The Deemster

"Is it Ewan?" he said, and his voice came like a hoarse whisper.

"No, his wife," said Mona.

It turned out that not long after daybreak that morning the young wife of Ewan, who had slept with Mona, had awakened with a start, and the sensation of having received a heavy blow on the forehead. She had roused Mona, and told her what seemed to have occurred. They had looked about and seen nothing that could have fallen. They had risen from bed and examined the room, and had found everything as it had been when they lay down. The door was shut and there was no hood above the bed. But Mona had drawn up the window blind, and then she had seen, clearly marked on the white forehead of Ewan's young wife, a little above the temple, on the spot where she had seemed to feel the blow, a streak of pale color such as might have been made by the scratch of a thorn that had not torn the skin. It had been a perplexing difficulty, and the girls had gone back to bed, and talked of it in whispers until they had fallen asleep in each other's arms. When they had awakened again, the Deemster was rapping at their door to say that he had taken an early breakfast, that he was going off to hold his court at Ramsey, and expected to be back at midday. Then half-timidly, Mona had told her father of their strange experience, but he had bantered them on their folly, and they had still heard his laughter when he had leaped to the saddle in front of the house, and was cantering away over the gravel. Reassured by the Deemster's unbelief, the girls had thrown off their vague misgivings, and given way to good spirits. Ewan's young wife had said that all morning she had dreamed of her husband, and that her dreams had been bright and happy. They had gone down to breakfast, but scarcely had they been seated at the table before they had heard the click of the gate from the road.

Then they had risen together, and Ewan had come up the path with a white bandage about his head, and with a streak of blood above the temple. With a sharp cry, Ewan's young wife had fallen to the ground insensible, and when Ewan himself had come into the house they had carried her back to bed. There she was at that moment, and from a peculiar delicacy of her health at the time, there was but too much reason to fear that the shock might have serious results.

All this Mona told to Dan from where she stood, three steps up the stairs, and he listened with his head held low, one hand gripping the stair-rail, and his foot pawing the mat at the bottom. When she finished, there was a pause, and then there came from overhead a long, deep moan of pain.

Dan lifted his face; its sudden pallor was startling. "Mona," he said, in a voice that was husky in his throat, "do you know who struck Ewan that blow?"

There was silence for a moment and then, half in a whisper, half with a sob, Mona answered that she knew. It had not been from Ewan himself, but by one of the many tongues of scandal, that the news had come to Ballamona.

Dan railed at himself in bitter words, and called God to witness that he had been a curse to himself and every one about him. Mona let the torrent of his self-reproach spend itself, and then she said:

"Dan, you must be reconciled to Ewan."

"Not yet," he answered.

"Yes, yes, I'm sure he would forgive you," said Mona, and she turned about as if in the act of going back to seek for Ewan.

Dan grasped her hand firmly. "No," he said, "don't heap coals of fire on my head, Mona; don't, don't." And after a moment, with a calmer manner, "I must see the Deemster first."

Hardly had this been spoken when they heard a horse's hoofs on the gravel path, and the Deemster's voice calling to Hommy-beg as he threw the reins over the post near the door and entered the house. The Deemster was in unusual spirits, and slapped Dan on the back and laughed as he went into his room. Dan followed him, and Mona crept nervously to the open door. With head held down, Dan told what had occurred. The Deemster listened and laughed, asked further particulars and laughed again, threw off his riding boots and leggings, looked knowingly from under his shaggy brows, and then laughed once more.

"And what d'ye say you want me to do for you, Danny veg?" he asked, with one side of his wrinkled face twisted awry.

"To punish me, sir," said Dan.

At that the Deemster, who was buckling his slippers, threw himself back in his chair, and sent a shrill peal of mocking laughter through the house.

Dan was unmoved. His countenance did not bend as he said slowly, and in a low tone, "If you don't do it, sir, I shall never look into Ewan's face again."

The Deemster fixed his buckles, rose to his feet, slapped Dan on the back, and said: "Go home, man veen, go home," and then hurried away to the kitchen, where in another moment his testy voice could be heard directing Hommy-beg to put up the saddle on the "lath."

