The Wind Bloweth Part 15

She faced him suddenly.

"Shane, why didn't somebody do it for him?"

"I suppose they couldn't see the end, Claire-Anne. They couldn't foresee the king of France's charity, the tricked women, the wine-stained cards.

There's many the Scots gentlemen who would have--set him free."

"But they didn't, Shane dearest. It seems--Destiny must always win.

Shane, what is that poem in Gaidhlig about the world, the verses you once said?"

"_Treasgair an saoghal, agus tigeann an garth mar smal.

Alaistir, Caesar, 's an mead do bhi d'a bpairt Ta an Theamhair na fear agas feach an Traoi mar ta_-- Life goes conquering on. The winds forever blow Alexander, Caesar, and the crash of their fighting men Tara is gra.s.s, and see how Troy is low--"

He stopped with a little shock, for her face was a mask of tears.

"Dearest, dearest, it's only an old, sad story. It has nothing to do with us. Claire-Anne--"

"Is any story old, Shane? Is any story ever new? Isn't it always the same story?"

She looked at the dagger for an instant more, and put it down with a little sob.

"Poor gentleman!"

-- 9

From his cabin below he could hear the Belfast mate roaring at the helmsman:

"What kind of steering do you call that? Look at your d.a.m.ned wake. Like an eel's wriggle. Keep her full, and less of your d.a.m.ned luffin'."

"Keep her full, sir!" the steersman repeated.

"Look at your foretopsail! Bouse it, blast ye! Bouse it! You Skye cutthroats!"

If the nor'easter held, Shane calculated, he could run through Biscay full, come into the Mediterranean on a broad reach, and jam her straight at Ma.r.s.eilles. About him was the tremor as she took the head seas.

Plunge! Tremble! Dash on! Overhead the squeaking of the sheets, the squeal of blocks, the _thrap-thrap-thrap_ of the lee halyards, the melancholy whining of the gulls. With luck he would be in Ma.r.s.eilles within the week. And if the wind swung westward after he left Gibraltar to port, he would nip off hours, a day even. And every hour counted until the moment he went up the dusky path and called, "Claire-Anne!"

He had never before driven the _Ulster Lady_ as he was driving her now.

Before, he had been content to get what he could out of her, coaxing her, nursing her, as a trainer does a horse he is fond of; but now he was riding her like a jockey intent on winning a race. On deck the crew wondered what had got into the old man, as they called him, for all his twenty-eight years.

"Before, he was a sailor," the isles crew complained. "Is he now a merchant at last? _A Righ is truagh!_ O King, the pity!"

But it was not interest in cargoes that compelled him; it was the thought of a face like the wing of a bird, ready to soar. The dark, gracious face, with the eyes where emotion swirled like a mill-race, the parted ruddy lips-_La Mielleuse_--mouth of honey. And the word he must not say aloud, like some occult word of magic until a certain moment should come:

"Claire-Anne!" Just "Claire-Anne!"

Before he had left Ma.r.s.eilles he had not been able to think of her, to weigh what happened, to understand. Things were too close. But at sea, and in the dusk of the Antrim glen, and in Belfast and Liverpool, he had had time to view the incident in perspective; to stand aside, as one stands back from a picture, and appreciate the color, the line, the truth; to see that that rich purple, that splash of orange, that rippling, rich silver-gray are not spots like flowers, but a definite design....

In Antrim he had remembered Dancing Town, the vision of Fiddlers' Green.

Fourteen years before!

And now that he remembered, it seemed to him foolish not to have known he was sailing somewhere. He was always sailing.... And unexpectedly, after he had given up all hope, under his lee bow had risen suddenly Fiddlers' Green.... Once before he thought he had made port there, but that only made this island the true one.... For there were always two things, and the second was right.... False dawn and dawn; the False Cape and Cape Horn; the Southern Crosses, the false and true....

And he would tell her this, when he met her again, of how he had been thinking, and discovered her to be the true life....

