Next morning the letter came from Cæsar inviting him to the Melliah, and then he thought of Kate more tenderly. She would suffer, she would cry—it would make his heart bleed to see her; but must he for a few tears put by the aims of a lifetime? If only Pete had been alive! If only Pete were yet to come home! He grew hot and ashamed when he remembered the time, so lately past, when the prayer of his secret heart would have been different. It was so easy now to hate himself for such evil impulses.
Philip decided to go to the Melliah. It would give him the chance he wanted of breaking off the friendship finally. More than friendship there had never been, except secretly, and that could not count. He knew he was deceiving himself; he felt an uneasy sense of loss of honour and a sharp pang of tender love as often as Kate's face rose up before him.
On the day of the Melliah he set off early, riding by way of St. John's that he might inquire at Kirk Michael about the Deemster.. He found the great man's house a desolate place. The gate was padlocked, and he had to clamber over it; the acacias slashed above him going down the path, and the fallen leaves encumbered his feet At the door, which was shut, he rang, and before it was opened to him an old woman put her untidy head out of a little window at the side.
“It's scandalous the doings that's here, sir,” she whispered. “The Dempster's gone into 'sterics with the drink, and the lil farmer fellow, Billiam Cowley, is over and giving him as much as he wants, and driving everybody away.”
“Can I speak to him?” said Philip.
“Billiam? It isn't fit. He'll blackguard you mortal, and the Dempster himself is past it. Just sitting with the brandy and drinking and drinking, and ateing nothing; but that dirt brought up on the Curragh shouting for beefstakes morning and night, and having his dinner laid on a beautiful new white sheet as clane as a bed.”
From the ambush of a screen before an open door, Philip looked into the room where the Deemster was killing himself. The window shutters were up to keep out the daylight; candles were burning in the necks of bottles on the mantelpiece; a fire smouldered in a grate littered with paper and ashes; a coarse-featured man was eating ravenously at the table, a chop-bone in his fingers, and veins like cords moving on his low forehead—and the Deemster himself, judge of his island since the death of Iron Christian, was propped up in a chair, with a smoking glass on a stool beside him, and a monkey perched on his shoulder. “Turn them out, neck and crop, Dempster; the women are all for robbing a man,” said the fellow; and a husky, eaten-out voice replied to him with a grunt and a laugh, “H'm! That's only what you're doing yourself, then, you rascal, and if I'd let the right one in long ago you wouldn't be here now—nor I neither, would I, Jacko?” The tail of the monkey flapped on the Deemster's breast, and Philip crept away with a shiver.
The sun was shining brightly outside the house, and the air was fresh and sweet. Remounting his horse, which was neighing and stamping at the gate, Philip rode hard to bring back a sense of warmth. At the “Fairy” he alighted and put up, and saw Grannie, who was laying tables in the mill.
“I'm busy as Trap's wife,” she said, “and if you were the Govenar itself you wouldn't get lave to spake to me now. Put a sight on himself on the field yonder, the second meadow past the Bishop's bridge, and come back with the boys to supper.”
Philip found the Melliah field. Two-score workers, men, women, and children, a cart and a pair of horses were scattered over it. Where the corn had been cut the day before the stubble had been woven overnight into a white carpet of cobwebs, which neither sun nor step of man had yet dispelled. There were the smell of the straw, the cawing of the rooks in the glen, the hissing to the breeze of the barley still standing, the swish of the scythe and the gling of the sickle, the bending and rising of the shearers, the swaying of the binders dragging the sheaves, the gluck of the wheels of the cart, the merry head of a child peeping out of a stook like a young bird out of the broken egg, and a girl in scarlet, whom Philip recognised, standing at the farthest hedge, and waving the corn band with which she was tieing to some one below.
Philip vaulted into the field, and was instantly seized by every woman working in it, except Kate, tied up with the straw ropes, and only liberated on paying the toll of an intruder.
“But I've come to work,” he protested, and Cæsar who, was plotting the last rigs of the harvest, paired him with Kate and gave him a sickle. “He's a David, he'll smite down his thousands/,” said Cæsar. Then cocking his eye up the field, “the Ballabeg for leader,” he cried, “he's a plate-ribbed man. And let ould Maggie take the butt along with him. Jemmy the Red for the after-rig, and Robbie to follow Mollie with the cart Now ding-dong, boys, bend your backs and down with it.”
Kate had not looked up when Philip came into the field, but she had seen him come, and she gave a little start when he took his place in his shirt-sleeves beside her. He used some conventional phrases which she scarcely answered, and then nothing was heard but the sounds of the sickle and the corn. She worked steadily for some time, and he looked up at her at intervals with her round bare arms and supple waist and firm-set foot and tight red stocking. Two butterflies tumbling in the air played around her sun bonnet and a lady-clock settled on her wrist.