Mona looked into Dan's face. "Will you be reconciled to Ewan now?" she said, and took both his hands and held them.

"No," he answered firmly, "I will see the Bishop." His eyes were dilated; his face, that had hitherto been very mournful to see, was alive with a strange fire. Mona held his hands with a passionate grasp.

"Dan," she said, with a great tenderness, "this is very, very noble of you; this is like our Dan, this – "

She stopped; she trembled and glowed; her eyes were close to his.

"Don't look at me like that," he said.

She dropped his hands, and at the next instant he was gone from the house.

Dan found the Bishop at Bishop's Court, and told him all. The Bishop had heard the story already, but he said nothing of that. He knew when Dan hid his provocation and painted his offense at its blackest. With a grave face he listened while Dan accused himself, and his heart heaved within him.

"It is a serious offense," he said; "to strike a minister is a grievous offense, and the Church provides a censure."

Dan held his face very low, and clasped his hands in front of him.

"The censure is that on the next Sabbath morning following, in the presence of the congregation, you shall walk up the aisle of the parish church from the porch to the communion behind the minister, who shall read the 51st Psalm meantime."

The Bishop's deep tones and quiet manner concealed his strong emotion, and Dan went out without another word.

This was Friday, and on the evening of the same day Ewan heard what had passed between Dan and the Deemster and between Dan and the Bishop, and with a great lump in his throat he went across to Bishop's Court to pray that the censure might be taken off.

"The provocation was mine, and he is penitent," said Ewan; and with heaving breast the Bishop heard him out, and then shook his head.

"The censures of the Church were never meant to pass by the house of the Bishop," he said.

"But he is too deeply abased already," said Ewan.

"The offense was committed in public, and before the eyes of all men the expiation must be made."

"But I, too, am ashamed – think of it, and remove the censure," said Ewan, and his voice trembled and broke.

The Bishop gazed out at the window with blurred eyes that saw nothing. "Ewan," he said, "it is God's hand on the lad. Let it be; let it be."

Next day the Bishop sent his sumner round the parish, asking that every house might send one at least to the parish church next morning.

On Sunday Ewan's young wife kept her bed; but when Ewan left her for the church the shock of her nerves seemed in a measure to have passed away. There was still, however, one great disaster to fear, and Mona remained at the bedside.

The meaning of the sumner's summons had eked out, and long before the hour of service the parish church was crowded. The riff-raff that never came to church from year's end to year's end, except to celebrate the Oiel Verree, were there with eager eyes. While Willas-Thorn tolled the bell from the rope suspended in the porch, there was a low buzz of gossip, but when the bell ceased its hoarse clangor, and Will-as-Thorn appeared with his pitch-pipe in the front of the gallery, there could be heard, in the silence that followed over the crowded church, the loud tick of the wooden clock in front of him.

Presently from the porch there came a low, tremulous voice reading the Psalm that begins, "Have mercy upon me, O God, after Thy great goodness: according to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine offenses."

Then the people who sat in front turned about, and those who sat at the side strained across, and those who sat above craned forward.

Ewan was walking slowly up the aisle in his surplice, with his pale face and scarred forehead bent low over the book in his hand, and close behind him, towering above him in his great stature, with head held down, but with a steadfast gaze, his hat in his hands, his step firm and resolute, Dan Mylrea strode along.

There was a dead hush over the congregation.

"Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my faults; and my sin is ever before me."

The tremulous voice rose and fell, and nothing else broke the silence except the uncertain step of the reader, and the strong tread of the penitent behind him.

"Against Thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight – "

At this the tremulous voice deepened, and stopped, and went on and stopped again, and when the words came once more they came in a deep, low sob, and the reader's head fell into his breast.

Not until the Psalm came to an end, and Ewan and Dan had reached the communion, and the vicar had begun the morning prayer, and Will-as-Thorn had sent out a blast from his pitch-pipe, was the hard tension of that moment broken.

When the morning service ended, the Deemster rose from his pew and hurried down the aisle. As usual, he was the first to leave the church. The ghostly smile with which he had witnessed the penance that had brought tears to the eyes of others was still on the Deemster's lip, and a chuckle was in his throat when at the gate of the churchyard he met Hommy-beg, whose face was livid from a long run, and who stood for an instant panting for breath.

