The Deemster

"We'd have to be despard hard put to for a bite and a sup before we'd take anything from you, Deemster," said the old woman.

The Deemster's quick eyes, under the shaggy gray brows, glanced about the room. It was a place of poverty, descending to squalor. The floor was of the bare earth trodden hard, the roof was of the bare thatch, with here and there a lath pushed between the uphewn spars to keep it up, and here and there a broken patch dropping hayseed.

"You are desperate hard put to, woman," said the Deemster, and at that Mally herself came out of the sleeping-crib. Her face was thin and pale, and her bleared eyes had lost their sharp light; it was a countenance without one ray of hope.

"Stop, mother," she said; "let us hear what the Deemster has to offer."

"Offer? Offer?" the old woman rapped out; "you've had enough of the Deemster's offers, I'm thinking."

"Be quiet, mother," said Mally, and then she turned to the Deemster and said, "Well, sir, and what is it?"

"Aw, very nate and amazing civil to dirks like that – go on, girl, go on," said the old woman, tossing her head and hand in anger toward Mally.

"Mother, this is my concern, I'm thinking – what is it, sir?"

But the old woman's wrath at her daughter's patience was not to be kept down. "Behold ye!" she said, "it's my own girl that's after telling me before strangers that I've not a farthing at me, and me good for nothing at working, and only fit to hobble about on a stick, and fix the house tidy maybe, and to have no say in nothing – go on, och, go on, girl."

The Deemster explained his proposal. It was that the boy Jarvis should be given entirely into his control, and be no more known by his mother and his mother's mother, and perhaps no more seen or claimed or acknowledged by them, and that the Deemster should provide for him and see him started in life.

Mrs. Kerruish's impatience knew no bounds. "My gough!" she cried – "my gough, my gough!" But Mally listened and reflected. Her spirit was broken, and she was thinking of her poverty. Her mother was now laid aside by rheumatism, and could earn nothing, and she herself worked piecework at the net-making – so much for a piece of net, a hundred yards long by two hundred meshes deep, toiling without heart from eight to eight, and earning four, five, and six shillings a week. And if there was a want, her boy felt it. She did not answer at once, and after a moment the Deemster turned to the door. "Think of it," he said; "think of it."

"Hurroo! hurroo!" cried the old woman, derisively, from her stool, her untamable soul aflame with indignation.

"Be quiet, mother," said Mally, and the hopelessness that had spoken from her eyes seemed then to find a way into her voice.

The end of it was that Jarvis Kerruish was sent to a school at Liverpool, and remained there three years, and then became a clerk in the counting-house of Benas Brothers, of the Goree Piazza, ostensibly African merchants, really English money-lenders. Jarvis did not fret at the loss of his mother, and of course he never wrote to her; but he addressed a careful letter to the Deemster twice a year, beginning "Honored Sir," and ending "Yours, with much respect, most obediently."

Mally had miscalculated her self-command. If she had thought of her poverty, it had been because she had thought of her boy as well. He would be lifted above it all if she could but bring herself to part with him. She wrought up her feelings to the sacrifice, and gave away her son, and sat down as a broken-spirited and childless woman. Then she realized the price she had to pay. The boy had been the cause of her shame; but he had been the centre of her pride as well. If she had been a hopeless woman before, she was now a heartless one. Little by little she fell into habits of idleness and intemperance. Before young Jarvis sat in his frilled shirt on the stool in the Goree Piazza, and before the down had begun to show on his lean cheeks, his mother was a lost and abandoned woman.

But not yet had the Deemster broken his fate. When Ewan disappointed his hopes and went into the Church, and married without his sanction or knowledge, it seemed to him that the chain was gradually tightening about him. Then the Deemster went over once more to the cottage at the Cross Vein, alone, and in the night.

"Mrs. Kerruish," he said, "I am willing to allow you six pounds a year pension, and I will pay it in three pound notes on Lady Day and Martinmas," and putting his first payment on the table he turned about and was gone before the rheumatic old body could twist in her chair.

