"See yander. What's agate of the lad?" cried Kisseck. And every one turned to Danny, whose cheeks were as pale as death. "What's it that's ailin' you at all?" shouted Kisseck.

"I--I thought it was--was--a _woman_," stammered Danny, with eyes still fixed on the door.

Loud peals of laughter followed. But wait--what was now going on at the head of the table? When the stranger rose, Christian had risen too. It was the moment to respond to the toast, but Christian glared wildly about him with a tongue that seemed to cleave to his mouth. His gla.s.s fell from his fingers. Every eye was fixed on his face. That face quivered and turned white. Laughter died away on the lip, and the voices were hushed. At last Christian spoke. His words came slowly, and fell on the ear like the clank of a chain across snow.

"Men," he said, "you've been drinking my health. You call me a good fellow. That's wrong. I'm the worst man among you." (Murmurs of dissent and some faint smiles of incredulity.) "Bill says I'm going to the House of Keys one of these days. That's wrong too. Shall I tell you where I _am_ going?" (Christian put one hand up to his head; you could see the throbbing of his temples.) "Shall I tell you?" he cried in a hollow voice and with staring eyes; "I'm going to the devil," and amid the breathless silence he dropped back in his seat and buried his head in his hands.

No one spoke. The fair hair lay on the table among broken pipes and the refuse of spilled beer. Then every man rose to his feet. There could be no more drinking to-night. One after one shambled out. In two minutes the room was empty except for the stricken man, who lay there with hidden face, and Danny Fayle, who, with a big glistening tear in his eye, was stroking the tangled curls.

"Strange now, wasn't it?--strange, uncommon! He's been heavy on the beer lately they're tellin' me. Well, well, it isn't right, and him a gentleman. Not lek as if he was one of us."

"And goin' to be a parson, too, so they're sayin'. It's middlin' wicked anyway, and no disrepec'. _Oie Vie!_ Good-night!"

"Pazon, is it?" says Tommy-Bill-beg. "Never a pazon will they make of his mother's son. What's that they're sayin', 'Never no duck wasn't hatched by a drake.'"

CHAPTER X

"THERE IS SORROW ON THE SEA"

Two months pa.s.sed away, and the mists from the sea were chased by the winds of winter. It was the twenty-third of December. In the two days that followed between that day and Christmas morning occurred the whole series of appalling events which it now remains to us to narrate.

Mona Cregeen and Danny Fayle, with Ruby between them, were walking along the sh.o.r.e from Orry's Head toward the south. The little one prattled and sang, shook out her hair in the wind, and flew down the sand; ran back and clasped a hand of each; and dragged Danny aside to look at this sea-weed, or pulled Mona along to look at that sh.e.l.l; tripped down to the water's edge until the big waves touched her boots, and then back once more with a half-frightened, half-affected laughter-loaded scream.

Mona was serious and even sad, and Danny wore a dejected look in his simple face which added a melancholy interest to its vacant expression.

Since we saw him first in the house of Mylrea Balladhoo, Danny had pa.s.sed through a bitter experience. There was no tangible sorrow, yet who shall measure the depth of his suffering?

When the new element of love first entered into Danny's life, he knew nothing of what it was. A glance out of woman's eyes had in an instant penetrated his nature. He was helpless and pa.s.sive. He would stand for an hour neither thinking nor feeling, but with a look of sheer stupidity. If this was love, Danny knew it by no such name. But presently a ray of sunlight floated into the lad's poor, dense intelligence and everything around was bathed in a new, glad light. The vacant look died away from his face. He smiled and laughed. He ran here and there with a jovial willingness. Even Kisseck's sneers and curses, his threats and blows became all at once easier to bear. "Be aisy with me, Uncle Bill," he would say; "be aisy, uncle, and I'll do it smart and quick astonishin'." People marked the change. "It's none so daft the lad is at all, at all," they said sometimes. This was the second stage of Danny's pa.s.sion--and presently came the third. Then arose a vague yearning not only to love but to be loved. The satisfied heart had not asked so much before, but now it needed this further sustenance. Curious and pathetic were the simple appeals made by Danny for the affection of the woman he loved. Sometimes he took up a huge fish to the cottage of the Cregeens, threw it on the floor, and vanished. Sometimes he talked to Mona of what great things he had done in his time--what fish he had caught, how fast he had rowed, and what weather he had faced. There was not a lad in Peel more modest than Danny, but his simple soul was struggling in this way with a desire to make itself seem worthy of Mona's love. The girl would listen in silence to the accounts of his daring deeds, and when she would look up with a glance of pity into his animated eyes, the eyes of Danny would be brave no more, but fall in confusion to his feet.

Then, bit by bit, it was borne in on Danny that his great, strong, simple love could never be returned; and this was the last stage of his affection. The idea of love had itself been hard to realize, but much harder to understand was the strange and solemn idea of unrequited pa.s.sion. Twenty times had Mona tried in vain to convey this idea to his mind without doing violence to the tenderness of the lad's nature. But that which no artifice could achieve time itself accomplished. Danny began to stay away from the cottage on the "brew," and when, in pity for that unspeakable sorrow which Mona herself knew but too well, the girl asked him why he did not come up as often as before, he answered, "I'm thinking it's not me you're wanting up there." And Danny felt as if the words would choke him.

Then the whole world, which had seemed brighter, or at least less cruel, became bathed in gloom. The lad haunted the seash.o.r.e. The moan of the long dead sea seemed to speak to him in a voice not indeed of cheer but of comforting grief. The white curves of the breakers had something in them that suited better with his mood than the sunlit ripples of a summer sea. The dapple-gray clouds that scudded across the leaden sky, the chill wind that scattered the salt spray and whistled along the gunwale of his boat, the mist, the scream of the sea-bird--all these spoke to his desolate heart in an inarticulate language that was answered by tears.

