The Wind Bloweth Part 7

"Ochanee! Ochanee! Ochanee o! the Shepherd's lamb! She's gone from us!

The high branch on the pleasant little tree! And what's to become of me in my latter days! Me that thought I'd have the beautiful house to live in, and a horse and cart, and a wake would be the envy of many, and not the curate, but the parish priest himself, to be at the head of the funeral. And now I'm to be thrown against the great cruelty of the harsh Northern men! Nine black curses against them and theirs, and on my bare knees I say it. Och, white gull o' the harbor, why did you die? Ochanee!

Ochanee!"

The gabbled rosary, the low laughter in the kitchen, the clink of gla.s.ses, the howling of the _cailleach_--all these noises repulsed him like a forefront of battle. So he did not go into the house, but took his hand from the half-door and returned to the haggard, to the grave, understanding silence of the moon.

-- 4

Because he was so young, and thought he knew so much when in reality he knew so little, young Shane had thought, when he met Moyra Dolan, that he had discovered the morning star. Five and a half years at sea, as apprentice and navigator, had shown his eyes much and his heart little.

He knew Bermuda and the harbor of Kingston. He had beaten up the China Seas. He had seen the clouds over Table Mountain. He knew Baltimore. He had seen the bowsprits of the great Indiamen thrust over the quays of Poplar parish like muskets leveled over a barricade. And to him it was just a wonder, a strange spectacle. The streets were strange as in a dream, and the folk were strange as in a play. One wandered down an avenue, seeing the queer commodities in the shops and booths. One wandered to the right. One wandered to the left. And there was great delight to finding a street one had seen before, maybe only five minutes ago, and one felt one was getting somewhere, was understanding the new country.

But one never did understand the new country. All the people were strange. One could not imagine them about the daily business of life, waking, eating, buying, and selling. Black men and ocher-colored folk.

There seemed to be a mystery somewhere. One imagined them gathering at night in secret to begin their real un-understood life. At times it seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine Glens, that were now angry as an angry man, now gentle as a gentle woman.

Only one thing was constant, and that was the women whom sailors know in ports. And they wore masks. The same easily forced laughter, the same crude flattery, the complacent arms, the eternal eager hand....

And then one day the new port palled, like a book one has read too often, or a picture one has looked at over-long. And it was sheet home the royals and off to a new port, where there were new strange people, and streets laid another way, and other things in the merchants' booths, and a new language to pick up a phrase or two of.

But in the end all palled for a time, the aphrodisiac tropic smell; the coral waters, clear as well water at home; the white houses with the green jalousies; the lush, coa.r.s.e green. And the melancholic drums of the East palled. And palled the grimness of the North. And the unceasing processional of strange secret faces wearied the eye and the mind. And the angular spiritual edges of shipmates wore toward one through the uniform of flesh, became annoying, sometimes unbearable.

And then an immense yearning would come over young Shane for the beloved faces in the lamplight, for the white road over the purple heather, for the garden where the greened sun-dial was, with its long motto in the Irish letter:

_Is mairg a baidhtear in am an anaithe Na tig an ghrian in dhiaidh na fearthainne_--

as if anybody didn't know that, that it was a pity to be drowned in time of storm, for the sun shines brightly when the rain goes!

But the sun-dial was mirrored in his heart, and the purple mountain and the great dun house. The winds he sniffed as a hunting dog does, and each tack to port or starboard either thrilled or cast him down.... When would he get there? Would it be cool of the evening, when the bats were out? Or would it be in the sunshine of the morning, when a great smell was from the heather? And who would hear the wicket-gate click as the latch was lifted, and put a welcome before him with a great shout, uncles Alan or Robin, or a servant girl or boy, or the bent old gardener who kept the lawn true as a bowling-green?... Or would it be his mother?

-- 5

Aboard ship the young apprentices had their problems, problems of conduct, or of girls at home, or of money in port, but for young Shane there was always the problem of his mother.

