Роберт Стивенсон: The Merry Men, and Other Tales and Fables

I found my uncle at the gable end, watching the signs of the weather, with a pipe in his fingers.

‘Uncle,’ said I, ‘there were men ashore at Sandag Bay – ’

I had no time to go further; indeed, I not only forgot my words, but even my weariness, so strange was the effect on Uncle Gordon. He dropped his pipe and fell back against the end of the house with his jaw fallen, his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. We must have looked at one another silently for a quarter of a minute, before he made answer in this extraordinary fashion: ‘Had he a hair kep on?’

I knew as well as if I had been there that the man who now lay buried at Sandag had worn a hairy cap, and that he had come ashore alive. For the first and only time I lost toleration for the man who was my benefactor and the father of the woman I hoped to call my wife.

‘These were living men,’ said I, ‘perhaps Jacobites, perhaps the French, perhaps pirates, perhaps adventurers come here to seek the Spanish treasure ship; but, whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your daughter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, man, the dead sleeps well where you have laid him. I stood this morning by his grave; he will not wake before the trump of doom.’

My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; then he fixed his eyes for a little on the ground, and pulled his fingers foolishly; but it was plain that he was past the power of speech.

‘Come,’ said I. ‘You must think for others. You must come up the hill with me, and see this ship.’

He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly after my impatient strides. The spring seemed to have gone out of his body, and he scrambled heavily up and down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was wont, from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, induce him to make better haste. Only once he replied to me complainingly, and like one in bodily pain: ‘Ay, ay, man, I’m coming.’ Long before we had reached the top, I had no other thought for him but pity. If the crime had been monstrous the punishment was in proportion.

At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and could see around us. All was black and stormy to the eye; the last gleam of sun had vanished; a wind had sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to the point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short as was the interval, the sea already ran vastly higher than when I had stood there last; already it had begun to break over some of the outward reefs, and already it moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first, in vain for the schooner.

‘There she is,’ I said at last. But her new position, and the course she was now lying, puzzled me. ‘They cannot mean to beat to sea,’ I cried.

‘That’s what they mean,’ said my uncle, with something like joy; and just then the schooner went about and stood upon another tack, which put the question beyond the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a gale on hand, had thought first of sea-room. With the wind that threatened, in these reef-sown waters and contending against so violent a stream of tide, their course was certain death.

‘Good God!’ said I, ‘they are all lost.’

‘Ay,’ returned my uncle, ‘a’ – a’ lost. They hadnae a chance but to rin for Kyle Dona. The gate they’re gaun the noo, they couldnae win through an the muckle deil were there to pilot them. Eh, man,’ he continued, touching me on the sleeve, ‘it’s a braw nicht for a shipwreck! Twa in ae twalmonth! Eh, but the Merry Men’ll dance bonny!’

I looked at him, and it was then that I began to fancy him no longer in his right mind. He was peering up to me, as if for sympathy, a timid joy in his eyes. All that had passed between us was already forgotten in the prospect of this fresh disaster.

‘If it were not too late,’ I cried with indignation, ‘I would take the coble and go out to warn them.’

‘Na, na,’ he protested, ‘ye maunnae interfere; ye maunnae meddle wi’ the like o’ that. It’s His’ – doffing his bonnet – ‘His wull. And, eh, man! but it’s a braw nicht for’t!’

Something like fear began to creep into my soul and, reminding him that I had not yet dined, I proposed we should return to the house. But no; nothing would tear him from his place of outlook.

‘I maun see the hail thing, man, Cherlie,’ he explained – and then as the schooner went about a second time, ‘Eh, but they han’le her bonny!’ he cried. ‘The Christ-Anna was naething to this.’

Already the men on board the schooner must have begun to realise some part, but not yet the twentieth, of the dangers that environed their doomed ship. At every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen how fast the current swept them back. Each tack was made shorter, as they saw how little it prevailed. Every moment the rising swell began to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, and the brown reef and streaming tangle appear in the hollow of the wave. I tell you, they had to stand to their tackle: there was no idle men aboard that ship, God knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible to any human-hearted man that my misguided uncle now pored and gloated like a connoisseur. As I turned to go down the hill, he was lying on his belly on the summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching in the heather. He seemed rejuvenated, mind and body.

When I got back to the house already dismally affected, I was still more sadly downcast at the sight of Mary. She had her sleeves rolled up over her strong arms, and was quietly making bread. I got a bannock from the dresser and sat down to eat it in silence.

‘Are ye wearied, lad?’ she asked after a while.

‘I am not so much wearied, Mary,’ I replied, getting on my feet, ‘as I am weary of delay, and perhaps of Aros too. You know me well enough to judge me fairly, say what I like. Well, Mary, you may be sure of this: you had better be anywhere but here.’

‘I’ll be sure of one thing,’ she returned: ‘I’ll be where my duty is.’

‘You forget, you have a duty to yourself,’ I said.

‘Ay, man?’ she replied, pounding at the dough; ‘will you have found that in the Bible, now?’

‘Mary,’ I said solemnly, ‘you must not laugh at me just now. God knows I am in no heart for laughing. If we could get your father with us, it would be best; but with him or without him, I want you far away from here, my girl; for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your father’s too, I want you far – far away from here. I came with other thoughts; I came here as a man comes home; now it is all changed, and I have no desire nor hope but to flee – for that’s the word – flee, like a bird out of the fowler’s snare, from this accursed island.’

She had stopped her work by this time.

‘And do you think, now,’ said she, ‘do you think, now, I have neither eyes nor ears? Do ye think I havenae broken my heart to have these braws (as he calls them, God forgive him!) thrown into the sea? Do ye think I have lived with him, day in, day out, and not seen what you saw in an hour or two? No,’ she said, ‘I know there’s wrong in it; what wrong, I neither know nor want to know. There was never an ill thing made better by meddling, that I could hear of. But, my lad, you must never ask me to leave my father. While the breath is in his body, I’ll be with him. And he’s not long for here, either: that I can tell you, Charlie – he’s not long for here. The mark is on his brow; and better so – maybe better so.’

I was a while silent, not knowing what to say; and when I roused my head at last to speak, she got before me.