Poor Danny, a hurricane had uprooted the only idol of your soul, and for you the one flower of life, the flower of love, was torn up and withered forever!

Love? Yes, even the image of a happy love had at length stood up for one moment before his mind, even before his mind. That love itself might have been possible to him, yes, possible to such a one as he was, though laughed at--"rigged" as he called it--here, there, and everywhere--this was the blessed vision of one brief instant. He thought of how he might have clasped her hands by the bright sea, and looked lovingly into her eyes. But no, no, no; not for him had G.o.d sent the gracious love, and Danny turned in his dumb despair to the cold winter sea, shrinking from every human face.

"Is there not a storm coming?" said Mona to Danny, as she and Ruby overtook the boy on the sh.o.r.e that morning.

"Ay, the long cat's tail was going off at a slant a while ago, and now the round thick skate yonder is hanging very low."

As he spoke, Danny turned about and looked at the clouds which we have been taught to know by less homely names.

"Danny, Danny," interrupted the little one, "what is that funny thing you told me the sailors say when the wind is getting up?"

"'Davy's putting on the coppers for the parson,'" answered the lad, absently, and without the semblance of a smile. For the twentieth time Ruby laughed and crowed over the dubious epigram.

Mona glanced sometimes at Danny's listless face as they walked together along the sh.o.r.e with the child between them. His look was dull and at certain moments even silly. Once she thought she saw a tear glistening in his eye, but he had turned his head away in an instant. There were moments when her heart bled for him. People thought her harsh and even cynical. "Aw, allis cowld and freezin' is the air she keeps about her,"

they would say. Perhaps some bitter experience of the past had not a little to do with this. Nothing so sure to petrify the warmer sensibilities as neglect and wrong. But in the presence of Danny's silent sorrow the girl's heart melted, and the almost habitual upward curve at one corner of her mouth disappeared. She knew something of his suffering. She could read it in her own. At some thrilling moment, if Heaven had so ordered it, they two, she and this simple lad, might have uncovered to the other the bleeding wound that each carried hidden in the breast. And that great moment was yet to come, though she knew it not.

Love is a selfish thing, let us say what we will of it besides.

"Danny," said Mona, "have you seen anything more of Christian?"

"Yes," said the lad. Some momentary remorse on Mona's part compelled her to glance into Danny's face. There was no trace of feeling there. It was baffled love, and not jealousy, that had taken the joy out of Danny's life. And as yet the lad had not once reflected that if Mona did not love him it was, perhaps, because she loved another.

"He isn't going," continued Danny.

"Thank G.o.d," said Mona, fervently. "And Kisseck, does he still mean to go?"

"Ay, of coorse he's going. It'll be to-morrow, it seems. I'm to go, too."

"Danny, you must not go," said Mona, dropping Ruby's hand to take hold of the lad's arm. He glanced up vacantly.

"Seems to me it doesn't matter much what I do," he said.

"But it does matter, Danny. What these men are attempting is crime--black, cruel, pitiless crime--murder, no less."

"That's what the young masther was sayin'," answered the lad, absently; "and the one of them hadn't a word to say agen it."

Ruby had tripped away for a moment. Returning with a little oval thing in her hand, she cried, "Danny, what's this? I found it under a stone, and its gills were shining like fire."

"A sea-mouse," said the lad, and taking it out of the child's hand, he added, "I'm less nor this worm to our Bill."

"Danny, would it hurt you much if you were to hear that your uncle Kisseck was being punished?"

The lad lifted his eyes with a bewildered stare. The idea that Bill Kisseck could be punished had never really come to him as within the limits of possibility. Once, indeed, he had thought of something that he might himself do, but the wild notion had vanished with the next glance at Kisseck's face.

"He could be punished," said Mona, "and must be."

Then Danny's eyes glittered and looked strange, but he said not a word.

They walked on, the happy child once more taking a hand from each, and laughing, prattling, leaping, and making little runs between them. Ruby was in a deeper sense the link that bound them, and in the deepest sense of all she was the link that held them apart forever. They had walked to the mouth of the harbor, and Mona held out her hand to say good-bye.

Danny looked beyond her over the sea. There was something in his face that Mona had never before seen there. What it meant she knew not then, except that in a moment he had grown to look old. "The storm is coming,"

said Mona. "I see the diver out at sea. Do you hear his wild note?"

"Ay, and ye see Mother Carey's chicken yonder," said Danny, pointing where the stormy petrel was scudding close to a white wave and uttering a dismal cry. Then, absently and in a low tone, "I think at whiles I'd like to die in a big sea like that," said the lad.

Mona looked for a moment in silence into the lad's hopeless eyes. Danny turned back with his hand in his pockets and his face toward the sand.

Truly a storm was coming, and it was a storm more terrible than wind and rain.

Mona and Ruby continued their walk. It was the slack season at the factory, and Mr. Kinvig's jewel in looms was compelled to stand idle three working days out of the six. The young woman and the child pa.s.sed down the quay to the bridge, crossed to the foot of the Horse Hill, and walked along the south side of the harbor--now full of idle luggers--toward Contrary Head. When they reached the narrow strait which cut off the Castle Isle from the mainland, they took a path that led upward over Contrary Head. A little way up the hill they pa.s.sed Bill Kisseck's cottage. The house stood on a wild headland, and faced nothing but the ruined castle and the open sea. An old quarry had once been worked on the spot, and Kisseck's cottage stood with its front to what must have been the level cutting, and its back to the straight wall of rock. A path wound round the house and came close to the edge of the little precipice. Mona took this path, and as they walked past the back part of the roof a woman's head looked out of a little dormered window that stood in the thatch.