Читать книгу Children of Tempest - Munro Neil - Страница 7

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Over three islands Dermosary went to his burial, the lairs of his name being at Trinity Temple in the other Uist, now cut off from the grace of Mother Church, astray and heretic. The cart he rode in—as comfortable for a corpse as any hearse with feathers—had to cross the two fords, dreadful in November weather, for all their sandy miles are mournful with the whimpering ghosts of ancient tragedy. He went on a Wednesday that he might be under turf on Thursday, for Friday is the cursed day (and yet for us how blest!) on which Christ died.

Father Ludovick and his sister and a dozen of his people rode north in the face of the wind, first traversing the plains, and in the afternoon threading among the little lochs that lie unnamed and without number in Uist and Benbecula, forgotten when the Lord relented and blew back the waves from all the bens and Ararats.

Three halts they made for refreshment, and built three cairns for a memorial, and at the mouth of the evening they came to Creggans—a hamlet of the ancient monks, that sees St Kilda itself far out on the deep, with its mountains exceeding dim.

Creggans had an inn, an ugly place, two-storeyed, square, and black with rain, thatched with withered ranach. It stood by itself drearily in the middle of a desolate patch of sandy soil near the margin of the sea, that always looked like leaping on it and sweeping all within it through the lattice windows, leaving the tangle of the outermost deeps upon its sills and astragals. Here the mourners meant to spend the night. When they came towards it at first there was no sign of occupation, far less of hospitality: no smoke came from the chimney, no person was visible in its neighbourhood, but when the cart was stopped Father Ludovick hailed the house and the household. A pock-marked red-haired man of an aspect unpleasant and unwelcoming came hurriedly to the door and touched his cap.

“Who in the world is this that travels?” said he with a glance at the mortcloth on the cart.

“One that was a man last Monday, innkeeper,” said the priest, “and travels no more in this world: my uncle of Dermosary.”

“Dermosary! Just so! just so! a good man; peace with him and his share of Paradise,” said the innkeeper, with a buttered mouth. “I am out of the world here, and never heard a word of it. You are making for Teampuill Trianaid, Master Ludovick? Then you cannot cross till break of day, if you will not cross in the dark.”

“That was in our calculations. With your will we will stay here till the morning ford is open. I daresay you can provide a room for my sister, and the rest of us who cannot make a shift with a chair at the kitchen fire can get accommodation in the outhouse.”

“I will do my best,” said the innkeeper, with a hesitation. “It is not every day we have a true gentleman of name as well as fortune to bury.” He made to help Anna from her saddle, but she was on her feet before he could offer her a hand. At that he gave a cunning smile.

“Her ladyship is very light,” said he, “for twenty thousand pounds.”

Father Ludovick gripped him by the arm. “My good man,” said he, “it is not the hour for wit.”

“Take my excuses, Father,” said the innkeeper, his pitted face as red as his hair. “It’s an old tale in the isles of Uist, her ladyship’s fifty-year fortune, and I meant no offence.” And then he went to the outhouse where his wife, a drab, was curing dog-fish, and gave her his mind in English oaths she luckily could not understand. She looked on him with terror, trembling, as dumb as a stalled beast. “Here’s a funeral,” he said to her, “from Boisdale—old Dermosary—and not a bed made. Mollachd Dhe! but have I not the useless slut, barren of wits and work and weans?”

Dermosary for the night slept under his mortcloth, in the barn; two men kept him company with a crusie, and played a game of cards; a few sheltered in houses near Gramisdale, Father Ludovick and the others sat up in the kitchen of the inn, and Anna tried to sleep in a room above. But the inn of Creggans was not meant, that night, for sleep. It was for ever shaking to the wind, its carpentry creaking, its doors and chimneys abominable with continual moans. She lay staring in the darkness, and the first touch of the dawn at her window was very welcome. Up she got and said her island prayer, and looked upon a landscape she had not seen since she was a child, a landscape that many a time in France she had thronged in dreams with folk of terror or romance. Miles of sandy strait lay between her and the hills and plains of Northern Uist. Deep sea-pools were there, and rivulets of escaping tide; rocks—very black—very cruel—very cold—were scattered upon the sands on which the sea-gull and the curlew went staggering before the wind. The light of Carinish was still shining on the other side, a wan eye for guidance to the traveller, and the tall Mount of Eaval was unseen, but already the ford was thronged. Some women with their gowns high-kilted waded knee-deep in the pools, spearing flat-fish; others bent to seek for bait. Little ponies, saddled with rugs of pleated bent-grass and bitted with rope, with streaming tails, plashed in the morning wind at a cheerful trot across the rivulets; others stepped leisurely, long streams of them laden with panniers of peat. The day indeed was come, and it came hardly any sooner than her brother, who was not astonished that she should answer dressed and ready for departure, to his summons at her door.

“I knew it,” said he. “No sleep, Anna? I could not sleep myself for the certainty of it, and there’s an innkeeper here has talked about what he calls ‘life’—his blackguard life of the barracks and the sea, of wars, and smuggling ships, and blacker crafts I’m thinking, though he dare not mention them to the priest,—till I could have gone into a trance had I not the knowledge—a constant pain over my eyebrows—that you were lying, m’eudail! staring in the dark and hungry for daylight.”

“I am so glad the day has come,” said Anna, looking about the room that had for so many hours seemed dreadful to her wakefulness, and they went to the poor slattern’s notion of breakfast. They were in the midst of it when Father Ludovick took a thought and cried upon the innkeeper.

“You have not seen any sign,” said he, “of a friend of mine from Corodale?”