The Deemster had just made his third visit to the cottage at the Cross Vein, and left his second payment, when the death of Ewan's young wife came as a thunderbolt and startled him to the soul. For days and nights thereafter he went about like a beaten horse, trembling to the very bone. He had resisted the truth for twenty years; he had laughed at it in his long lingering laugh at going to bed at night and at rising in the morning; he had ridiculed superstition in others, and punished it when he could; he was the judge of the island, and she through whose mouth his fate fell upon him was a miserable ruin cast aside on life's highway; but the truth would be resisted no longer: the house over his head was accursed – accursed to him, and to his children, and to his children's children.

The Deemster's engrossing idea became a dominating terror. Was there no way left to him to break the fate that hung over him? None? The Deemster revolved the problem night and day, and meantime lived the life of the damned. At length he hit on a plan, and then peace seemed to come to him, a poor paltering show of peace, and he went about no longer like a beaten and broken horse. His project was a strange one; it was the last that prudence would have suggested, but the first that the evil spirit of his destiny could have hoped for – it was to send to Liverpool for Jarvis Kerruish, and establish him in Ballamona as his son.

In that project the hand of his fate was strongly upon him; he could not resist it; he seemed to yield himself to its power; he made himself its willing victim; he was even as Saul when the Spirit of the Lord had gone from him and an evil spirit troubled him, sending for the anointed son of Jesse to play on the harp to him and to supplant him on the throne.

CHAPTER XV

THE LIE THAT EWAN TOLD

It was not for long that Dan bore the signs of contrition. As soon as Ewan's pale face had lost the weight of its gloom, Dan's curly poll knew no more trouble. He followed the herrings all through that season, grew brown with the sun and the briny air, and caught the sea's laughter in his rollicking voice. He drifted into some bad habits from which he had hitherto held himself in check. Every morning when the boats ran into harbor, and Teare, the mate, and Crennel, the cook, stayed behind to sell the fish, Dan and old Billy Quilleash trooped up to the "Three Legs of Man" together. There Dan was made much of, and the lad's spirit was not proof against the poor flattery. It was Mastha Dan here, and Mastha Dan there, and Where is Mastha Dan? and What does Mastha Dan say? and great shoutings, and tearings, and sprees; and all the time the old cat with the whiskers who kept the pot-house was scoring up against Dan at the back of the cupboard door.

Did the Bishop know? Know? Did ever a young fellow go to the dogs but some old woman of either sex found her way to the very ear that ought not to be tormented with Job's comfort, and whisper, "Aw, dear! aw, dear!" and "Lawk-a-day!" and "I'm the last to bring bad newses, as the saying is," and "Och, and it's a pity, and him a fine, brave young fellow too!" and "I wouldn't have told it on no account to another living soul!"

The Bishop said little, and tried not to hear; but when Dan would have hoodwinked him, he saw through the device as the sun sees through glass. Dan never left his father's presence without a sense of shame that was harder to bear than any reproach would have been. Something patient and trustful, and strong in hope, and stronger in love, seemed to go out from the Bishop's silence to Dan's reticence. Dan would slink off with the bearing of a whipped hound, or perhaps, with a muttered curse under his teeth, and always with a stern resolve to pitch himself or his cronies straightway into the sea. The tragical purpose usually lasted him over the short mile and a half that divided Bishop's Court from the "Three Legs of Man," and then it went down with some other troubles and a long pint of Manx jough.

Of all men, the most prompt to keep the Bishop informed of Dan's sad pranks was no other than the Deemster. Since the death of Ewan's wife the Deemster's feelings toward Dan had undergone a complete change. From that time forward he looked on Dan with eyes of distrust, amounting in its intensity to hatred. He forbade him his house, though Dan laughed at the prohibition and ignored it. He also went across to Bishop's Court for the first time for ten years, and poured into the Bishop's ears the story of every bad bit of business in which Dan got involved. Dan kept him fully employed in this regard, and Bishop's Court saw the Deemster at frequent intervals.

If it was degrading to the Bishop's place as father of the Church that his son should consort with all the "ragabash" of the island, the scum of the land, and the dirtiest froth of the sea, the Bishop was made to know the full bitterness of that degradation. He would listen with head held down, and when the Deemster, passing from remonstrance to reproach, would call upon him to set his own house in order before he ever ascended the pulpit again, the Bishop would lift his great heavy eyes with an agonizing look of appeal, and answer in a voice like a sob, "Have patience, Thorkell – have patience with the lad; he is my son, my only son."

