Читать книгу Children of Tempest - Munro Neil - Страница 8

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The last turf was hardly upon old Dermosary, and the spades were still at the smoothing of his bed, when the storm, that had all day threatened a renewal, made its bold and unmistakable appearance in the west. The afternoon smelt suddenly salt; there came a boom of the surf from Eachkamish; wild-geese flapped, tuneless and harsh, in wedges hurriedly over Benbecula; the skua slanted like a lance across the wind. Then it was that Father Ludovick’s face clouded, though his thoughts were not upon the weather. He was one that had curious gifts, and felt the influence of the elements quickly,—felt them not in warmth or chill, but in premonitions and inward impulses that answered to the tiniest rainfall of the spring, even when he slept, and made him glad in his dreams for all the flowers, and rejoice with the thirsty mountain grasses. He had communion with the sea and wind; could tell when they must rise and shout, or when their hour of rest was come for them—not a trivial gift of fisher-lore, but the knowledge of the smaller gods. “I am Boreas to-day, my dear!” he was used to tell his sister when she came seeking for him, with a hat and plaid, knowing him of old, and finding him all uplifted, breathing deep in hours of storm upon their island, tramping the sands of the beach, or bareheaded, with flying curls upon his temples, and an abandoned neck, standing on the farthest promontory crying Gaelic verses to the day.

“Boreas will excuse me for interrupting his business, but he must not be catching cold, and it’s wise he would be to come to dinner,” she would cry through the gale, laughing, and stand on tiptoe to clap his hat upon his foolish head, his plaid upon his shoulder, then gently tug at a wet sleeve to bring him home. “Come in, Boreas, come into thy cave and use thy breath to cool thy broth! It is good broth, for I myself made it. O king! am not I the unhappy woman to have a brawling wind for brother? Father Boreas, consider the poor seamen that are tacking for home, and that I am a useless doctor for quinsies, and that my humble human broth is waiting your reverence’s leisure.”

“It will clear in half an hour,” he would tell her then, perhaps, though the sky seemed angrier than before, and he would go with her calmly, laughing, a little ashamed of his raptures, and by-and-by, as he had said, the ocean shared his impulse and was stilled.

No less was he the instrument of the dulcet hours. “To-morrow I will shine, I know it!” he would say, on a night no matter how black and menacing, and to-morrow for a certainty it would be a world of light, and he would spend the day from house to house among his people, jocular and hearty, the very sun itself, and yet—and yet at times between the dwellings, with just a little touch of sadness as he looked upon the ground and thought of all the earth’s futilities. “You are the master of them all—Boreas or Sol,” would Anna say on such occasions, sharing in his gaiety, for was not that, too, her nature? but more deeply feeling in her breast a pang of the Gaelic melancholy. “Yet on my word I am liking you best as Boreas, for storming is a brisk business that needs no meditation, and when it’s shining we must be, it is so easy that it gives too much time for thoughts.” It was true; he had in marshalling the stormy elements a rapture that he never found in the days of calm. And she knew why. “It is just this, Ludovick,” she would tell him; “you and I are bairns of tempest, and feel that it is better to fight and die than rest and rot. For me, give me the pots and pans and something sensible to be doing.”

As he stood at the grave, hearing the pat of the spades, his thoughts were with the conquering worm that crawls in the chamber of dreams and glory; and with the angels that are no nearer earth anywhere than in the Outer Isles, so that he saw nothing of the mustering clouds, and had no calculation of the weather, and yet Boreas frowned upon his face, and at a gentle touch from Anna he wakened with the full knowledge that it was time for them to make for shelter.

“A bad night, people,” he said, hurrying them from the graveyard. “It will last, this stormy weather, till the quarter moon, and to-night we must keep well together in crossing the ford. We will go by Gramisdale.”

But Gramisdale or otherways, the ford was gulping full, and they must wait its emptying. Between the isles the channel ran boisterously with waves, every fang of rock upon the strait—Grimisay Isle, and the Grey Isle, Thin Isle, and Trialabreck, and the Islet of the Dead Women—white with the spray and spindrift. Benbecula, flat like a bannock, that they had walked from in the forenoon, was but dimly to be seen on the other side of this new-born sea. It seemed a change incredible to Anna. That the hoof-prints of her pony Gaisgeach should be for miles below that noisy sea, and that there, where the fish now sported, she had tranced and dreamed behind the mortcloth of her uncle Dermosary! Was it possible that the tide, filling this channel to the brim, would flow back to the west again before nightfall, and leave the bare dim sands as they had been before?

