Читать книгу Children of Tempest - Munro Neil - Страница 4

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A custom of all lonely simple races brings the folk together at night to ceilidh (as they call their evening gossips) in these Outer Isles. Storms do not prevent them; storms, indeed, but make these evening entertainments sweeter when the merry groups meet in the larger houses of the townships to sit about the central fires of peat. Tales ancient and heroic, of Fingal the brave and Ossian the plucker of harps, are told; songs of sea and pasture-land, and short love and long war, are sung: guesses are put and repartee abounds. Sometimes, too, a gifted man will fill a sheepskin with a gush of pride and squeeze the most marvellous tunes from reeds and drones, expressing, to all who have the ears to hear, the ecstasy that lies in remembrance and regret, till the folk lean forward on their seats, and with blood-red faces look into the peat-flame and the ember, something with no words for its description, something old and sweetly melancholy and unrecoverable stirring them to tears. Up in the lofts, peeping between the jetty cabars—the peat-stained joists—will lie the children, marvelling, and all eyes and ears, drinking song and tale and pipe-tune thirstily, terrified for the dark spaces of the roof above and behind them when the story is of ghost and sad presentiment, and laughing heartily and uncontrolled when other humours inform the entertainment. The men pleat quicken tethers for the cattle, or twine tough heather into ropes to bind the thatch for the roofs of their houses; the women knit, sew, card, and spin. So have they done for generations beyond number, carrying on by word of mouth the poems, the histories of the Gael.

It was at such a gathering in the township of Dalvoolin, round Kintra of the Holy Cross, the dark man, who looked Spanish because of his curled short beard, found himself that self-same night he had saved an elderly wretch from drowning. He was one that ever loved an entertainment—if it cost him nothing—and felt it good to bask in the praise the Islands of the west will ever accord to a hero.

They called him Young Corodale at the outset, for the name of his family’s small estate on the other side of the island: the night passed quickly, but if quick passed the night quicker passed their shyness, and soon they were calling him by his Christian name of Col. For he was one who stood on no ceremony, and liked the brevity of his own name because it came so pat to the lips of all good fellows who had coin to spend. There was no flattery too coarse for him of the Spanish beard. In the spaces between song or tale ’twas “Oh ’ille! what courage! In the black squall, too, and for Dark John, an old man without woman or child or a penny of land of his own, who must die soon anyway.”

“Amn’t I telling the same Dark John that death has surely forgotten him?” said an unkindly spinster woman, dragging rebellious wool through her carding-combs.

“But a trifle, but a trifle, good folk!” said the affable man from Corodale. “I have swam ere now as a lad round Oronsay, and to carry this man you call Dark John round the point of Kintra was like bearing a sack of sticks.”

“Now that we have dried you, we must wet you, hero,” said the man of the house, proffering a glass. “Have that, Master Col, and stretch your hand for another; it is not every day, worse luck! a man is on the edge of drowning, and a gallant close bye to save him in windy Uist. Drink, and stretch again your hand.”

And Col most cheerfully stretched his hand. It cost nothing.

“It is not lucky to save a man from drowning: take its spoil from the sea and the spoil itself will punish you,” said the grumbling woman at the carding-combs. “There would have been a lament and a keening at Boisdale to-morrow, sure, but for this strong gentleman, and I have not had the fortune to hear a dirge for a twelvemonth.”

“Daughter of him I’ll mention not! do you grudge Dark John his life?” cried the man of the house impatiently, and at that the boys in the loft began to laugh, so up with a scourge of broom to them climbed their mother. They ran like mice to their bed, but she was after them, and her switching could be heard below.

“It was not I, mother, not I,” cried one of the boys, whimpering carefully.

“Well, never mind; take yon for the sake of company! it will like enough be you on the next occasion. Oh, Mary Mother, what a heart-break are the children of this island!” And down she came, smiling, stout, and panting, no sooner to be seated at her hearth than the faces of the children were at the mouth of the loft again.

