Gillespie

Book I

Somewhat by east of the bay two of the Crimea cannon, each on a wooden platform, lifted to seaward dumb mouths which once had thundered at Sevastopol. A little west of the derelict guns, and almost at the end of the shore-road, stood a gaunt two-storeyed house. Its walls were harled, its gables narrow and high, and its plain windows, whitened in winter with sea-salt, gave it the appearance of an old high-browed lady, with her white hair tightly drawn back from her forehead. This house, at the root of the hills, bleached with the gales of centuries, and imminent upon a beach of gravel, had a sinister appearance. From a distance one was infected with a sense of austere majesty at first sight of the house. It came as a discovery, nearer hand, that it was the tall gables which produced this effect. Attention, however, was attracted, not to the gables, but to a sign which hung over the door. Dimly traced on this heart-shaped sign was the half -defaced head of a man, and a hand grasping a dagger. The hand stabbed down with sleuth-like malignity. The place had once been an inn and of considerable repute; but horror came to nest there in the inscrutable way in which it attaches to certain places. Two men had come up from the sea in the dusk, and put

B in for the night at the inn. His wife being sick, Alastair Campbell went up in the morning to rouse the men. He found one of them lying on his back on the floor as if sunk in profound meditation. A bone handle rested on his left breast.

“ Clare tae Goad,” said Campbell, “ I thought it was the dagger o’ the sign above the door. A cold grue went doon my back.” The slain man, one-eyed, with a broad black beard, was a Jew. His pockets had been rifled. The hue and cry was raised, but the tall, swarthy fellow had vanished even more completely than the dead man, where he lay nameless in the south-west corner of 1 the graveyard.

Fear fell upon the inn. It was named the “ Ghost.’’ ; The painted dagger seemed to grate aloft when the wind blew. Campbell took to drink, and used to wander through the house at night, candle in hand. His wife became worn, watching him, and, always ailing, died within the year on child-bed. It came to this at last that her husband sat in the bar all day drinking with every wastrel, and too sodden at nightfall to make a reckoning. He roved the rooms, shouting with terrible blasphemy on a concealed left-handed devil to come out and show himself. Fishermen sailing past said that they saw lights dancing about the rigging of the “ Ghost ” in the grey of dawn. Soon all the bottles in the bar were emptied. Campbell’s comrades from the town dropped off, and the scavengers who remained held the pewter measure beneath the tap as Campbell tilted up each barrel in turn. Of all that he had done, of all that had happened to him I in his downfall and degradation, this was the most pitiable. I “ This is the last nicht, my he’rties,” he cried, tilting up the last barrel. Without the sign creaked ominously in the scuffling wind. “ Hark to it ! ” he yelled ; “ the bloody dagger’s speakin’. Here’s to it;” and with an oath he held the tankard to his mouth. His bloodshot eyes rolled in his inflamed face. “ By Goad, boys, I’ll fire the hoose ower my heid and burn oot the bloody Spaniard.” The scavengers stamped out the fire, and carried him upstairs to the bed of the room where he had discovered the Jew lying on the floor, sunk in eternal meditation. He kicked and screamed in mortal terror, the veins standing out on his brow like whip-cords, and the sweat drenching his face. In the midst of a scream he clapped his hands to his head and heaved upon the bed, and the room became suddenly quiet with the dumbness that follows a thunderclap. Campbell had taken a shock. The coyotes at his bedside held the tankard to his twisted mouth; the liquid trickled impotently down over his chin, and they knew that he was done. At the turn of the night Campbell joined hands with the bearded Jew, and together they went into the Shadow to look for retribution on their maimed and scarred lives.

Through the night the creaking of the sign without was as the rattling of Death’s skeleton keys.