It chanced that toward the end of the herring season an old man of eighty, one William Callow, died, and he was the captain of the parish of Michael. The captaincy was a semi-civil, semi-military office, and it included the functions of parish head-constable. Callow had been a a man of extreme probity, and his walk in life had been without a slip.

"The ould man's left no living craythur to fill his shoes," the people said when they buried him, but when the name of the old man's successor came down from Castletown, who should be the new captain but Daniel Mylrea? The people were amazed, the Deemster laughed in his throat, and Dan himself looked appalled.

Hardly a month after this event, the relations of Dan and the Deemster, and Dan and the Bishop, reached a climax.

For months past the Bishop had been hatching a scheme for the sub-division of his episcopal glebe, the large extent of which had long been a burden on the dwindling energies of his advancing age; and he had determined that, since his son was not to be a minister of the Church, he should be its tenant, and farm its lands. So he cut off from the demesne a farm of eighty acres of fine Curragh land, well drained and tilled. This would be a stay and a solid source of livelihood to Dan when the herring fishing had ceased to be a pastime. There was no farmhouse on the eighty acres, but barns and stables were to be erected, and Dan was to share with Ewan the old Ballamona as a home.

Dan witnessed these preparations, but entered into them with only a moderate enthusiasm. The reason of his lukewarmness was that he found himself deeply involved in debts whereof his father knew nothing. When the fishing season finished and the calculations were made, it was found that the boat had earned no more than £240. Of this, old Billy Quilleash took four shares, every man took two shares, there was a share set aside for Davy, the boy, and the owner was entitled to eight shares for himself, his nets, and his boat. So far, all was reasonably satisfactory. The difficulty and dissatisfaction arose when Dan began to count the treasury. Then it was discovered that there was not enough in hand to pay old Billy and his men and the boy, leaving Dan's eight shares out of the count Dan scratched his head and pondered. He was not brilliant at figures, but he totted up his numbers again with the same result. Then he computed the provisioning – tea, at four shillings a pound, besides fresh meat four times a week, and fine flour biscuits. It was heavy, but not ruinous, and the season had been poor, but not bad, and whatever the net results, there ought not to have been a deficit where the principle of cooperation between master and man was that of share and share.

Dan began to see his way through the mystery – it was most painfully transparent in the light of the score that had been chalked up from time to time on the inside of the cupboard of the "Three Legs of Man." But it was easier to see where the money had gone than to make it up, and old Billy and his chums began to mutter and to grumble.

"It's raely wuss till ever," said one.

"The tack we've been on hasn't been worth workin'," said another.

Dan heard their murmurs, and went up to Bishop's Court. After all, the deficit was only forty pounds, and his father would lend him that much. But hardly had Dan sat down to breakfast than the Bishop, who was clearly in lower spirits than usual, began to lament that his charities to the poor had been interrupted by the cost of building the barns and stables on the farm intended for his son.

"I hope your fishing will turn out well, Dan," he said, "for I've scarce a pound in hand to start you."

So Dan said nothing about the debt, and went back to the fisher-fellows with a face as long as a haddock's. "I'll tell you, men, the storm is coming," he said.

Old Billy looked as black as thunder, and answered with an impatient gesture, "Then keep your weather eye liftin', that's all."

Dan measured the old salt from head to foot, and hitched his hand into his guernsey. "You wouldn't talk to me like that, Billy Quilleash, if I hadn't been a fool with you. It's a true saying, that when you tell your servant your secret you make him your master."

Old Billy sniggered, and his men snorted. Billy wanted to know why he had left Kinvig's boat, where he had a sure thirty pounds for his season; and Ned Teare wished to be told what his missus would say when he took her five pound ten; and Crennel, the slushy, asked what sort of a season the mastha was aftha callin' it, at all, at all.

Not a man of them remembered his share of the long scores chalked up on the inside of the cupboard door.

"Poor old dad," thought Dan, "he must find the money after all – no way but that," and once again he turned toward Bishop's Court.

Billy Quilleash saw him going off, and followed him. "I've somethin' terrible fine up here," said Billy, tapping his forehead mysteriously.

"What is it?" Dan asked.

"Och, a shockin' powerful schame. It'll get you out of the shoal water anyways," said Billy.