Col of the Spanish beard and the trim clothing had an eye that found the very core of whoever he looked at, rendering the shy or the scarce honest uneasy at his glance. He would seem a fellow to be adored by man-or woman-kind, so fine in his gestures, so free and bold and ringing in his voice. But the goodwife sitting at his side had his beard between her and the light of a crusie that hung from a rafter, and she must be staring every now and then through it at the mouth below betraying another character. She had started by admiring; she grew, like a woman, on the mere aspect of things concealed, to dislike, and her chastisement of her children had been meant in a roundabout way as relief for her feelings.

“Stretch your hand, Master Col,” invited the man of the house, who loved a merry party. She gave him a grimace disapproving, and made to end this adulation.

“Perhaps,” said she, “our piper will play another tune?”

“The piper has gone over for a while to Geepie’s dwelling,” said the husband, “but his pipes are here.”

“Poor is the bagpipe that is widowed,” said she, and could not keep her eyes off the mouth that to all but her was hid below the Spanish beard. Col saw her look: he turned on her his disconcerting eyes; but for once they had no power, because the woman had seen his mouth. “There, or I’m wrong, is the daughter of a bitch!” he thought, for no other reason than that she faced him unabashed.

And then a loud knocking came to the door, setting the hearts of the bairns in the loft thundering in their bosoms. Even the elder company seemed alarmed. It was not on Michaelmas night there should be rapping at any door in hospitable Uist.

“Christ’s cross be on us!” whispered the girls. A hollow silence held the house all trembling; outside there was the drip of the thatch eaves, the old search and pity of the wind, but they heard not these, nor the threat of ocean that is ever in the air of the Outer Isles.

“Who knocks?” cried the goodman at last, and manœuvred to get his wife, a stout one, between him and the door.

“Hail to the house and the household! For the love of Mary will any one give me a place here to lay my head?” cried a voice they all knew, and none better than Col, who had heard the despairing shriek of it as he dived for the man who had lost his hold of the fishing-bladder and was slipping for the last time into the deeps of Barra Sound.

The company laughed, their minds relieved.

“And where would you lay your feet, honest person? Outside to trip the neighbours?” asked the goodwife. She opened the door, and gave entrance to the old man with the slack foolish mouth. “I thought they had dried your skin and wet your stomach, John, and put you long ago to your naked bed?”

“I was there indeed,” said the man who entered, blinking with eyes inflamed by the deeper brine, “but wakened and had a strong command in me to seek for the hero that saved me, and in the dark I have lost my way.”

“Faith! and in the dark, then, you have had a lover’s good fortune and have found your heart,” said the goodman, “for here he is.”

“Let me put my two eyes on him,” cried Dark John. He peered about the assemblage, plainly a whimsical natural character, long and thin and sea-sodden till his skin was all in furrows, scarcely worth saving from the fish he had himself so long preyed on. When he saw the gentleman from Corodale, he made a loutish bow. “There he is to you!” cried he, aloud and elated. “Master; I could not sleep without coming again to thank you. For more than an hour, mo chreach! have I looked for you, and here my fortune brings me to your feet. I dreamt I was in the deep again and the net-bow gone, and the sting of the salt in the nose of me. I wakened with the water glucking at my throat, and felt I must come and make my reverence to the hero that saved me.”

“You thanked me enough before, just man,” said Corodale, but still was manifestly pleased. “How happens it that a decent man of Uist was fishing alone on Michaelmas Day?”

“It is not a day of Obligation,” answered the old man. “I have a wonderful memory for minding things; but of the feast days and the fast days of Isle Uist I am for ever forgetting, being a lonely man without woman or child to keep me to the bit. The truth, O king of the moon and sun and the beautiful sublime stars! is, that I forgot what day this was.”

The young folk laughed at his eloquence; the goodwife filled him out a little glass with a foot on it, for the footless glass of the hero with a will is not for men with slack and foolish mouths.

“ ’Tis no great glass, goodwife,” said he; “I could drain it if it was a mile or more to the bottom for I have salt, oh God! such salt, in me. I drink,” said he, and stood up like a mast, “to the gentleman of Corodale. I am his man from this on. Is it the fire?—there is the hand! The knife for him?—here is the bosom! Oh, the sea, the sea! the tremendous sea, and terrible! I have lived on it, and lived by it, and still I hate it like the very hell when there’s but a plank between me and purgatory, even though my oars are in the arm-pits of the waves. It serves me right that I should be forgetful of the good St Michael’s Day. But I drink to the hero.”