"Well, well, well?" said the Deemster, sending the words like small shot into Hommy-beg's deaf ear.

"Terrible, terrible, terrible," said Hommy-beg, and he lifted his hands.

"What is it? What? What?"

"The young woman-body is dead in child-bed."

Then the ghostly smile fled from the Deemster's face.

CHAPTER XIII

HOW EWAN MOURNED FOR HIS WIFE

What passed at the new Ballamona on that morning of Dan's penance was very pitiful. There, in the death-chamber already darkened, lay Ewan's young wife, her eyes lightly closed, her girlish features composed, and a faint tinge of color in her cheeks. Her breast was half open, and her beautiful head lay in a pillow of her soft brown hair. One round arm was stretched over the counterpane, and the delicate fingers were curved inward until the thumb-nail, like an acorn, rested on the inner rim of a ring. Quiet, peaceful, very sweet and tender, she lay there like one who slept. After a short, sharp pang she had died gently, without a struggle, almost without a sigh, merely closing her eyes as one who was weary, and drawing a long, deep breath. In dying she had given premature birth to a child, a girl, and the infant was alive, and was taken from the mother at the moment of death.

When the Deemster entered the room, with a face of great pallor and eyes of fear, Mona was standing by the bed-head gazing down, but seeing nothing. The Deemster felt the pulse of the arm over the counterpane with fingers that trembled visibly. Then he shot away from the room, and was no more seen that day. The vicar, the child-wife's father, came with panting breath and stood by the bedside for a moment, and then turned aside in silence. Ewan came, too, and behind him Dan walked to the door and there stopped, and let Ewan enter the chamber of his great sorrow alone. Not a word was said until Ewan went down on his knees by the side of his wife, and put his arms about her, and kissed her lips, still warm, with his own far colder lips, and called to her softly by her name, as though she slept gently, and must not be awakened too harshly, and drew her to his breast, and called again, in a tenderer tone that brushed the upturned face like a caress:

"Aileen! Aileen! Aileen!"

Mona covered her eyes in her hands, and Dan, where he stood at the door, turned his head away.

"Aileen! Ailee! Ailee! My Ailee!"

The voice went like a whisper and a kiss into the deaf ear, and only one other sound was heard, and that was the faint cry of an infant from the room below.

Ewan raised his head and seemed to listen; he paused and looked at the faint color in the quiet cheeks; he put his hand lightly on the heart, and looked long at the breast that did not heave. Then he drew his arms very slowly away, and rose to his feet.

For a moment he stood as one dazed, like a man whose brain is benumbed, and, with the vacant light still in his eyes, he touched Mona on the arm and drew her hand from her eyes, and he said, as one who tells you something that you could not think, "She is dead!"

Mona looked up into his face, and at sight of it the tears rained down her own. Dan had stepped into the room noiselessly, and came behind Ewan, and when Ewan felt his presence, he turned to Dan with the same vacant look, and repeated in the same empty tone, "She is dead!"

And never a tear came into Ewan's eyes to soften their look of dull torpor; never again did he stretch out his arms to the silent form beneath him; only with dazed, dry eyes, he looked down, and said once more, "She is dead!"

Dan could bear up no longer; his heart was choking, and he went out without a word.

It was the dread silence of feeling that was frozen, but the thaw came in its time. They laid out the body of the young wife in the darkened room, and Ewan went away and rambled over the house all day long, and when night fell in, and the lighted candles were set in the death-chamber, and all in Ballamona were going off to bed, Ewan was still rambling aimlessly from room to room. He was very quiet, and he spoke little and did not weep at all. In the middle of that night the Deemster opened his bedroom door and listened, and Ewan's step was still passing from room to room, and Mona heard the same restless footfall in every break of her fitful sleep. But later on, in the dark hour that comes before day, the Deemster opened his door and listened again, and then all was quiet in the house. "He has gone to bed at last," thought the Deemster; but in the early morning, as he passed by Ewan's room, he found the door open, and saw that the bed had not been slept in.

