The Manxman Part 4

Bridget was dying of pleurisy, brought on by a long day's work at hoeing turnips in a soaking rain. Dr. Mylechreest had poulticed her lungs with mustard and linseed, but all to no purpose. "It's feeling the same as the sun on your back at harvest," she murmured, yet the poultices brought no heat to her frozen chest.

Caesar Cregeen was at her side; John the Clerk, too, called John the Widow; Kelly, the rural postman, who went by the name of Kelly the Thief; as well as Black Tom, her father. Caesar was discoursing of sinners and their latter end. John was remembering how at his election to the clerkship he had rashly promised to bury the poor for nothing; Kelly was thinking he would be the first to carry the news to Christian Balla-whaine; and Black Tom was varying the exercise of pounding rock-sugar for his bees with that of breaking his playful wit on the dying woman.

"No use; I'm laving you; I'm going on my long journey," said Bridget, while Granny used a shovel as a fan to relieve her gusty breathing.

"Got anything in your pocket for the road, woman?" said the thatcher.

"It's not houses of bricks and mortal I'm for calling at now," she answered.

"Dear heart! Put up a bit of a prayer," whispered Grannie to her husband; and Caesar took a pinch of snuff out of his waistcoat pocket, and fell to "wrastling with the Lord."

Bridget seemed to be comforted. "I see the jasper gates," she panted, fixing her hazy eyes on the scraas under the thatch, from which broken spiders' webs hung down like rats' tails.

Then she called for Pete. She had something to give him. It was the stocking foot with the eighty greasy Manx banknotes which his father, Peter Christian, had paid her fifteen years before. Pete lit the candle and steadied it while Grannie cut the stocking from the wall side of the bed-ticking.

Black Tom dropped the sugar-pounder and exposed his broken teeth in his surprise at so much wealth; John the Widow blinked; and Kelly the Thief poked his head forward until the peak of his postman's cap fell on to the bridge of his nose.

A sea-fog lay over the land that morning, and when it lifted Bridget's soul went up as well.

"Poor thing! Poor thing!" said Grannie. "The ways were cold for her--cold, cold!"

"A dacent la.s.s," said John the Clerk; "and oughtn't to be buried with the common trash, seeing she's left money."

"A hard-working woman, too, and on her feet for ever; but 'lowanced in her intellecks, for all," said Kelly.

And Caesar cried, "A brand plucked from the burning! Lord, give me more of the like at the judgment."

When all was over, and tears both hot and cold were wiped away--Pete shed none of them--the neighbours who had stood with the lad in the churchyard on Maughold Head returned to the cottage by the water-trough to decide what was to be done with his eighty good bank-notes. "It's a fortune," said one. "Let him put it with Mr. Dumbell," said another.

"Get the boy a trade first--he's a big lump now, sixteen for spring,"

said a third. "A draper, eh?" said a fourth. "May I presume? My nephew, Bobbie Clucas, of Ramsey, now?" "A dacent man, very," said John the Widow; "but if I'm not ambitious, there's my son-in-law, John Cowley.

The lad's cut to a dot for a grocer, and what more nicer than having your own shop and your own name over the door, if you plaze--' Peter Quilliam, tay and sugar merchant!'--they're telling me John will be riding in his carriage and pair soon."

"Chut! your grannie and your carriage and pairs," shouted a rasping voice at last. It was Black Tom. "Who says the fortune is belonging to the lad at all? It's mine, and if there's law in the land I'll have it."

Meanwhile, Pete, with the dull thud in his ears of earth falling on a coffin, had made his way down to Ballawhaine. He had never been there before, and he felt confused, but he did not tremble. Half-way up the carriage-drive he pa.s.sed a sandy-haired youth of his own age, a slim dandy who hummed a tune and looked at him carelessly over his shoulder.

Pete knew him--he was Boss, the boys called him Dross, son and heir of Christian Ballawhaine.

At the big house Pete asked for the master. The English footman, in scarlet knee-breeches, left him to wait in the stone hall. The place was very quiet and rather cold, but all as clean as a gull's wing. There was a dark table in the middle and a high-backed chair against the wall. Two oil pictures faced each other from opposite sides. One was of an old man without a beard, but with a high forehead, framed around with short grey hair. The other was of a woman with a tired look and a baby on her lap.

Under this there was a little black picture that seemed to Pete to be the likeness of a fancy tombstone. And the print on it, so far as Pete could spell it out, was that of a tombstone too, "In loving memory of Verbena, beloved wife of Peter Chr--"

The Ballawhaine came crunching the sand on the hall-floor. He looked old, and had now a pent-house of bristly eyebrows of a different colour from his hair. Pete had often seen him on the road riding by.

"Well, my lad, what can I do for _you?_" he said. He spoke in a jerky voice, as if he thought to overawe the boy.

Pete fumbled his stocking cap. "Mothers dead," he answered vacantly.

The Ballawhaine knew that already. Kelly the Thief had run hot-foot to inform him. He thought Pete had come to claim maintenance now that his mother was gone.

"So she's been telling you the same old story?" he said briskly. ?

