The Bondman: A New Saga

"His Excellency is asleep," said the blue-jacket.

No, no; that could not be, for he had been talking as they entered. "Father," cried the lad, and pushed him.

Then the Governor opened his eyes, and yawned heavily. The blue-jacket, cap in hand, told his story again, and the good Adam seemed to struggle hard in the effort to grasp it through the mists of sleep. At length he said, "What has the man done?"

"Deserted his ship, your Excellency."

"Nothing else – no crime?"

"Nothing else, your Excellency. Has he been here?"

"No;" said the Governor.

And at that the weary man shut his eyes again and began to breathe most audibly. But when the blue-jackets, taking counsel together, concluded that somewhere thereabouts the man must surely be, and decided to sleep the night in the stable loft, that they might scour the country in the morning, the Governor awoke suddenly, saying he had no beds to offer them, but they might sleep on the benches of the kitchen.

An hour later, when all Lague was asleep, Adam rose from his bed, took a dark lantern and went back to the stable loft, aroused the Icelander and motioned him to follow. They crossed the paved courtyard and came in front of the window. Adam pointed, and the man looked in. The four blue-jackets were lying on the benches drawn round the fire, and the dull glow of the slumbering peat was on their faces. They were asleep. At that sight the man's eyes flashed, his mouth set hard, the muscles of his cheeks contracted, and with a hoarse cry in his throat, he fumbled the haft of the seaman's knife that hung in his belt and made one step forward.

But Adam, laying hold of his arm, looked into his eyes steadfastly, and in the light of the lantern their wild glance fell before him. At the next instant the man was gone.

The night was now far spent. In the town the forts were silent, the streets quiet, the market place vacant, and on the hilltops the fires had smouldered down. By daybreak next morning the blue-jackets had gone back empty to Ramsey, and by sunrise the English brig had sailed out of the bay.

Two beautiful creeks lie to the south of Ramsey and north of Maughold Head. One is called Lague, the other Port-y-Vullin. On the shore of Port-y-Vullin there is a hut built of peat and thatched with broom – dark, damp, boggy and ruinous, a ditch where the tenant is allowed to sit rent free. The sun stood high when a woman, coming out of this place, found a man sleeping in a broken-ribbed boat that lay side down on the beach. She awakened him, and asked him into her hut. He rose to his feet and followed her. Last night he had been turned out of the best house in the island; this morning he was about to be received into the worst.

The woman was Liza Killey – the slut, the trollop, the trull, the slattern and drab of the island.

The man was Stephen Orry.

CHAPTER V.

Little Sunlocks

One month only had then passed since the night of Stephen Orry's flight from Iceland, and the story of his fortunes in the meantime is quickly told. In shame of his brutal blow, as well as fear of his wife's threat, he had stowed away in the hold of an English ship that sailed the same night. Two days later famine had brought him out of his hiding place, and he had been compelled to work before the mast. In ten more days he had signed articles as able seaman at the first English port of call. Then had followed punishments for sloth, punishments for ignorance, and punishments for not knowing the high-flavored language of his boatswain. After that had come bickerings, threats, scowls, oaths, and open ruptures with this chief of petty tyrants, ending with the blow of a marlin-spike over the big Icelander's crown, and the little boatswain rolling headlong overboard. Then had followed twenty-eight days spent in irons, rivetted to the ship's side on the under deck, with bread and water diet every second day and nothing between. Finally, by the secret good fellowship of a shipmate with some bowels of compassion, escape had come after starvation, as starvation had come after slavery, and Stephen had swum ashore while his ship lay at anchor in Ramsey Bay.

What occurred thereafter at the house whereto he had drifted no one could rightly tell. He continued to live there with the trull who kept it. She had been the illegitimate child of an insolvent English debtor and the daughter of a neighboring vicar, had been ignored by her father, put out to nurse by her mother, bred in ignorance, reared in impurity, and had grown into a buxom hussy. By what arts, what hints, what appeals, what allurements, this trollop got possession of Stephen Orry it is not hard to guess. First, he was a hunted man, and only one who dare do anything dare open doors to him. Next, he was a foreigner, dumb for speech, and deaf for scandal, and therefore unable to learn more than his eyes could tell him of the woman who had given him shelter. Then the big Icelander was a handsome fellow; and the veriest drab that ever trailed a petticoat knows how to hide her slatternly habits while she is hankering after a fine-grown man. So the end of many conspiring circumstances was that after much gossip in corners, many jeers, and some tossings of female heads, the vicar of the parish, Parson Gell, called one day at the hut in Port-y-Vullin, and on the following Sunday morning, at church, little Robbie Christian, the clerk and sexton, read out the askings for the marriage of Liza Killey, spinster, of the parish of Maughold, and Stephen Orry, bachelor, out of Iceland.

