Читать книгу Children of Tempest - Munro Neil - Страница 5

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Col went back that day to Corodale, walking, to begin with, on the pleasant sandy plains facing the Atlantic, that turned and basked in the bosom of the world, murmuring a little in the creeks, and showing a curl of grey on the distant Monach isles. The road soon left the shore and brought him into the country of the lochs, past dark and thoughtful barps knee-deep in the rushy tarns, past ruined duns where ravens pecked in the eyeless gables—old strongholds of the tribes, remembering. Beyond Askernish and Mingary, Ollay Loch and Ormaclett Castle, and then he departed from the country of habitations and went through grave Glen Dorochay, seeking the Pass of Hellisdale that comes out upon the east of Uist.

A pleasant land to travel in upon such happy weather; on every hand the folk so rude and strong, coming along the way with cheerful salutations, engaged with natural easiness upon their season’s occupations—the reaping of oat and barley, the herding of sturdy little cattle red and brown, the driving in of peats. Long strings of little horses, led by girls and boys, came out of the east where cried the lapwing, where sometimes blackguardly old Loch Boisdale sea-gulls screamed to the little rustic birds the taunt of far-travelled mariners, and every horse had its panniers laden with the turf to light and warm innumerable ceilidhs, to make pictures on the hearth-stones for the tales in the winter nights to come. The huts gulped smoke, the doors stood open; he had many invitations to go in and drink milk and rest.

It was pleasant exceedingly to see the young folk smiling; it was good to travel in such a land of hospitality, but Col stayed to enjoy neither one nor the other, walking quickly, and full of thought about his fortunes.

He came down the pass on Corodale when the sun was at his height and grandeur, saw the lake in Glen Usinish shining like an angel’s eye; and far away, dim and faery, a vision like Ibrysail, land of eternal youth, a bard’s thought breathed in vapour on the horizon, he saw, unmoved, the cliffs, the peaks of Skye.

At a place beside the cave where Charles Edward Stuart skulked when all his fights were done and his hopes destroyed, Col met his mother, with a bright tonnag of tartan wrapped over her head, as if she were for travelling.

She was altogether unlike her son, this widow woman of Corodale, notable in the isles till to-day as the best who ever danced there; so little in stature that he might have lifted her like a child. She ran to him with her arms outstretched, and, never at ease in the English tongue a new gentility was bringing to the best families of the Outer Isles, though she knew it very well, she cried, “O Michael Saint! my son that was lost is found again, bless the sacred Name! And come away within this moment, and have something to eat.”

She turned to walk with him towards the house, that stood in tall walls sheltering such lowly shrubs as alone will thrive upon the wind-vexed Hebrides.

“For two days I have not touched bread,” said she, hanging on his arm and all trembling. “For two days! And as for sleep in such storms, with a door shut upon my son, it was impossible. Col, Col, where were you?”

He smiled, kindly at the eyes (whatever might happen below the Spanish beard). “There’s news to tell in that,” said he. “I was on Monday at Loch Eynort, spending the night with our friends at Kirkidale. Yesterday I took my feet out of there with me and went west to Boisdale, and——”

“On Michaelmas Day, O king! to be travelling on affairs. Col, it is not right. Were you at Mass?”

He felt annoyed to be so questioned, but did not show it. “I went to Our Lady Star of the Sea,” he said.

“My good Col!” cried out the happy mother. “And saw Master Ludovick?”

“Yes,” said Col, never mentioning how brief and secular had been his seeing. “There is no word of the sloop,” he hurried on. “She has been heard of neither in Loch Eynort nor on the other side. I thought she might have been driven through Sound Eriskay on Monday, and it was that sent me over to the machar side of the island; but there the sea is blank. Three days ago she should have been here in Skiport, but now I’m thinking there may be empty kegs about the Minch and dog-fish in the hold of the Happy Return. There was my last chance!” He became exceeding bitter in his tone.

“Oh Dhe!” she cried in horror; “to have such a thought, and make so much of the vessel and so little of her men! I will excuse you, because you must always be putting the worst face on affairs; and it is not at all likely that so skilly a man as the skipper was anywhere else than safe in Arisaig yesterday waiting the end of the storm. He will be here to-morrow; and now I must go and comfort his wife.”

“And still,” said Col, “I wish I had the comfort of but the one look of the sloop, and her with her mast standing. This north wind takes three days before its heart is broken——”

“——And this is the fourth,” said she, determined to make him more cheerful, “and look what a day it is, with the sea, as the men are telling me, all shivering with fish. We went to Mass yesterday, in St Mary’s, Duncan and I; but my Michaelmas morning cake is still on the board: I had not the heart to go among the poor people. But now I’ll be hurrying among them, seeing you are back again. It was wrong of me to stay at home.”