It turned out that the "shockin' powerful schame" was the ancient device of borrowing the money from a money-lender. Old Billy knew the very man to serve the turn. His name was Kisseck, and he kept the "Jolly Herrings" in Peeltown, near the bottom of the crabbed little thoroughfare that wound and twisted and descended to that part of the quay which overlooked the castle rock.

"No, no; that'll not do," said Dan.

"Aw, and why not at all?"

"Why not? Why not? Because it's blank robbery to borrow what you can't pay back."

"Robbery? Now, what's the use of sayin' the like o' that? Aw, the shockin' notions! Well, well, and do you raely think a person's got no feelin's? Robbery? Aw, well now, well now."

And old Billy tramped along with the air of an injured man.

But the end of it was that Dan said nothing to the Bishop that day, and the same night found him at the "Jolly Herrings." The landlord had nothing to lend, not he, but he knew people who would not mind parting with money on good security, or on anybody's bail, as the sayin' was. Couldn't Mastha Dan get a good man's name to a bit o' paper, like? Coorse he could, and nothing easier, for a gen'l'man same as him. Who was the people? They belonged to Liverpool, the Goree Peaizy – Benas they were callin' them.

Three days afterward the forty pounds, made up to fifty for round numbers, came to Kisseck, the landlord, and the bit o' paper came with it. Dan took the paper and went off with it to the old Ballamona. Ewan would go bail for him, and so the Bishop need know nothing of the muddle. But when Dan reached his new home Ewan was away – a poor old Quaker named Christian, who had brought himself to beggary by neglecting Solomon's injunction against suretyship, was dying, and had sent for the parson.

Dan was in a hurry; the fisher-fellows were grumbling, and their wives were hanging close about their coat-tails; the money must be got without delay, and of course Ewan would sign for it straight-away if he were there. An idea struck Dan, and made the sweat to start from his forehead. He had put the paper on the table and taken up a pen, when he heard Ewan's voice outside, and then he threw the pen down and his heart leaped with a sense of relief.

Ewan came in, and rattled on about old Christian, the Quaker. He hadn't a week to live, poor old soul, and he hadn't a shilling left in the world. Once he farmed his hundred acres, but he had stood surety for this man and surety for that man, and paid up the defalcations of both, and now, while they were eating the bread of luxury, he was dying as a homeless pauper.

"Well, he has been practising a bad virtue," said Ewan. "I wouldn't stand surety for my own brother – not for my own brother if I had one. It would be helping him to eat to-day the bread he earns to-morrow."

Dan went out without saying anything of the bit of paper from Liverpool. The fisher-fellows met him, and when they heard what he had to say their grumblings broke out again.

"Well, I'm off for the Bishop – and no disrespec'," said old Billy.

He did not go; the bit o' paper was signed, but not by Ewan; the money was paid; the grateful sea-dogs were sent home with their wages in their pockets and a smart cuff on either ear.

A month or two went by, and Dan grew quiet and thoughtful, and sometimes gloomy, and people began to say, "It's none so wild the young mastha is at all, at all," or perhaps, "Wonderful studdy he's growing," or even, "I wouldn't trust but he'll turn out a parson after all." One day in November Dan went over to new Ballamona and asked for Mona, and sat with her in earnest talk. He told her of some impending disaster, and she listened with a whitening face.

From that day forward Mona was a changed woman. She seemed to share some great burden of fear with Dan, and it lay heavy upon her, and made the way of life very long and cheerless to the sweet and silent girl.

Toward the beginning of December, sundry letters came out of their season from the young clerk of Benas Brothers, Jarvis Kerruish. Then the Deemster went over more than once to Bishop's Court, and had grave interviews with the Bishop.

"If you can prove this that you say, Thorkell, I shall turn my back on him forever – yes, forever," said the Bishop, and his voice was husky and his sad face was seamed with lines of pain.

A few days passed and a stranger appeared at Ballamona, and when the stranger had gone the Deemster said to Mona, "Be ready to go to Bishop's Court with me in the morning."

Mona's breath seemed to be suddenly arrested. "Will Ewan be there?" she asked.

"Yes – isn't it the day of his week-day service at the chapel – Wednesday – isn't it?"

"And Dan?" she said.

"Dan? Why Dan? Well, woman, perhaps Dan too – who knows?"

