When Ewan got back home there was Dan sitting before the fire in the old hall, his legs stretched out before him, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his head low in his breast, and his whole mien indicative of a crushed and broken spirit. He glanced up furtively as Ewan entered, and then back with a stony stare to the fire. If Ewan had then given him one word of cheer, God knows what tragic consequences would have been spared to them both. But Ewan had saved Dan from the penalty of his crime at the cost of truth and his self-esteem.
"Dan," he said, "you and I must part—we can be friends no longer."
He spoke with a strong effort, and the words seemed to choke him. Dan shambled to his feet; he appeared to collect his thoughts for a moment, like one who had fainted and returns to consciousness.
"Mind—I don't turn you out of the house," said Ewan, "only if we are to share this place together we must be strangers."
A hard smile broke out on Dan's face. He seemed to be trying to speak, but not a word would come. He twisted slowly on his heel, and lifted the latch of the door that led to the inner part of the house.
"One thing more," said Ewan, speaking quickly, and in a tremulous voice, "I will ask you to look upon yourself as a stranger to my sister also."
Dan stopped and turned about. Over the forced smile his hard face told of a great struggle for self-command. He said nothing, and after a moment he went out, drawing his breath audibly.
Then straightway Ewan flung himself into the chair from which Dan had risen, and his slight frame shook with suppressed sobs. After some minutes the sense of his own degradation diminished, and left room for a just idea of Dan's abject humiliation. "I have gone too far," he thought; "I will make amends." He had risen to follow Dan, when another thought trod heavily on the heels of the first. "Leave him alone, it will be best for himself—leave him alone, for his own sake." And so, with the madness of wrath fermenting in his own brain, he left it to ferment in Dan's brain as well.
Now, when Dan found himself left alone he tried to carry off his humiliation by a brave show of unconcern. He stayed on at the old Ballamona, but he never bothered himself—not he, forsooth—to talk to folks who passed him on the stairs without a word of greeting, or met in the hall without a glance of recognition.
It chanced just then that, in view of a threatened invasion, the authorities were getting up a corps of volunteers, known as the Manx Fencibles, and that they called on the captains of the parishes to establish companies. Dan threw himself into this enterprise with uncommon vigor, took drills himself, acquired a competent knowledge of the rudiments in a twinkling, and forthwith set himself to band together the young fellows of his parish. It was just the sort of activity that Dan wanted at the moment, and in following it up the "Three Legs" saw him something oftener than before, and there the fellows of the baser sort drank and laughed with him, addressing him sometimes as captain, but oftener as Dan, never troubling themselves a ha'p'orth to put a handle to his name.
This was a turn of events which Ewan could not understand. "I have been mistaken in the man," he thought; "there's no heart left in him."
Toward the middle of December Jarvis Kerruish arrived at Ballamona, and forthwith established himself there in a position that would have been proper to the Deemster's heir. He was a young man of medium height and size, closely resembling the Deemster in face and figure. His dress was English: he wore a close-fitting undercoat with tails, and over it a loose cloak mounted with a brass buckle at the throat; he had a beaver hat of the shape of a sugar-loaf; and boots that fitted to his legs like gloves. His manner was expansive, and he betrayed a complete unconsciousness of the sinister bar of his birth, and of the false position he had taken up in the Deemster's house. He showed no desire to visit the cottage at the Cross Vein; and he spoke of the poor with condescension. When he met with Ewan he displayed no uneasiness, and Ewan on his part gave no sign of resentment. Mona, on the other hand, betrayed an instinctive repulsion, and in less than a week from his coming their relations had reached an extraordinary crisis, which involved Ewan and Dan and herself in terrible consequences. This is what occurred:
On the day before Christmas Day there was to be a plowing match in a meadow over the Head, and Ewan stood pledged by an old promise to act as judge. The day came, and it was a heavy day, with snow-clouds hanging overhead, and misty vapors floating down from the hills and up from the Curraghs, and hiding them. At ten in the morning Mona muffled herself in a great cloak, and went over to the meadow with Ewan. There a crowd had already gathered, strong men in blue pilots, old men in sheepskin coats, women with their short blue camblet gowns tucked over their linen caps, boys and girls on every side, all coming and going like shadows in the mist. At one end of the meadow several pairs of horses stood yoked to plows, and a few lads were in charge of them. On Ewan's arrival there was a general movement among a group of men standing together, and a respectful salutation to the parson. The names were called over of the plowmen who had entered for the prize—a pound note and a cup—and last of all, there was a show of hands for the election of six men to form a jury.