What a wedding it was that came three weeks later! Liza wore a gay new gown that had been lent her by a neighbor, Bella Coobragh, a girl who had meant to be married in it herself the year before, but had not fully carried out her moral intention and had since borne a child. Wearing such borrowed plumes and a brazen smile of defiance, Liza strutted up to the Communion rail, looking impudently into the men's faces, and saucily into the women's – for the church was thronged with an odorous mob that kept up the jabbering of frogs at spawn – and Stephen Orry slouched after her in his blowzy garments with a downward, shame-faced, nervous look that his hulky manners could not conceal. Then what a wedding feast it was that followed! The little cabin in Port-y-Vullin reeked and smoked with men and women, and ran out on to the sand and pebbles of the beach, for the time of year was spring and the day was clear and warm. Liza's old lovers were there in troops. With a keg of rum over his shoulder Nary Crowe, the innkeeper, had come down from the "Hibernian" to give her joy, and Cleave Kinley, the butcher, had brought her up half a lamb from Ballaglass, and Matt Mylechreest, the net maker – a venal old skinflint – had charged his big snuff horn to the brim for the many noses of the guests. On the table, the form, the three-legged stool, the bed and the hearth, they sat together cheek by jowl their hats hung on the roof rafters, their plates perched on their knees.

And loud was their laughter and dubious their talk. Old Thurstan Coobragh led off on the advantages of marriage, saying it was middlin' plain that the gels nowadays must be wedded when they were babies in arms, for bye-childers were common, and a gel's father didn't care in a general way to look like a fool; but Nary Crowe saw no harm in a bit of sweetheartin', and Cleave Kinley said no, of course, not if a man wasn't puttin' notions into a gel's head, and Matt Mylechreest, for his part, thought the gels were amazin' like the ghosts, for they got into every skeleton closet about the house.

"But then," said Matt, "I'm an ould bachelor, as the sayin' is, and don't know nothin'."

"Ha, ha, ha! of course not," laughed the others; and then there was a taste of a toast to Liza's future in Nary's rum.

"Drop it," said Liza, as Nary, lifting his cup, leaned over to whisper.

"So I will, but it'll be into your ear, woman," said Nary. "So here's to the king that's comin'."

By this time Stephen had slipped out of the noisome place, and was rambling on the quiet shore alone, with head bent, cheeks ashy pale, eyes fixed, and his brawny hands thrust deep into his pockets. At last, through the dense fumes within the house, Bella Coobragh noted Stephen's absence, and "Where's your man?" she said to Liza, with a tantalizing light in her eyes.

"Maybe where yours is, Bella," said Liza, with a toss of the head; "near enough, perhaps, but not visible to the naked eye."

The effects of going to church on Liza Killey were what they often are of a woman of base nature. With a man to work for her she became more idle than before, and with nothing to fear from scandal more reckless and sluttish. Having hidden her nakedness in the gown of marriage, she lost the last rag of womanly shame.

The effects on Stephen Orry were the deepening of his sloth, his gloom and his helplessness. What purpose in life he ever had was paralyzed. On his first coming to the island he had sailed to the mackerel fishing in the boats of Kane Wade – a shrewd Manxman, who found the big, dumb Icelander a skilful fisherman. Now he neglected his work, lost self-reliance, and lay about for hours, neither thinking nor feeling, but with a look of sheer stupidity. And so the two sat together in their ditch, sinking day by day deeper and yet deeper into the mire of idleness, moroseness, and mutual loathing. Nevertheless, they had their cheerful hours together.

The "king" of Nary's toast soon came. A child was born – a bonny, sunny boy as ever yet drew breath; but Liza looked on it as a check to her freedom, a drain on her energy, something helpless and looking to her for succor. So the unnatural mother neglected it, and Stephen, who was reminded by its coming that Rachel had been about to give birth to a child, turned his heart from it and ignored it.

Thus three spirit-breaking years dragged on, and Stephen Orry grew woe-begone and stone-eyed. Of old he had been slothful and spiritless indeed, but not a base man. Now his whole nature was all but gone to the gutter. He had once been a truth-teller, but living with a woman who assumed that he must be a liar, he had ended by becoming one. He had no company save her company, for his slow wit had found it hard to learn the English tongue, and she alone could rightly follow him; he had no desires save the petty ones of daily food and drink; he had no purpose save the degrading purpose of defeating the nightly wanderings of his drunken wife. Thus without any human eye upon him in the dark way he was going, Stephen Orry had grown coarse and base.

But the end was not yet, of all this than was to be and know. One night, after spending the day on the sea with the lines for cod, the year deepening to winter, the air muggy and cold, he went away home, hungry, and wet and cold, leaving his mates at the door of the "Plough," where there was good company within and the cheer of a busy fire! Home! On reaching Port-y-Vullin he found the door open, the hearth cold, the floor in a puddle from the driving rain, not a bite or sup in the cupboard, and his wife lying drunk across the bed, with the child in its grimy blueness creeping and crying about her head.

It was the beginning of the end. Once again he fumbled the haft of his seaman's knife, and then by a quick impulse he plucked up the child in his arms.

"Now God be praised for your poor face," he said, and while he dried the child's pitiful eyes, the hot drops started to his own.

He lit the fire, he cooked a cod he had brought home with him, he ate himself and fed the little one. Then he sat before the hearth with the child at his breast, as any mother might do, for at length it had come to him to know that, if it was not to be lost and worse than orphaned, he must henceforth be father and mother both to it.

And when the little eyes, wet no longer, but laughing like sunshine into the big seared face above them struggled in vain with sleep, he wrapped the child in his ragged guernsey and put it to lie like a bundle where the fire could warm it. Then all being done he sat again, and leaning his elbows on his knees covered his ears with his hands, so that they might shut out the sound of the woman's heavy breathing.

It was on that night, for the first time since he fled from Iceland, that he saw the full depth of his offence. Offence? Crime it was, and that of the blackest; and in the terror of his loneliness he trembled at the thought that some day his horrible dumb secret would become known, that something would happen to tell it – that he was married already when he married the woman who lay behind him.

At that he saw how low he had fallen – from her who once had been so pure and true beside him, and had loved him and given up father, and home, and fame for him; to this trull, who now dragged him through the slush, and trod on him and hated him. Then the bitter thought came that what she had suffered for him who had given him everything, he could never repay by one kind word or look. Lost she was to him forever and ever, and parted from him by a yet wider gulf than eight hundred miles of sea. Such was the agony of his shame, and through it all the snore of the sleeping woman went like iron through his head, so that at last he wrapped his arms about it and sobbed out to the dead fire at his feet, "Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!"

All at once he became conscious that the heavy breathing had ceased, that the house was silent, that something had touched him on the shoulder, and that a gaunt shadow stood beside him. It was the woman, who at the sound of his voice had arisen from her drunken sleep, and now gasped,

"Who is Rachel?"

At that word his blood ran cold, and shivering in his clothes, he crouched lower at the hearth, neither answering her nor looking up.

Then with eyes of hate she cried again,

"Who is Rachel?"

But the only voice that answered her was the voice that rang within him – "I'm a lost man, God help me."

"Who is Rachel?" the woman cried once more, and the sound of that name from her lips, hardening it, brutalizing it, befouling it, was the most awful thing by which his soul had yet been shaken out of its stupor.

"Who is she, I say? Answer me," she cried in a raging voice; but he crouched there still, with his haggard face and misty eyes turned down.

Then she laid her hand on his shoulder and shook him, and cried bitterly.

"Who is she, this light o' love – this baggage?"

At that he stiffened himself up, shuddered from head to foot, flung her from him and answered in a terrible voice.

"Woman, she is my wife."

That word, like a thunderbolt, left a heavy silence behind it. Liza stood looking in terror at Stephen's face, unable to utter a cry.