“There is nothing in that that heaven will not look over, for we are poor enough ourselves.”

“Not so poor,” said she blythly, “but there are others will be thinking us as wealthy as the kings, Col.”

“That is Duncan’s way of it; my own is greatly different. By all the old great stones, I have had such plans!”

“Plans, mo chreach!” said she. “It is richer you would be, my son, with plain contentment.”

“You are learning Duncan’s lesson very well,” said Col, and stared ahead of him as they neared the house in the glen.

“We could have no more than we have,” said the mother. “Here’s a comfortable dwelling—praise Mary! and the good building of your great-great-grandfather! Here’s our own land with Mary’s Treasury lapping at our door, and every fisherman will bring his basket for us to pick from before he takes a fin to his own fireside, even if he must live himself on the dog-fish afterwards.”

“It is good, mother, that you are so easily pleased. I have other notions myself of what is comfort. But indeed what am I to be complaining, that am only your second son?”

“You are the only son of your father, my goodman—peace with him and his share of Paradise!” said the little woman, her face exalted. “Duncan—dear heart!—would be the last to think of things in that way.”

They had come to the garden wall. Corodale House, that was as high as a tree in this treeless glen, and as grey as the rocks, and speckled with windows, blind or lozenged, had one gable of greater antiquity than the rest, with broken gun-ports for a hint of other days. Col stopped and looked at it, struck for the first time in his life with some sense of its humility.

“Where’s Duncan?” he asked suddenly.

“He has but new come home,” said the mother. “Like yourself he has been gone all night.”

“All night!” said Col, astonished. “And where was he all night?”

“I was anxious about you; I had dreams, I saw you swimming for your life——”

“By the name of God!” cried Col, and faced her, “you were not far amiss. I had to do some swimming last night down at Boisdale for an old man who but for me would never sup crowdy nor set eyes on Uist again.”

“A drowning man,” said his mother, with a start; “a drowning man, and you saved him. I am glad, and I am sorry, for whoever takes its spoil from the sea, the spoil, they say, will punish.”

“The saying’s a silly one,” said Col, uneasy to hear it so soon again. “Where’s Duncan?”

“All night the poor lad searched on either side of the fords and is just come home, and is now at a melancholy meal.”

They entered the gate. In the shelter of the old house that had seen wars there was every sign of calm affairs,—a barn with cockerels pecking grain; a byre where a cow was being milked by a servant-maid, who sat on a stool with her cheek against the flank and sprayed the milk in the frothing cogue, looking from the dusk out into the dazzling sun. Pigeons, too, pure white, paraded with trailing wings about their loves before the door, and a hundred starlings chattered on the ridges of the roofs. A pleasant, flourishing place enough, and yet Col of Corodale felt it more than ever mean.

“Duncan, Duncan! here is Col!” cried out his mother at the door. A man inside laughed gladly with all his heart, laughed as a boy might laugh in his sleep at some keen joy tickling his dreams. So the well laughs in the mountains when it tumbles into linns among the heather and the fern. He ran out, sweeping his brown hair from his temples, and caught his brother by the shoulders and shook him playfully, crying the while, “Son of the one I’ll mention not! here is a fine joke upon the mother and on me; come home, vagabond, come home!” He was slighter than Col but every inch as tall, brown where the other was black, scarce so handsome, and yet more pleasant in the countenance, clean-shaven, womanly at the mouth, and glanced from a tranquil eye.

“Come in and eat, lad!” he cried, with the universal welcome of these isles, seizing his brother’s arm. He spoke in English. “I have been spoiling my own dinner these twenty minutes with the foolishest speculations about you; now I’ll make up for it.”

But when they were before the food it was Col who ate the heartiest after all, while Duncan, eating little, listened to the other’s story.

“Bah! Col,” he cried, “it’s ever the worst look-out with you. Your skipper is too good a seaman to lose the Happy Return or to be caught in yesterday’s weather anywhere west of Arisaig. I wish he had other cargoes—but no; no, no; I’ll say nothing of that now, Col; take your meat like a man! A stuck priest should be sparing of his homilies, in case the world laugh at him.”

Col frowned, plucking his Spanish beard.