Then the stretch was staked out. The prize was to the plowman who would make the stretch up and down the meadow in the shortest time, cutting the furrows straightest, cleanest, and of the most regular depth.
When all was ready, Ewan took up his station where the first furrow would be cut into the field, with Mona at his side, and the six jurors about him. The first plowman to bring up his plow was a brawny young fellow with a tanned face. The plowman had brought up his horses in front of the stake, and had laid hands on his plow-handles, and was measuring the stretch with his eye for a landmark to sight by, when Jarvis Kerruish came into the meadow, and walked through the crowd, and took up a place by Mona's side. There were audible comments, and some racy exclamations as he pushed through the crowd, not lifting an eye to any face; but he showed complete indifference, and began to talk to Mona in a loud, measured tone.
"Ah! this is very gratifying," he was saying, "to see the peasantry engaged in manly sports—useful sports—is, I confess, very gratifying to me."
"My gough!" said a voice from one side.
"Hurroo!" said a voice from the other side.
"Lawk-a-day!" came from behind, in a shrill female treble. "Did ye ever see a grub turn butterfly?"
Jarvis seemed not to hear. "Now therearesports—" he began; but the plowman was shouting to his horses, "Steady, steady," the plow was dipping into the succulent grass, the first swish of the upturned soil was in the air, and Jarvis's wise words were lost.
All eyes were on the bent back of the plowman plodding on in the mist. "He cuts like a razor," said one of the spectators. "He bears his hand too much on," said another. "Do better yourself next spell," said a third.
When the horses reached the far end of the stretch the plowman whipped them round like the turn of a wheel, and in another moment he was toiling back, steadily, firmly, his hand rigid, and his face set hard. When he got back to where Ewan, with his watch in his hand, stood surrounded by the jurors, he was covered with sweat. "Good, very good—six minutes ten seconds," said Ewan, and there were some plaudits from the people looking on, and some banter of the competitors who came up to follow.
Jarvis Kerruish, at Mona's elbow, was beginning again, "I confess that it has always been my personal opinion—" but in the bustle of another pair of horses whipped up to the stake no one seemed to be aware that he was speaking.
Five plowmen came in succession, but all were behind the first in time and cut a less regular furrow. So Ewan and the jurors announced that the prize was to the stranger. Then as Ewan twisted about, his adjudication finished, to where Mona stood with Jarvis by her side, there was a general rush of competitors and spectators to a corner of the meadow, where, from a little square cart, the buirdly stranger who was victor proceeded to serve out glasses of ale from a small barrel.
While this was going on, and there was some laughter and shouting and singing, there came a loud "Hello," as of many voices from a little distance, and then the beat of many irregular feet, and one of the lads in the crowd, who had jumped to the top of the broad turf hedge, shouted, "It's the capt'n—it's Mastha Dan."
In another half-minute, Dan and some fifty or sixty of the scum of the parish came tumbling into the meadow on all sides—over the hedge, over the gate, and tearing through the gaps in the gorse. They were the corps that Dan had banded together toward the Manx Fencibles, but the only regimentals they yet wore were a leather belt, and the only implement of war they yet carried was the small dagger that was fitted into the belt. That morning they had been drilling, and after drill they had set off to see the plowing match, and on the way they had passed the "Three Legs," and being exceeding dry, they had drawn up in front thereof, and every man had been served with a glass, which had been duly scored off to the captain's account.
Dan saw Mona with Ewan as he vaulted the gate, but he gave no sign of recognition, and in a moment he was in the thick of the throng at the side of the cart, hearing all about the match, and making loud comments upon it in his broadest homespun.
"What!" he said, "and you've let yourselves be bate by a craythur like that. Hurroo!"
He strode up to the stranger's furrow, cocked his eye along it, and then glanced at the stranger's horses.
"Och, I'll go bail I'll bate it with a yoke of oxen."
At that there was a movement of the crowd around him, and some cheering, just to egg on the rupture that was imminent.
The big stranger heard all, and strode through the people with a face like a thunder-cloud.
"Who says he'll bate it with a yoke of oxen?" he asked.
"That's just what I'm afther saying, my fine fellow. Have you anything agen it?"
In half a minute a wager had been laid of a pound a side that Dan, with a pair of oxen, would beat the stranger with a pair of horses in two stretches out of three.
"Davy! Davy!" shouted Dan, and in a twinkling there was Davy Fayle, looking queer enough in his guernsey, and his long boots, and his sea-cap, and withal his belt and his dagger. Davy was sent for a pair of oxen to where they were leading manure, not far away. He went off like a shot, and in ten minutes he was back in the meadow, driving the oxen before him.