Chapter II

Richard Glamis Strang bought the inn. Nobody else would bid for such a nest of bad odour. Mr. Strang, untainted with the supernatural of the West Highlands, was young and about to marry. He had established himself in Duntyre. He was not a native of these parts, having sailed from the Heads of Ayr, where his folk had been ling-fishers. For a year he had lived penuriously, like a Viking, in the fo’c’sle of one of the derelict smacks heeled on the beach, and took to the herring fishing. He wore a thin silver chain twisted round his neck in a double loop. Its ends disappeared with a heavy silver watch beneath his oxter. Over his jersey he wore a waistcoat lined with red flannel, which peeped abroad at the armpits. Only in the coldest weather did he wear a jacket. A hardy, tall, weather-beaten man with a stoop, taciturn and slow of speech, whose large hands gripped like steel. His eyes, grey and keen as blades, were seated in those depths which sea- vigil digs in the head of man. He took the sea in his little boat, working his lines during the winter, and in the spring he sold her to a boat-hirer, and offered money down for a share in a fishing-boat. He told the crew he had come from Ayr to found a home in the west. He was accepted ; his skill recognised ; his seamanship became a matter of wonder. None in the fleet could steer as he by the weather-ear. He went upon his own ground unquestioned, till on a Saturday night at the “Shipping Box,” a Macdougall, a red-haired, vitriolic man, half drunk, called him by an indecent name, saying he was a Lowland interloper. A strain of Irish blood in Mr. Strang surged up into his pale face, and his eyes glittered like swords upon the little red man, who mouthed at him.

“ Come on,” he spluttered. “ Dae ye ken who I am ? I’m the man that boiled a kettle in the lee o’ a sea. Come on, ye Ayrshire bastard, I’ll show ye the wy tae fush herrin’.”

A plump smack sounded abroad, and the Macdougall went down under the palm of Mr. Strang. A laugh from some twenty salt-hardened throats burst boisterously on the fallen hero’s ears.

“ Dived like a solan, Erchie,” some one cried; and the Macdougall rose, his coward heart fluttering in fear.

“ By the jumping Jehosiphat ! ” he cried, “but you’re a man,” and put forth his hand. Mr. Strang took it and nodded.

“ We’re aye learnin’, Erchie, to work to windward,” he said with a quiet smile.

Thus was he enlarged upon the imagination of men. Thus do men found the pillars of their house upon clay, rust, and mire.

He fell in love with one of the girls of the town, a Macmillan, lissom, white as milk, red as the dawn, with an eye for mirth and an abundance of sympathy — a trusty, wise mate. He had been reared in an iron school ; bred to the sea with nerves of steel informed against the chances of gales, the darkness of fogs, the welter of snow-showers. He had the sailing lore by rote; and putting no store by anything but his business in the waters, neither legend nor superstition, took the inn at an easy rate, made some alterations, but left the sign above the door, where on surly nights it swung and groaned as if lamenting the weird upon the ill-fated house. On tempestuous winter nights of the first year of their wedded life, when they sat in the stone-flagged kitchen, her tales of the countryside came upon him, not with the stuff of surprise, but of magic. She had fed on oral romance and was its herald, proclaiming to him the deeds of her ancestors of Knapdale, and their mad ploy on the playground of half the county. Outside the seas thundered and clawed the beach; the old sign of the faded head mourned and jabbered; the sea-fowl screamed over the roof; and the house shook to the hammers of the gale. To the man the Lord of Hosts was abroad upon the air, and the wings of His angel troubled the deep.

The whole thing was so different from the sordid life of an Ayrshire fishing -port, which had no leisure and little inspiration for romance in its pale flat lands, that his life became clothed upon with wonder, and he lived in a world with more in it of magic than of reality. He sat under the elusive deft hands of a seer, who wove upon him a garment rich with pearls and shone upon with a haunting light, here and here alluring and splendid ; but there also stained with the shadows of what was grim, terrible, and foreboding. He could not feel himself sib to this glancing wife. This strange food of reality for her had always been to him the thinnest stuff of dreams — things he had heard of vaguely, things so improbable and intangible in a world of deep-sea lines and strife with winds, tides, and piratical dog-fish that scarcely the phantom of their ghostly presence had passed upon the face of his seaboard. Now he heard them, plucked from the life of a people, and chanted as their gospel by a girl who crept close to him, shivering at the sadness of her tale. As the sea without droned the antiphon, and the homeless wind upon the hill cried the antistrophe, he thought it was a wilding elfin thing he loved who was one with the witch-wind upon the waste, and with the changeling brumous sea. At the end of the tale, as a dog that is half drowned shakes the water from its pelt, he shook himself free from an undefined sinister influence.