They were in the country of heretics, but still an isle of hospitality. Folk came out to them, and proffered shelter till the ford was open, and of this kindness they availed themselves until the evening, when the ford was almost dry. The storm was worse than ever; but the priest was confident of a lull, and delayed their departure until it came, as he had said, at the utmost slack of the tide.

“Gramisdale, and in a hurry now,” cried he, leading the way on his pony; and Anna, warmly wrapped in a plaid, comfortable on a Spanish saddle, kept close by his side, never afraid the least, but almost glad and eager for this new experience. They went before the wind down the Big Bay, as it might be the gullet of the sea, and at the end of it turned to the west. The driver of the cart sheltered his head and shoulders with the mortcloth, and a man who rode beside him carried a torch that flamed noisily in the slackened wind and hissed in the raindrops. It called about them shadows and shapes of fear, and drew to their neighbourhood, too, screaming sea-birds that might very well be ghosts; but worse than all, the flambeau brought the night about them like a wall, so that no matter how quick they rode, they had with them always the one same little bit of sandy desert.

“We would be better without the light,” at last said Father Ludovick, for the second time confused by the shadows, and unable to see the rocks that are the beacons of the ford; and so the torch was stamped out in the moist sand.

The priest went on his way, with his grey eyes searching into the very deeps of the darkness, humming the native Veni Creator—

“Ur naimhdean fuadaich fada bhuainn,

’Us builich òirnn do shìth gu buan.”

The air, the sentiment, commanded him at last; his voice increased, as challenging the wind, and Anna’s joined it. There were runnels to cross, rocks, and pools like tiny lakes to pass round, quicksands familiar and ill-reputed—some of them with horrible stories—to evade; but these things they accomplished as in a dream. Conquered by the music was their company too, and, carried away upon the hymn, they began to separate a little.

“Keep together! keep together!” cried the priest. “I have no notion for any of us to pass the night on Trialabreck, and it is the poor best that could happen to whoever missed his way here.”

He caught his sister’s reins.

“I must not lose you, at any rate,” said he.

“And am I to be the only child of the company?” she asked with a touch of spirit, gently releasing them from his grasp. “No, no, Ludovick; I can do as well as my neighbours. There is no fear that I shall lose myself.”

“If you did,” said he passionately, “I should wade or swim between Eachkamish and Grimisay all night long looking for you; but there must be no talk of losing you or any other. Poor girl! I’m sorry to have you out in such a night.”

“I am happier here than I could be at home in your absence,” said she, and fell again into the humming of the Gaelic hymn, her head bent down against a wind gaining its strength anew, some loops of her hair beating lightly on her cheek.

No lights shone that night in all Benbecula, or, if they did, the clouds concealed them. Some there were behind them if they turned to look—pale crusies, weeping through the rain in the little windows of the Protestants, and one or two in Grimisay; but they grew dimmer and dimmer, and died at last suddenly, as if puffed out at a breath.

“Keep together! keep together!” cried the priest, sure that some of his company straggled, though they were not all to be compassed even vaguely by the eye, and he wheeled his pony about to circle round them and gather in the wanderers of his flock. Anna followed, so that she might obey his behest and keep by his side. She had no sooner turned her pony’s head than he was seized by longings for the shore of Northern Uist, for the hard salt turf he had come from last, for a stall where he had ease and oats and none of the sleet and rain that now began to fall. He dashed sprightly over the sands with one little snort of pleasure.

“Gaisgeach! Gaisgeach!” said Anna with reproach, struggling to stay this shameful retreat, but the pony could not be stopped till something so suddenly checked him that he almost threw her from the saddle. He flung back his head with a whimper, plunging with his forefeet as if they had been hobbled: he had come on quicksand, and was sinking!

The girl was as calm as if the hour had been noon and this the highway. She dismounted hurriedly, coaxed the animal for a little in vain, then urged him free at last. He stood with his nose on her shoulder, all trembling.