Now, these oxen had been a gift of the Bishop to Dan. They were old, and had grown wise with their years. For fifteen years they had worked on the glebe at Bishop's Court, and they knew the dinner hour as well as if they could have taken the altitude of the sun. When the dinner bell rang at the Court at twelve o'clock, the oxen would stop short, no matter where they were or what they were doing, and not another budge would they make until they had been unyoked and led off for their midday mash.
It was now only a few minutes short of twelve, but no one took note of that circumstance, and the oxen were yoked to a plow.
"Same judge and jury," said the stranger, but Ewan excused himself.
"Aw, what matter about a judge," said Dan, from his plow-handles; "let the jury be judge as well."
Ewan and Mona looked on in silence for some moments. Ewan could scarce contain himself. There was Dan, stripped to his red flannel shirt, his face tanned and glowing, his whole body radiant with fresh life and health, and he was shouting and laughing as if there had never been a shadow to darken his days.
"Look at him," whispered Ewan, with emotion, in Mona's ear. "Look! this good-nature that seems so good to others is almost enough to make me hate him."
Mona was startled, and turned to glance into Ewan's face.
"Come, let us go," said Ewan, with head aside.
"Not yet," said Mona.
Then Jarvis Kerruish, who had stepped aside for a moment, returned and said:
"Will you take a wager with me, Mona—a pair of gloves?"
"Very well," she answered.
"Who do you bet on?"
"Oh, on the stranger," said Mona, coloring slightly, and laughing a little.
"How lucky," said Jarvis, "I bet on the captain."
"I can stand it no longer," whispered Ewan, "will you come?" But Mona's eyes were riveted on the group about the oxen. She did not hear, and Ewan turned away, and walked out of the meadow.
Then there was a shout, and the oxen started with Dan behind them. On they went through the hard, tough ground, tranquilly, steadily, with measured pace, tearing through roots of trees that lay in their way as if nothing could stop them in their great strength.
When the oxen got back after the first stretch the time was called—five minutes thirty seconds—and there was a great cheer, and Mona's pale face was triumphant.
The stranger brought up his horses, and set off again, straining every muscle. He did his stretch in six minutes four seconds, and another cheer—but it was a cheer for Dan—went up after the figures were called.
Then Dan whipped round his oxen once more, and brought them up to the stake. The excitement among the people was now very great. Mona clutched her cloak convulsively, and held her breath. Jarvis was watching her closely, and she knew that his cold eyes were on her face.
"One would almost imagine that you were anxious to lose your bet," he said. She made no answer. When the oxen started again her lips closed tightly, as if she was in pain.
On the oxen went, and made the first half of the stretch without a hitch, and, with the blade of the plow lifted, they were wheeling over the furrow end, when a bell rang across the Curragh—it was the bell for the midday meal at Bishop's Court—and instantly they came to a dead stand. Dan called to them, but they did not budge; then his whip fell heavily across their snouts, and they snorted, but stirred not an inch. The people were in a tumult, and shouted with fifty voices at once. Dan's passion mastered him. He brought his whip down over the flanks and across the eyes and noses of the oxen; they winced under the blows that rained down on them, and then shot away across the meadow, tearing up the furrows they had made.
Then there was a cry of vexation and anger from the people, and Dan, who had let go his reins, strode back to the stake. "I've lost," said Dan, with a muttered oath at the oxen.
All this time Jarvis Kerruish had kept his eye steadily fixed on Mona's twitching face. "You've won, Mona," he said, in a cold voice and with an icy smile.
"I must go. Where is Ewan?" she said, tremulously, and before Jarvis was aware she had gone over the grass.
Dan had heard when Ewan declined to act as judge, he had seen when Ewan left the meadow, and, though he did not look, he knew when Mona was no longer there. His face was set hard, and it glowed red under his sunburned skin.
"Davy, bring them up," he said; and Davy Fayle led back the oxen to the front of the stake.
Then Dan unyoked them, took out the long swinging tree that divided them—a heavy wooden bar clamped with iron—and they stood free and began to nibble the grass under their feet.
"Look out!" he shouted, and he swung the bar over his shoulder.
The crowd receded and left an open space in which Dan stood alone with the oxen, his great limbs holding the ground like their own hoofs, his muscles standing out like bulbs on his bare arms.
"What is he going to do—kill them?" said one.
"Look out!" Dan shouted again, and in another moment there was the swish of the bar through the air. Then down the bar came on the forehead of one of the oxen, and it reeled, and its legs gave way, and it fell dead.
