Flora Lyndsay Volume Ii Part 6

"Confound the idiot!" cried old Boreas; "he thinks more of his old jacket, that was not worth picking off a dunghill, than of his wife and his own safety. Why man," turning to the shoemaker, who was dripping like a water-dog, "what tempted you to jump into the sea when you could not swim a stroke?"

"My jacket," continued the son of Crispin, staring wildly at his saturated garments: "it was the only one I had. Oh, my jacket, my jacket!"

Strange that such a dull piece of still life should risk his life for a jacket--and an old one that had seen good service and was quite threadbare; but necessity replies, it was his only garment. A rich person can scarcely comprehend the magnitude of the loss of an only jacket to a poor man.

No one was more amused by the adventure of the jacket than Stephen Corrie, who wrote a comic song on the subject, which Duncan the fiddler set to music, and used to sing, to the great annoyance of the hero of the tale, whenever he ventured in his shirt sleeves upon the deck.

The Duncans, for there were two of them, were both highlanders, and played with much skill on the violin. They were two fine, honest, handsome fellows, who, with their music and singing kept all the rest alive. Directly the sun set, the lively notes of their fiddles called young and old to the deck, and Scotch reels, highland flings, and sailors' hornpipes were danced till late at night--often until the broad beams of the rising sun warned the revellers that it was time to rest.

The Captain and the Lyndsays never joined the dancers; but it was a pretty sight to watch them leaping and springing, full of agility and life, beneath the clear beams of the summer moon.

The foremost in these nightly revels was a young highlander called Tam Grant, who never gave over while a female in the ship could continue on her legs. If he lacked a partner he would seize hold of the old beldame, Granny Williamson, and twist and twirl her around at top speed, never heeding the kicking, scratching, and shrieking of the withered old crone. Setting to her, and nodding at her with the ta.s.sel of the red nightcap he wore, hanging so jauntily over his left eye, that it would have made the fortune of a comic actor to imitate--he was a perfect impersonification of mischief and wild mirth.

By-and-by the old granny not only got used to his mad capers, but evidently enjoyed them; and used to challenge Tam for her partner; and if he happened to have engaged a younger and lighter pair of heels, she would retire to her den below, cursing him for a rude fellow, in no lullaby strains.

And there was big Marion, a tall, stout, yellow-haired girl, from Berwickshire, who had ventured out all alone, to cross the wide Atlantic to join her brother in the far west of Canada, who was the admiration of all the sailors on board, and the adored of the two Duncans. Yet she danced just as lightly as a cow, and shook her fat sides and jumped and bounded through the Scotch reels, much in the same fashion that they did, when,

"She up and wolloped o'er the green, For brawly she could frisk it."

Marion had had many wooers since she came on board; but she laughed at all her lovers, and if they attempted to take any liberties with her, she threatened to call them out if they did not keep their distance, for she had "a lad o' her ain in Canada, an' she didna care a bodle for them an' their clavers."

Yet, in spite of her boasted constancy, it was pretty evident to Flora that Rab Duncan was fiddling his way fast into the buxom Marion's heart; and she thought it more than probable that he would succeed in persuading her to follow his fortunes instead of seeking a home with her brother and her old sweetheart in the far West.

There was one sour-looking puritanical person on board, who regarded the music and dancing with which the poor emigrants beguiled the tedium of the long voyage with silent horror. He was a minister of some dissenting church; but to which of the many he belonged Flora never felt sufficiently interested in the man to inquire. His countenance exhibited a strange mixture of morose ill-humour, shrewdness, and hypocrisy. While he considered himself a vessel of grace chosen and sanctified, he looked upon those around him as vessels of wrath only fitted for destruction.

In his eyes they were already d.a.m.ned, and only waited for the execution of their just sentence. Whenever the dancing commenced he went below and brought up his Bible, which he spread most ostentatiously on his knees, turning up the whites of his eyes to heaven, and uttering very audible groans between the pauses in the music. What the subject of his meditations were, is best known to himself: but no one could look at his low head, sly, sinister-looking eyes and malevolent scowl, and imagine him a messenger of the glad tidings that speak of peace and good-will to man. He seemed like one who would rather call down the fire from heaven to destroy, than learn the meaning of the Christ-spoken text--"I will have mercy and not sacrifice."

Between this man and Mr. Lootie a sort of friendship had sprung up. They might constantly be seen about ten o'clock P.M. seated beneath the shade of the boat, wrangling and disputing about contested points of faith, contradicting and denouncing their respective creeds in the most unchristianlike manner, each failing to convince the other, or gain the least upon his opponent.