“Who has not the best of memories himself,” said Col, laughing. “We are so far from the ordinances yonder at Corodale, and I am so much from home that even I will now and then overlook spiritual matters. And what luck had you, just old man, at the day’s fishing?”

“What but Michaelmas luck?”

“A good catch?”

“No, but very near it; a Protestant from Benbecula, who shot a fathom or two to the side of me, had, I am sure, three cran.”

“So!” said Col; “the English have a saying that has more sense than most of their sayings—that a miss is as good as a mile; it pertains marvellously to a fisherman who hales empty nets from alongside full ones. And God seems careless enough to be so kind to heretics from Benbecula.”

The goodwife looked through the Spanish beard and crossed herself; she had no taste for irreligious levity, and there the ceilidh company shared her sentiment, thinking the Corodale hero scarcely considerate of his pleasantries on a Michaelmas night. Dark John coughed to cover the disgrace of his rescuer, and did it so well that it ended in a real convulsion.

“It is there you have the bad cough, old man,” said the goodwife.

“He will be wanting another glass,” said the woman who was unkind, and teased wool with a gusto as if it were the fibres of bachelor mankind.

“A bad enough cough I’ll allow,” said Dark John; “but there’s many a one in Boisdale burying-ground would like to have it this night.”

A demand rose for the dance of Cailleag-an-Dunan—the Mill-dust Man. The piper was called from Geepie’s; up he set his drones upon his shoulder and played like a MacCruimen of Skye, while a man and woman made attitudes graceful or grotesque before each other till the woman fell at last upon the floor, play-acting death. Her partner made moan for his dead carlin, dancing still about her body, stopping to breathe upon her palms or touch her with a willow wand. But she did not stir till he had kissed her on the lips, and then she sprang joyfully to life that ever comes from love, and again the dance went on.

Col smiled with an outer aspect of sympathy; but the goodwife looked at his beard, and was annoyed to see his lips.

“You are perhaps tired of our poor play?” said she hastily, jealous for her guests.

“On my word,” said he, “I have seldom enjoyed myself better. ’Tis ten years, no more nor less, since I saw Cailleag-an-Dunan danced in Corodale. Folk in our part have lost the skill of it.” And then he saw that she was annoyed, and she knew he saw it, and was vexed to make a stranger feel uneasy, so she gave him the first word of her flattery that night.

“They have not lost their skill of swimming, at least,” she said, “as the old man there has reason well to know. You are a lucky man, that are so friendly with the heartless sea—Mary forgive me that I should speak so of Her Treasury!”

“The sea is no friend of mine, and still I am much on the sea,” he explained, “though something of a landlord by estate.” He whispered in her ear, “I have an interest in a sort of sloop that sometimes runs a little Barra cordial to the mainland.”

“I have heard a breath of that among the men-folk,” whispered back the goodwife. “O king! good winds be ever behind you in that. In Barra and Mingulay are honest pious Catholics like ourselves, and well-deserving.”

“Doubtless, goodwife, doubtless!” said he of the Spanish beard, “but for once their Michaelmas has gone by without some mainland commodities, for the Happy Return, launched by Master Paul, priest of Barra, and with three vials of holy water in her den, is two days overdue. I left Corodale yesterday to look for signs of her, and thought she might have been driven through the Sound by last night’s storm, and might be beating in upon this side of Uist to-day, but never a glimpse of the Happy Return.”

“Oh righ!” said the goodwife.

“Blest be the boat

By our King of the elements,

Blest be the boat!”

crossing herself the while.

“It is a pious rune,” admitted Col of Corodale; “but I wish my skipper may have been depending more on his own seamanship than on prayers.”

“But the prayers of the faithful!” said the goodwife eagerly. “Oh! they avail, Corodale. Seven skiffs have I seen brought safe to land through the wildest weather simply through the supplications of Master Ludovick.”

Col smiled. “There,” said he, “is angelic navigation for you! A good priest, they say; but I fear he could not put all his power into prayer for a smuggler’s sloop, for there’s some of the cloth are mighty particular nowadays.”

