The Deemster

As he turned away from the porch a heavy web of cloud was sweeping on and sweeping on from over the sea. He looked up and saw that a snow-storm was coming, and that the snow-cloud would break when it reached the mountains.

The clock in the gray tower was striking – one – two – three – so it was now three o'clock. Dan went down toward the creek known as the Lockjaw, under Orris Head. There he expected to see old Billy Quilleash and his mates, who had liberty to use the "Ben-my-Chree" during the winter months for fishing with the lines. When he got to the creek it was an hour after high water, and the lugger, with Quilleash and Teare, had gone out for cod. Davy Fayle, who, like Dan himself, was still wearing his militia belt and dagger, had been doing something among scraps of net and bits of old rope, which lay in a shed that the men had thrown together for the storing of their odds-and-ends.

Davy was looking out to sea. Down there a stiff breeze was blowing, and the white curves of the breakers outside could just be seen through the thick atmosphere.

"The storm is coming, Mastha Dan," said Davy. "See the diver on the top of the white wave out there! D'ye hear her wild note?"

Davy shaded his eyes from the wind, which was blowing from the sea, and looked up at the stormy petrel that was careering over the head of the cliff above them and uttering its dismal cry: "Ay, and d'ye see Mother Carey's chickens up yonder?" said Davy again. "The storm's coming, and wonderful quick too."

Truly, a storm was coming, and it was a storm more terrible than wind and snow.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BLIND WOMAN'S SECOND SIGHT

Now, when Jarvis Kerruish encountered Dan in the act of coming out of Mona's room, his surprise was due to something more than the knowledge that Dan had been forbidden the house. On leaving the meadow after the plowing match, and the slaughter of the oxen that followed it, Jarvis had made a long circuit of the Curragh, and returned to Ballamona by the road. He had been pondering on Mona's deportment during the exciting part of the contest between Dan and the stranger, and had just arrived at obvious conclusions of his own by way of explaining the emotion that she could not conceal, when he recognized that he was approaching the cottage occupied by Hommy-beg and his wife Kerry. A droning voice came from within, accompanied by some of the most doleful wails that ever arrested mortal ears.

Jarvis was prompted to stop and enter. He did so, and found both the deaf husband and the blind wife at home. Hommy was squatting on a low three-legged stool, with his fiddle at his shoulder, playing vigorously and singing as he played. It was Christmas Eve to Hommy-beg also, and he was practising the carol that he meant to sing at the Oiel Verree that night. Blind Kerry was sitting by the fire knitting with gray yarn. The deaf man's eyes and the blind woman's ears simultaneously announced the visit of Jarvis, and as Hommy-beg dropped his fiddle from his shoulder, Kerry let fall the needles on her lap, and held up her hand with an expression of concern.

"Och, and didn't I say that something was happening at Ballamona?" said Kerry.

"And so she did," said Hommy-Beg.

"I knew it," said Kerry. "I knew it, as the sayin' is."

All this in return for Jarvis's casual visit and mere salutation surprised him.

"The sight! The sight! It's as true as the ould Book itself. Aw, yes, aw, yes," continued Kerry, and she began to wring her hands.

Jarvis felt uneasy. "Do you know, my good people," he said, largely, "I'm at a loss to understand what you mean. What is it that has happened at Ballamona?"

At that the face of the blind wife looked puzzled.

"Have ye not come from Ballamona straight?" she asked.

"No – it's four hours since I left there," said Jarvis.

"Aw, dear, aw dearee dear!" said Kerry. "The sight! the sight!"

Jarvis's uneasiness developed into curiosity, and in answer to many questions he learned that blind Kerry had that day been visited by another of those visions of Dan which never came to her except when her nursling was in some disgrace or danger, and never failed to come to her then. On this occasion the vision had been one of great sorrow, and Kerry trembled as she recounted it.

"I saw him as plain as plain, and he was standing in Misthress Mona's room, atween the bed and the wee craythur's cot, and he went down on his knees aside of it, and cried, and cried, and cried morthal, and Misthress Mona herself was there sobbing her heart out, as the sayin' is, and the wee craythur was sleeping soft and quiet, and it was dark night outside, and the candle was in the misthress's hand. Aw, yes, I saw it, sir, I saw it, and I tould my man here, and, behould ye, he said, 'Drop it, woman, drop it,' says he, 'it's only drames, it's only drames.'"

