The Wind Bloweth Part 9

"_Gloir do'n Athair, agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh_," went the drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, Amen!"

-- 10

And the house that he had known in a dream was no more in reality than a cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the house was built on some tragic rock....

Only the old dog was faithful, and stayed where his master put him.

And the face he had dreamed would not look toward him over the illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a s.p.a.ce in the watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet, brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his gifts were treated tepidly, though with cupidinous eyes. In the evening, if he stood on the threshold, it was: "Wisha, is it going out you are?

And isn't it enough of the fresh air you have, and you on the salt water?" And her embraces were half chast.i.ty, half sin, tepidly pa.s.sionate, unintimate ... so that shame was on him, and no pride or joyousness.... Cold! cold! cold!... A cold house, a cold woman.... No light or warmth or graciousness....

And the old woman whom he had thought of as warm and peaceful by the fire was a hag with a peasant's cupidity: "And isn't it a little more you can be leaving us, darling lad, what with the high price that does be on things in this place and you not spending a brown ha'penny aboard s.h.i.+p?... And herself might be taken sick now, and wouldn't it be a grand thing, a wee store of money in the house? Or the wars might come, find you far on the sea! An extra sovereign now, brave fellow, a half-sovereign itself!"

And when he left it was of less import than the cow going dry. Only one mourned him, the old dog. Only one remembered him, the half-blind badger hound, that dreamed of ancient hunting days....

And he would go down to his s.h.i.+p, heartbroken, when none was looking a mist of tears in his eyes,--he was not yet twenty-one,--but in a day or so that would pa.s.s, and the sea that was so strong would give him of its strength and heal him, so that after a few days he could stand up and say: "Well.... Huuh.... Well...."

A trick had been played him, like some tricks the sea and sun play. Afar off he had seen an island like an appointed dancing place, like the Green of Fiddlers, and he had asked to be put ash.o.r.e there, to live and be a permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching winds and dank stone....

But he came of a race that are born men, breed men, and kill men. Crying never patched a hole in a brogue, and a man who's been fooled is no admirable figure, at least to Antrim men. So shut your mouth! When a master loses a s.h.i.+p he gets no other. That is the inexorable rule of the sea. So when a man wrecks his life....

What he had decided was this: go ahead. He had been fooled; pay the forfeit. Retreat into his own heart, and go ahead. Thirty, forty years.... He had himself to blame. And it wasn't as if he had to live in the house all the time; he had only to come back there. All that was killed was his heart. His frame was still stolid, his eye clear....

There would be little oases here and there, some great record of a voyage broken, friends bravely made, a kiss now and then, freely, gallantly given.... But ... go ahead!

And then suddenly death had come, and the scheme of life was broken, like a piece from the end of a stick. Death he had seen before, but never so close to him. A good man had died and he had said: "G.o.d!

there's a pity!" though why he didn't know. And a young girl might die, and it would seem like a tragedy in a play. And a child would die, and he would feel hurt and say, "Yon's cruelty, yon!" And death had seemed to be an ultimate word.

But never before now had he seen the ramifications of death. Life had seemed to him to be a straight line, and suddenly he was inspired to the knowledge that it was a design, a pattern, a scheme.... And now he felt it was only a tool, like a knife, or scissors, in the hands of what?...

What? Destiny?... or what?...

-- 11

"_A chraoibhin aoibhinn!_ O pleasant little branch, is there regard in you for the last words of the dead woman?" The old _cailleach_ had come again to ruffle the grave silence about young Shane in the haggard.

"Was it--was it anything for me?"

"And whom would it be for, _acushla veg?_ Sure the love of her heart you were, the white love of her heart. You and me she was thinking of, her old mother that saw a power of trouble. Ill-treated I was by Sergeant Dolan, who fought old Bonaparte in the foreign wars, and took to drinking in the dreadful days of peace. Harsh my life was, and peaceful should my end be, the like of a day that does be rainy, and turns fine at evening-time. And that was what she wanted, _a charaid bhig_, little friend o' me."

"What now?"

"She said to me, and she dying in my arms and the blue spirit coming out of the red lips of her--och! achanee!--'Sure it's not in that grand Northern lad to see you despised in your old age, and the grannies of the neighborhood laughing at you who boasted often. The wee house he'll give you--the wee house is comfortable for an old woman--'"

"But the house isn't mine. It's Alan Donn Campbell's. It isn't mine to give, and I haven't the money to buy it. All the money I have is my pay and what my uncles give me--and they won't see you want."

"But isn't it the grand rich Northern family you are? And won't there be money coming to you when your uncles and mother die?"

"I suppose so."

"Well now, agra, a few of us have been thinking. And Ma.n.u.s McGinty, the priest's brother, is willing to advance you the money at interest, to be paid him when your people die. And you can buy the house, and a slip of a pig I can be fattening against the Christmas market."

"No!"