“Poor Gaisgeach!” said she, soothing him, while the wind boomed over the flats and the sleet whipped her forehead. “Poor Gaisgeach! home was happier than this; but never mind, we’ll be there to-morrow.” He raised his head to whinny, still trembling at the neighbourhood of his terror, and she caught him by the nostrils to prevent him, lest it should alarm her brother and call attention to her accident. The night was deathly dark; her friends were wrapped in it and no sound came from them, but yet she had no fear that she could not speedily regain her brother’s side. Mounting again, she forced her pony to a canter. She rode for five minutes—nothing rose before her but the black wall of night; she rode for ten—the world seemed governed all by darkness, and tenanted wholly by sleet and the sounds of the sea, and the sands had swallowed up her company. Then she knew herself lost indeed, for she came on a group of little rocks, and beyond them a great pool that the good guidance of her brother would never have brought them near.

“Ludovick! Ludovick!” she cried, stopping her pony, and bent against the wind to listen. She got no answer. New fears came down on her—dogs of darkness and danger—she set the beast to a gallop on the sands, finding more runnels, rocks, pools, and quicks. The sleet stung on her eyelids and the wind struggled with her gown. With her growing terror there came a thought half-envious, half-despairing—of warmth in St Teresa, and Sister Agnes snug with a book beside a fire: she could have sworn she heard the chime of bells.

“Ludovick! Ludovick!” she cried again. Only a sea-gull answered from another pool greater than the first she had encountered. Ludovick could not hear; he was far off to her right, ignorant of her absence, driving his flock before him, his face uplifted to the sleet, Boreas again, exalted in this night of hazards.

“I must trust in God and Gaisgeach,” said Anna, and at guess trotting through pools, with a loose rein, on ways that appeared to lead nowhere. She seemed to herself to travel thus for hours, but always with hope—till at last, with a splash of her pony’s feet, a thought struck cold at her vitals.

She was crossing many streams for this to be a falling tide!

The tide was coming in again; the ford was filling!

She had heard too many tales of disaster in this place not to know the horror of the situation. It was she that was all trembling now; her pony was indifferent. “We must hurry, Gaisgeach!” she said. “We must hurry. Dear Gaisgeach! fellow of my heart! Gaisgeach, my hero! Gaisgeach, we must hurry! Ludovick! Ludovick!” She cried again, shrill against the wind that tore her voice in fragments; the horse began to share her fears, and raised his head and whinnied as he did before upon the verge of the perilous quicks; she felt the sense of swooning, and gasped a prayer for heaven’s assistance.

Her answer came at once in the stumble of her pony on some stones and in the odour of grass. Here was safety of some kind—if it were no better than Trialabreck that her brother had spoken of. She dismounted, led her pony over the loose stones, and reached with difficulty a summit tufted with herbage, where, all worn by her fears, she threw herself upon the ground, under a heavy overhanging reef of rock, and burst into tears.

The rain had ceased; the wind bellowed more fiercely than before, and seemed to challenge her intrusion on the haunt of gull and gannet. Many a time she cried like a soul lost in the chaos of the latter days—a poor little tender, gentle soul, and white and fragile, perched on a rock uplifted from the waters. They ran round the base of the islet now, and sent her to speculate whether she should be safe in such a night even here. The pony lay beside her, and gave her shelter. She heard the wind grow larger and larger until it seemed a world of sound; she grew more tired; she was not cold; she was not uncomfortable; she could sleep. She would have slept but that a curious sound startled her into full wakefulness and something of her native Gaelic terrors. It was the plash of footsteps as if some one waded to the rock. The sea has a thousand wonders in the Outer Isles; there still haunt the sexless and nameless things that are in olden legends, storms enticing them from profound green beds that they may sport on sea-beach and on shallow. She stood up trembling, little left in her of all her foreign scholarship, a cry kept back upon her lips.

The plashing footsteps came near,—unmistakably some one walked in the rising tide. They reached the rock; she heard breathing, some one stood—she knew though she could not see him—on the level below her, and a man’s voice cried “Anna! Anna!” over the darkness. And it was not her brother’s, nor that of any one else she knew.