“I have heard you often on that tack, Duncan,” said he. “My small ventures in the free trade seem to be spoiling your sleep. You are more particular on that score than the clergy themselves. Faith! many a keg I’ve had Flying Jib-boom slip in at the presbytery houses in Moidart. But that’s all done with, perhaps, if the Happy Return belies her name for once. If you want to know, I’m seeing a gloomy time for us in Corodale.”

“The last year I was in Passy,” said the other, sharing none of his apprehension, “there was a French student there who saw ruin in every washing-bill. His face turned whiter than the linen each time the blanchisseuse unpinned her account from her basket. On the last day of his term he fell heir to twenty thousand louis, and without a moment’s swithering he gave it all to the Jesuits.”

“Twenty thousand!” cried Col with a start. “The luck of the world seems to run in twenty thousand. I like the ring of twenty thousand; it sings itself like a good song: more than twenty thousand would be awkward, less would be scrimp.”

Duncan laughed.

“Keep a close grip on your envy, lad,” cried he; “doesn’t our Gaelic proverb say it is the second cousin of avarice, and wears the same tartan?”

“I think nobody can call me miserly,” said Col.

“I thought nothing of the kind; I meant that there’s the root of it in every man that has imagination and a love of power.”

“You talk about Passy!” said Col. “Now let me tell you, I wish to heaven you had gone through with it; faith! it seems to me silly enough to boggle at one or two doctrines of the Church and swallow all the rest without bocking.”

He saw his brother’s face show vexation, and hurriedly begged his pardon; then plunged into the bitter recitation of evils that had of late befallen all his ventures. Two seasons’ fishing had been failures; cattle had died, sheep had been lost by the trembling, two cargoes of Barra cordial had been confiscated by the excise.

“And yet what the poorer are we, Col?” asked his brother. “We sleep as soft, we eat as well, we are sheltered as securely, and clothed as warmly as when Corodale was at its best.”

“It took five hundred pounds from Corodale to teach you what your notion was about the Church,” retorted Col, again angry. His brother gently smiled, his eyes half-shut upon the other’s rudeness.

“I could make an easy answer to that, dear brother.”

“Yes, I know, I know,” said Col, hurried and more bitter still. “Out with it, Duncan, man! out with it! Corodale is none of mine, and I am but the beggar for your bounty. It is yours I have ventured with and lost—do I not know it?”

“I have not said a word of that, brother,” said Duncan; “I had forgot; I gave up all for the Church——”

“It was not on paper,” said Col, pulling his beard, and mentioning the fact as if it were a grudge.

“Our parents meant me for the priesthood and you for the world; there was no contract needed between us; what money there was at hand seven years ago went to keep me in Paris and make it plain that Duncan, son of Ranald, was not the stuff priests are made of. All I got from the money spent on me was that I found myself and lost a calling. Col, ’ille! ’tis I that am the beggar, ashamed to be here but half-employed. All I expect from Corodale is shelter, till I have decided what to make elsewhere of the trivial learning it cost Corodale so much to get for me.”

“If things go on as they are doing, I must go elsewhere without even the learning. If I had had it instead of you, I might have made more of it than you did; but the one thing is certain, there is little room for two of us in Corodale: perhaps if the sloop is really lost, there is little enough for one.”

Duncan looked on him with some surprise: this was not altogether the brother who had gone away two days ago. And so, someway, thought the mother; and so, too, thought the workpeople of Corodale when that day Col went out among them.

Many a glance he cast to sea, but never found a sloop upon the rollers. The women loading and leading peats upon the moss found him changed: he that had hitherto gone among them anxious to have the best of their labours, but always with some jocundity, now drove without a smile.

“God be about us! what ails the poor man?” they said, lading up the creels or binding corn, and speaking before their master freely, as they always do in Uist. “His Michaelmas cake must have disagreed with the stomach of him, for black’s his aspect, as black as his father’s before him.”

“What ails the brother?” they asked Duncan, when he in his turn came smiling and hearty among them. “He has got a turn through Boisdale reek, and come back with his face like thunder.”

“Worry, good folks, just worry! the worst dog in the pack. There is no sign of the sloop?”

“Oh Dhe!” cried the labourers, “St Michael keep off all dangers! What would become of the widows of her crew?”

“They would starve—like the rest of us,” said Col, overhearing, and left the field.

He spent a sullen day; at night he went early to bed, in an upper room below the roof of Corodale House. It had been lit by his mother with two candles; he pinched them out, and looked from the little window into the garden and over the fields and out as far as he might upon the sea, that he had robbed of its spoil, and now—it might be in the first of its revenge—had robbed him of his sloop. The moon, enormous, stared upon the Isles.