"Och, agra," she whined, "you wouldn't go back on the words of the poor girl, and her dying in my arms? And she was thinking of you when she should have been thinking of her G.o.d! And the grand subtle things she said of you, that only a woman can understand! Sure it was of love for you she died, you being away so long from her on the salt and bitter sea--"

"Listen, woman Dolan. I heard how Moyra died as I came through the village. She died as she was beating my poor old hound. She dropped dead from the pa.s.sion in her, like a shot man. So where's all your love and your long dying wishes as she lay in your arms?"

He arose and walked away from her, through the haggard, under the sky, where the southeast cloud-banks rolled steadily toward the placid moon.

And there was silence for an instant, so speechless he left her. And then suddenly her ancient shrill voice cut the air like a drover's whip:

"You Orange b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

-- 12

The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any grievance against G.o.d such as little men might have. But a strange dumb wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden crucifix. And no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the great hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake the ash from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No longer would she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the broom. No longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of tea for a pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea for him with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her sharpish voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.

And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child pats his castle of sand on the sea-sh.o.r.e--and leave her there in the rain.

A month from now they would say a ma.s.s for her, a year from now another, but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of life--with the fussy excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything....

And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a stay aboard s.h.i.+p. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as though, indeed, she had never even lived, and northward he would go past the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrs.h.i.+re sloops danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine.... Over the great sea he would go, as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay--down to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the playful, stupid, short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous, sliding icebergs; and the gulls that cried with the sea's immense melancholy; and the great plum-colored whales....

PART THREE

THE MOUTH OF HONEY

-- 1

It was all like a picture some painter of an old and obvious school might have done. First, there was the port, with the white s.h.i.+ps riding at their moorings in the blue sea. Then grayish white Ma.r.s.eilles, with its two immense ribbons, the Cannebiere running northward, and the Rue de Rome and the Prado intersecting it. The great wooded amphitheater rising like a wave and little Notre Dame de la Garde peeking like a sentry out to sea. And eastward from the quays were the little jagged islands the Phenicians knew, If, and Rion, Jaros, strange un-French names ... the suns.h.i.+ne yellow as a lamp, and the sea blue as flax, and the green woods, and the ancient grayish white city--all a picture some unimaginative painter would have loved. Next to Belfast, Ma.r.s.eilles was to Shane Campbell a second home. There it was, like your own house!

Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ash.o.r.e, the swarming, teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays, along the Cannebiere, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable from on board s.h.i.+p. Here were Turks dignified and shy. Here were Greeks, wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livonians, droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians, black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their walk like a horse's lope. Here were French business men, very important.

Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored, black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue d'oc_ of the troubadours, _"Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?"_

And the bustle of the shops and the bustle of cafes, until Shane was forced to go out to the olive-lined roads to the rocky summit of La Garde, and once there, as if drawn by a magnet, Shane would enter the chapel in the fort, where the most renowned Notre Dame of the Mediterranean smiles mawkishly in white olive-wood. After the blinding sun of the Midi, the cool dark chapel was like a dungeon to him, so little could he see anything; but in a while the strange furniture of the place would take form before his eyes: the white statue of the Virgin, the silver tunny-fish, the daubs of sea hazards whence the Virgin had rescued grateful mariners, the rope-ends, the crutches....

And though none might be in the chapel, yet it was full of life, so much did the pathetic ex-votos tell.... And he would come out of the chapel, and again the Midi sun would flash in a shower of gold, and he could see the blue Mediterranean, p.r.i.c.ked with minute lateen-sails, and the grayish town beneath him, so old and yet so vital, and the calm harbor, with the forest of spars, and Monte Cristo, white as an egg....

A queer town that, as familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocaeans who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebiere was a rope-walk, where they made the sheets for their s.h.i.+ps.... And one thought of Lazarus, who had been raised from among the silent dead and who had come there, so legend read, a gray figure in ceramic garments, standing in the prow of a boat....

One thing Robin More had told him remained in his mind and captured his fancy, and that was that Pontius Pilate had been governor of Ma.r.s.eilles after his office in Judea. And of him Shane would think when the mysterious dusk came on the Midi hills ... Pilate, who had smiled, "What is truth?" and who had turned Christ over to the mob.... A big man, he imagined the Roman to have been, with clever eyes, and a great black beard covering a weak chin.... A man who knew all the subtleties of mind, and had no backbone.... And he could see the Roman, sitting on his villa porch in the dusk with tortured eyes, and fingering his beard with fingers that shook.... Paul was going through Greece and Rome like a flame, and the Pilate wondered.... Could it have been possible?...

Ridiculous! a Jewish carpenter! A crazy man!.... And yet.... Could it have been possible.... No! no! no! And yet.... People had seen Him walk on the waves.... But people never knew what they saw, exactly.... No!

How foolis.h.!.+... He raised a man from the dead they said.... And that centurion--what was his name?--his daughter!... No, a stupid Jewish legend.... And yet.... Could it be possible? Could it? Could it?

"Lights! Lights! Do you hear me! Bring lights! Lights!" Pilate would all but scream, panic-stricken in the Midi dusk....