The second day went by like the first, and the next night like the former one, and again in the dead of night the Deemster opened his door and heard Ewan's step. Once more, in the dark hour that goes before the day, he opened his door and listened again, and all was quiet as before. "Surely he is in bed now," thought the Deemster. He was turning back into his own room, when he felt a sudden impulse to go to Ewan's room first and see if it was as he supposed. He went, and the door was open and Ewan was not there, and again the bed had not been slept in.

The Deemster crept back on tiptoe, and a gruesome feeling took hold of him. He could not lie, and no sleep had come near his wakeful eyes, so he waited and listened for that unquiet beat of restless feet, but the sound did not come. Then, as the day was breaking over the top of Slieu Dhoo, and all the Curraghs around lay veiled in mist, and far away to the west a deep line stretched across where the dark sea lay with the lightening sky above it, the Deemster opened his door yet again, and went along the corridor steadily until he came to the door of the room where the body was. "Perhaps he is sitting with her," he thought, with awe, and he turned the handle. But when the door swung open the Deemster paused; a faint sound broke the silence; it was a soft and measured breathing from within. Quivering with dread, the Deemster stepped into the death-chamber, and his head turned rigidly toward the bed. There, in the gloom of the dawn that came over the light of the last candle that flickered in its socket, Ewan lay outstretched by the side of the white, upturned face of his dead wife, and his hand lay on her hand, and he was in a deep sleep.

To the Deemster it was as if a spirit had passed before his face, and the hair of his flesh stood up.

They buried Ewan's young wife side by side with his mother, under the elder-tree (now thick with clusters of the green berry) by the wall of the churchyard that stood over by the sea. The morning was fine, but the sun shone dimly through a crust of hot air that gathered and slumbered and caked above. Ewan passed through all without a word, or a sigh, or a tear. But when the company returned to the Deemster's house, and Mona spoke to Ewan and he answered her without any show of feeling, and Dan told him of his own remorse and accused himself of every disaster, and still Ewan gave no sign, but went in and out among them all with the vacant light in his eyes, then the Bishop whispered to Mona, and she went out and presently came again, and in her arms was the infant in its white linen clothes.

The sun was now hidden by the heavy cloud overhead, and against the window-panes at that moment there was a light pattering of rain-drops. Ewan had watched with his vacant gaze when Mona went out, but when she came again a new light seemed to come into his eyes, and he stepped up to her and looked down at the little face that was sleeping softly against her breast. Then he put out his arms to take the child, and Mona passed it to him, and he held it, and sat down with it, and all at once the tears came into his dry eyes and he wept aloud.

CHAPTER XIV

WRESTLING WITH FATE

So far as concerned the Deemster, the death of Ewan's wife was the beginning of the end. Had she not died under the roof of the new Ballamona? Was it not by the strangest of accidents that she had died there, and not in her own home? Had she not died in child-bed? Did not everything attending her death suggest the force of an irresistible fate? More than twenty years ago the woman Kerruish, the mother of Mally Kerruish, had cursed this house, and said that no life would come to it but death would come with it.

And for more than twenty years the Deemster had done his best to laugh at the prediction and to forget it. Who was he that he should be the victim of fear at the sneezing of an old woman? What was he that he should not be master of his fate? But what had occurred? For more than twenty years one disturbing and distinct idea had engrossed him. In all his waking hours it exasperated him, and even in his hours of sleep it lay heavy at the back of his brain as a dull feeling of dread. On the bench, in the saddle, at table, alone by the winter's fire, alone in summer walks, the obstinate idea was always there. And nothing but death seemed likely to shake it off.

Often he laughed at it in his long, lingering, nervous laugh; but it was a chain that was slowly tightening about him. Everything was being fulfilled. First came the death of his wife at the birth of Mona, and now, after an interval of twenty years, the death of his son's wife at the birth of her child. In that stretch of time he had become in his own view a childless man; his hopes had been thwarted in the son on whom alone his hopes had been built; the house he had founded was but an echoing vault; the fortune he had reared an empty bubble. He was accursed; God had heard the woman's voice; he looked too steadily at the facts to mistake them, and let the incredulous fools laugh if they liked.