“It is true he does not favour the honest free trade,” she confessed, “otherwise you might have asked his services. For indeed he is mighty in prayer, more than any other priest in the Long Island, and can wrestle with the worst agents. He might have been among us to-night, for affable exceedingly is Master Ludovick, and loves the old devices; but he has an uncle that is of great years and is near his end, as you may have heard across the way in Corodale, and Master Ludovick and his sister have gone early home to-night.”

“His sister?” said Col, with a little livelier interest; “I thought she was in France.”

“Indeed, the dear creature! and she was, just man, for five years at her schooling, but came home again three months ago; and long may she be with us, till the right man comes to take her!”

“It was Anna I saw, then, in Saxon clothes among the company at the games?”

“Just Herself, Corodale, just Herself—Little Anna with the fifty-years’ fortune,” said the goodwife fondly, like one who spoke about a daughter of her own.

“Fortune?” said Col, as if he sang a note of song. She cast a quick glance into his beard and saw greed.

“It is just a saying of the common folk,” said she hastily. “They are talking about a treasure; faith! who gets our Anna gets a treasure better far than the red metal of the MacNeil’s ulaidh.”

When she said that, young Corodale laughed. “MacNeil’s Treasure,” said he. “You are speaking of the Prince’s money from Loch Arkaig? An old tale yon! I am fearing there is little of it to the fore now that Anna’s uncle is at his end. I have heard my father”—(“May your father have his share of paradise!” murmured the goodwife, piously crossing herself)—“I have heard my father often speak of this money, and laugh at the notion of any of it being left.”

“That may be as it may,” said the goodwife, “but here we have another way of it.” And stopped suddenly, annoyed at the mouth below the Spanish beard.

“But the treasure would not be Anna’s in any case,” said Col, with his mind briskly turning over all considerations. “It would more properly be her brother the priest’s—no, no, now that I mind of it, the men who made the pact knew better, as my father had the story, and agreed that a priest should never share a second time the secret of the Loch Arkaig ulaidh. They were wise in their generation.”

“God be about us!” said the goodwife humbly. “Who would touch it till the appointed time?”

A flash came in Corodale’s eyes. “The appointed time?” said he, “of course; Dhe! have I not forgotten? If there was not another Rising in fifty years, the money was to go to the last survivors or their families. And the last is Master Ludovick’s uncle, the old done man of Dermosary. When will the time be up, good woman?”

“I do not know, and I do not care,” said she shortly, and cried across to a guest, “Oh, Hector, tell us the tale of Manus!” And the guest started a tale that seemed like to last till the crowing of cocks, but all were happy and all intent upon his story, except the dark man from Corodale.

He made calculations, ticking the years off with his hand inside his waistcoat on his heart, so eager on it, so apt to blunder in his hurry, that he wished he had a score of fingers on each hand.

“Why, by the soul of me!” said he to the goodwife at last, a light in his eyes, and his mouth to her more unpleasant than ever—“there’s no more than a year to run. Come next Feill Michael the treasure will be Anna’s. Lucky indeed was Anna—if the tale were true.” The goodwife paid no heed. “Twenty thousand pounds!” he said to himself softly in English no one there could understand. “I have heard my father mention it a score of times. He believed the stuff was still wherever it was hidden when they brought it to the Isles, and many a day he searched for it when fishing had been more profitable. Twenty thousand pounds in louis of France, crusadoes of Spain, and English guineas! Lord! what a hole it would cobble in Corodale’s brogues, that’s like to suffer again by the loss of the Happy Return, stove in maybe on Barra Head or Mingulay.” He lost himself in thoughts the most indulgent, the most luxurious. What could he not do with twenty thousand pounds? No longer this ridge of rock, this narrow life among unable simpletons. With half twenty thousand pounds he could take the world for his pillow, and see to the very end of things—travel, adventure, purchase, love and win. Twenty thousand pounds; God! twenty thousand pounds! In the hands—as it were—of a schoolgirl! What days and nights were in a tenth part of that sum! And still—and still—not so very much in itself after all; some people ill-deserving had far more—but in what a bold spirit could make out of it. He turned over in his pocket some coins that had been his first care when he was dragged ashore with Dark John drenched; he turned them over, and they felt singularly lonely and insignificant. What might be made of twenty thousand pounds—the stuff itself being but dead dust? A bigger sloop was in a fraction of it, perhaps two or three; no need to run risks in the free trade; himself his old ideal—master of a bigger fleet of fishers, or briskly trading between Uskavagh and the mainland, with curing-stations round every creek in Uist, beating the encroaching east coast merchant at his own devices. Twenty thousand pounds—and every pound a bait for twenty more!