Time was called for rest as Nancy Joe came through the gate bringing a basket with bottles and a can.
“The belly's a malefactor that forgets former kindness,” said Cæsar; “ate and drink.”
Then the men formed a group about the ale, the older women drank tea, the children making bands were given butter-milk, and the younger women with babes went cooing and clucking to the hedge where the little ones lay nuzzled up and unattended, some asleep in shawls, some awake on their backs and grabbing at the wondrous forests of marguerites towering up beside them, and all crying with one voice at sight of the breast, which the mothers were as glad to give as they to take.
The rooks cawed in the glen, there was a hot hum of bees, and a company of starlings passed overhead, glittering in the sunlight like the scales of a herring.
“They're taiching us a lesson,” said Cæsar. “They're going together over the sea; but there's someones on earth would sooner go to heaven itself solitary, and take joy if they found themselves all alone and the cock of the walk there.”
Kate and Philip stood and talked where they had been shearing quietly, simply, without apparent interest, and meanwhile the workers discussed them.
First the men: “He works his siggle like a man though.”—“A stout boy anyway; give him practice and he'd shear many a man in bed.” Then the women: “She's looking as bright as a pewter pot, and she's all so pretty as the Govenar's daughter too.”—“Got a good heart, though. Only last week she had word of Pete, and look at the scarlet perricut.” Finally both men and women: “Lave her alone, mother; it's that Ross that's wasting the woman.”—“Well, if I was a man I'd know my tack.”—“Wouldn't trust. It comes with Cæsar anyway; the Lord prospers him; she'll have her pickings. Nothing bates religion in this world. It's like going to the shop with an ould Manx shilling—you get your pen'orth of taffy and twelve pence out.”—“Lend's a hand with the jough then, boy. None left? Aw, Cæsar's wonderful religious, but there's never much lavings of ale with him.”
Cæsar was striding through the stooks past Philip and Kate.
“Will it thrash well, Mr. Cregeen?” said Philip.
“Eight bolls to the acre maybe, but no straw to spake of, sir,” said Cæsar. “Now, boys, let the weft rest on the last end, finish your work.”
The workers fell to again, and the sickle of the leader sang round his head as he hacked and blew and sent off his breath in spits until the green grass springing up behind him left only a triangular corner of yellow corn. Fore-rig and the after-rig took a tussle together, and presently nothing was standing of all the harvest of Glenmooar but one small shaft of ears a yard wide or less. Then the leaders stopped, and all the shearers of the field came up and cast down their sickles into the soil in a close circle, making a sheaf of crescent moons.
“Now for the Melliah,” said Cæsar. “Who's to be Queen?”
There was a cry for Kate, and she sailed forward buoyantly, fresh still, warm with her work, and looking like the afterglow from the sunset in the lengthening shadows from the west.
“Strike them from their legs, Kirry,” cried Nancy Joe, and Kate drew up one of the sickles, swept her left arm over the standing corn, and at a single stroke of her right brought the last ears to the ground.
Then there was a great shout. “Hurrah for the Mel-liah!” It rang through the glen and echoed in the mountains. Grannie heard it in the valley, and said to herself, “Cæsar's Melliah's took.”
“Well, we've gathered the ripe corn, praise His name,” said Cæsar, “but what shall be done at the great gathering for unripe Christians?”
Kate lifted her last sheaf and tied it about with a piece of blue ribbon, and Philip plucked the cushag (the ragwort) from the hedge, and gave it her to put in the band.
This being done; the Queen of the Melliah stepped back, feeling Philip's eyes following her, while the oldest woman shearer came forward.
“I've a crown-piece, here that's being lying in my pocket long enough, Joney,” said Cæsar with an expansive air, and he gave the woman her accustomed dole.
She was a timid, shrinking creature, having a face walled with wrinkles, and wearing a short blue petticoat, showing heavy dull boots like a man's, and thick black stockings.
Then the young fellows went racing over the field, vaulting the stooks, stretching a straw rope for the girls to jump over, heightening and tightening it to trip them up, and slacking and twirling it to make them skip. And the girls were falling with a laugh, and leaping up again and flying off like the dust, tearing their frocks and dropping their sun-bonnets as if the barley grains they had been reaping had got into their blood.
In the midst of this maddening frolic, while Cæsar and the others were kneeling behind the barley stack, Kate snatched Philip's hat from his head and shot like a gleam into the depths of the glen.
Philip dragged up his coat by one of its arms and fled after her.