At home he had regarded as a matter of fact that she should come and go in her hard, efficient French way. It had not seemed strange to him that her mouth was tight, her eyes hard as diamonds. It was to him one with his Uncle Robin's solemnity and Alan Donn's gruff sportsmanship. But away from home he thought of it, brooded over it. Her letters to him were so curt, so cut and dried! She wrote of the birth of another child to young Queen Victoria,--as if that mattered a tinker's curse!--or how her Holland bulbs, which she had bought at Belfast, had withered and died. She directed him "to pray G.o.d to keep him pure in mind and body, your affectionate mother, Louise de Damery Campbell." Alan Donn's letters had the grand smell of harness about them. "You'll mind the brown gelding we bought at Ballymena. He disgraced us at Dublin in the jumping compet.i.tions. You know he can jump his own height, but he got the gate after three tries. I could have graet like a bairn. Well, this will be all from your loving Uncle Alan. P.S. I caught the white trout in Johnson's Brae burn. I was after him, and he was dodging me for six years. Your loving Uncle Alan, P.P.S. The championship is at Newcastle this year, and I think I've a grand chance. If you're home, you can caddy for me. Your loving Uncle Alan."

Uncle Robin's letters had vast wisdom. "Ay be reading the books, laddie.

An ill-educated man feels always at a disadvantage among folk of talent.

Aboard ship you can read and think more than at a university. I've got a parcel for you to take when you go again. Hakluyt's Voyages and a good Marco Polo. And the new book of Mr. d.i.c.kens, 'The Haunted Man.' And there's a great new writer you'll not want to miss, by name of Thackeray." And there'd be the Bank of England note, "for fear you might be needing it on a special occasion, and not having it, and feeling bad." Dear Uncle Robin! And then the flash of tenderness, like a rainbow: "G.o.d bless you and keep you, my brother's son!"

His Uncle Robin's letters he would greet with a smile, and perhaps a bit moistness in the eye; Alan Donn's with a grin, as an elder brother's.

But his mother's letters he would approach with a coldness akin to fear.

He hated to open them. It was like an unpleasant duty.

The realization of her was always a chilling disappointment, but the dream of her was a great hope. And in the black waters of the China Seas, or in the night watches off the Azores, where the porpoises played in the phosph.o.r.escence, there would come a sea-change over the knowledge he had of her. All the spiritual, all the mental angles of her faded into gracious line, and on the tight French lips of her a smile would play as a flower opens, and her eyes, hard as diamonds, would open and become kindly as a lighted house. And the strange things of the heart would come out, like little shy rabbits, or like the young tortoises, and bask in that kindly picture. And the things that were between them, that could not be said, but just sensed, as the primroses of spring are sensed, not seen, not felt, hardly smelt even, but sensed.... The hesitant deep things he would say and the dignified, smiling answer, or the pressure of the hand even, and the inclination of the shoulder....

And the people he would meet who would ask him about his mother, and he could answer nothing, so that they thought him stupid and unthoughtful.

But really what was there to say?... And once when he sprang into Biscay Bay after a cabin-boy who had fallen over the taffrail, and the lad's mother had thanked him in Plymouth for saving the child's life: "Your mother will be very proud of you," the old woman said. But the reality of the harsh Frenchwoman came to him like a slap in the face. "Christ, if she only were!" his heart cried. But the clipped little Scots-Irish voice replied, "Aye, I suppose she will."

And again the soft mood would come, and then he would have a letter from her, ending with that harsh command, that was a gust of some bleak tempest of her own life, where his father had perished: "Pray G.o.d to keep you pure in mind and body!"

And homeward bound again, in the soft murmur of the wind among the shrouds, and the little laughter of the water at the bows, there would abide with him again the dream mother of the night watches, until he said to himself that surely the reality was false, and at the garden-gate she would be waiting for him with a great depth of kindness in her eyes, and arms warm as sunshine, and a bosom where a boy might rest his head for a moment after the great harshness of the strange places.

But the kindliness came not from her. It came from Robin More, who ran down the garden faster than his dignity should have allowed him. "Are you all right, wee Shane? Is everything all right with you? You're looking fine, but you haven't been sick, wee fellow? Tell me, you haven't been sick?" Or from Alan Donn, with his great snort of laughter: "Christ! are you home again? And all the good men that's been lost at sea! Well, the devil's childer have the devil's luck. Eigh, laddie, gie's a feel o' ye. _A Righ_--O King of Graces, but you're the lean pup! Morag, Nellie, Ca.s.sie, some tea! and be d.a.m.ned quick about it!"

And then his mother would come into the room, like a cold wind or a thin ghost, and there would be a kiss on the cheek, a cold, precise peck, like a bird's. And, "Did you have a good voyage?" just as if she said, "Do you think we'll have rain?"

Oh, well, to h.e.l.l with it! as Alan Donn said when he flubbed his approach to the last green for some championship or other. "What you never had, you never lost!"