The bar was raised again, and again it fell, and the second of the oxen reeled like the first and fell dead beside its old yoke-fellow.
A cry of horror ran through the crowd, but heeding it not at all, Dan threw on his coat and buckled his belt about him, and strode through the people and out at the gate.
What happened next was one of those tragedies of bewildering motive, so common and so fatal, in which it is impossible to decide whether evil passion or evil circumstances plays the chief malicious part.
Dan walked straight to the new Ballamona, and pushed through the house without ceremony, as it had been his habit to do in other days, to the room where Mona was to be found. She was there, and she looked startled at his coming.
"Is it you, Dan?" she said, in a tremulous whisper.
He answered sullenly:
"It is I. I have come to speak with you. I have something to say—but no matter—"
He stopped and threw himself into a chair. His head ached, his eyes were hot, and his mind seemed to him to be in darkness and confusion.
"Mona, I think I must be going mad," he stammered after a moment.
"Why talk like that?" she said. Her bosom heaved and her face was troubled.
He did not answer, but after a pause turned toward her, and said in a quick, harsh tone, "You did not expect to see me here, and you have been forbidden to receive me. Is it not so?"
She colored deeply, and did not answer at once, and then she began, with hesitation:
"My father—it is true, my father—"
"Itisso," he said sharply. He got on to his feet and tramped about the room. After a moment he sat down again, and leaned his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.
"But what of Ewan?" he asked.
"Ewan loves you, Dan, and you have been at fault," said Mona, in broken accents.
"At fault?"
There was a sudden change in his manner. He spoke bruskly, even mockingly, and laughed a short, grating laugh.
"They are taking the wrong way with me, Mona—that's the fact," he said, and now his breast heaved and the words came with difficulty.
Mona was gazing absently out at the window, her head aslant, her fingers interlaced before her. "Oh, Dan, Dan," she murmured in a low tone, "there is your dear, dear father, and Ewan, and—and myself—"
Dan had leapt to his feet again. "Don't turn my eyes into my head, Mona," he said.
He tramped to and fro in the room for a moment and then broke out nervously, "All last night I dreamt such an ugly dream. I dreamt it three times, and, O God! what an ugly dream it was! It was a bad night, and I was walking in the dark, and stumbling first into bogs and then in cart ruts, when all of a sudden a man's hand seized me unawares. I could not see the man, and we struggled long in the darkness, and it seemed as if he would master me. He gripped me by the waist, and I held him by the shoulders. We reeled and fell together, and when I would have risen his knee was on my chest. But a great flood of strength seemed to come to me and I threw him off, and rose to my feet and closed with him again, and at last I was over him, covering him, with his back across my thigh and my hand set hard in his throat. And all this time I heard his loud breathing in the darkness, but never once the sound of his voice. Then instantly, as if by a flash of lightning, I saw the face that was close to mine, and—God Almighty! it was my own face—my own—and it was black already from the pressure of my stiff fingers at the throat."
He trembled as he spoke, and sat again and shivered, and a cold chill ran down his back.
"Mona," he said, half in a sob, "do you believe in omens?"
She did not reply. Her breast heaved visibly, and she could not speak.
"Tush!" he said, in another voice, "omens!" and he laughed bitterly, and rose again and picked up his hat, and then said, in a quieter way, "Only, as I say, they're taking the wrong way with me, Mona."
He had opened the door, and she had turned her swimming eyes toward him.
"It was bad enough to make himself a stranger to me, but why did he want to make you a stranger, too? Stranger, stranger!" He echoed the word in a mocking accent, and threw back his head.
"Dan," said Mona, in a low, passionate tone, and the blinding tears rained down her cheeks, "nothing and nobody can make us strangers, you and me—not my father, or your dear father, or Ewan, or"—she dropped her voice to a deep whisper—"or any misfortune or any disgrace."
"Mona!" he cried, and took a step toward her, and stretched out one arm with a yearning gesture.
But at the next moment he had swung about, and was going out at the door. At sight of all that tenderness and loyalty in Mona's face his conscience smote him as it had never smitten him before.
"Ewan was right, Mona. He is the noblest man on God's earth, and I am the foulest beast on it."
He was pulling the door behind him when he encountered Jarvis Kerruish in the hall. That gentleman had just come into the house, and was passing through the hall in hat and cloak. He looked appalled at seeing Dan there, and stepped aside to let him go by; but Dan did not so much as recognize his presence by lifting his head as he strode out at the porch.
