Maurice Walsh - The Small Dark Man (Maurice Walsh) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

No home have I, no dear one,

No friend, no kin to cheer one,

No foe to fight or fear one,

Nowhere to go or stay;

My life is reft of laughter,

My clan gone down in slaughter,

Yet in some dim hereafter

Is dawning of the day.

Close outside, the song stilled on a long middle note, and then a small dark man leant in the doorway. The blonde young giant at the fireside felt a prickling at the back of the neck, and something stirred at his roots. For the waving yellow flame from the peat showed the black V of hair on the wide forehead below the tilted head-gear, the black pools of eyes that drowned the light, the wide-winged nose flatly aquiline, the broad flat chin, the bare neck like a white pillar; and what looked like a saffron-yellow cloak was thrown carelessly over the wide shoulders. Leaning in the doorway, hands hidden, the peat flame in front and the wan moonlight behind, that figure might have stepped out of the remote past. A small dark man! One of the small dark men that possessed the land before history, and that persist!

“God save all here,” saluted the vibrant deep voice, and waited for a response. It did not come. “ ‘God save you kindly’ is the reply to that. Pity that ye should forget.” The voice mocked them.

Hugh Forbes had taken in the situation at a glance. The blonde young fellow—beast or otherwise—and the blonde girl, who had now drawn a shoeless foot under her chair. “A sair bad blister,” the wise Highland postmaster had said, and she had brought it over bad territory. Game she must have been! And now they were sheltering in the old bothy, and had built a fire. He could sniff the faintly sour odour of old soot, the mustiness of a house long disused. But it was comfortable too. The ruddy glow of the fire set shadows wavering on the lime-washed walls and vanishing in the smoked blackness between the rafters. There was no furniture except that old chair and a deal table against the wall. On the wall, above the table, was a heavily-lined crayon drawing not quite distinguishable. A bare room, yet the firelight made it cosy. Queer how a peat fire had that effect! And it was a poor fire at that.

“The man who built that fire did not know one damn thing about peat fires.” He spoke the last words aloud, but as if still musing.

Charles William Vivian Stark came out of his uncomfortable trance. He felt a sudden twitch of anger and resentment at being, for a few seconds, under psychical durance, and his voice showed it. “Do you usually swear in the presence of a lady?”

The man in the doorway considered that. Swear? When had he sworn? An odd expletive was not swearing. He knew and could use a swear or two: splendid fine swears—do any girl’s heart good to hear them—learned in the Tenth Division in that retreat down to Salonika when, instead of meals, they had bayonet fights three times a day with that very adequate fighting man, the Bulgar. And, anyhow, if he wanted to swear he would not let any dry small convention stop him. Startled you were, my lad, and bluffing to hide it—“No blame to you either,” he said aloud.

He stepped into the room and walked evenly to the fireside between the man and the woman. “I am used to a turf fire,” he said. “This is the trick of it.” He went on one knee, laid down his ash-plant, and picked up two black divots. “Stand the sods against the hob, keep the red coals in the middle, hedge ’em in like that—with a gap in front for draught. You’ll see the blaze in a minute.” He turned his head and looked over the bulge of his shoulder at the shoeless foot under the chair. “ ‘A sair bad blister,’ ” he quoted—“and we knew you’d have it. Spirit you had to bring it this far.”

“You were at the post-office at Croghanmoyle,” said Frances Mary Grant. She was slightly amused at the bold coolness of the small man.

“Probably followed us over the hill.” Stark addressed himself to the girl only.

“My own road I came,” murmured Hugh Forbes, “and heard the bad gods whisper in the mist,” and forthwith went into one of his reveries, his eyes on the fire, where a valley glowed up a long mile and then a long mile, with broken castle walls at the end. So this hay-head had seen him at Croghanmoyle. The lad had looked at him with a look that did not register, but her eyes had never once seemed to observe him. Women were the very devil. . . . Pleasant voice the girl had too; soft and round, with the words slightly drawn, but not with the drawl that spoiled the Dublin voices. A Highland voice? And the man had a Rathmines accent. Oxford that would be. . . .

The tall man looked down and smiled, and in his hawk face was a trace of contempt for the small man and for his own recent feelings. Strange the tricks the firelight played on one. The saffron cloak of the Pict was only a rusty old trench-coat thrown loosely on the shoulders, and the clothes beneath it were modern and shabby—frayed at the wrist, a rent at the side of the lifted knee. That hat was new—one of those furry-black things affected by the vulgar—and the brown shoes were strong and well made. Probably lifted at a back door! A tramp, very likely—and Irish—who had seen better days! Charles Grant had mentioned that wandering men sometimes used the glen and the great pass of Sealig to cross over into Deeside and Aberdeen. Trying him for a touch in another minute! Damn him! He did complicate things. Couldn’t very well leave Fred now unless . . . “Are you alone?” Stark queried suddenly.

As from a mile off in his musings Hugh answered casually. “But not for always—if there’s a red-haired woman in all Scotland.” He was watching the castle walls crumble at the end of the glowing valley and was stringing queer little rhymes in his mind:

The red strong valley of life shall flatten in dust.

The red long rally of steel shall crumble in rust.

The red strong pulse of the heart shall falter in lust.

The red . . .

“The red what? bust, trust, confust, must—elephants go must—that last line is going to be the devil.”

Frances Mary, too, was observing the small man resting on one knee, and she was thinking along a line of her own. She, also, put him a sudden question. “Are you going on down the glen?”

“I was thinking of doing that.” He had not raised his eyes.

“Could you do me a favour?”

“To be sure—if I can.”

“Will you call at Innismore—the first house you come to, the big house on the right over the footbridge—and tell my brother Charles—Mr Charles Grant . . .”

III

Hugh Forbes for the time did not hear another word. He had a trick of concentrating on his own thoughts or problems and breaking contact with the outside. He did that now. Her brother Charles! So this was Tearlath’s sister. Frances Mary! That darling name! He had heard this big lad call her Fred; silly ass to shorten a name like that. But of course she must be Frances Mary—Tearlath’s only sister. How often had he heard Tearlath speak of her, his fine kid-sister! There was that heart-opening bad day when they were trapped on the wrong side of the Jordan and the Turkish snipers hitting close. Over the Jordan but not into camp-ground—not by a long shot—not by a long shot. Four hours among the hot stones till night came—and half the company gone. And Tearlath and himself talking so as not to think too much—picking their words slowly. “It would be no harm to say, Tearlath boy, that if that fellow lowers his front sight, the valley of Glounagrianaan will be needing another schoolmaster.” And Tearlath, his great body flattened out and his cheek to the stones, smiling at him! “Never mind, Aodh, you’ve the soul of a teacher; and little wee imps in hell will learn things from you.” Ay, the hot stones beyond the Jordan and the angry sun, and he minding the green valley of Glounagrianaan below the heather, and the kindly sun on the amber river where the trout lay! And then Tearlath spoke of his very wonderful mother who was nearly blind. “Ah well! she has Frances Mary, and as long as she has Frances Mary no harm can come to her.” A darn queer thing race! Scot and Irishman with the same turn of speech and the same twist of mind. And this was Frances Mary! Somehow he had pictured her as little and red-haired, with live blue eyes and a skin liable to freckles. And instead she was a long-limbed, tow-headed—no, not that word—female. Good-looking in a way, with nicely curved lips, and the cheek-bones of the Scot, and those grey wide-set eyes that could never hide any feeling—love or dislike or——