Sulby Glen is winding, soft, rich, sweet, and exquisitely beautiful. A thin thread of blue water, laughing, babbling, brawling, whooping, leaping, gliding, and stealing down from the mountains; great boulders worn smooth and ploughed hollow by the wash of ages; wet moss and lichen on the channel walls; deep, cool dubbs; tiny reefs; little cascades of boiling foam; lines of trees like sentinels on either side, making the light dim through the overshadowing leafage; gaunt trunks torn up by winds and thrown across the stream with their heads to the feet of their fellows; the golden fuschia here, the green trammon there; now and again a poor old tholthan, a roofless house, with grass growing on its kitchen floor; and over all the sun peering down with a hundred eyes into the dark and slumberous gloom, and the breeze singing somewhere up in the tree-tops to the voice of the river below.
Kate had run out on the stem of one of the fallen trees, and there Philip found her, over the middle of the stream, laughing, dancing, waving his hat in one hand, and making sweeping bows to her reflection in the water below.
“Come back,” he cried. “You terrible girl, you'll fall. Sit down there—don't torment me, sit down.”
After a curtsey to him she turned her attention to her skirts, wound them about her ankles, sat on the trunk, and dangled her shapely feet half an inch over the surface of the stream.
Then Philip had time to observe that the other end of the tree did not reach the opposite bank, but dipped short into the water. So he barricaded his end by sitting on it, and said triumphantly: “My hat, if you please.”
Kate looked and gave a little cry of alarm and then a chuckle, and then she said—
“You thought you'd caught me, didn't you? You can't, though,” and she dropped on to a boulder from which she might have skipped ashore.
“I can't, can't I?” said Philip; and he twisted a smaller boulder on his side, so that Kate was surrounded by water and cut off from the bank. “My hat now, madam,” he said with majestic despotism. 10
She would not deliver it, so he pretended to leave her where she was. “Good-bye, then; good evening,” he cried over the laughter of the stream, and turned away a step bareheaded.
A moment later his confidence was dashed. When he turned his head back Kate had whipped off her shoes and stockings, and was ramming the one inside the other.
“What are you doing?” cried Philip.
“Catch this—and this,” she said, flinging the shoes across to him. Then clapping his straw hat on the crown of her sun-bonnet, she tucked up her skirts with both hands and waded ashore.
“What a clever boy you are! You thought you'd caught me again, didn't you?” she said.
“I've caught your shoes, anyway,” said Philip, “and until you give me my hat I'll stick to them.”
She was on the shingle, but in her bare feet, and could not make a step.
“My shoes, please?” she pleaded.
“My hat first,” he answered.
“Take it.”
“No; you must give it me.”
“Never! I'll sit here all night first,” said Kate.
“I'm willing,” said Philip.
They were sitting thus, the one bare-headed, the other with bare feet, and on the same stone, as if seats in the glen were scarce, when there came the sound of a hymn from the field they had left, and then it was agreed by way of mutual penalty that Kate should put on Philip's hat on condition that Philip should be required to put on Kate's shoes.
At the next moment Philip, suddenly sobered, was reproaching himself fiercely. What was he doing? He had come to tell Kate that he should come no more, and this was how he had begun! Yesterday he was in Douglas reading his father's letters, and here he was to-day, forgetting himself, his aims in life, his duties, his obligations—everything. “Philip,” he thought, “you are as weak as water. Give up your plans; you are not fit for them; abandon your hopes—they are too high for you.”
“How solemn we are all at once!” said Kate.
The hymn (a most doleful strain, dragged out to death on every note) was still coming from the Melliah field, and she added, slyly, shyly, with a mixture of boldness and nervousness, “Do you think this world is so very bad, then?”
“Well—aw—no,” he faltered, and looking up he met her eye, and they both laughed.
“It's all nonsense, isn't it?” she said, and they began to walk down the glen.
“But where are we going?”
“Oh, we'll come out this way just as well.”
The scutch grass, the long rat-tail, and the golden cushag were swishing against his riding-breeches and her print dress. “I must tell her now,” he thought. In the narrow places she went first, and he followed with a lagging step, trying to begin. “Better prepare her,” he thought. But he could think of no commonplace leading up to what he wished to say.
Presently, through a tangle of wild fuchsia, there was a smell of burning turf in the air and the sound of milking into a pail, and then a voice came up surprisingly as from the ground, saying:
“Aisy on the thatch, Miss Cregeen, ma'am.”
It was old Joney, the shearer, milking her goat, and Kate had stepped on to the roof of her house without knowing it, for the little place was low and opened from the water's edge and leaned against the bank.
Philip made some conventional inquiries, and she answered that she had been thirty years there, and had one son living with her, and he was an imbecile.
“There was once a flock at me, and I was as young as you are then, miss, and all as happy; but they're laving me one by one, except this one, and he isn't wise, poor boy.”
Philip tried to steel his heart. “It is cruel,” he thought, “it will hurt her; but what must be, must be.” She began to sing and went carolling down the glen, keeping two paces in front of him. He followed like an assassin meditating the moment to strike. “He is going to say something,” she thought, and then she sang louder.
