smiles and sun; at her wind-blown hair, her ardent open lips, her head upheld in a playful arrogance. “Ah, it will come, it will come!” he said regretfully, and pushed her from him lovably. “The world is not so blind; God the good Artist does not throw away His finest masterpiece upon a desolate rock. And when it comes——”

“It will be for MacNeil’s Treasure, and never for my heart,” said Anna. “I declare the existence of that wretched gold would make me suspect a fairy prince’s wooing.”

“It must be for the pure love of the sweetest girl in all broad Albyn!” cried he; “and MacNeil’s Treasure will be none of her attractions.”

“The good folk of Uist, all the same, make much of my fifty-year fortune,” said Anna.

“They will not envy you it, at all events, or I misjudge the folk of Uist.”

“Oh no, they do not envy me; they would not do that, I feel sure, if it was blessed instead of cursed as you are always telling them. But I am hearing of it constantly in the huts——”

Father Ludovick gave an impatient cry. “In spite of what I say to them!” said he. “I will not have it! I have told them neither you nor I shall handle this cursed Loch Arkaig treasure. I loathe the very mention of it, because I know its story better perhaps than any man that lives, though maybe there are scores whose purgatory is the more frightful for their new knowledge of how much that devil’s dross misled them. What a thought that men—otherwise, maybe, fit for paradise—should tenant hell eternally because some metal, whose glitter they never saw, lay tarnishing under a rock in—in——” He checked himself, and reddened. Anna looked up at him, surprised.

“In where?” she asked him, curiously. “I thought you could not know.”

“Nor do I,” said the priest hastily. “I have no idea where this wretched ulaidh is now, and I wish our uncle had never made it known to folk that he had passed the secret on to you. We are agreed, you and I, Anna, that though to please an old man dying, you may listen, it would be the greatest of errors to try to benefit you by this bequest.”

“That is very well, but still I think the Church——”

“The Church!” He raised his arms with an impatient gesture. “Say no more of that; the Church could never touch it, except perhaps to sink it in the deeps of Barra Sound. Dhe! I would not risk it even there, for fear our cod and halibut should perish of yellow pest, and our herring come to table with eternal gut-poke for the fever of avarice.”

“Peccavi! peccavi! I confess, Master Priest, to a small deception just now,” said Anna, smiling again. “When I said the Church I meant just a new tower—of the littlest, of the cheapest—for Stella Maris, and perhaps a bottle of Spanish wine more frequently for Father Ludovick——”

“For his visitors it might perhaps be welcome, this extra flagon; myself, I have wine enough in my soul—faith! the juice itself of sun and tempest; carouse on fancies, and walk, when I will, uplifted on the mists of Hecla and Benmore. I own the Isles from Barra Head to the very Butt of Lewis so far as I can ride or sail a skiff; the sea is mine to the dip of it and all the winds come neighbourly to my door; would I change for a display of stone and mortar, and a bottle, the mood that makes me free of all, and one and equal with the universe? The first that mentions your name together with Loch Arkaig’s trash—by God! I’ll bring him to his bended knees! It was gathered in folly; it was buried in disgrace. Men have lied for it and died for it, and have lain awake at night to think on it when they might in dreams be happier than kings.”

“But still,” said Anna,—though this was more to herself than to her brother,—“but still I think it would be fine to have a new tower for the dear church, and the extra bottle of Spanish wine!”

They had reached the door of the presbytery house; they went in together.

There was a shiver of autumn coldness in the air; the horizon was broken by a long cloud that looked like a mountain new born in the deep; far off on the flats of Heiskar there was the froth of billows.

And all along the pathways of the island sped the people, hurrying home to break their cakes and divide the ceremonial lamb. Some of them whose dwellings were nearer the church had done so already, and were running with bee-skep baskets round the poorer huts of the nearer town-land, giving, as custom compelled, and their good hearts in any case had prompted, something of their bounty in St Michael’s morning food to the less fortunate of their fellows. Uist the windy complained in tussock and dune, and still gallant above the wind was the sound of young folks’ merriment, of children laughing and crying to each other in the fields where they kept the cattle from the unfenced corn, of girls innumerable singing in the spirit of holiday, as, waist-encircled in each other’s arms, they walked in groups to outer townships round the bays. A pleasant chatter of voices was carried on the wind, through it, and over all the piper upon Kinavreck giving himself wholly to the wonder of the day, the spirit of the season, breathing his immortal soul into the sheepskin and telling the grumbling sea.