One evening, when dark-bluish shadows lay upon the snow, she had been telling tales of olden bickerings — how one of her race had been hanged by the Duke of Argyle from the tall mast of his galley within the harbour there at the west end of the Island ; of one that had been out in the ’45 and had fled the country to France, and had married there — there was a strain of French blood in her veins ; of another that had come out of the foreign wars limping under the weight of a major’s commission, and had found his grave in the lee of Brussels at Waterloo ; and then suddenly veered to an ancient tale of a heroine of her race who had slain her son to save her lover. She ceased talking. Her husband looked at her with simple level eyes. In the silence they heard the cry of wild geese high up in the sky — the ghostly birds, instinctdriven, passing as the arrow of God through the heavens to their decreed place.

“We are driven by something deep within us that we have got from our ancestors, to do strange things that were allowed in their age, but are unlawful now,” she said. “ Honk ! Honk ! ” vibrant and clear as a bell it rang out high over the snow in response — the bugling of birds borne along by the “ something deep ” within them — and was heard by these frigate-birds, a man and a woman, sitting facing one another in the pitiable belief that they, alone of all God’s creatures, can stem the call of destiny.

She told of her who had slain her son to save her lover, and of the terrible doom that rested on the name ever since, and was not yet fulfilled, that fratricide, parricide, or matricide would yet stain their house and open the ancient scar again before the house and name perished for ever.

“ Oh, my dear, dear husband, if the doom should fall on you or on our children ! ” She lifted a scared white face searchingly to his. Alas ! that every evangel must have behind it a doom.

“ I vowed again and again never to marry to escape it ” — a faint smile stole across her serious face — “ but love for you compelled me. Oh, Dick ! Dick ! ” she wound her arms about his neck, “ you love me, don’t you ? tell me again that you do. Our love must keep the doom at bay.”

He struggled back again to the place of reality from that twilit land to which she had led him. He was vexed with her imagined woe.

“ Doom be blowed,” he cried; “ it’s as dead as a red herring.”

“Oh, Dick ! Dick ! ” she visualised the haggard spectre riding the back of her house ; “ you must love me to fight it. You do, don’t you ? ”

“ As weel as I love my mother, lyin’ i’ the mools o’ Ayr Kirkyaird,” he answered solemnly.

She held up her mouth to him.

“ Mary,” he adjured her, “ the time’s gane by for ony mair nonsense o’ thae olden times. Doom be hanged. Wha’s tae kill either you or me ? We’re mairrit eighteen months lucky, an’ hae nae waen yet.”

“ I’d like to have a baby, a wee girlie ; but I’m afraid, terribly afraid.”

He jumped to his feet, flushed and angry.

“ Feart o’ an auld wife’s story.”

“ Hush, Dick, hush ; even this house isn’t canny. There’s a curse on it. Do you hear it ? That creaking sign scares the life out of me at nights, when you’re at the fishing. I can’t sleep for listening to it.”

He clapped his two big hands together.

“ Doon it comes noo ; where’s the hammer ? ”

He searched, but could not find it.

“ Never mind, Dick,” her eyes followed him through the kitchen; “ you can take it down in the morning.”

But in the morning the frost had frozen the wind, and Dick was gone to shoot “ the big lines ” ten miles away on the Nesskip banks. The sign was forgotten ; and the wild geese had passed on unerringly, unquestioningly, on the path of destiny.

Chapter III

Six months later Richard Strang came to face something that was elemental. His wife was pregnant. As she became heavier with child he deserted his work to comfort her, but could not drive away her fear.