“Kate,” he called huskily.
But she only clapped her hands, and cried in a voice of delight, “The echo! Here's the echo! Let's shout to it.”
Her kindling features banished his purpose for the time, and he delivered himself to her play. Then she called up the gill, “Ec—ho! Ec—ho!” and listened, but there was no response, and she said, “It won't answer to its own name. What shall I call?”
“Oh, anything,” said Philip.
“Phil—ip! Phil—ip!” she called, and then said pettishly, “No, Philip won't hear me either.” She laughed. “He's always so stupid though, and perhaps he's asleep.”
“More this way,” said Philip. “Try now.”
“You try.”
Philip took up the call. “Kate!” he shouted, and back came the answer,Ate!“Kate—y!”—Ate—y.
“Ah! how quick! Katey's a good girl. Hark how she answers you,” said Kate.
They walked a few steps, and Kate called again, “Philip!” There was no answer. “Philip is stubborn; he won't have anything to do with me,” said Kate.
Then Philip called a second time, “Katey!” And back came the echo as before. “Well, that's too bad. Katey is—yes, she's actuallyfollowingyou!”
Philip's courage oozed out of him. “Not yet,” he thought.Traa-dy-liooar—time enough. “After supper, when everybody is going! Outside the mill, in the half light of candles within and darkness without! It will sound so ordinary then, 'Good-bye! Haven't you heard the news? Auntie Nan is reconciled at last to leaving Ballure and joining me in Douglas.' That's it; so simple, so commonplace.”
The light was now coming between the trees on the closing west in long swords of sunset red. They could hear the jolting of the laden cart on its way down the glen. The birds were fairly rioting overhead, and all sorts of joyous sounds filled the air. Underfoot there were long ferns and gorse, which caught at her crinkling dress sometimes, and then he liberated her and they laughed. A trailing bough of deadly nightshade was hanging from the broken head of an old ash stump, whose wasted feet were overgrown by two scarlet-tipped toadstools, and she plucked a long tendril of it and wound it about her head, tipping her sun-bonnet back, and letting the red berries droop over her dark hair to her face. Then she began to sing,
O were I monarch o' the globe,Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign.
Radiant gleams shot out of her black pupils, and flashes of love like lightning passed from her eye to his.
Then he tried to moralise. “Ah!” he said, out of the gravity of his wisdom, “if one could only go on for ever like this, living from minute to minute! But that's the difference between a man and a woman. A woman lives in the world of her own heart. If she has interests, they centre there. But a man has his interests outside his affections. He is compelled to deny himself, to let the sweetest things go by.”
Kate began to laugh, and Philip ended by laughing too.
“Look!” she cried, “only look.”
On the top of the bank above them a goat was skirmishing. He was a ridiculous fellow; sometimes cropping with saucy jerks, then kicking up his heels, as if an invisible imp had pinched him, then wagging his rump and laughing in his nostrils.
“As I was saying,” said Philip, “a man has to put by the pleasures of life. Now here's myself, for example. I am bound, do you know, by a kind of duty—a sort of vow made to the dead, I might say———”
“I'm sure he's going to say something,” thought Kate. The voice of his heart was speaking louder and quicker than his halting tongue. She saw that a blow was coming, and looked about for the means to ward it off.
“The fairy's dubb!” she cried suddenly, and darted from his side to the water's edge.
It was a little round pool, black as ink, lying quiet and apparently motionless under a noisy place where the waters swirled and churned over black moss, and the stream ran into the dark. Philip had no choice but to follow her.
“Cut me a willow! Your penknife! Quick, sir, quick! Not that old branch—a sapling. There, that's it. Now you shall hear me tell my own fortune.”
“An ordeal is it?” said Philip.
“Hush! Be quiet, still, or little Phonodoree wont listen. Hush, now hush!”
With solemn airs, but a certain sparkle in her eyes, she went down on her knees by the pool, stretched her round arm over the water, passed the willow bough slowly across its surface, and recited her incantation:
Willow bough, willow bough, which of the four,Sink, circle, or swim, or come floating ashore?Which is the fortune you keep for my life,Old maid or young mistress or widow or wife?
With the last word she flung the willow bough on to the pool, and sat back on her heels to watch it as it moved slowly with the motion of the water.
“Bravo!” cried Philip.
“Be quiet. It's swimming. No, it's coming ashore.”
“It's wife, Kate. No, it's widow. No, it's——”
“Do be serious. Oh, dear! it's going—yes, it's going round. Not that either. No, it has—yes, it has———oh!”
“Sunk!” said Philip, laughing and clapping his hands. “You're doomed to be an old maid, Kate. Phonodoree says so.”