“Corodale,” said the innkeeper, and showing a slight confusion,—“Col, or Master Duncan?”

“Either,” answered Father Ludovick. “I sent a message asking them to the funeral, and hoped to meet one or other of them at the south ford or here. But the bidding was something of a piper’s, as we say, and it is unlikely that any of them would come all the way from the other side of Benmore in such weather.”

“Weather, Master Ludovick, is a thing that never troubled one of them in Corodale: there is something in the race of them that they would sooner have the blash of rain in their necks than a sun-burning.”

Anna could not but smile to her brother, for here was his commonest sentiment—a preference for the storm, that made him often wander out upon the shore at midnight and revel in the onset and the fury of the sea.

“If he comes, then,—but I do not look for him now,—he will have counted on the open ford, and will be here presently,” said Father Ludovick, and the innkeeper went out to make inquiries.

“I was not aware you had specially invited Corodale,” said Anna when they were alone.

“I did so at the last moment,” said her brother, “and on a curious impulse, for it was our droll friend, Dark John, hinted at the compliment, and offered himself to travel with my message. I thought if one brother could not come, we might be honoured by the other.”

“Dark John—poor fellow! it will be long before he forgets his thankfulness. Since Michaelmas Day he has been constantly praising Young Corodale to me. Many a time I have blamed myself that I did not that day see the man who risked his life to save a few more years for John. What is he like, this Col?”

“Like? Oh, just like the world, my dear, that we luckily never see the inside of till we die: pleasant enough to look at, and reputed of many accomplishments. It may be no more than the scandal of Uist, but he has the name of trafficking in contraband between Barra and the mainland,—a wretched enterprise surely for one that has no excuse of poverty to justify it. I have been vexed myself that I found no opportunity to talk with him when he swam ashore at Dalvoolin on St Michael’s Day; it might have been lucky. I had that high impulse on me at the time I could have wrenched the soul from him.”

Anna wanly smiled. “It would have been taking an unfair advantage,” said she, “of a soul soaking with the brine of the Atlantic. Your human intuitions, dear Ludovick, are fortunately much better than your spiritual ones sometimes.”

He sighed at that.

“Well, I no more than saw him landed, and assured myself that he and the other man were safe. As you know, I went to the tacksman’s house again in the morning and found that Col was gone. He had come over from Corodale to look for a sloop that was thought to be foundered, but has since turned up and plies her trade as wickedly as ever—so I hear—between Mingulay and Moidart. I would like to meet the man for the sake of his soul and his brother Duncan.”

“The heretic!” cried Anna.

“Hush! my dear; a most unholy epithet. That a man has abandoned his intention of taking orders is no impeachment, surely, of his faith. Duncan has his own sufficient reasons, as no one will admit more readily than I, that know them best—‘faith, better than himself, maybe. You have never seen him, and can never know how good a heart he is—so frank, so bright, so honest.”

“My dear brother! And are they the qualities that spoil him for a priest?” said Anna, smiling again. “If it is so, I wonder that some folk I know are doing not so very badly in Highland chapels.”

“I have not met him but once since he came back from France,” said Father Ludovick, unheeding of her humour, “and I hoped that he, if not his brother, should be with us at the Trinity Temple.”

But neither of the sons of the widow in Corodale had come to Creggans before the ford was fully open, when the funeral party set out again upon its convoy of old Dermosary to the place where his folk were sepulchred. The innkeeper stood at his door and watched them trailing behind the mortcloth to the side of the ford, and “Fair wind to you! brethren,” said he; “if there’s one I cannot stand much company with, it’s his reverence from Boisdale.”

The cart laboured in the sand, and splashed axle-deep in the rivulets that in the north ford are never dry; behind came the mounted mourners, Anna the only woman among them. Once and again on the ford, she let her pony fall behind a little, to gaze curiously at the spectacle. This way and thus, she thought, had come many burials; this way had come fierce bands of cruel soldiers from the north, scourging the poor islands; this way had come lovers, fiery after waiting weary hours upon the cold shore of Benbecula or Uist, to meet the lady.

Her company, crossing the sand without a sound of hoof or wheel or whinny, was like a vision: as her little pony walked doucely under its fairy burden, she half closed her eyes and sank (for she had something of her brother’s habit) into the trance that sometimes came to her from rare landscapes, from unusual aspects of sea or cloud,—a trance where, in a sweet half-dream, she saw the mourners as ancient old eternal folk, travelling through time for a goal unattainable, the sport of the pagan gods, with one that was her brother, a dreamer and a priest, leading them on a tall horse, his head, half sunk on his bosom, thinking. She saw, too, Eachkamish in the west, barring the way to the open sea, and busy with birds above it like a dust, though so far away she could not hear their screaming: Isle Grimisay rose in the sands, half-way over the ford, low and rank and dark, a sand-blown rock whence came the women spearing flat-fish in the pools. The men they passed stopped their labours, arrested their ponies, and doffed their bonnets to the pall; the women—if they were of the ancient faith—let down their garments, waded from the pools, knelt upon the sand and crossed themselves, murmuring—

“O Mary! Mother of Christ,

A soft path for the far traveller!”

“Dear people! dear people!” said Anna, passing them: they wakened her from her reverie, and she urged her pony to a sprightly pace that brought her up beside her brother.

They rode wearily through the unending sands of the Great Bay, and passed among bareheaded heretics at the Ditch of Blood, and reached the grave beside the Trinity Temple about the hour of noon. Anna looked round the company at the grave, half hoping to see the man from Corodale, but he was not there.