Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (418 page)

Something like fear began to creep into my soul and, reminding him that I had not yet dined, I proposed we should return to the house.  But no; nothing would tear him from his place of outlook.

‘I maun see the hail thing, man, Cherlie,’ he explained — and then as the schooner went about a second time, ‘Eh, but they han’le her bonny!’ he cried.  ‘The
Christ-Anna
was naething to this.’

Already the men on board the schooner must have begun to realise some part, but not yet the twentieth, of the dangers that environed their doomed ship.  At every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen how fast the current swept them back.  Each tack was made shorter, as they saw how little it prevailed.  Every moment the rising swell began to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, and the brown reef and streaming tangle appear in the hollow of the wave.  I tell you, they had to stand to their tackle: there was no idle men aboard that ship, God knows.  It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible to any human-hearted man that my misguided uncle now pored and gloated like a connoisseur.  As I turned to go down the hill, he was lying on his belly on the summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching in the heather.  He seemed rejuvenated, mind and body.

When I got back to the house already dismally affected, I was still more sadly downcast at the sight of Mary.  She had her sleeves rolled up over her strong arms, and was quietly making bread.  I got a bannock from the dresser and sat down to eat it in silence.

‘Are ye wearied, lad?’ she asked after a while.

‘I am not so much wearied, Mary,’ I replied, getting on my feet, ‘as I am weary of delay, and perhaps of Aros too.  You know me well enough to judge me fairly, say what I like.  Well, Mary, you may be sure of this: you had better be anywhere but here.’

‘I’ll be sure of one thing,’ she returned: ‘I’ll be where my duty is.’

‘You forget, you have a duty to yourself,’ I said.

‘Ay, man?’ she replied, pounding at the dough; ‘will you have found that in the Bible, now?’

‘Mary,’ I said solemnly, ‘you must not laugh at me just now.  God knows I am in no heart for laughing.  If we could get your father with us, it would be best; but with him or without him, I want you far away from here, my girl; for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your father’s too, I want you far — far away from here.  I came with other thoughts; I came here as a man comes home; now it is all changed, and I have no desire nor hope but to flee — for that’s the word — flee, like a bird out of the fowler’s snare, from this accursed island.’

She had stopped her work by this time.

‘And do you think, now,’ said she, ‘do you think, now, I have neither eyes nor ears?  Do ye think I havenae broken my heart to have these braws (as he calls them, God forgive him!) thrown into the sea?  Do ye think I have lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you saw in an hour or two?  No,’ she said, ‘I know there’s wrong in it; what wrong, I neither know nor want to know.  There was never an ill thing made better by meddling, that I could hear of.  But, my lad, you must never ask me to leave my father.  While the breath is in his body, I’ll be with him.  And he’s not long for here, either: that I can tell you, Charlie — he’s not long for here.  The mark is on his brow; and better so — maybe better so.’

I was a while silent, not knowing what to say; and when I roused my head at last to speak, she got before me.

‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘what’s right for me, neednae be right for you.  There’s sin upon this house and trouble; you are a stranger; take your things upon your back and go your ways to better places and to better folk, and if you were ever minded to come back, though it were twenty years syne, you would find me aye waiting.’

‘Mary Ellen,’ I said, ‘I asked you to be my wife, and you said as good as yes.  That’s done for good.  Wherever you are, I am; as I shall answer to my God.’

As I said the words, the wind suddenly burst out raving, and then seemed to stand still and shudder round the house of Aros.  It was the first squall, or prologue, of the coming tempest, and as we started and looked about us, we found that a gloom, like the approach of evening, had settled round the house.

‘God pity all poor folks at sea!’ she said.  ‘We’ll see no more of my father till the morrow’s morning.’