Aye, true indeed. What you never had you couldn't very well lose. Aye, there was a lot in that. Just so; but--

Boys do be thinking long....

-- 6

Because his Uncle Alan was in Scotland somewhere shooting deer and would not be home for several days, and because Uncle Robin was in Paris, and because the _Goban Saor_ put into Dundalk to take a cargo of unbleached linen, young Shane decided to stay there for a few days before proceeding northward to the Antrim Glens. He felt he couldn't face the house at Cushendu with his cold, precise mother alone there, so he accepted the hospitality of an apprentice friend.

It was at a country barn dance during these few days that he met Moyra Dolan.

A tallish, tawny-haired woman with the dead-white skin that goes with reddish hair, with steel for eyes, there was a grace and carriage to her that put her aside from the other peasant girls as a queen may masquerade as a slave and yet betray herself as a queen. Other girls there were as pretty, with their hair like flax and their eyes like blue water; with hair like a dim blue cloud and eyes like a smudge of charcoal. But none had her teeth, her small ankles, her long, sensitive hands. Some strain of the Stuart cavaliers had crept into that hardy peasant stock on the way to the defeat of the Boyne Water.... She might have seemed nothing but a pretty lady's maid in London or Dublin but in North Louth she was like a queen....

Her looks were her tragedy, for she held herself too good for a laboring man to marry, and, having no dower, no farmer would have her.

Among the peasantry romance does not count, but land. And if the Queen of Sheba, and she having nothing but her shift, were to offer herself in marriage to a strong farmer, he would refuse her for the cross-eyed woman in the next townland who had twenty acres and five good milch cows.... Only for the very rich or the very poor is romance!

Her only chance for marriage was a matter of luck. She would have to meet some government official, or some medical student home on his holidays, or some small merchant whom her beauty would unbalance, as drink would unbalance him. And she must dazzle, and her old mother play and catch him, as a jack pike is dazzled by a spoon bait, hooked, and brought ash.o.r.e. She might marry or might miss, or grow into an acidulous red-headed woman. It was a matter of luck. And her luck was in. She met young Shane Campbell.

They danced together. They wandered in the moonlight. They met in the country lanes. And they were very silent, she because she played a game, and a counter is better than a lead, and he because he was in love with her. Had it been only a matter of sweethearting, he would have been merry as a singing bird, full of chatter, roughing it with her for a kiss. But it was love with him, and a thing for life, and life was long and more serious than death.... So he was silent.

He was silent when he went home for a week, silent with uncles Robin and Alan, who sensed he was going through one of the crises of adolescence, and knew the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He was silent with his mother, who saw nothing, cared nothing, so intent was she on revolving within herself as inexorably as the planets revolve in s.p.a.ce.

He decided to spend the last days of his leave in Dundalk. And at the railroad station in Ballymena he hazarded a look at Alan Donn.

"Uncle Alan--" and he stopped.

"What is it, laddie? Is it a girl troubling you? Take my advice and look her in the eyes and, 'You can love me or leave me, and to h.e.l.l with you!' tell her. 'Do you see this right foot of mine?' says you. 'Well, it's pointed to the next townland, where there's just as pretty a one as you.' And you'll find her come around; maybe there'll be a bit of an argument, but she'll come around. And if she doesn't, there'd have been no hope for you, anyway. A touch o' the spur for the lazy mare and a bit sugar for the jumper! And when you've done loving her, gie her a chuck in the chin: 'Good-by! Good luck! What you keep to yoursel' 'll worry n.o.body,' says you. And to h.e.l.l with her!"

"Alan Donn!"

"Oh, it's that way, is it, Shaneen? If you're in deep water, there's none but yourself can help you, laddie. I thought it was just maybe a case o' laugh and kiss me. But it's different, is it? There's no use giving advice. What's in you will out. But remember this: when it's over, for good or bad, your Uncle Alan's here, to laugh with you or greet with you or help you out of a hole. So--

"Good-by, laddie. _Beannacht leat!_ My blessing with you!"

-- 7

"Young lad, what is this you have done to my fine young daughter?"

"I have done nothing, Bhean 'i Dolain," young Shane flared up, "save in honor, and the man or woman who says other lies."

"Agra, I know that. I know there's no harm in you from head to foot. And the trouble you've put on her is in her heart. All day long she sighs, and is listless as a shaded plant that does be needing the sun. All night long she keeps awake, and the wee silent tears come down her face.