The Deemster. Hall Sir Caine
was now empty. The bishopric had been vacant these five years, and under the heavy rains from the hills and the strong winds from the sea, the old house had fallen into decay.
Thorkell sat in the saddle under the tall elms in the dim light, and his mind was busy with many thoughts. His memory went back with something akin to tenderness to the last days of old Ewan, his father; to his brother, Gilcrist, and then, by a sudden transition, to the incidents of that morning at Castle Rushen. How far in the past that morning seemed to be!
The last rook had cawed out its low guttural note, and the last gleam of daylight died off between the thick boughs of the dark trees that pattered lightly overhead, as Thorkell set off afresh.
When he arrived at Ballamona the night was dark. The Archdeacon was sitting with his daughter, who had not left her room that day. Thorkell, still booted and spurred, ran like a squirrel up the stairs and into the bedroom. In twenty hot words that were fired off like a cloud of small shot from a blunderbuss, Thorkell told what had occurred. His wife's white face showed no pleasure and betrayed no surprise. Her silence acted on Thorkell as a rebuke, and when her eyes rested on his face he turned his own eyes aside. The Archdeacon was almost speechless, but his look of astonishment was eloquent, and when Thorkell left the room he followed him out.
At supper the Archdeacon's manner was that of deep amity.
"They are prompt to appoint a Deemster," he said. "Has it not struck you as strange that the bishopric has been vacant so long?"
Thorkell laughed a little over his plate, and answered that it was strange.
"Maybe it only needs that a name should be suggested," continued the Archdeacon. "That is to say, suggested by a man of influence – a man of position – by the Deemster, for instance."
"Just that," said Thorkell, with a titter.
Then there was an interchange of further amity. When the two men rose from the table the Archdeacon said, with a conscious smile, "Of course, if you should occur – if you should ever think – if, that is, the Deemster should ever suggest a name for the bishopric – of course, he will remember that – that blood, in short, is thicker than water —ta fuill my s'chee na ushtey, as the Manxman says."
"I will remember it," said Thorkell, in a significant tone, and with a faint chuckle.
Satisfied with that day's work, with himself, and with the world, Thorkell then went off to bed, and lay down in peace and content, and slept the sleep of the just.
In due course Thorkell Mylrea became Deemster Ballamona.
He entered upon his duties after the briefest study of the Statute Laws. A Manx judge dispensed justice chiefly by the Breast Laws, the unwritten code locked in his own breast, and supposed to be handed down from Deemster to Deemster. The popular superstition served Thorkell in good stead: there was none to challenge his knowledge of jurisprudence.
As soon as he was settled in his office he began to make inquiries about his brother Gilcrist. He learned that after leaving Cambridge, Gilcrist had taken deacon's orders, and had become tutor to the son of an English nobleman, and afterward chaplain to the nobleman's household. Thorkell addressed him a letter, and received a reply, and this was the first intercourse of the brothers since the death of old Ewan. Gilcrist had lately married; he held a small living on one of the remote moors of Yorkshire; he loved his people and was beloved by them. Thorkell wrote again and again, and yet again, and his letters ran through every tone of remonstrance and entreaty. The end of it was that the Deemster paid yet another visit to the lady deputy at Castle Rushen, and the rumor passed over the island that the same potent influence that had made Thorkell a Deemster was about to make his brother the Bishop of Man.
Then the Archdeacon came down in white wrath to Ballamona, and reminded his son-in-law of his many obligations, touched on benefits forgot, hinted at dark sayings and darker deeds, mentioned, with a significant accent, the girl Mally Kerruish, protested that from causes not to be named he had lost the esteem of his clergy and the reverence of his flock, and wound up with the touching assurance that on that very morning, as he rode from Andreas, he had overheard a burly Manxman say to the tawny-headed fellow who walked with him – both of them the scabbiest sheep on the hills – "There goes the pazon that sold his daughter and bought her husband."
Thorkell listened to the torrent of reproaches, and then said, quietly, as he turned on his heel, "Near is my shirt, but nearer is my skin."
The Deemster's wife held up her head no more. After the christening she rarely left her room. Her cheeks grew thinner, paler they could not grow, and her meek eyes lost their faint lustre. She spoke little, and her interest in life seemed to be all but gone. There was the same abject submission to her husband, but she saw less of him day by day. Only the sight of her babe, when Kerry brought it to be nursed, restored to her face the light of a fleeting joy. If it stayed too long at her breast, if it cried, if its winsome ways made her to laugh outright, the swift recoil of other feelings saddened her to melancholy, and she would put the child from her with a sigh. This went on for several months, and meantime the Deemster was too deeply immersed in secular affairs to make serious note of the shadow that hung over his house. "Goll sheese ny lhiargagh– she's going down the steep places," said Kerry.
It was winter when Gilcrist Mylrea was appointed to reach the island, but he wrote that his wife's health was failing her, that it was not unlikely that she was to bear a child, and that he preferred to postpone his journey until the spring. Before the gorse bushes on the mountains had caught their new spears of green, and before the fishermen of Peeltown had gone down to the sea for their first mackerel, Thorkell's wife was lying in her last illness. She sent for her husband and bade him farewell. The Deemster saw no danger, and he laughed at her meek adieu. She was soon to be the mother of another of his children – that was all. But she shook her head when he rallied her, and when he lifted the little creeping, cooing, babbling Ewan from the floor to his mother's bed, and laughed and held up his long, lean, hairy finger before the baby face and asked the little one with a puff how he would like a little sister, the white face on the pillow twitched and fell, and the meek eyes filled, and the shadow was over all.
"Good-by, Thorkell, and for baby's sake – "
But a shrill peal of Thorkell's laughter rang through the chamber, and at the next instant he was gone from the room.
That day the wife of the Deemster passed beyond the sorrows of the life that had no joys. The angels of life and death had come with linked hands to the new homestead of Ballamona, and the young mother had died in giving birth to a girl.
When the Deemster heard what had happened, his loud scream rang through every room of the house. His soul was in ferment; he seemed to be appalled, and to be stricken, not with sorrow, but with fright and horror.
"She's dead; why, she's dead, she's dead," he cried, hysterically; "why did not somebody tell me that she would die?"
The Deemster buried his wife by the side of old Ewan, under the elder-tree that grew by the wall of the churchyard that stands over by the sea. He summoned no mourners, and few stood with him by the open grave. During the short funeral, his horse was tied to the cross-timbers of the lych-gate, and while the earth was still falling in hollow thuds from the sexton's spade, Thorkell got into the saddle and rode away.
Before sunset he waited by the wooden landing jetty at Derby Haven. The old sea-tub, the "King Orry," made the port that day, and disembarked her passengers. Among them was the new Bishop of Man, Gilcrist Mylrea. He looked much older for the six years he had been away. His tall figure stooped heavily; his thick hair fell in wavelets on his shoulders, and was already sprinkled with gray; his long cheeks were deeply lined. As he stepped from the boat on to the jetty he carried something very tenderly in his arms. He seemed to be alone.
The brothers met with looks of constraint and bewilderment.
"Where is your wife?" asked Thorkell.
"She is gone," said Gilcrist. "I have nothing left of her but this," and he looked down at the burden at his breast.
It was a baby boy. Thorkell's face whitened, and terror was in his eyes.
CHAPTER V
THE MANXMAN'S