When, twenty years before, the Deemster realized that he was the slave of one tyrannical idea, he tried to break the fate that hung over him. He bought up the cottage on the Brew, and turned the woman Kerruish into the roads. Then he put his foot on every sign of superstitious belief that came in his way as judge.

But not with such brave shows of unbelief could he conquer his one disturbing idea. His nature had never been kindly, but now there grew upon him an obstinate hatred of everybody. This was in the days when his children, Ewan and Mona, lived in the cozy nest at Bishop's Court. If in these days any man mentioned the Kerruishes in the Deemster's presence, he showed irritation, but he kept his ears open for every syllable said about them. He knew all their history; he knew when the girl Mally fled away from the island on the day of Ewan's christening; he knew by what boat she sailed; he knew where she settled herself in England; he knew when her child was born, and when, in terror at the unfulfilled censure of the Church that hung over her (separating her from all communion with God's people in life or hope of redemption in death), she came back to the island, drawn by an irresistible idea, her child at her breast, to work out her penance on the scene of her shame.

Thereafter he watched her daily, and knew her life. She had been taken back to work at the net-looms of Kinvig, the Peeltown net-maker, and she lived with her mother at the cottage over the Head, and there in poverty she brought up her child, her boy, Jarvis Kerruish, as she had called him. If any pointed at her and laughed with cruelty; if any pretended to sympathize with her and said, with a snigger, "The first error is always forgiven, Mally woman"; if any mentioned the Deemster himself, and said, with a wink, "I'm thinking it terrible strange, Mally, that you don't take a slue round and put a sight on him"; if any said to her when she bought a new garment out of her scant earnings, a gown, or even a scarf or bit of bright ribbon such as she loved in the old days, "Dearee dear! I thought you wouldn't take rest, but be up and put a sight on the ould crooky" – the Deemster knew it all. He saw the ruddy, audacious girl of twenty sink into the pallid slattern of thirty, without hope, without joy in life, and with only a single tie.

And the Deemster found that there grew upon him daily his old malicious feeling; but so far as concerned his outer bearing, matters took a turn on the day he came upon the boys, Dan Mylrea and Jarvis Kerruish, fighting in the road. It was the first time he had seen the boy Jarvis. "Who is he?" he had asked, and the old woman Kerruish had made answer, "Don't you know him, Deemster? Do you never see a face like that? Not when you look in the glass?"

There was no need to look twice into a mirror like the face of that lad to know whose son he was.

The Deemster went home to Ballamona, and thought over the fierce encounter. He could tolerate no longer the living reproach of this boy's presence within a few miles of his own house, and, by an impulse no better than humbled pride, he went back to the cottage of the Kerruishes at night, alone, and afoot. The cottage was a lone place on the top of a bare heath, with the bleak sea in front, and the purple hills behind, and with a fenceless cart-track leading up to it. A lead mine, known as the Cross Vein, had been worked there forty years before. The shaft was still open, and now full of dark, foul water almost to the surface. One roofless wall showed where the gear had stood, and under the shelter of this wall there crouched a low thatched tool-shed, having a door and a small window. This was the cottage; and until old Mrs. Kerruish had brought there her few rickety sticks when, by the Deemster's orders, they had been thrown into the road, none had ever occupied the tool-shed as a house.

The door was open, and the Deemster stepped in. One of the women, old Mrs. Kerruish, was sitting on a stool by the fire – it was a fire of sputtering hazel sticks – shredding some scraps of green vegetables into a pot of broth that swung from the iron hook of the chimney. The other woman, Mally, was doing something in the dark crib of a sleeping-room, shut off from the living-room by a wooden partition like the stanchion-board of a stable. The boy was asleep; his soft breathing came from the dark crib.

"Mrs. Kerruish," said the Deemster, "I am willing to take the lad, and rear him, and when the time comes, to set him to business, and give him a start in life."

Mrs. Kerruish had risen stiffly from her stool, and her face was set hard.

"Think of it, woman, think of it, and don't answer in haste," said the Deemster.