With head still bent, Dan had reached the gate to the road and pushed through it, and sent it back with a swing and a click, when the Deemster walked up to it, and half halted, and would have stopped. But Dan went moodily on, and the frown on the Deemster's wizened face was lost on him. He did not take the lane toward the old Ballamona, but followed the turnpike that led past Bishop's Court, and as he went by the large house behind the trees Ewan came through the smaller gate, and turned toward the new Ballamona. They did not speak, or even glance at each other's faces.
Dan went on until he came to the parish church. There was singing within, and he stopped. He remembered that this was Christmas Eve. The choir was practising the psalms for the morrow's services.
"Before I was troubled, I went wrong; but now have I kept Thy word."
Dan went up to the church porch, and stood there and listened.
"It is good for me that I have been in trouble, that I may learn Thy statutes."
The wooden door, clamped and barred and worm-eaten and cut by knives, was ajar, and from where he stood Dan could see into the church. There were the empty pews, the gaunt, square, green-clad boxes on which he had sat on many a Christmas Eve at Oiel Verree. He could picture the old place as it used to be in those days of his boyhood, the sea of faces, some solemn and some bubbling over with mischief, the candles with their ribbons, the old clerk, Will-as-Thorn, standing up behind the communion rail with his pitch-pipe in his hand, and Hommy-beg in his linsey-woolsey petticoat, singing lustily from a paper held upside down. The singing stopped. Behind were the hills Slieu Dhoo and Slieu Volley, hidden now under a thick veil of mist, and from across the flat Curragh there came in the silence the low moan of the sea. "Once more," said a voice within the church, and then the psalm was sung again. Dan began to breathe easier, he scarce knew why, and a great weight seemed to be lifted off his breast.
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.
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, "Itistrue."
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.
"Shehasacknowledged 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.
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.
Ewan began to run, and as he ran all his blood seemed to rush to his head, and a thousand confused and vague forms danced before his eyes. All at once he recognized that he was at the mouth of the creek, going down the steep gate to the sea that ended in the Lockjaw. Before he was aware, he was talking with Davy Fayle, and asking for Dan. He noticed that his voice would scarcely obey him.
"He's in the crib on the shore, sir," said Davy, and the lad turned back to his work. He was hammering an old bent nail out of a pitch-pine plank that had washed ashore with the last tide. After a moment Davy stopped and looked after the young parson, and shook his head and muttered something to himself. Then he threw down his hammer, and followed slowly.
Ewan went on. His impatience was now feverish. He was picturing Dan as he would find him—drinking, smoking, laughing, one leg thrown over the end of a table, his cap awry, his face red, his eyes bleared, and his lips hot.
It was growing dark, the snow-cloud was very low overhead, the sea-birds were screaming down at the water's edge, and the sea's deep rumble came up from the shingle below and the rocks beyond.
Ewan saw the tent and made for it. As he came near to it he slipped and fell. Regaining his feet, he perceived that in the dusk he had tripped over some chips that lay about a block. Davy had been chopping firewood of the driftwood that the sea had sent up. Ewan saw the hatchet lying among the loose chips. In an instant he had caught it up. Recognizing in every event of that awful hour the mysterious influence of supernatural powers, he read this incident as he had read all the others. Until then he had thought of nothing but the deed he was to do; never for one instant of how he was to do it. But now the hatchet was thrust into his hand. Thus was everything irrevocably decided.
And now Ewan was in front of the tent, panting audibly, the hatchet in his hand, his eyes starting from their sockets, the great veins on his forehead hard and black. Now, O God! for a moment's strength, one little moment's strength, now, now!
The smoke was rising from the gorse-covered roof; the little black door was shut. Inside was Dan, Dan, Dan; and while Ewan's young wife lay in her grave, and Ewan's sister was worse than in her grave, and the good Bishop was brought low, Dan was there, there, and he was drinking and laughing, and his heart was cold and dead.
Ewan lifted the latch and pushed the door open, and stepped into the tent.
Lord of grace and mercy, what was there? On the floor of earth, in one corner of the small place, a fire of gorse, turf, and logs burned slowly; and near the fire Dan lay outstretched on a bed of straw, his head pillowed on a coil of old rope, one hand twisted under his head, the other resting lightly on his breast, and he slept peacefully like a child.
Ewan stood for a moment shuddering and dismayed. The sight of Dan, helpless and at his mercy, unnerved his arm and drove the fever from his blood. There was an awful power in that sleeping man, and sleep had wrapped him in its own divinity.