Later in the day there rose a new sound—the thud of galloping hoofs and the whinnying of island ponies bearing the folk to another Michaelmas ceremony. They came from every part of the macharland, men and women and children; Father Ludovick led them to the graveyard first for prayers for all the stout old forefathers, and then to the scene of games. On the great white strand they played. There was running on foot and galloping on horseback; the ambitious contended eagerly for trivial prizes; couples, more wisely gauging the value of all this world can give, sought sandy little dells among the dunes, and there unseen made love with the vigour of the wind, the depth, the passion of the sea. A most merry wholesome world, and frank and simple! Anna flashed, a sunbeam, here and there among them; her brother, the priest, had children tugging at his knees and their mothers crying ironic pleasantries to him. He, too, felt tipsy with the wind-wine of Uist, felt in tune with the everlasting rhythm of all the swinging worlds. So busy were the white sands of the bay that it looked as if the whole isle were here.

All but one man.

The day was growing late when he came—this fellow—along the road from Corodale, and climbed to the back of the church of Stella Maris by a rocky path. He was tall, black, broad-shouldered, curled and bearded like a Spaniard, exceedingly neat in dress. When he reached the top of the rock at the church gable, he threw a glance to sea, sweeping the farthest line of it like a mariner expectant on a raft, then turned his glance with disappointment to the Sound. There was nothing to see there but a tiny lug-sail boat that had rounded Kintra of the Holy Cross, and beat clumsily against dark squalls and a rising tide.

He stood black and tall, and bitterly vexed, it seemed, biting his beard. And then his glance fell on the people at their games.

“St Michael’s Day!” he said aloud. “I wondered where the folk had gone, and left their fields so lonely and their doors without a word of welcome. O king! are we not the forgetful folk in Corodale? Had I come here earlier I should have run my head into a Mass that might have cost me sixpence. I came to look for a sloop, and find myself at an oda. Well, here’s no sloop on the blue, and my skipper is two days late from Arisaig, or met last night’s storm and is now at the end of days and all sea-faring, with weeds in his teeth, somewhere under the Minch. I have no luck, devil the bit of it! what else could I look for when I rose on my wrong side this morning, and had mother cry me back in Corodale yesterday?”

He turned on his heel to go down from the rock the way he had mounted, when the open door of the chapel seemed to call him in. He hesitated for a little, bit his beard again, then challenged his resolution, went in with his cap in his hand, and awkwardly dipped a finger in the porringer. The bowl, perched precariously in its nook, toppled and fell on the floor, breaking in fragments, and splashing his boots with the holy water.

“God be about us, that’s bad!” said he, turning quickly from the unlucky omen. His going had been delayed but a few moments, yet they made nigh twelve months’ difference to the life of the man in the lug-sail boat, who was buffeted in the Sound where the black squalls chased each other. For what to him upon the rock was to be the last glance out to sea showed the lug-sail shake a moment, then belly suddenly, then the skiff upset and sink.

No one saw it but himself: the lovers busy in the dells, the dancers on the sand, the foot-runners striving on the beach,—all the merry, careless populace missed the spectacle. He gave a shout that rang vastly in the wind, plunged down the rocky path before the church, and ran towards the cove where the idle skiffs were tossing. “To sea! to sea! ’illean!” he cried over and over again; and the people looked amazed at him tearing to their skiffs. They were ignorant of the tragedy; they could not guess a reason for his conduct. “ ’Twas ever the way with Uist at the dancing,” he thought angrily; “their eyes in their insteps;” and reached the wall where the skiffs were ranged, and leaped on the nearest, and slashed with a knife till the bow was free, and threw out with one enormous heave of his arms the big brown sail, and steered in chase of a helpless figure clinging to a fishing bladder, driven before the squalls to Kintra of the Holy Cross.

He was an elderly man that grasped the bladder, with a slack foolish mouth in which the rude seas plopped, exceedingly salt and smelling of weeds. To his senses the bladder seemed no bigger than a pebble and no more buoyant as he turned and rolled in the waves. Of windy Uist he could see no speck; but when at intervals upon a crest he opened brine-blurred eyes, he saw the shabby tower of Our Lady Star of the Sea standing miraculous and serene among the waves that swept conquering over the bulging world. His ears were full of roarings, his mind fumbled confusedly over the beginnings of many prayers. Mountains seemed weighed on his feet; his fingers appeared to sweat a grease, and slipped in spite of him from the wood of the bladder; and he sank, and he sank, and he sank, till he hung over the edge of the universe, above the emptiness that is under all things, sea or land.

Down upon him swept the skiff, with the dark man calling, the tiller hard in his armpit, the sheets of the mainsail shrieking under his heel; she went round into the wind, her canvas flapping, her bows, annoyed, objecting to the check. The dark man saw a hand, plucked free the halyard, threw up the helm, and dived.

Before the wind, tossed like the bladder or the skiff ahead of them, the two men drifted towards Kintra of the Holy Cross.

And then night fell on windy Uist; the curlews cried; night and storm. The wind raved, and the rain slanted over the land. But still were people passing along the road and footpaths; lights shone over all the country. Michaelmas Day was done, and now had come the hour of song and story.