And then she told me, as we sat by the fire and hearkened to the rising gusts, of how this change had fallen upon my uncle.  All last winter he had been dark and fitful in his mind.  Whenever the Roost ran high, or, as Mary said, whenever the Merry Men were dancing, he would lie out for hours together on the Head, if it were at night, or on the top of Aros by day, watching the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for a sail.  After February the tenth, when the wealth-bringing wreck was cast ashore at Sandag, he had been at first unnaturally gay, and his excitement had never fallen in degree, but only changed in kind from dark to darker.  He neglected his work, and kept Rorie idle.  They two would speak together by the hour at the gable end, in guarded tones and with an air of secrecy and almost of guilt; and if she questioned either, as at first she sometimes did, her inquiries were put aside with confusion.  Since Rorie had first remarked the fish that hung about the ferry, his master had never set foot but once upon the mainland of the Ross.  That once — it was in the height of the springs — he had passed dryshod while the tide was out; but, having lingered overlong on the far side, found himself cut off from Aros by the returning waters.  It was with a shriek of agony that he had leaped across the gut, and he had reached home thereafter in a fever-fit of fear.  A fear of the sea, a constant haunting thought of the sea, appeared in his talk and devotions, and even in his looks when he was silent.

Rorie alone came in to supper; but a little later my uncle appeared, took a bottle under his arm, put some bread in his pocket, and set forth again to his outlook, followed this time by Rorie.  I heard that the schooner was losing ground, but the crew were still fighting every inch with hopeless ingenuity and course; and the news filled my mind with blackness.

A little after sundown the full fury of the gale broke forth, such a gale as I have never seen in summer, nor, seeing how swiftly it had come, even in winter.  Mary and I sat in silence, the house quaking overhead, the tempest howling without, the fire between us sputtering with raindrops.  Our thoughts were far away with the poor fellows on the schooner, or my not less unhappy uncle, houseless on the promontory; and yet ever and again we were startled back to ourselves, when the wind would rise and strike the gable like a solid body, or suddenly fall and draw away, so that the fire leaped into flame and our hearts bounded in our sides.  Now the storm in its might would seize and shake the four corners of the roof, roaring like Leviathan in anger.  Anon, in a lull, cold eddies of tempest moved shudderingly in the room, lifting the hair upon our heads and passing between us as we sat.  And again the wind would break forth in a chorus of melancholy sounds, hooting low in the chimney, wailing with flutelike softness round the house.

It was perhaps eight o’clock when Rorie came in and pulled me mysteriously to the door.  My uncle, it appeared, had frightened even his constant comrade; and Rorie, uneasy at his extravagance, prayed me to come out and share the watch.  I hastened to do as I was asked; the more readily as, what with fear and horror, and the electrical tension of the night, I was myself restless and disposed for action.  I told Mary to be under no alarm, for I should be a safeguard on her father; and wrapping myself warmly in a plaid, I followed Rorie into the open air.

The night, though we were so little past midsummer, was as dark as January.  Intervals of a groping twilight alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it was impossible to trace the reason of these changes in the flying horror of the sky.  The wind blew the breath out of a man’s nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead like one huge sail; and when there fell a momentary lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping in the distance.  Over all the lowlands of the Ross, the wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and God only knows the uproar that was raging around the head of Ben Kyaw.  Sheets of mingled spray and rain were driven in our faces.  All round the isle of Aros the surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon the reefs and beaches.  Now louder in one place, now lower in another, like the combinations of orchestral music, the constant mass of sound was hardly varied for a moment.  And loud above all this hurly-burly I could hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermittent roaring of the Merry Men.  At that hour, there flashed into my mind the reason of the name that they were called.  For the noise of them seemed almost mirthful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality.  Nay, and it seemed even human.  As when savage men have drunk away their reason, and, discarding speech, bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my ears, these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night.

Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind, Rorie and I won every yard of ground with conscious effort.  We slipped on the wet sod, we fell together sprawling on the rocks.  Bruised, drenched, beaten, and breathless, it must have taken us near half an hour to get from the house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost.  There, it seemed, was my uncle’s favourite observatory.  Right in the face of it, where the cliff is highest and most sheer, a hump of earth, like a parapet, makes a place of shelter from the common winds, where a man may sit in quiet and see the tide and the mad billows contending at his feet.  As he might look down from the window of a house upon some street disturbance, so, from this post, he looks down upon the tumbling of the Merry Men.  On such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where the waves joust together with the noise of an explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye.  Never before had I seen the Merry Men thus violent.  The fury, height, and transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be seen and not recounted.  High over our heads on the cliff rose their white columns in the darkness; and the same instant, like phantoms, they were gone.  Sometimes three at a time would thus aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust took them, and the spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave.  And yet the spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than impressive by its force.  Thought was beaten down by the confounding uproar — a gleeful vacancy possessed the brains of men, a state akin to madness; and I found myself at times following the dance of the Merry Men as it were a tune upon a jigging instrument.