“Cruel Brownie! I'm vexed that I bothered with him,” said Kate, dropping her lip. Then nodding to her reflection in the water where the willow bough had disappeared, she said, “Poor little Katey! He might have given you something else. Anything but that dear, eh?”
“What,” laughed Philip, “crying? Because Phonodoree—never!”
Kate leapt up with averted face. “What nonsense you are talking!” she said.
“There are tears in your eyes, though,” said Philip.
“No wonder, either. You're so ridiculous. And if I'm meant for an old maid, you're meant for an old bachelor—and quite right too!”
“Oh, it is, is it?”
“Yes, indeed. You've got no more heart than a mushroom, for you're all head and legs, and you're going to be just as bald some day.”
“I am, am I, mistress?”
“If I were you, Philip, I should hire myself out for a scarecrow, and then having nothing under your clothes wouldn't so much matter.”
“It wouldn't, wouldn't it?” said Philip.
She was shying off at a half circle; he was beating round her.
“But you're nearly as old as Methuselah already, and what you'll be when you're a man——”
“Lookout!”
She made him an arch curtsey and leapt round a tree, and cried from the other side, “I know. A squeaking old croaker, with the usual old song, 'Deed yes, friends, this world is a vale of sin and misery.' The men's the misery and the women's the sin——”
“You rogue, you!” cried Philip.
He made after her, and she fled, still speaking, “What do you think a girl wants with a——Oh! Oh! Oo!”
Her tirade ended suddenly. She had plunged into a bed of the prickly gorse, and was feeling in twenty places at once what it was to wear low shoes and thin stockings.
“With a Samson, eh?” cried Philip, striding on in his riding breeches, and lifting the captured creature in his arms. “Why, to carry her, you torment, to carry her through the gorse like this.”
“Ah!” she said, turning her face over his shoulder, and tickling his neck with her breath.
Her hair caught in a tree, and fell in a dark shower over his breast. He set her on her feet; they took hands, and went carolling down the glen together:
“The brightest jewel in my crown, Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.”
The daylight lingered as if loth to leave them. There was the fluttering of wings overhead, and sometimes the last piping of birds. The wind wandered away, and left their voices sovereign of all the air.
Then there came a distant shout; the cheer of the farm people on reaching home with the Melliah.. It awakened Philip as from a fit of intoxication.
“This is madness,” he thought. “What am I doing?” “He is going to speak now,” she told herself.
Her gaiety shaded off into melancholy, and her melancholy burst into wild gaiety again. The night had come down, the moon had risen, the stars had appeared. She crept closer to Philip's side, and began to tell him the story of a witch. They were near to the house the witch had lived in. There it was—that roofless cottage—that tholthan under the deep trees like a dungeon.
“Have you never heard of her, Philip? No? The one they called the Deemster's lady?”
“What Deemster?” said Philip.
“This one, Deemster Mylrea, who is said to be dying.”
“He is dying; he is killing himself; I saw him to-day,' said Philip.
“'Well, she was the blacksmith's daughter, and he left her, and she went mad and cursed him, and said she was his wife though they hadn't been to church, and he should never marry anybody else. Then her father turned her out, and she came up here all alone, and there was a baby, and they were saying she killed it, and everybody was afraid of her. And all the time her boy was making himself a great, great man until he got to be Deemster. But he never married, never, though times and times people were putting this lady on him and then that; but when they told the witch, she only laughed and said, 'Let him, he'll get lave enough!' At last she was old and going on two sticks, and like to die any day, and then he crept out of his big house unknown to any one and stole up here to the woman's cottage. And when she saw the old man she said, 'So you've come at last, boy; but you've been keeping me long, bogh, you've been keeping me long.' And then she died. Wasn't that strange?”
Her dark eyes looked up at him and her mouth quivered.
“Was it witchcraft, then?” said Philip.
“Oh, no; it was only because he was her husband. That was the hold she had of him. He was tempted away by a big house and a big name, but hehadto come back to her. And it's the same with a woman. Once a girl is the wife of somebody, shemustcling to him, and if she is ever false she must return. Something compels her. That's if she's really his wife—really, truly. How beautiful, isn't it? Isn't it beautiful?”
“Do you think that, Kate? Do you think a man, like a woman, would cling the closer?”
“He couldn't help himself, Philip.”
Philip tried to say it was only a girl's morality, but her confidence shamed him. She slipped her moist fingers into his hand again. They were close by the deserted tholthan, and she was creeping nearer and nearer to his side. A bat swirled above their heads and she made a faint cry. Then a cat shot from under a gooseberry bush, and she gave a little scream. She was breathing irregularly. He could smell the perfume of her fallen hair. He was in agony of pain and delight. His heart was leaping in his bosom; his eyes were burning.
“She's right,” he thought. “Love is best. It is everything. It is the crown of life. Shall I give it up for the Dead Sea fruit of worldly success? Think of the Deemster! Wifeless, childless, living solitary, dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate as they will.”