“ Pray God it’s a girl ; a girl can do no harm ; ” and again she harped on the ancient tale, and summoned up the black rider that rode with such sinister menace on its back.

“Mary,” he cried, fumbling impotently with his hands, desirous to strangle this hideous ghost, “ will ye bring the doom on yoursel’ ? ”

“ Oh, no ! no ! ” she moaned, wringing her hands.

“ You’re like to,” he answered bitterly. “ You’ll kill yoursel’ an’ the wean in your womb wi’ fright.”

She cowered, but clung despairingly to the arms of her cross.

“ Oh, no ! no ! Dick ; it won’t be that way, however it comes.”

He was fairly angry now.

“ Let me hear nae mair o’ this trash an’ nonsense. Your wild ancestors is no goin’ to herry my nest. If they had to labour at the oar there wad be nane o’ this.” His voice had a ring of pride in it. It was the first time he had referred to his people. “ It may be bonny to tell ; but I’m thinkin’ it wad hae been better for them to hae earned an honest penny like me an’ mine.” He got up and strode through the kitchen, the iron of his sea-boots ringing on the flags. “ They were a bonny crew wi’ their ongoins. As for oor folk, they were skilly at the lines an’ the oar. They werna trokin’ wi’ princes that hadna a penny to their name. I don’t ken as ony were hangit or got a red face for being ca’ed a thievery set. We didna brag o’ being rebels an’ shoutherin’ a gun; oor name wasna cried aboot the countryside for dirty work wi’ the lassies and ploys at the inns.”

She put out her two blue-veined hands to him piteously, her eyes big with fear, her breasts heaving rapidly. He pushed them away. “We didna ride hell-gallopin’ on black stallions, an’ leave the weemin’ at hame scared o’ their life.”

She burst out sobbing, her face like clay. He strode up to her. “ Mary ! Mary ! my lamb, I’m no angry at ye, lassie; I’m vexed at the wy ye’re vexin’ yersel’ wi’ a’ this clishmaclaiver.”

“ Dick ! Dick ! Oh ! Oh ! ! Oh ! ! ! don’t look at me that way ; don’t be angry with me ; you’ll kill me.”

He gathered her in his arms with a groan.

“ Downa greet ; downa greet mair ; it’s a lassie that’s cornin’.”

The sobs trailed away.

“ If it’s a boy, leave him to me. I’ll teach him hoo tae handle the tiller, no’ the dirk. Just bide till you see.” And he comforted her.

Five months later he made fast his boat to an iron staple beneath the guns and hurriedly leapt ashore. Last night his wife had taken a fancy for whitings. Since daybreak he had searched three banks. The white fish, strung on by the gills to his fingers, shone in the dusk as angels of mercy come up out of the sea. As Richard Strang stepped within his door and stood in the passage at the foot of the stair, he heard a wailing cry in the room above — thin, fretting, querulous. His heart stopped in its beat. Open-mouthed he listened, with his massive dark head leaning forward. The sign rasped above the door; and mingling with its harsh noise was that feeble whimper. The hand of something alive, which had that moment drawn in from a far-off impenetrable deep, beyond the confines of the world, touched his heart with tender fingers. A new life from inscrutable eternity mingled with his being. Out of a vast silence it had come, away back in the ages. He gasped. Was she right after all ? Did ancestry stalk Time and become reincarnate ? That wail seemed to drift up from the dim spaces of a far unknown. Lugubriously overhead the sign rasped and ground out its baleful note. Once more the wail rang out, now strong and lusty. Tiny fingers creeping over his heart, set it drumming in his breast. “ Good God ! ” he whispered, “ the baby’s born; ” and shaking the fish from his fingers he tooks the stairs in three bounds, and saw the pallid face of his wife turned to the wall. The room was heavy with the dumbness and mystery which pass into the chambers of birth. Lucky Ruagh from the Back Street was bending over a long-shaped, dark-haired head. His wife turned a face of woe to him, as she stretched out a thin white arm and pulled his face down to her.