I first caught sight of my uncle when we were still some yards away in one of the flying glimpses of twilight that chequered the pitch darkness of the night.  He was standing up behind the parapet, his head thrown back and the bottle to his mouth.  As he put it down, he saw and recognised us with a toss of one hand fleeringly above his head.

‘Has he been drinking?’ shouted I to Rorie.

‘He will aye be drunk when the wind blaws,’ returned Rorie in the same high key, and it was all that I could do to hear him.

‘Then — was he so — in February?’ I inquired.

Rorie’s ‘Ay’ was a cause of joy to me.  The murder, then, had not sprung in cold blood from calculation; it was an act of madness no more to be condemned than to be pardoned.  My uncle was a dangerous madman, if you will, but he was not cruel and base as I had feared.  Yet what a scene for a carouse, what an incredible vice, was this that the poor man had chosen!  I have always thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful pleasure, rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above that hell of waters, the man’s head spinning like the Roost, his foot tottering on the edge of death, his ear watching for the signs of ship-wreck, surely that, if it were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a man like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a damnatory creed and haunted by the darkest superstitions.  Yet so it was; and, as we reached the bight of shelter and could breathe again, I saw the man’s eyes shining in the night with an unholy glimmer.

‘Eh, Charlie, man, it’s grand!’ he cried.  ‘See to them!’ he continued, dragging me to the edge of the abyss from whence arose that deafening clamour and those clouds of spray; ‘see to them dancin’, man!  Is that no wicked?’

He pronounced the word with gusto, and I thought it suited with the scene.

‘They’re yowlin’ for thon schooner,’ he went on, his thin, insane voice clearly audible in the shelter of the bank, ‘an’ she’s comin’ aye nearer, aye nearer, aye nearer an’ nearer an’ nearer; an’ they ken’t, the folk kens it, they ken wool it’s by wi’ them.  Charlie, lad, they’re a’ drunk in yon schooner, a’ dozened wi’ drink.  They were a’ drunk in the
Christ-Anna
, at the hinder end.  There’s nane could droon at sea wantin’ the brandy.  Hoot awa, what do you ken?’ with a sudden blast of anger.  ‘I tell ye, it cannae be; they droon withoot it.  Ha’e,’ holding out the bottle, ‘tak’ a sowp.’

I was about to refuse, but Rorie touched me as if in warning; and indeed I had already thought better of the movement.  I took the bottle, therefore, and not only drank freely myself, but contrived to spill even more as I was doing so.  It was pure spirit, and almost strangled me to swallow.  My kinsman did not observe the loss, but, once more throwing back his head, drained the remainder to the dregs.  Then, with a loud laugh, he cast the bottle forth among the Merry Men, who seemed to leap up, shouting to receive it.

‘Ha’e, bairns!’ he cried, ‘there’s your han’sel.  Ye’ll get bonnier nor that, or morning.’

Suddenly, out in the black night before us, and not two hundred yards away, we heard, at a moment when the wind was silent, the clear note of a human voice.  Instantly the wind swept howling down upon the Head, and the Roost bellowed, and churned, and danced with a new fury.  But we had heard the sound, and we knew, with agony, that this was the doomed ship now close on ruin, and that what we had heard was the voice of her master issuing his last command.  Crouching together on the edge, we waited, straining every sense, for the inevitable end.  It was long, however, and to us it seemed like ages, ere the schooner suddenly appeared for one brief instant, relieved against a tower of glimmering foam.  I still see her reefed mainsail flapping loose, as the boom fell heavily across the deck; I still see the black outline of the hull, and still think I can distinguish the figure of a man stretched upon the tiller.  Yet the whole sight we had of her passed swifter than lightning; the very wave that disclosed her fell burying her for ever; the mingled cry of many voices at the point of death rose and was quenched in the roaring of the Merry Men.  And with that the tragedy was at an end.  The strong ship, with all her gear, and the lamp perhaps still burning in the cabin, the lives of so many men, precious surely to others, dear, at least, as heaven to themselves, had all, in that one moment, gone down into the surging waters.  They were gone like a dream.  And the wind still ran and shouted, and the senseless waters in the Roost still leaped and tumbled as before.