The hatchet dropped from Ewan's graspless fingers, and he covered his face. As a drowning man is said to see all his life pass before him at the moment of death, so Ewan saw all the past, the happy past—the past of love and of innocence, whereof Dan was a part—rise up before him.
"It is true, I am going mad," he thought, and he fell back on to a bench that stood by the wall. Then there came an instant of unconsciousness, and in that instant he was again by the waters of the Jordan, and the ewes and the rams and the milch camels were toiling through the long grass, and Esau was falling on the neck of Jacob, and they were weeping together.
Dan moved uneasily, and presently awoke, opened his eyes, and saw Ewan, and betrayed no surprise at his presence there.
"Ah! Is it you, Ewan?" he said, speaking quietly, partly in a shamefaced way, and with some confusion. "Do you know, I've been dreaming of you—you and Mona?"
Ewan gave no answer. Because sleep is a holy thing, and the brother of death, whose shadow also it is, therefore Ewan's hideous purpose had left him while Dan lay asleep at his feet; but now that Dan was awake, the evil passion came again.
"I was dreaming of that Mother Carey's chicken—you remember it? when we were lumps of lads, you know—why, you can't have forgotten it—the old thing I caught in its nest just under the Head?"
Still Ewan gave no sign, but looked down at Dan resting on his elbows. Dan's eyes fell upon Ewan's face, but he went on in a confused way:
"Mona couldn't bear to see it caged, and would have me put it back. Don't you remember I clambered up to the nest, and put the bird in again? You were down on the shore, thinking sure I would tumble over the Head, and Mona—Mona—"
Dan glanced afresh into Ewan's face, and its look of terror seemed to stupefy him; still he made shift to go on with his dream in an abashed sort of way:
"My gough! If I didn't dream it all as fresh, as fresh, and the fight in the air, and the screams when I put the old bird in the nest—the young ones had forgotten it clean, and they tumbled it out, and set on it terrible, and drove it away—and then the poor old thing on the rocks sitting by itself as lonesome as lonesome—and little Mona crying and crying down below, and her long hair rip-rip-rippling in the wind, and—and—"
Dan had got to his feet, and then seated himself on a stool as he rambled on with the story of his dream. But once again his shifty eyes came back to Ewan's face, and he stopped short.
"My God, what is it?" he cried.
Now Ewan, standing there with a thousand vague forms floating in his brain, had heard little of what Dan had said, but he had noted his confused manner, and had taken this story of the dream as a feeble device to hide the momentary discomfiture.
"What does it mean?" he said. "It means that this island is not large enough to hold both you and me."
"What?"
"It means that you must go away."
"Away!"
"Yes—and at once."
In the pause that followed after his first cry of amazement, Dan thought only of the bad business of the killing of the oxen at the plowing match that morning, and so, in a tone of utter abasement, with his face to the ground, he went on, in a blundering, humble way, to allow that Ewan had reason for his anger.
"I'm a blind headstrong fool, I know that—and my temper is—well, it's damnable, that's the fact—but no one suffers from it more than I do, and if I could have felled myself after I had felled the oxen, why down ... Ewan, for the sake of the dear old times when we were good chums, you and I and little Mona, with her quiet eyes, God bless her—!"
"Go away, and never come back to either of us," cried Ewan, stamping his foot.
Dan paused, and there was a painful silence.
"Why should I go away?" he said, with an effort at quietness.
"Because you are a scoundrel—the basest scoundrel on God's earth—the foulest traitor—the blackest-hearted monster—"
Dan's sunburnt face whitened under his tawny skin.
"Easy, easy, man veen, easy," he said, struggling visibly for self-command, while he interrupted Ewan's torrent of reproaches.
"You are a disgrace and a by-word. Only the riff-raff of the island are your friends and associates."
"That's true enough, Ewan," said Dan, and his head fell between his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.
"What are you doing? Drinking, gambling, roistering, cheating—yes—"
Dan got on his feet uneasily and took a step to and fro about the little place; then sat again, and buried his head in his hands as before.
"I've been a reckless, self-willed, mad fool, Ewan, but no worse than that. And if you could see me as God sees me, and know how I suffer for my follies and curse them, for all I seem to make so light of them, and how I am driven to them one on the head of another, perhaps—perhaps—perhaps—you would have pity—ay, pity."
"Pity? Pity for you? You who have brought your father to shame? He is the ruin of the man he was. You have impoverished him; you have spent his substance and wasted it. Ay, and you have made his gray head a mark for reproach. 'Set your own house in order'—that's what the world says to the man of God whose son is a child of the—"
"Stop!" cried Dan.