The wife he had married and buried seven years before he thought of now; she was the second woman he had known, his mother the first. And from the cold precipice of his mother he had fled into the flinty fields of Moyra Dolan.... He felt a little sorry for the boy he was seven years before--so young, so gallant, so wrong.... He had thought that all there was in life was a home to return to, a wife, children.... He had wanted an acre of land in the sun, where all the world was his. When one was young, one knew so little.... Wisdom came with the lapping of the waves, and years of quiet thinking under the gigantic stars.... A plot of land he had wanted then, and now he had the stars, they belonging more to him than to the astrologers who conned them, the fields, more than to the tillers who cultivated them, the sea than to the fishermen who trawled.... He was one with everything, understanding everything, its immense harmony.... From hard earth and wet sea he had arisen on swift, dark pinions until he had been one with the spirit that infused all earth and sea and sky holding the mult.i.tudinous atoms in One with immense will and scheme.... And it was she who had given them to him--Claire-Anne ... the wings of the morning.... The flutter of her white hands ... the eyes that looked and drooped, looked, drooped ...

the little catch in her breath....

His life opened before him now, like a fair seaway. About his appointed tasks he would go in his appointed life ... sailing ships with needed cargoes ... a despatch messenger for the peoples of the world over the vast solitudes of sea ... doing his work well and willingly ... and asking no reward but that the bird of dusk, the mouth of honey, be his to love and be loved by ... to melt with and be one in occult alchemy of soul and mind and body ... to get strength and knowledge, and the understanding which is more than strength and knowledge....

He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five. There were twenty years before them still, twenty years of love and understanding, and then a strange happy twilight, like the dusk of Antrim, that gives way hardly to the short night.... Some day she would marry him and come to his house ...

some day when something that was wrong in her heart was righted and forgotten, something he had no wish to intrude upon, so closely did she conceal it.... There was a locked, haunted room in her heart ... poor heart!... but one day the presence would be exercised, and the room swept and garnished.... Some day she would marry him, and he would bring her home to Ulster.... And who better than she could understand the springy heather and the blue smoke-reek, the crickets of the evening and the curlew's call? And in the house where his mother was cold and arrogant, would be a warm and gracious lady ... Claire-Anne!...

G.o.d! he was thinking long to be in Ma.r.s.eilles again, to go up the dusky path, to call, "Claire-Anne!"

The big Belfast mate larruped down the short companionway.

"How's she doing, Mr. McKinstry?"

"She's doing fine, sir. If I may say so, there's not a better boat sails the water, not the _Sovereign of the Seas_ itself. Nor a better crew to handle things, not on board the king's yacht."

"Nor a better mate, Mr. McKinstry."

"Ah, well, sir; we do wir best."

He tumbled on deck again, and Shane could hear him roar from amidships:

"Lay forward, a couple of you d.a.m.ned farmers, and see if you can't get more out of those jibs. Faster! faster! You're as slow as the grace of G.o.d at a miser's funeral.... If I only had a crew...."

-- 10

She stopped in her swift flight to him through the dusk of the Midi garden.

"Dearest, why is your face so white? Your hands bruised?"

"The consul said something to me--about you--and I knocked him down."

"Oh!" she said, a shocked little cry, and: "Oh!" a drawn-out wail of pain. "Why did you strike him?"

"Because he lied about you."

Her face was turned from him, in the dusk of the crickets, toward the wooded amphitheater, where dead Pontius roved wild-eyed in the dusk, where Lazarus tossed uneasily in his second sleep, where the Greeks lay in alien soil, and the shadows of Roman legionaries looked puzzled at the flat sea, not recognizing busy Tiber--her back was to him, her head up in pain, her nerve-wrenched hands uneasy, white....

"He didn't lie," she said at last. "Oh, you'd have known it sooner or later. No! no! He didn't lie."

"Claire-Anne!"

"He didn't lie. I was just a fool to think--oh, well, he didn't lie. No, no!" she repeated. "He didn't lie." She threw out a hand hopelessly. "He didn't lie."