“ Oh, Dick ! Dick ! it’s a boy.”

Stunned, he could answer nothing; and when he was again at the foot of the stair he was listening to a wail which, borne down upon the wind of Time out of an inimical midnight past, and passing beneath the heavens like an arrow of God, struck unerringly into his heart, as he stood listening to the scurry of the wind rasping the rusty dagger overhead. With every swing of the drunken sign the dagger was plunged downwards with a snarl.

Chapter IV

Man is the blindest of God’s creatures. We concert measures and cast the most sanguine of plans, and all the time are weaving a mesh for ourselves. We harness life and put a snaffle bit in its mouth, and, gathering up the reins, direct our hopeful course. All the time we are trotting down a road that has been prepared for us. Richard Strang was determined to conquer heredity by habit. The vision which he had seen of the spirit of ancestry gleaming out of the past had terrified him, and it was he who was now afraid of the doom. He had established the house of Strang and, forgetting that heredity is stronger than the bands of habit, planned a definite mode of life for his son. Purblind, he was but fashioning the dynamite that was yet to ruin his house. The son took after him. He trained the boy to the sea ; gave him no books to read ; took him from school at the bare age of fourteen. The tales of his romance were figures; his tradition was record catches of fish. The only doom the boy feared was loss of gear in a gale. The parents pathetically believed that if the lad got no stupid stories into his head he was safe. The son not only inherited his father’s temperament ; but where his father judged of the chances of the sea, the boy dreamed of them. From training as well as by nature he became close-fisted* Where the father was keen the son was greedy. The parents, dreading the very word “ ancestors,” secretly rejoiced ; and the father even tempted fate one idle night by asking the lad if he ever read a story-book. The boy curled his lip. “ Story-books ’ill no boil the pot.” The parents smiled. Purblind !

Mrs. Strang had no more children. Life became fuller for her. She lay awake at night when husband and son were on the sea, not from any fear of doom but from fear of the perils of the deep. The boy grew supple, tall, broad, commonplace in mind, a worshipper of things. At twenty, when his father had given him his own bank-book, he began to dominate the house. His mother, folk noticed, was failing. She was troubled with a little hacking cough, and seemed to have grown lately. She was out a good deal, by Doctor Maclean’s advice. Her favourite walk was up to the town, round its curving shore street to the north road, which brought her to Galbraith’s farm. She had often wondered why Mrs. Galbraith had become a farmer’s wife, for this woman read books of philosophy and poetry, played the piano, and could discourse about Nature, its beauties, its secrets, and its wayward moods, to Mrs. Strang by the hour as they sat on the brae, looking down on the fishing-fleet in the harbour and on the town. Once or twice Mrs. Strang’s son accompanied her on these walks.

“ Gillespie,” she asked him once, “ what secrets have you and Mr. Galbraith got together ? ” There was a pleasant ring of maternal pride in her voice. It was difficult to know if Gillespie Strang ever flushed. He had his mother’s high colour. It was brick-red on the nape of his bull-dog neck. Gillespie looked fixedly ahead.

“ There’s nae secrets. He’s learnin’ me to ferret an’ trap rabbits for a pastime.”

Times were never so good. It was a word with the elder fishermen, “ When spring comes in with spring tides and a new moon the fishing is sure to be good.” Each herring meant money. Gillespie was constantly on the sea. At twenty-five he had a strong name in the bank, and Lowrie the banker would cross the street, seen of men, and talk civilly to him. Every man’s fortune is in a lockfast box, of which he has the key. Some men use it skilfully ; some blunder and break the lock ; many tell themselves they are unable, and live by assisting other men to use their key. Gillespie, a master of craft, had the wards well oiled. None was defter with the key. He looked to unlock a fortune, this wiry supple youth.