He had leapt to his feet, his fist clenched, his knuckles showing like nuts of steel.
But Ewan went on, standing there with a face that was ashy white above his black coat. "Your heart is as dead as your honor. And that is not all, but you must outrage the honor of another."
Now, when Ewan said this, Dan thought of his forged signature, and of the censure and suspension to which Ewan was thereby made liable.
"Go away," Ewan cried again, motioning Dan off with his trembling hand.
Dan lifted his eyes. "And what if I refuse?" he said in a resolute way.
"Then take the consequences."
"You mean the consequences of that—that—that forgery?"
At this Ewan realized the thought in Dan's mind, and perceived that Dan conceived him capable of playing upon his fears by holding over his head the penalty of an offense which he had already taken upon himself. "God in heaven!" he thought, "and this is the pitiful creature whom I have all these years taken to my heart."
"Is that what your loyalty comes to?" said Dan, and his lip curled.
"Loyalty!" cried Ewan, in white wrath. "Loyalty, and you talk to me of loyalty—you who have outraged the honor of my sister—"
"Mona!"
"I have said it at last, though the word blisters my tongue. Go away from the island forever, and let me never see your face again."
Dan rose to his feet with rigid limbs. He looked about him for a moment in a dazed silence, and put his hand to his forehead as if he had lost himself.
"Do you believethat?" he said, in a slow whisper.
"Don't deny it—don't let me know you for a liar as well," Ewan said, eagerly; and then added in another tone, "I have had her own confession."
"Her confession?"
"Yes, and the witness of another."
"The witness of another!"
Dan echoed Ewan's words in a vague, half-conscious way.
Then, in a torrent of hot words that seemed to blister and sting the man who spoke them no less than the man who heard them, Ewan told all, and Dan listened like one in a stupor.
There was silence, and then Ewan spoke again in a tone of agony. "Dan, there was a time when in spite of yourself I loved you—yes, though I'm ashamed to say it, for it was against God's own leading; still I loved you, Dan. But let us part forever now, and each go his own way, and perhaps, though we can never forget the wrong that you have done us, we may yet think more kindly of you, and time may help us to forgive—"
But Dan had awakened from his stupor, and he flung aside.
"Damn your forgiveness!" he said, hotly, and then, with teeth set and lips drawn hard and eyes aflame, he turned upon Ewan and strode up to him, and they stood together face to face.
"You said just now that there was not room enough in the island for you and me," he said, in a hushed whisper. "You were right, but I shall mend your words: if you believe what you have said—by Heaven, I'll not deny it for you!—there is not room enough for both of us in the world."
"It was my own thought," said Ewan, and then for an instant each looked into the other's eyes and read the other's purpose.
The horror of that moment of silence was broken by the lifting of the latch. Davy Fayle came shambling into the tent on some pretended errand. He took off his militia belt with the dagger in the sheath attached to it, and hung it on a long rusty nail driven into an upright timber at one corner. Then he picked up from among some ling on the floor a waterproof coat and put it on. He was going out, with furtive glances at Dan and Ewan, who said not a word in his presence, and were bearing themselves toward each other with a painful constraint, when his glance fell on the hatchet which lay a few feet from the door. Davy picked it up and carried it out, muttering to himself, "Strange, strange, uncommon!"
Hardly had the boy dropped the latch of the door from without than Ewan took the militia belt from the nail and buckled it about his waist. Dan understood his thought; he was still wearing his own militia belt and dagger. There was now not an instant's paltering between them—not a word of explanation.
"We must get rid of the lad," said Dan.
Ewan bowed his head. It had come to him to reflect that when all was over Mona might hear of what had been done. What they had to do was to be done for her honor, or for what seemed to be her honor in that blind tangle of passion and circumstance. But none the less, though she loved both of them now, would she loathe that one who returned to her with the blood of the other upon him.
"She must never know," he said. "Send the boy away. Then we must go to where this work can be done between you and me alone."
Dan had followed his thought in silence, and was stepping toward the door to call to Davy, when the lad came back, carrying a log of driftwood for the fire. There were some small flakes of snow on his waterproof coat.
"Go up to the shambles, Davy," said Dan, speaking with an effort at composure, "and tell Jemmy Curghey to keep me the ox-horns."
Davy looked up in a vacant way, and his lip lagged low. "Aw, and didn't you tell Jemmy yourself, and terrible partic'lar, too?"
"Do you say so, Davy?"
"Sarten sure."
"Then just slip away and fetch them."