Jarvis did not find the story a tragic one, but he listened with an interest that was all his own.

"You saw Mr. Dan in Miss Mona's room – do you mean her chamber?"

"Sure, and he climbed in at the window, and white as a haddock, and all amuck with sweat."

"Climbed in at the window – the window of her chamber – her bedroom – you're sure it was her bedroom?"

"Sarten sure. Don't I know it same as my own bit of a place? The bed, with the curtains all white and dimity, as they're sayin', and the wee thing's cot carved over with the lions, and the tigers, and the beasties, and the goat's rug, and the sheepskin – aw, yes, aw, yes."

The reality of the vision had taken such a hold of Kerry that she had looked upon it as a certain presage of disaster, and when Jarvis had opened the door she had leapt to the conclusion that he came to announce the catastrophe that she foresaw, and to summon her to Ballamona.

Jarvis smiled grimly. He had heard in the old days of Kerry's second sight, and now he laughed at it. But the blind woman's stupid dreams had given him an idea, and he rose suddenly and hurried away.

Jarvis knew the Deemster's weakness, for he knew why he found himself where he was. Stern man as the Deemster might be, keen of wit and strong of soul, Jarvis knew that there was one side of his mind on which he was feebler than a child. On that side of the Deemster Jarvis now meant to play to his own end and profit.

He was full to the throat of the story which he had to pour into credulous ears, that never listened to a superstitious tale without laughing at it, and mocking at it, and believing it, when he stepped into the hall at Ballamona, and came suddenly face to face with Dan, and saw the door of Mona's sitting-room open before and close behind him.

Jarvis was bewildered. Could it be possible that there was something in the blind woman's second sight? He had scarcely recovered from his surprise when the Deemster walked into the porch, looking as black as a thunder-cloud.

"That man has been here again," he said. "Why didn't you turn him out of the house?"

"I have something to tell you," said Jarvis.

They went into the Deemster's study. It was a little place to the left of the hall, half under the stairs, and with the fireplace built across one corner. Over the mantel-shelf a number of curious things were hung from hooks and nails – a huge silver watch with a small face and great seals, a mask, a blunderbuss, a monastic lamp and a crucifix, a piece of silvered glass, and a pistol.

"What now?" asked the Deemster.

Jarvis told the blind woman's story with variations, and the Deemster listened intently, and with a look of deadly rage.

"And you saw him come out of her room – you yourself saw him?" said the Deemster.

"With my own eyes, dear sir," said Jarvis.

The Deemster's lip quivered. "My God! it must be true," he said.

At that moment they heard a foot in the hall, and going to the door in his restless tramping to and fro, the Deemster saw that Ewan had come into the house. He called to him, and Ewan went into the study, and on Ewan going in Jarvis went out.

There was a look of such affright on the Deemster's face that before a word was spoken Ewan had caught the contagion of his father's terror. Then, grasping his son by the wrist in the intensity of his passion, the Deemster poured his tale into Ewan's ear. But it was not the tale that blind Kerry had told to Jarvis, it was not the tale that Jarvis had told to him; it was a tale compounded of superstition and of hate. Blind Kerry had said of her certain knowledge that Dan was accustomed to visit Mona in her chamber at night alone, entering in at the window. Jarvis Kerruish himself had seen him there – and that very day, not at night, but in the broad daylight, Jarvis had seen Dan come from Mona's room. What? Had Ewan no bowels that he could submit to the dishonor of his own sister?

Ewan listened to the hot words that came from his father in a rapid and ceaseless whirl. The story was all so fatally circumstantial as the Deemster told it; no visions; no sights; no sneezings of an old woman; all was clear, hard, deadly, damning circumstance, or seemed to be so to Ewan's heated brain and poisoned heart.

"Father," he said, very quietly, but with visible emotion, "you are my father, but there are only two persons alive from whose lips I would take a story like this, and you are not one of them."

At that word the Deemster's passion overcame him. "My God," he cried, "what have I done that I should not be believed by my own son? Would I slander my own daughter?"

But Ewan did not hear him. He had turned away, and was going toward the door of Mona's room. He moved slowly; there was an awful silence. Full half a minute his hand rested on the door handle, and only then did his nervous fingers turn it.