He had extended the scope of his operations from the sea to the hill. This hybrid life put him in bad odour with everybody. To be a fisherman is always a fisherman ; to be a farmer always a farmer. Gillespie was despised as an idiot, who wrought clashing irons in the fire. His eye was as quick on the gun as on the line ; as cunning with the snare as with the tiller. He made a bargain with Lonend, whose farm marched with Galbraith’s, for the rights of fishing, shooting, and trapping over his lands. He worked like two men; his robust frame was seldom fatigued. He visited his snares at dawn, when he had returned from a night’s fishing. Secretly he snared the runs in the graveyard. Superstition made him immune from detection. In the winter when he could not tempt the sea, he shot rabbits and roamed the forest for white hares. He arranged with a Glasgow merchant of the Fish Market for the disposal of his hares, rabbits, wild-duck, and trout. He was seldom in his father’s house. If he was not on the sea, draining his nets of their ultimate fin, he was at Lonend. He was now on his way there with his mother ; but suddenly left her in the hollow below Galbraith’s farm and skirted the edge of the Fir Planting. In this sere time of the year the place looked bleached and grey, and was full of a haunting melancholy. It was empty, save for a solitary man ploughing the Laigh Park. He was a tall spare man, loosely knit, whose hair was turning grey. His face had something of the geniality and frankness of a child’s.

In the plum-like bloom of the winter dusk he ploughed the lea, urging his ministry of faith in a pentecost of peace. It was strange to watch him at his work of redemption, for he looked wan, haggard, spent. The fruition of autumn seemed an impossible thing to this prematurely aged man, and his worn grey and brown team. As the pallid sunset fell across the lines of resurrection which his plough turned up, the field looked a half-torn, rifled purse. At the end of the field he turned, with the gait of a man who has weariness even in his bones. In the dimness Gillespie could discern but the faint outline of a figure. He heard a dull creaking of harness, and a monotonous voice urging the drooping horses, which moved beneath a faint cloud. Patiently they drew out of the shadow of the firs and plodded down the field. A curlew cried on the moor above ; a vagrant gull flitted by like a ghost with silent swoop. The trees on the east and south sides gathered the gloom about them. In the oppressive stillness they stood up like gaunt sentinels of the man’s labour, screening him from the pirate eyes of Gillespie. Inexpressible sadness, and the pathos of human frailty, set their profound significance upon this altar of hope ; for though the man was at the beginning of things in his labour, yet he was consumed with the modern cancer of unrest. He was up to the ears in debt to Gillespie. The money had been largely squandered in Brodie’s back-room. Late and early he wrestled with the sour soil, relying upon the imperishable husbandry of earth to stop the mouth of the wolf, without perceiving that whisky would make the ground sterile.

With a faint shearing sound the plough lifted the scented fallow, but the aridity of Galbraith’s heart would admit no savour of the fresh earth. The dying are not revived with eau-de-Cologne. In the upturned soil Galbraith knew no potency; in its young face felt no resurrection. Only in the doggedness of despair he caught a gleam of far-off gold in the black, shining furrows. He ploughed on mechanically, straight and silent to the end of the field. He was assisting in turning Gillespie’s key in the lockfast box.

The early stars arose upon the wood. So benign it all was, and he so weary. He came to a halt in the thick shadows of the Planting. A little wind began to rustle among the skeleton boughs, like the feet of timid animals scurrying in the dark. Suddenly a light flared in the window of the farm. It spoke of the security, the tranquillity, the tenderness of the hearth across the perplexing vastness of this outland brooding night. The ploughman turned his eyes upon it in a long hungry stare. Slowly he unyoked and turned his horses home, and upon them fell the deliberate night, as the moon grew by stealth over the tree-tops and across the half-ploughed field.

Our nature is rarely prophetic of happiness : very little causes to brood over it the sable wings of omens. Thus Galbraith, harassed with vexing thoughts, was not startled on hearing Gillespie’s voice as he stepped out of the shadows.

“ Makin’ heidway wi’ the plooghin’, Calum.”

This was Gillespie’s way — no salutation. There was something sinister in the tone. It was the voice of an overseer.