Davy fixed the log on the fire, tapped it into the flame, glanced anxiously at Dan and Ewan, and then in a lingering way went out. His simple face looked sad under its vacant expression.
The men listened while the lad's footsteps could be heard on the shingle, above the deep murmur of the sea. Then Dan stepped to the door and threw it open.
"Now," he said.
It was rapidly growing dark. The wind blew strongly into the shed. Dan stepped out, and Ewan followed him.
They walked in silence through the gully that led from the creek to the cliff head. The snow that had begun to fall was swirled about in the wind that came from over the sea, and spinning in the air, it sometimes beat against their faces.
Ewan went along like a man condemned to death. He had begun to doubt, though he did not know it, and would have shut his mind to the idea if it had occurred to him. But once, when Dan seemed to stop as if only half resolved, and partly turn his face toward him, Ewan mistook his intention. "He is going to tell me that there is some hideous error," he thought. He was burning for that word. But no, Dan went plodding on again, and never after shifted his steadfast gaze, never spoke, and gave no sign. At length he stopped, and Ewan stopped with him. They were standing on the summit of Orris Head.
It was a sad, a lonesome, and a desolate place, in sight of a wide waste of common land, without a house, and with never a tree rising above the purple gorse and tussocks of long grass. The sky hung very low over it; the steep red cliffs, with their patches of green in ledges, swept down from it to the shingle and the sharp shelves of slate covered with seaweed. The ground swell came up from below with a very mournful noise, but the air seemed to be empty, and every beat of the foot on the soft turf sounded near and large. Above their heads the sea-fowl kept up a wild clamor, and far out, where sea and sky seemed to meet in the gathering darkness, the sea's steady blow on the bare rocks of the naze sent up a deep, hoarse boom.
Dan unbuckled his belt, and threw off his coat and vest. Ewan did the same, and they stood there face to face in the thin flakes of snow, Dan in his red shirt, Ewan in his white shirt open at the neck, these two men whose souls had been knit together as the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and each ready to lift his hand against his heart's best brother. Then all at once a startled cry came from near at hand.
It was Davy Fayle's voice. The lad had not gone to the shambles. Realizing in some vague way that the errand was a subterfuge and that mischief was about, he had hidden himself at a little distance, and had seen when Dan and Ewan came out of the tent together. Creeping through the ling, and partly hidden by the dusk, he had followed the men until they had stopped on the Head. Then Davy had dropped to his knees. His ideas were obscure, he scarcely knew what was going on before his eyes, but he held his breath and watched and listened. At length, when the men threw off their clothes, the truth dawned on Davy; and though he tried to smother an exclamation, a cry of terror burst from his husky throat.
Dan and Ewan exchanged glances, and each seemed in one moment to read the other's thoughts. In another instant, at three quick strides, Dan had taken Davy by the shoulders.
"Promise," he said, "that you will never tell what you have seen."
Davy struggled to free himself, but his frantic efforts were useless. In Dan's grip he was held as in a vice.
"Let me go, Mastha Dan," the lad cried.
"Promise to hold your tongue," said Dan; "promise it, promise it."
"Let me go, will you? let me go," the lad shouted sullenly.
"Be quiet," said Dan.
"I won't be quiet," was the stubborn answer. "Help! help! help!" and the lad screamed lustily.
"Hold your tongue, or by G—"
Dan held Davy by one of his great hands hitched into the lad's guernsey, and he lifted the other hand threateningly.
"Help! help! help!" Davy screamed still louder, and struggled yet more fiercely, until his strength was spent, and his breath was gone, and then there was a moment's silence.
The desolate place was still as desolate as before. Not a sign of life around; not an answering cry.
"There's nobody to help you," said Dan. "You have got to promise never to tell what you have seen to man, woman, or child."
"I won't promise, and I won't hould my tongue," said the lad, stoutly. "You are goin' to fight, you and Mastha Ewan, and—"
Dan stopped him. "Hearken here. If you are to live another hour, you will promise—"
But Davy had regained both strength and voice.
"I don't care—help! help! help!" he shouted.
Dan put his hand over the lad's mouth, and dragged him to the cliff head. Below was the brant steep, dark and jagged, and quivering in the deepening gloom, and the sea-birds were darting through the mid-air like bats in the dark.
"Look," said Dan, "you've got to swear never to tell what you have seen to-night, so help you God!"
The lad, held tightly by the breast and throat, and gripping the arms that held him with fingers that clung like claws, took one horrified glance down into the darkness. He struggled no longer. His face was very pitiful to see.