At that Pete's face stiffened all at once. "She's been telling me that you're my father, sir."

The Ballawhaine tried to laugh. "Indeed!" he replied; "it's a wise child, now, that knows its own father."

"I'm not rightly knowing what you mane, sir," said Pete.

Then the Ballawhaine fell to slandering the poor woman in her grave, declaring that she could not know who was the father of her child, and protesting that no son of hers should ever see the colour of money of his. Saying this with a snarl, he brought down his right hand with a thump on to the table. There was a big hairy mole near the joint of the first finger.

"Aisy, sir, if you plaze," said Pete; "she was telling me you gave her this."

He turned up the corner of his jersey, tugged out of his pocket, from behind his flaps, the eighty Manx bank-notes, and held them in his right hand on the table. There was a mole at the joint of Pete's first finger also.

The Ballawhaine saw it. He drew back his hand and slid it behind him.

Then in another voice he said, "Well, my lad, isn't it enough? What are you wanting with more?"

"I'm not wanting more," said Pete; "I'm not wanting this. Take it back,"

and he put down the roll of notes between them.

The Ballawhaine sank into the chair, took a handkerchief out of his tails with the hand that had been lurking there, and began to mop his forehead. "Eh? How? What d'ye mean, boy?" he stammered.

"I mane," said Pete, "that if I kept that money there is people would say my mother was a bad woman, and you bought her and paid her--I'm hearing the like at some of them."

He took a step nearer. "And I mane, too, that you did wrong by my mother long ago, and now that she's dead you're blackening her; and you're a bad heart, and a low tongue, and if I was only a man, and didn't _know_ you were my father, I'd break every bone in your skin."

Then Pete twisted about and shouted into the dark part of the hall, "Come along, there, my ould c.o.c.katoo! It's time to be putting me to the door."

The English footman in the scarlet breeches had been peeping from under the stairs.

That was Pete's first and last interview with his father. Peter Christian Ballawhaine was a terror in the Keys by this time, but he had trembled before his son like a whipped cur.

V.

Katherine Cregeen, Pete's champion at school, had been his companion at home as well. She was two years younger than Pete. Her hair was a black as a gipsy's, and her face as brown as a berry. In summer she liked best to wear a red frock without sleeves, no boots and no stockings, no collar and no bonnet, not even a sun-bonnet. From constant exposure to the sun and rain her arms and legs were as ruddy as her cheeks, and covered with a soft silken down. So often did you see her teeth that you would have said she was always laughing. Her laugh was a little saucy trill given out with head aside and eyes aslant, like that of a squirrel when he is at a safe height above your head, and has a nut in his open jaws.

Pete had seen her first at school, and there he had tried to draw the eyes of the maiden upon himself by methods known only to heroes, to savages, and to boys. He had prowled around her in the playground with the wild vigour of a young colt, tossing his head, swinging his arms, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his body, kicking up his legs, walking on his hands, lunging out at every lad that was twice as big as himself, and then bringing himself down at length with a whoop and a crash on his hindmost parts just in front of where she stood. For these tremendous efforts to show what a fellow he could be if he tried, he had won no applause from the boys, and Katherine herself had given no sign, though Pete had watched her out of the corners of his eyes. But in other scenes the children came together.

After Philip had gone to King William's, Pete and Katherine had become bosom friends. Instead of going home after school to cool his heels in the road until his mother came from the fields, he found it neighbourly to go up to Ballajora and round by the network of paths to Cornaa. That was a long detour, but Caesar's mill stood there. It nestled down in the low bed of the river that runs through the glen called Ballagla.s.s.

Song-birds built about it in the spring of the year, and Caesar's little human songster sang there always.

When Pete went that way home, what times the girl had of it! Wading up the river, clambering over the stones, playing female Blondin on the fallen tree-trunks that spanned the chasm, slipping, falling, holding on any way up (legs or arms) by the rotten branches below, then calling for Pete's help in a voice between a laugh and a cry, flinging chips into the foaming back-wash of the mill-wheel, and chasing them down stream, racing among the gorse, and then lying full length like a lamb, without a thought of shame, while Pete took the thorns out of her bleeding feet.

She was a wild duck in the glen where she lived, and Pete was a great lumbering tame duck waddling behind her.

But the glorious, happy, make-believe days too soon came to an end. The swinging cane of the great John Thomas Corlett, and the rod of a yet more relentless tyrant, darkened the sunshine of both the children. Pete was banished from school, and Catherine's father removed from Cornaa.

When Caesar had taken a wife, he had married Betsy, the daughter of the owner of the inn at Sulby. After that he had "got religion," and he held that persons in the household of faith were not to drink, or to buy or to sell drink. But Grannie's father died and left his house, "The Manx Fairy," and his farm, Glenmooar, to her and her husband. About the same time the miller at Sulby also died, and the best mill in the island cried out for a tenant. Caesar took the mill and the farm, and Grannie took the inn, being brought up to such profanities and no way bound by principle. From that time forward, Caesar pinned all envious cavillers with the text which says, "Not that which goeth into the mouth of a man defileth him, but that which cometh out."