"That is the religion of words," said Lyndsay, one day to Flora, as they had been for some time silent listeners to one of Mr. S----'s fierce arguments on predestination--"I wonder how that man's actions would agree with his boasted sanct.i.ty?"

"Let him alone," said Flora; "time will perhaps show. I have no faith in him."

For three weeks the _Anne_ was becalmed upon the Banks. They were surrounded by a dense fog, which hid even the water from their sight, while the beams of sun and moon failed to penetrate the white vapour which closed them in on every side. It was no longer a pleasure to pace the deck in the raw damp air and drizzling rain, which tamed even the little tailor's aspiring soul, and checked the merry dancers and the voice of mirth. Flora retreated to the cabin, and read all the books in the little cupboard at her bed-head. A "Life of Charles XII. of Sweden,"

an odd volume of "Pamela," and three of "The Children of the Abbey"

comprised the Captain's library. What could she do to while away the lagging hours? She thought, and re-thought--at length, she determined to weave some strange incidents, which chance had thrown in her way, into a story, that might divert her mind from dwelling too much upon the future, and interest her husband. So unpacking her writing-desk, she set to work; and in the next Chapter we give to our readers the tale which Flora Lyndsay wrote at sea.

CHAPTER VII.

NOAH COTTON.

THE WIDOW GRIMSHAWE AND HER NEIGHBOURS.

On the road to ----, a small seaport town on the east coast of England, there stood in my young days an old-fashioned, high-gabled, red brick cottage. The house was divided into two tenements, the doors opening in the centre of the building. A rustic porch shaded the entrance to the left from the scorching rays of the sun, and the clouds of dust which during the summer months rose from the public road in front. Some person, whose love of nature had survived amidst the crushing cares of poverty, had twined around the rude trelliswork the deliciously fragrant branches of the brier-rose, which, during the months of June and July, loaded the air with its sweet breath.

The door to the right, although unmarked by sign or chequer-board, opened into a low hedge-tavern of very ill repute, well known through the country by the name of the "Brig's Foot," which it derived from its near proximity to the bridge that crossed the river--a slow-moving, muddy stream, whose brackish waters seemed to have fallen asleep upon their bed of fat, black ooze, while creeping onward to the sea, through a long flat expanse of dreary marshes.

The "Brig's Foot" was kept by the Widow Mason and her son, both persons of notoriously bad character. The old man had been killed a few months before in a drunken brawl with some smugglers; and his name was held in such ill odour that his ghost was reported to haunt the road leading to C---- churchyard, which formed the receptacle, but it would seem not the resting-place, of the dead.

None but persons of the very lowest description frequented the tavern.

Beggars made it their headquarters; smugglers and poachers their hiding-place; and sailors, on sh.o.r.e for a spree, the scene of their drunken revels. The honest labourer shunned the threshold as a moral pest-house, and the tired traveller, who called there once, seldom repeated the visit. The magistrates, who ought to have put down the place as a public nuisance, winked at it as a necessary evil; the more to be tolerated, as it was half a mile beyond the precincts of the town.

Outwardly the place had some attractive features, it was kept so scrupulously clean. The walls were so white, the floor so neatly sanded, and the pewter pots glittered so cheerily on the polished oak-table which served for a bar, that a casual observer might reasonably have expected very comfortable and respectable accommodation from a scene which, though on an humble scale, promised so fair. Even the sleek, well-fed tabby-cat purred so peacefully on the door-sill that she seemed to invite the pedestrian to shelter and repose.

Martha Mason, the mistress of the house, was a bad woman, in the fullest sense of the word. Cunning, hard-hearted, and avaricious, without pity, and without remorse; a creature so hardened in the ways of sin, that conscience had long ceased to offer the least resistance to the perpetration of crime. Unfeminine in mind and person, you could scarcely persuade yourself that the coa.r.s.e, harsh features, and bristling hair about the upper lip, belonged to a female, had not the untamed tongue, ever active in abuse and malice, a.s.serted its claim to the weaker s.e.x, and rated and scolded through the long day, as none but the tongue of a bad woman can rate and scold. An accident had deprived the hideous old crone of the use of one of her legs, which she dragged after her by the help of a crutch. But though she could not move quickly in consequence of her lameness, she was an excellent hand at quickening the motions of those who had the misfortune to be under her control.

Her son Robert, who went by the familiar appellation of "Bully Bob,"

was the counterpart of his mother. A lazy, drunken fellow, who might be seen from morning till night lounging, with his pipe in his mouth, on the well-worn settle at the door, humming some low ribald song to chase away the lagging hours, till the shades of evening roused him from his sluggish stupor to mingle with gamblers and thieves in their low debauch. The expression of this young man's face was so bad, and his manners and language so coa.r.s.e and obscene, that he was an object of dislike and dread to his low a.s.sociates, who regarded him as a fit subject for the gallows. In the eyes of his mother, Bob Mason was a very fine young man--a desirable mate for any farmer's daughter in the country.

The old Spanish proverb, "Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows," was never more fully exemplified than in the case of these people and their next door neighbours.

Dorothy Grimshawe was the widow of a fisherman, whose boat foundered in the dreadful storm of the 10th of October, 1824. Like many others, who sailed from the little port high in health and hope, expecting to reap a fine harvest from the vast shoals of herrings which annually visit that coast, Daniel Grimshawe fell a prey to the spoiler, Death, that stern fisher of men.

The following morning, after the subsidence of the gale, the beach for miles was strewn with pieces of wreck, and the bodies of forty drowned men were cast ash.o.r.e! Most of these proved to be natives of the town; and the bodies being carried to the town-hall, notice was sent to the wives of the absent fishermen to come and claim their dead.

This awful summons quickly collected a crowd to the spot. Many anxious women and children were there, and Dorothy Grimshawe and her little ones came with the rest.

"Thank the good G.o.d! my man is not there," said a poor woman, coming out with her ap.r.o.n to her face. "The Lord save us! 'tis a fearsome sight."

"He may be food for the crabs at the bottom of the sea," said a hoa.r.s.e voice from the crowd; "you are not going to flatter yourself, Nancy, that you are better off than the rest."

"Oh, oh, oh!" shrieked the poor woman, thus deprived by envy of the anchor of hope to which she clung. "I trusted in the mercy of G.o.d; I could not look to the bottom of the salt deep."

"Trust to Him yet, Nancy, and all will be well," said an old weather-beaten tar. "It is He who rules the winds and waves, and brings the storm-tossed ship into a safe harbour."

"But what has He done for these poor men? Were they worse than the rest?" sobbed Nancy.

"It is not for us to bring to the light what He has left in darkness,"

said the old sailor. "He took three fine lads of mine in one night, and left me childless. But it is not for the like o' me to murmur against _Him_. I always trusted to His providence, and I found that it gave me strength in the hour of danger."

"Dorothy," cried he, turning to Mrs. Grimshawe, "it is your turn to go in. It's no use crying and hanging back. Mayhap Dan has escaped the storm, an' is spreading a white sheet to the fine, fresh breeze this morning."

"My heart feels as cold as a stone," sobbed Dorothy: "I dare not go forward; I feel--I know that he is there."

"Shall I go for you? I have known Dan from a boy."

"Oh, no, no; I must see with my own eyes," said Dorothy; "nothing else will convince me that he is either saved, or lost;" and she hurried into the hall.

Trembling with apprehension, the poor woman entered the melancholy place of death. The bodies were arranged in rows along the floor, and covered decently with coa.r.s.e clean sheets. The mournful and mysterious silence which always broods above the dead, was broken by sighs and sobs. Wives, mothers, sisters, and little children, were collected in heartrending groups around some uncovered and dearly-loved face, whose gla.s.sy eyes, staring and motionless, were alike unconscious of their presence and their tears.

Mrs. Grimshawe recoiled with a sudden backward step--"What if Dan is here?" She pressed her hands tightly upon her breast--the stifled cry of agony and fear that burst from her lips, nearly choked her--she clutched at the bare walls for support, and panted and gasped for breath.

A little humpbacked child, after casting upon her mother a look of unutterable pity, slowly advanced to the first shrouded figure, and, kneeling down, reverentially lifted the sheet, and gazed long and sadly upon the object beneath. "Father!" murmured the child; no other word escaped her quivering lips. She meekly laid her head upon the dead seaman's breast, and kissed his cold lips and brow with devoted affection. Then, rising from her knees, she went to her pale, weeping, distressed mother, and, taking her gently by the hand, led her up to the object of her search.

The winds and waves are sad disfigurers; but Mrs. Grimshawe instantly recognised, in the distorted features, so marred in their conflict with the elements, the husband of her youth, the father of her orphan children; and, with a loud shriek, she fell upon the bosom of the dead.

Rough, pitiful hands lifted her up, and unclasped the rigid fingers that tightened about his neck, and bore the widow tenderly back to her desolate home.