She had disengaged her hand, and was creeping away from him in the half darkness, treading softly and going off like a gleam.
“Kate!” he called.
He heard her laughter, he heard the drowsy hum of the gill, he could smell the warm odour of the gorse bushes.
“But this is madness,” he thought. “This is the fever of an hour. Yield now and I am ruined for life. The girl has come between me and my aims, my vows, my work—everything. She has tempted me, and I am as weak as water.”
“Kate!”
She did not answer.
“Come here this moment, Kate. I have something to say to you.”
“Bite!” she said, coming back and holding an apple to his lips. She had plucked it in the overgrown garden.
“Listen! I'm leaving Ramsey for good—don't intend to practise in the northern courts any longer—settling in Douglas—best work lies there, you see—worst of it is—we shan't meet again soon—not very soon, you know—not for years, perhaps——”
He began by stammering, and went on stuttering, blurting out his words, and trembling at the sound of his own voice.
“Philip, you must not go!” she cried. “I'm sorry, Kate, very sorry. Shall always remember so tenderly—not to say fondly—the happy boy and girl days together.”
“Philip, Philip, you must not go—you cannot go—you shall not go!”
He could see her bosom heaving under her loose red bodice. She took hold of his arm and dragged at it.
“Won't you spare me? Will you shame me to death? Must I tell you? If you won't speak, I will. You cannot leave me, Philip, because—because—what do I care?—because I love you!”
“Don't say that, Kate!”
“I love you, Philip—I love you—I love you!”
“Would to God I had never been born!”
“But I will show you how sweet it is to be alive. Take me, take me—I am yours!”
Her upturned face seemed to flash. He staggered like one seized with giddiness. It was a thing of terror to behold her. Still he struggled. “Though apart, we shall remember each other, Kate.”
“I don't want to remember. I want to have you with me.”
“Our hearts will always be together.”
“Come to me then, Philip, come to me!”
“The purest part of our hearts—our souls——”
“But I wantyou!Will you drive a girl to shame herself again? I wantyou, Philip! I want your eyes that I may see them every day; and your hair, that I may feel it with my hands; and your lips—can I help it?—yes, and your lips, that I may kiss and kiss them!”
“Kate! Kate! Turn your eyes away. Don't look at me like that!” She was fighting for her life. It was to be now or never.
“If you won't come to me, I'll go to you!” she cried; and then she sprang upon him, and all grew confused, the berries of the nightshade whipped his forehead, and the moon and the stars went out.
“My love! My darling! My girl!”
“You won't go now?” she sobbed.
“God forgive me, I cannot.”
“Kiss me. I feel your heart beating. You are mine—mine—mine! Say you won't go now!”
“God forgive us both!”
“Kiss me again, Philip! Don't despise me that I love you better than myself!”
She was weeping, she was laughing, her heart was throbbing up to her throat. At the next moment she had broken from his embrace and was gone.
“Kate! Kate!”
Her voice came from the tholthan.
“Philip!”
When a good woman falls from honour, is it merely that she is a victim of momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of the fever of instinct? No. It is mainly that she is a slave of the sweetest, tenderest, most spiritual and pathetic of all human fallacies—the fallacy that by giving herself to the man she loves she attaches him to herself for ever. This is the real betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It lies at the root of tens of thousands of the cases that make up the merciless story of man's sin and woman's weakness. Alas! it is only the woman who clings the closer. The impulse of the man is to draw apart. He must conquer it or she is lost. Such is the old cruel difference and inequality of man and woman as nature made them—the old trick, the old tragedy.
Old Mannanin, the magician, according to his wont, had surrounded his island with mist that day, and, in the helpless void of things unrevealed, a steamship bound for Liverpool came with engines slacked some points north of her course, blowing her fog-horn over the breathless sea with that unearthly yell which must surely be the sound whereby the devil summons his legions out of chaos.
Presently something dropping through the dense air settled for a moment on the damp rope of the companion ladder, and one of the passengers recognised it.
“My gough! It's a bird, a sparrow,” he cried.
At the same moment there was a rustle of wind, the mist lifted, and a great round shoulder rose through the white gauze, as if it had been the ghost of a mountain.
“That's the Isle of Man,” the passenger shouted, and there was a cry of incredulity. “It's the Calf, I'm telling you, boys. Lave it to me to know.” And instantly the engines were reversed.
The passenger, a stalwart fellow, with a look as of pallor under a tawny tan, walked the deck in a fever of excitement, sometimes shouting in a cracked voice, sometimes laughing huskily, and at last breaking down in a hoarse gurgle like a sob.
“Can't you put me ashore, capt'n?”
“Sorry I can't, sir, we've lost time already.”
There was a dog with him, a little, misshappen, ugly creature, and he lifted it up in his arms and hugged it, and called it by blusterous swear names, with noises of inarticulate affection. Then he went down to his berth in the second cabin and opened a little box of letters, and took them out one by one, and leaned up to the port to read them. He had read them before, and he knew them by heart, but he traced the lines with his broad forefinger, and spelled the words one by one. And as he did so he laughed aloud, and then cried to himself, and then laughed once more. “She is well and happy, and looking lovely, and, if she does not write, don't think she is forgetting you.”
“God bless her. And God bless him, too. God bless them both!”
He went up on deck again, for he could not rest in one place long. There was a breeze now, and he filled his lungs and blew and blew. The island was dying down over the sea in a pale light of silver grey. An engineman and a stoker were leaning over the bulwark to cool themselves.
“Happy enough now, sir, eh?”
“Happy as a sand-boy, mate, only mortal hungry. Tiffin you say? Aw, the heart has its hunger same as anything else, and mine has been on short commons these five years and better. See that island there, lying like a salmon gull atop of the water? Looks as if she might dip under it, doesn't she? That's my home, my native land, as the man says, and only three weeks ago I wasn't looking to see the thundering ould thing again; but God is good, you see, and I am middling fit for all. I'm a Manxman myself, mate, and I've got a lil Manx woman that's waiting for me yonder. It's only an ould shirt I'm bringing her to patch, as the saying is, but she'll be that joyful you never seen. It's bad to take a woman by surprise, though—these nervous creatures—'sterics, you see—I'll send her a tally graph from the Stage. My sakes! the joy she'll be taking of that boy, too! He'll be getting sixpence for himself and a drink of butter-milk. It's always the way of these poor lil things—can't stand no good news at all—people coming home and the like—not much worth, these women—crying reglar—can't help it. Well, you see, they're tender-hearteder than us, and when anybody's been five years... Be gough, we're making way, though! The island's going under, for sure. Or is it my eyes that isn't so clear since my bit of a bullet-wound! Aw, God is good, tremen-jous!”
The breaking voice stopped suddenly, and the engine-men turned about, but the passenger was stumbling down the cabin stairs.
“If ever a man came back from the dead it's that one,” said both men together.
Philip was vanquished, and he knew it, but he was not daunted, he was not distressed. To have resisted the self-abandonment of Kate's love would have been monstrous. Therefore, he had done no wrong, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. But when he reached Ballure he did not dash into Auntie Nan's room, according to his wont, though a light was burning there, and he could hear the plop and click of thread and needle; he crept upstairs to his own, and sat down to write a letter. It was the first of his love letters.
“I shall count the days, the hours, and the minutes until we meet again, my darling, and I shall be constantly asking what time it is. And seeing we must be so much apart, let us contrive a means of being together, nevertheless. Listen!—I whisper the secret in your ear. To-morrow night and every night eat your supper at eight o'clock exactly; I will do the same, and so we shall be supping in each other's company, my little wife, though twenty miles divide us. If any body asks me to supper, I will refuse in order that I may sup with you. 'I am promised to a friend,' I'll say, and then I'll sit down in my rooms alone, but you will be with me.”
Tingling with delight, he wrote this letter to Kate, though less than an hour parted from her, and went out to post it. He was going upstairs again, steadily, on tiptoe, his head half aside and his face over his shoulder, when Auntie Nan's voice came from the blue room—“Philip!”
He returned with a sheepish look, and a sense, never felt before, of being naked, so to speak. But Auntie Nan did not look at him. She was working a lamb on a sampler, and she reached over the frame to take something out of a drawer and hand it to him. It was a medallion of a young child—a boy, with long fair curls like a girl's, and a face like sunshine.
“Was it father, Auntie?”
“Yes; a French painter who came ashore with Thurlot painted it for grandfather.”
Philip laid it on the table. He was more than ever sure that Auntie Nan had heard something. Such were her tender ways of warning him. He could not be vexed.
“I'm sleepy to-night, Auntie, and you look tired too. You've been waiting up for me again. Now, you really must not. Besides, it limits one's freedom.”
“That's nothing, Philip. You said you would come home after calling on the poor Deemster, and so——”
“He's in a bad way, Auntie. Drink—delirium—such a wreck. Well, good night!”
“Did you read the letters, dear?”
“Oh, yes. Father's letters. Yes, I read them. Good night.”
“Aren't they beautiful? Haven't they the very breath of ambition and enthusiasm? But poor father! How soon the brightness melted away! He never repined, though. Oh, no, never. Indeed, he used to laugh and joke at our dreams and our castles in the air. 'You must do it all yourself, Nannie; you shall have all the cakes and ale.' Yes, when he was a dying man he would joke like that. But sometimes he would grow serious, and then he would say, 'Give little Philip some for all. He'll deserve it more than me. Oh, God,' he would say, 'let me think to myself when I'mthere, you've missed the good things of life, but your son has got them; you are here, but he is on the heights; lie still, thou poor aspiring heart, lie still in your grave and rest.'”
Philip felt like a bird struggling in the meshes of a net.
“My father was a poet, Auntie, trying to be a man of the world. That was the real mischief in his life, if you think of it.”
Auntie Nan looked up with her needle at poise above the sampler, and said in a nervous voice, “The real mischief of your father's life, Philip, was love—what they call love. But love is not that. Love is peace and virtue, and right living, and that is only madness and frenzy, and when people wake up from it they wake up as from a nightmare. Men talk of it as a holy thing—it is unholy. Books are written in praise of it—I would have such books burnt. When anybody falls to it, he is like a blind man who has lost his guide, tottering straight to the precipice. Women fall to it too. Yes, good women as well as good men; I have seen them tempted——”
Philip was certain of it now. Some one had been prying upon him at Sulby. He was angry, and his anger spent itself on Auntie Nan in a torrent of words. “You are wrong, Aunt Anne, quite wrong. Love is the one lovely thing in life. It is beauty, it is poetry. Call it passion if you will—what would the world be like without it? A place where every human heart would be an island standing alone; a place without children, without joy, without merriment, without laughter. No, no; Heaven has given us love, and we are wrong when we try to put it away. We cannot put it away, and when we make the attempt we are punished for our pride and arrogance. It ought to be enough for us to let heaven decide whether we are to be great men or little men, and to decide for ourselves whether we are to be good men and happy men. And the greatest happiness of life is love. Heaven would have to work a miracle to enable us to live without it. But Heaven does not work such a miracle, because the greatest miracle of heaven is love itself.”
The needle hand of Auntie Nan was trembling above her sampler, and her lips were twitching.
“You are a young man yet, Philip,” she faltered, “but I am an old lady now, dear, and I have seen the fruits of the intoxication you call passion. Oh, have I not, have I not? It wrecks lives, ruins prospects, breaks up homes, sets father against son, and brother against brother——”
Philip would give her no chance. He was tramping across the room, and he burst out with, “You are wrong again, Auntie. You are always wrong in these matters, because you are always thinking from the particular to the general—you are always thinking of my father. What you have been calling my father's fall was really his fate. He deserved it. If he had been fit for the high destiny he aspired to—if he had been fit to be a judge, he would not have fallen. That he did fall is proof enough that he was not fit. God did not intend it. My father's aspirations were not the call of a stern vocation, they were mere poetic ambition. If he had ever by great ill-fortune lived to be made Deemster, he would have found himself out, and the island would have found him out, and you yourself would have found him out, and all the world would have been undeceived. As a poet he might have been a great man, but as a Deemster he must have been a mockery, a hypocrite, an impostor, and a sham.”
Auntie Nan rose to her feet with a look of fright on her sweet old face, and something dropped with a clank on to the floor.
“Oh, Philip, Philip, if I thought you could ever repeat the error——”
But Philip gave her no time to finish. Tossing his disordered hair from his forehead, he swung out of the room.
Being alone, he began to collect himself. Was it, in sober fact, he who had spoken like that? Of his father too? To Auntie Nan as well? He saw how it was; he had been speaking of his father, but he had been thinking of himself; he had been struggling to justify himself, to reconcile, strengthen, and fortify himself. But in doing so he had been breaking an idol, a life-long idol, his own idol and Auntie Nan's.
He stumbled downstairs in a rush of remorse, and burst again into the room crying in a broken voice, “Auntie! Auntie!”
But the room was empty; the lamp was turned down; the sampler was pushed aside. Something crunched under his foot, and he stooped and picked it up. It was the medallion, and it was cracked across. The accident terrified him. His skin seemed to creep. He felt as if he had trodden on his father's face. Putting the broken picture into his pocket, he turned about like a guilty man and crept silently to bed in the darkness.
But the morning brought him solace for the pains of the night—it brought him a letter from Kate.
“The Melliah is over at long, long last, and I am allowed to be alone with my thoughts. They sang 'Keerie fu Snaighty' after you left, and 'The King can only love his wife, And I can do the sa-a-me, And I can do the same.' But there is really nothing to tell you, for nothing happened of the slightest consequence. Good night! I am going to bed after I have posted this letter at the bridge. Two hours hence you will appear to me in sleep, unless I lie that long awake to think of you. I generally do. Good-bye, my dear lord and master! You will let me know what you think best to be done. Your difficulties alarm me terribly. You see, dear, we two are about to do something so much out of the common. Good night! I lift my head that you may give me another kiss on the eyes, and here are two for yours.”
Then there were empty brackets [ ], which Kate had put her lips to, expecting Philip to do the same.