The Bishop had sent across to the old Ballamona to say that he wished to see his son in the library after service on the following morning.

At twelve next day, Dan, who had been plowing, turned in at Bishop's Court in his long boots and rough red shirt, and there in the library he found Mona and the Deemster seated. Mona did not speak when Dan spoke to her. Her voice seemed to fail; but the Deemster answered in a jaunty word or two; and then the Bishop, looking very thoughtful, came in with Ewan, whose eyes were brighter than they had been for many a day, and behind them walked the stranger whom Mona had seen at Ballamona the day before.

"Why, and how's this?" said Ewan, on perceiving that so many of them were gathered there.

The Bishop closed the door, and then answered, with averted face, "We have a painful interview before us, Ewan – be seated."

It was a dark day; the clouds hung low, and the dull rumble of the sea came through the dead air. A fire of logs and peat burned on the hearth, and the Deemster rose and stood with his back to it, his hands interlaced behind him. The Bishop sat on his brass-clamped chair at the table, and rested his pale cheek on his hand. There was a pause, and then without lifting his eyes the Bishop said, "Ewan, do you know that it is contrary to the customs of the Church for a minister to stand security for a debtor?"

Ewan was standing by the table, fumbling the covers of a book that he had lifted. "I know it," he said, quietly.

"Do you know that the minister who disregards that custom stands liable to suspension at the hands of his Bishop?"

Ewan looked about with a stare of bewilderment, but he answered again, and as quietly, "I know it."

There was silence for a moment, and then the Deemster, clearing his throat noisily, turned to where Dan was pawing up a rug that lay under a column and bust of Bunyan.

"And do you know, sir," said the Deemster, in his shrill tones, "what the punishment of forgery may be?"

Dan's face had undergone some changes during the last few minutes, but when he lifted it to the Deemster's, it was as firm as a rock.

"Hanging, perhaps," he answered, sullenly; "transportation, perhaps. What of it? Out with it – be quick."

Dan's eyes flashed; the Deemster tittered audibly; the Bishop looked up at his son from under the rims of his spectacles and drew a long breath. Mona had covered her face in her hands where she sat in silence by the ingle, and Ewan, still fumbling the book in his nervous fingers, was glancing from Dan to the Deemster, and from the Bishop to Dan, with a look of blank amazement.

The Deemster motioned to the stranger, who thereupon advanced from where he had stood by the door, and stepped up to Ewan.

"May I ask if this document was drawn by your authority?" and saying this the stranger held out a paper, and Ewan took it in his listless fingers.

There was a moment's silence. Ewan glanced down at the document. It showed that fifty pounds had been lent to Daniel Mylrea, by Benas Brothers, of the Goree Piazza, Liverpool, and it was signed by Ewan's own name as that of surety.

"Is that your signature?" asked the stranger.

Ewan glanced at Dan, and Dan's head was on his breast and his lips quivered. The Bishop was trembling visibly, and sat with head bent low by the sorrow of a wrecked and shattered hope.

The stranger looked from Ewan to Dan, and from Dan to the Bishop. The Deemster gazed steadily before him, and his face wore a ghostly smile.

"Is it your signature?" repeated the stranger, and his words fell on the silence like the clank of a chain.

Ewan saw it all now. He glanced again at the document, but his eyes were dim, and he could read nothing. Then he lifted his face, and its lines of agony told of a terrible struggle.

"Yes," he answered, "the signature is mine – what of it?"

At that the Bishop and Mona raised their eyes together. The stranger looked incredulous.

"It is quite right if you say so," the stranger replied, with a cold smile.

Ewan trembled in every limb. "I do say so," he said.

His fingers crumpled the document as he spoke, but his head was erect, and the truth seemed to sit on his lips. Dan dropped heavily into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

The stranger smiled again the same cold smile. "The lenders wish to withdraw the loan," he said.

"They may do so – in a month," said Ewan.

"That will suffice."

The Deemster's face twitched; Mona's cheeks were wet with tears; the Bishop had risen and gone to the window, and was gazing out through blurred eyes into the blinding rain that was now pelting against the glass.

"It would be cruel to prolong a painful interview," said the stranger; and then, with a glance toward Dan where he sat convulsed with distress that he made no effort to conceal, he added, in a hard tone: