Malcolm Part 28

As soon as he appeared on the other side of the rock, the marquis challenged him: "Who goes there?" he said.

"Malcolm MacPhail, my lord."

"You rascal!" said his lords.h.i.+p, good humouredly; "you've been listening!"

"No muckle, my lord. I heard but a word apiece. An' I maun say my leddy had the best o' the loagic."

"My lady generally has, I suspect," laughed the marquis. "How long have you been in the rock there?"

"No ae meenute, my lord. I flang aff my butes to rin efter a freen', an' that's hoo ye didna hear me come up. I'm gaein' efter them noo, to gang hame i' them. Guid nicht, my lord. Guid nicht, my leddy."

He turned and pursued his way; but Florimel's face, glimmering through the night, went with him as he ran.

He told his grandfather how he had left the mad laird lying on his face, on the sands between the bored craig and the rocks of the promontory, and said he would like to go back to him.

"He'll be hafing a fit, poor man," said Duncan. "Yes, my son, you must co to him and to your pest for him. After such an honour as we 'fe had this day, we mustn't pe forgetting our poor neighpours.

Will you pe taking to him a trop of uisgebeatha?"

"He taks naething o' that kin'," said Malcolm.

He could not tell him that the madman, as men called him, lay wrestling in prayer with the Father of lights. The old highlander was not irreverent, but the thing would have been unintelligible to him. He could readily have believed that the supposed lunatic might be favoured beyond ordinary mortals; that at that very moment, lost in his fit, he might be rapt in a vision of the future--a wave of time, far off as yet from the souls of other men, even now rolling over his; but that a soul should seek after vital content by contact with its maker, was an idea belonging to a region which, in the highlander's being, lay as yet an unwatered desert, an undiscovered land, whence even no faintest odour had been wafted across the still air of surprised contemplation.

About the time when Malcolm once more sped through the bored craig, the marquis and Lady Florimel were walking through the tunnel on their way home, chatting about a great ball they were going to give the tenants.

He found the laird where he had left him, and thought at first he must now surely be asleep; but once more bending over him, he could hear him still murmuring at intervals, "Father o' lichts! Father o' lichts!"

Not less compa.s.sionate, and more sympathetic than Eliphaz or Bildad or Zophar, Malcolm again took his place near him, and sat watching by him until the gray dawn began in the east. Then all at once the laird rose to his feet, and without a look on either side walked steadily away towards the promontory. Malcolm rose also, and gazed after him until he vanished amongst the rocks, no motion of his distorted frame witnessing other than calmness of spirit. So his watcher returned in peace through the cool morning air to the side of his slumbering grandfather.

No one in the Seaton of Portlossie ever dreamed of locking door or window at night.

CHAPTER XXIII: ARMAGEDDON

The home season of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. Other boats lay drawn up on the beach in front of the Seaton, and beyond it on the other side of the burn. Men and women were busy with the brown nets, laying them out on the short gra.s.s of the sh.o.r.e, mending them with netting needles like small shuttles, carrying huge burdens of them on their shoulders in the hot sunlight; others were mending, calking, or tarring their boats, and looking to their various fittings. All was preparation for the new venture in their own waters, and everything went merrily and hopefully.

Wives who had not accompanied their husbands now had them home again, and their anxieties would henceforth endure but for a night --joy would come with the red sails in the morning, lovers were once more together, the one great dread broken into a hundred little questioning fears; mothers had their sons again, to watch with loving eyes as they swung their slow limbs at their labour, or in the evenings sauntered about, hands in pockets, pipe in mouth, and blue bonnet cast carelessly on the head: it was almost a single family, bound together by a network of intermarriages, so intricate as to render it impossible for any one who did not belong to the community to follow the threads or read the design of the social tracery.

And while the Seaton swarmed with "the goings on of life," the town of Portlossie lay above it still as a country hamlet, with more odours than people about: of people it was seldom indeed that three were to be spied at once in the wide street, while of odours you would always encounter a smell of leather from the saddler's shop, and a mingled message of bacon and cheese from the very general dealer's--in whose window hung what seemed three hams, and only he who looked twice would discover that the middle object was no ham, but a violin--while at every corner lurked a scent of gillyflowers and southernwood. Idly supreme, Portlossie the upper looked down in condescension, that is in half concealed contempt, on the ant heap below it.

The evening arrived on which the greater part of the boats was to put off for the first a.s.say. Malcolm would have made one in the little fleet, for he belonged to his friend Joseph Mair's crew, had it not been found impossible to get the new boat ready before the following evening; whence, for this one more, he was still his own master, with one more chance of a pleasure for which he had been on the watch ever since Lady Florimel had spoken of having a row in his boat. True, it was not often she appeared on the sh.o.r.e in the evening; nevertheless he kept watching the dune with his keen eyes, for he had hinted to Mrs Courthope that perhaps her young lady would like to see the boats go out.

Although it was the fiftieth time his eyes had swept the links in vague hope, he could hardly believe their testimony when now at length he spied a form, which could only be hers, looking seaward from the slope, as still as a sphinx on Egyptian sands.

He sauntered slowly towards her by the landward side of the dune, gathering on his way a handful of the reddest daisies he could find; then, ascending the sandhill, approached her along the top.

"Saw ye ever sic gowans in yer life, my leddy?" he said, holding out his posy.

"Is that what you call them?" she returned.

"Ow ay, my leddy--daisies ye ca' them. I dinna ken but yours is the bonnier name o' the twa--gien it be what Mr Graham tells me the auld poet Chaucer maks o' 't."

"What is that?"

"Ow, jist the een o' the day.--the day's eyes, ye ken. They're sma' een for sic a great face, but syne there's a lot o' them to mak up for that. They've begun to close a'ready, but the mair they close the bonnier they luik, wi' their bits o' screwed up mooies (little mouths). But saw ye ever sic reid anes, or ony sic a size, my leddy?"

"I don't think I ever did. What is the reason they are so large and red?"

"I dinna ken. There canna be muckle nourishment in sic a thin soil, but there maun be something that agrees wi' them. It's the same a'

roon' aboot here."

Lady Florimel sat looking at the daisies, and Malcolm stood a few yards off watching for the first of the red sails, which must soon show themselves, creeping out on the ebb tide. Nor had he waited long before a boat appeared, then another and another--six huge oars, ponderous to toil withal, urging each from the shelter of the harbour out into the wide weltering plain. The fis.h.i.+ng boat of that time was not decked as now, and each, with every lift of its bows, revealed to their eyes a gaping hollow, ready, if a towering billow should break above it, to be filled with sudden death.

One by one the whole fleet crept out, and ever as they gained the breeze, up went the red sails, and filled: aside leaned every boat from the wind, and went dancing away over the frolicking billows towards the sunset, its sails, deep dyed in oak bark, s.h.i.+ning redder and redder in the growing redness of the sinking sun.

Nor did Portlossie alone send out her boats, like huge seabirds warring on the live treasures of the deep; from beyond the headlands east and west, out they glided on slow red wing,--from Scaurnose, from Sandend, from Clamrock, from the villages all along the coast, --spreading as they came, each to its work apart through all the laborious night, to rejoin its fellows only as home drew them back in the clear gray morning, laden and slow with the harvest of the stars. But the night lay between, into which they were sailing over waters of heaving green that for ever kept tossing up roses --a night whose curtain was a horizon built up of steady blue, but gorgeous with pa.s.sing purple and crimson, and flas.h.i.+ng with molten gold.

Malcolm was not one of those to whom the sea is but a pond for fish, and the sky a storehouse of wind and rain, suns.h.i.+ne and snow: he stood for a moment gazing, lost in pleasure. Then he turned to Lady Florimel: she had thrown her daisies on the sand, appeared to be deep in her book, and certainly caught nothing of the splendour before her beyond the red light on her page.

"Saw ye ever a bonnier sicht, my leddy?" said Malcolm.

She looked up, and saw, and gazed in silence. Her nature was full of poetic possibilities; and now a formless thought foreshadowed itself in a feeling she did not understand: why should such a sight as this make her feel sad? The vital connection between joy and effort had begun from afar to reveal itself with the question she now uttered.

"What is it all for?" she asked dreamily, her eyes gazing out on the calm ecstasy of colour, which seemed to have broken the bonds of law, and ushered in a new chaos, fit matrix of new heavens and new earth.

"To catch herrin'," answered Malcolm, ignorant of the mood that prompted the question, and hence mistaking its purport.

But a falling doubt had troubled the waters of her soul, and through the ripple she could descry it settling into form. She was silent for a moment.

"I want to know," she resumed, "why it looks as if some great thing were going on. Why is all this pomp and show? Something ought to be at hand. All I see is the catching of a few miserable fis.h.!.+ If it were the eve of a glorious battle now, I could understand it --if those were the little English boats rus.h.i.+ng to attack the Spanish Armada, for instance. But they are only gone to catch fish.

Or if they were setting out to discover the Isles of the West, the country beyond the sunset!--but this jars."

"I canna answer ye a' at ance, my leddy," said Malcolm; "I maun tak time to think aboot it. But I ken brawly what ye mean." Even as he spoke he withdrew, and, descending the mound, walked away beyond the bored craig, regardless now of the far lessening sails and the sinking sun. The motes of the twilight were multiplying fast as he returned along the sh.o.r.e side of the dune, but Lady Florimel had vanished from its crest. He ran to the top: thence, in the dim of the twilight, he saw her slow retreating form, phantom-like, almost at the grated door of the tunnel, which, like that of a tomb, appeared ready to draw her in, and yield her no more.

"My leddy, my leddy," he cried, "winna ye bide for 't?"

He went bounding after her like a deer. She heard him call, and stood holding the door half open.

"It's the battle o' Armageddon, my leddy," he cried, as he came within hearing distance.

"The battle of what?" she exclaimed, bewildered. "I really can't understand your savage Scotch."

"Hoot, my leddy! the battle o' Armageddon 's no ane o' the Scots battles; it's the battle atween the richt and the wrang, 'at ye read aboot i' the buik o' the Revelations."

"What on earth are you talking about?" returned Lady Florimel in dismay, beginning to fear that her squire was losing his senses.

"It's jist what ye was sayin,' my leddy: sic a pomp as yon bude to hing abune a gran' battle some gait or ither."

"What has the catching of fish to do with a battle in the Revelations?"