He stepped into the room. The room was empty. It was Mona's sitting-room, her work-room, her parlor, her nursery. Out of it there opened another room by a door at the further end of the hall on the left.

The door of that other room was ajar, and Ewan could hear, from where he now stood quivering in every limb, the soft cooing of the child – his child, his dead wife's child – and the inarticulate nothings that Mona, the foster-mother, babbled over it.

"Boo-loo-la-la-pa-pa," "Dearee-dearee-dear," and then the tender cooing died off into a murmur, and an almost noiseless, long kiss on the full round baby-neck.

Ewan stood irresolute for a moment, and the sweat started from his forehead. He felt like one who has been kneeling at a shrine when a foul hand besmudges it. He had half swung about to go back, when his ear caught the sound of the Deemster's restless foot outside. He could not go back: the poison had gone to his heart.

He stepped into the bedroom that led out of the sitting-room. Mona raised her eyes as her brother entered. She was leaning over the cot, her beautiful face alive with the light of a tender love – a very vision of pure and delicious womanhood. Almost she had lifted the child from the cot to Ewan's arms when at a second glance she recognized the solemn expression of his face, and then she let the little one slide back to its pillow.

"What has happened?"

"Is it true," he began very slowly, "that Dan has been here?"

Then Mona blushed deeply, and there was a pause.

"Is it true?" he said again, and now with a hurried and startled look; "is it true that Dan has been here – here?"

Mona misunderstood his emphasis. Ewan was standing in her chamber, and when he asked if Dan had been there, he was inquiring if Dan had been with her in that very room. She did not comprehend the evil thought that had been put in his heart. But she remembered the prohibition placed upon her both by Ewan and her father, never to receive Dan again, and her confusion at the moment of Ewan's question came of the knowledge that, contrary to that prohibition, she had received him.

"Is it true?" he asked yet again, and he trembled with the passion he suppressed.

After a pause he answered himself, with an awful composure, "It is true."

The child lifted itself and babbled at Mona with its innocent face all smiles, and Mona turned to hide her confusion by leaning over the cot.

"Boo – loo – la-la."

Then a great wave of passion seemed to come to Ewan, and he stepped to his sister, and took her by both hands. He was like a strong man in a dream, who feels sure that he can only be dreaming – struggling in vain to awake from a terrible nightmare, and knowing that a nightmare it must be that sits on him and crushes him.

"No, no, there must be a mistake; there must, there must," he said, and his hot breathing beat on her face. "He has never been here – here – never."

Mona raised herself. She loosed her hands from his grasp. Her woman's pride had been stung. It seemed to her that her brother was taking more than a brother's part.

"There is no mistake," she said, with some anger; "Dan has been here."

"You confess it?"

She looked him straight in the eyes and answered, "Yes, if you call it so – I confess it. It is of no use to deceive you."

Then there was an ominous silence. Ewan's features became death-like in their rigidity. A sickening sense came over him. He was struggling to ask a question that his tongue would not utter.

"Mona – do you mean – do you mean that Dan has – has – outrage – Great God! what am I to say? How am I to say it?"

Mona drew herself up.

"I mean that I can hide my feelings no longer," she said. "Do with me as you may; I am not a child, and no brother shall govern me. Dan has been here – outrage or none – call it what you will – yes, and – " she dropped her head over the cot, "I love him."

Ewan was not himself: his heart was poisoned, or then and there he would have unraveled the devilish tangle of circumstance. He tried again with another and yet another question. But every question he asked, and every answer Mona gave, made the tangle thicker. His strained jaw seemed to start from his skin.

"I passed him on the road," he said to himself, in a hushed whisper. "Oh, that I had but known!"

Then with a look of reproach at Mona he turned aside and went out of the room.

He stepped back to the study, and there the Deemster was still tramping to and fro.

"Simpleton, simpleton, to expect a woman to acknowledge her own dishonor," the Deemster cried.

Ewan did not answer at once; but in silence he reached up to where the pistol hung over the mantel-shelf and took it down.

"What are you doing?" cried the Deemster.

"She has acknowledged it," said Ewan, still in a suppressed whisper.

For a moment the Deemster was made speechless and powerless by that answer. Then he laid hold of his son's hand and wrenched the pistol away.

"No violence," he cried.

He was now terrified at the wrath that his own evil passions had aroused; he locked the pistol in a cabinet.

"It is better so," said Ewan, and in another moment he was going out at the porch.

The Deemster followed him, and laid a hand on his arm.

"Remember – no violence," he said; "for the love of God, see there is no violence."

But Ewan, without a word more, without relaxing a muscle of his hard, white face, without a glance or a sign, but with bloodshot eyes and quivering nostrils, with teeth compressed and the great veins on his forehead large and dark over the scar that Dan had left there, drew himself away, and went out of the house.

CHAPTER XIX

HOW EWAN FOUND DAN

Ewan went along like a man whose reason is clogged. All his faculties were deadened. He could not see properly. He could not hear. He could not think. Try as he might to keep his faculties from wandering, his mind would not be kept steady.

Time after time he went back to the passage of Scripture which he had fixed on that morning for his next lesson and sermon. It was the story how Esau, when robbed of his birthright blessing, said in his heart, "I will slay my brother Jacob"; how Jacob fled from his brother's anger to the home of Laban; how after many years Esau married the daughter of Ishmael, and Jacob came to the country of Edom; how, in exceeding fear of Esau's wrath, Jacob sent before him a present for Esau out of the plenty with which God had blessed him; and how Jacob lifted up his eyes and beheld Esau, and ran to meet him and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.

Ewan would see the goats and the ewes, and the rams, and the milch camels toiling along through the hot lush grass by the waters of the Jordan; then all at once these would vanish and he would find himself standing alone in the drear winter day, with the rumble of the bleak sea far in front, and close overhead the dark snow-clouds sweeping on and on.

His strong emotion paralyzed all his faculties. He could neither fix his mind on the mission on which he had set out, nor banish the thought of it. Mission! What was it? At one moment he thought he knew, and then his eyes seemed to jump from their sockets. "Am I going mad?" he asked himself, and his head turned giddy.

He went on; a blind force impelled him. At length he reached the old Ballamona. His own especial room in the house was the little book-encased closet, looking over the Curraghs toward the sea – the same that had been the study of Gilcrist Mylrea, before he went away and came back as bishop.

But Ewan turned mechanically toward another part of the house and entered a room hung about with muskets and the horns of deer, fishing rods and baskets, a watchman's truncheon lettered in red, loose pieces of net, and even some horse harness. A dog, a brown collie, lay asleep before the fire, and over the rannel-tree shelf a huge watch was ticking.

But Dan was not in his room. Then Ewan remembered in a dazed way – how had the memory escaped him so long? – that when Dan passed him on the road he was not going homeward, but toward the village. No doubt the man was on his way to the low pot-house he frequented.

Ewan left Ballamona and went on toward the "Three Legs of Man." He crossed the fields which the Bishop had cut off from the episcopal demesne for his son's occupation as a farm. As he walked, his wandering, aimless thoughts were arrested by the neglected state of the land and the stock upon it. In one croft the withered stalks of the last crop of cabbage lay rotten on the ground; in a meadow a sheep was lying dead of the rot, and six or seven of the rest of the flock were dragging their falling wool along the thin grass.

Ewan came out of the fields to the turnpike by the footpath that goes by Bishop's Court, and as he passed through the stile he heard the Bishop in conversation with some one on the road within.

"What is the balance that I owe you, Mr. Looney, for building those barns on my son's farm?" the Bishop was saying.

"Seven pounds five shillings, my lord," the man answered, "and rael bad I'm wanting the money, too, my lord, and three months I'm afther waiting for it."

"So you are, Mr. Looney. You would have been paid before this if I'd had wherewith to pay you."

Then there was silence between the two, and Ewan was going on, when the Bishop added:

"Here – here – take this;" there was a sound as of the rattle of keys, and seals, and a watch chain – "it was my old father's last gift to me, all he had to give to me – God bless his memory! – and I little thought to part with it – but there, take it and sell it, and pay yourself, Mr. Looney."

The man seemed to draw back.

"Your watch!" he said. "Aw, no, no, no! Och, if I'm never paid, never, it's not Patrick Looney that is the man to take the watch out of your pocket."

"Take it – take it! Why, my good man" – the Bishop's voice was all but breaking – "you should not refuse to take the time of day from your Bishop." Then there was a jaunty laugh, with a great sob at the back of it. "Besides, I've found the old thing a sore tax on my failing memory this many day, to wind it and wear it. Come, it will wipe out my debt to you."

Ewan went on; his teeth were set hard. Why had he overheard that conversation? Was it to whet his purpose? It seemed as if there might be some supernatural influence over him. But this was not the only conversation he overheard that day. When he got to the "Three Legs of Man" a carrier's cart stood outside. Ewan stepped into the lobby of the house. The old cat was counting up the chalk marks, vertical and horizontal, at the back of the cupboard door, and the carrier was sitting on a round table, recounting certain mad doings at Castletown.

"'Let's down with the watch and take their lanterns,' says the captain, says he, laughing morthal and a bit sprung, maybe; and down they went, one a top o' the other, Jemmy the Red, and Johnny-by-Nite, and all the rest of them, bellowing strong, and the capt'n and his pals whipping up their lanterns and their truncheons, and away at a slant Aw, it was right fine."

The carrier laughed loud at his story.

"Was that when Mastha Dan was down at Castletown, fixing the business for the Fencibles?"

"Aw, yes, woman, and middlin' stiff it cost him. Next morning Jemmy the Red and Johnny-by-Nite were off for the Castle, but the captain met them, and 'I'm not for denying it,' says he, and 'a bit of a spree,' he says, and Take this, Jemmy,' says he, 'and say no more.'"

"And what did he give the watch to sweeten them?"

"Three pound, they're saying. Aw, yes, woman, woman – liberal, very. None o' yer close-fisted about the captain."

The blood rushed to Ewan's heart. In a moment he found himself asking for Dan and hearing from the old woman with the whiskers, who spoke with a curtsey after every syllable, that Master Dan had been seen to go down toward the creek, the Lockjaw, under Orris Head.

Ewan went out of the pot-house and turned the lane toward the creek. What was the mysterious influence on his destiny, that he of all men must needs overhear two such conversations, and hear them now of all times? The neglected lands, the impoverished old Bishop, the reckless spendthrift, all rose before Ewan's mind in a bewildering haze.

The lane to the Lockjaw led past the shambles, that stood a little out of the village. Ewan had often noticed the butcher's low wagon on the road, with sheep penned in by a rope across the sternboard, or with a calf in a net. All at once he now realized that he was walking behind this wagon, and that a dead ox lay in it, and that the driver at the horse's head was talking to a man who plodded along beside him. Ewan's faculties were now more clouded than before, but he could hear, with gaps in which his sense of hearing seemed to leave him, the conversation between the two men.

"Well, well, just to think – killing the poor beast for stopping when the dinner bell rang at the Coort! And them used of it for fifteen years! Aw, well, well."

"He's no Christian, anyway, and no disrespec'."

"Christian? Christian, is it? Brute beast, as I'm sayin'. The ould Bishop's son? Well, well."

Bit by bit, scarcely listening, losing the words sometimes, as one loses at intervals the tick of a clock when lying awake at night with a brain distraught, Ewan gathered up the story of the bad business at the plowing match after he had left the meadow.

"Christian? Och, Christian?" one of the men repeated with a bitter laugh of mockery. "I'm thinking it would be a middlin' little crime to treat a Christian like that same as he treated the poor dumb craythurs."

Ewan's temples beat furiously, and a fearful tumult was rife in his brain. One wild thought expelled all other thoughts. Why had he overheard three such conversations? There could be but one answer – he was designed by supernatural powers to be the instrument of a fixed purpose. It was irrevocably decided – he was impelled to the terrible business that was in his mind by an irresistible force to which he was blind and powerless. It was so, it was so.

Ewan pushed on past the wagon, and heard the men's voices die off to an indistinct mumble behind him. How hideous were the meditations of the next few minutes! The beating of his temple drew the skin hard about the scar above it. He thought of his young wife in her grave, and of the shock that sent her there. He felt afresh the abject degradation of that bitter moment in the library at Bishop's Court, when, to save the honor of a forger, he had lied before God and man. Then he thought of the gray head of that august old man, serenest of saints, fondest of fathers, the Bishop, bowed down to the dust with shame and a ruined hope. And after his mind had oscillated among these agonizing thoughts, there came to him over all else and more hideous than all else, the memory of what his own father, the Deemster, had told him an hour ago.