And all this was in the keeping of a girl! He felt a grievance against her, though he had never seen her close at hand since six or seven years ago, when she was but a child with no interest for him.

The night passed quickly in the house of entertainment; dance followed story, and song came after dance. “More peat: more peat!” the hearth glowed; the bairns still looked down from the loft, lying on their bellies, some asleep for weariness, and one of them fell among the company and suffered his mother’s lovable harmless chastisement. The cattle in the byre turned noisily in their stalls, a pony fastened at the gable beat wildly on the ground. Smells of mordants, of the herb-dyed clothes, of peats and pungent byres and the sea perfume—the clean, good, zesty perfume of net and line and oar—prevailed. And outside in the night there was the storm rising with the rising tide. The lights of the islands grew less; townlands were gone to bed; the ocean tore round Kintra of the Holy Cross, and growled like a beast furious on Rhu-na-faing. Far off on Heiskar, like a star afloat upon the sea, there gleamed a beacon-fire—Heiskar was guiding in the herring shoals or warning off the foreign mariner.

And Corodale the hero, on the hero’s seat beside the goodwife, turned his silver tasdan in his pouch, feeling the indecent lust for gold, the goodwife glancing through his Spanish beard the while, liking him less at every look, though there were half-a-dozen girls in her company who would have gone barefoot with such a noble fellow to the other end of Albyn through the storm.

“What would you do with twenty thousand pounds if you had it?” he asked her suddenly, coming out of his noble dreams.

“Fine I know that!” said the goodwife quickly. “I would make mirth in every patch of tenant land in brindled little Uist of the sheldrakes. Tochers for the brides, and silver crown pieces of luck for the little fists of the darling new-born babies; hale nets for the fishers, and braver boats. Where the land is blanched, I would spread, sow, and build. O king! what an opportunity! I am all hot to be thinking of it, sure! Good would it be indeed to be the free giver out of such a store. And first there would be a guinea for Nanny Veg, that needs a new loom, and there would be five to bring the blind man’s son back from the bloody wars—oh, it would take the night to tell the marvels of merriment there would be in twenty thousand pounds; but very early and above all there would be a new tower for the chapel.”

Corodale laughed.

“Oh Dhe! I daresay the Church has had its claw in the stuff ere now,” said he, “though a priest by the pact was never again to know its whereabouts.”

“Heaven forgive the thought!” said the goodwife humbly. “There would be a curse on any that handled it before the time appointed; and indeed Master Ludovick calls it cursed in any case, and has a red fury on him if he hears us call it Anna’s gold.”

And now the night of song and story was done; the folk, humming the airs of the songs they had heard, went forth in groups for their homes. Loud indeed was the storm on the islands; no distant star was to be seen except the flame of Heiskar or the twinkle of some crusie light in Dalvoolin. Corodale went forth to his lodging in the tacksman’s dwelling over the burn, pondering on hidden gold, never heeding the wind or rain, unhaunted by any tender strain of song. One by one the lights went out in windy Uist, and the night was conqueror. But in the waste and middle of it, when the storm was wildest and the hour most dark, fathers and children came out and got upon the roofs to keep the thatch from flying. They sat on the slopes of heather and straw, beat on by rains and choking to the gusts, and sang together:—

“God shield the house, the fire, the kine,

And all who take their peace within,

Hold care aloof from me and mine,

And Mary keep us all from sin.

This night, this night, this stormy night,

O Lightner of the stars that shine,

Pity the women, pity the bairns,

Bring peace to man, and horse, and kine!”

They sat all night on the frail roofs along the shore, singing these and suchlike runes and hymns (if ships were passing and could hear, the seamen must have thought the waves enchanted); and there the morning found them when he came, gladly and with peace, over the hills of Hecla and Benmore.