Transcribed from the 1904 edition Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





THE MERRY MEN
AND
Other Tales and Fables


BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

TENTH EDITION

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1904

Three of the following Tales have appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_;
one in _Longman's_; one in Mr. Henry Norman's Christmas Annual; and one
in the _Court and Society Review_.  The Author desires to make proper
acknowledgements to the Publishers concerned.




Dedication


_MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR_,

_To your name_, _if I wrote on brass_, _I could add nothing_; _it has
been already written higher than I could dream to reach_, _by a strong
and dear hand_; _and if I now dedicate to you these tales_, _it is not as
the writer who brings you his work_, _but as the friend who would remind
you of his affection_.

_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON_

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.




Contents


The Merry Men

    i.    Eilean Aros

    ii.   What the wreck had brought to Aros

    iii.  Land and sea in Sandag Bay

    iv.   The gale

    v.    A man out of the sea

Will o' the Mill

Markheim

Thrawn Janet

Olalla

The Treasure of Franchard

    i.    By the dying Mountebank

    ii.   Morning tale

    iii.  The adoption

    iv.   The education of the philosopher

    v.    Treasure trove

    vi.   A criminal investigation, in two parts

    vii.  The fall of the House of Desprez

    viii. The wages of philosophy




THE MERRY MEN


CHAPTER I.  EILEAN AROS.


It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for
the last time for Aros.  A boat had put me ashore the night before at
Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving
all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck
right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from
an unmixed lowland stock.  But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a
poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the
islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when
she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had
remained in his possession.  It brought him in nothing but the means of
life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued;
he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh
adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny.
Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help
nor contentment.  Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands;
there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the
luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left
a son to his name and a little money to support it.  I was a student of
Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without
kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the
Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than
water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to
count Aros as my home.  Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in
that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between
the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done
with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July
day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as
rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full
of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen--all overlooked from
the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw.
_The Mountain of the Mist_, they say the words signify in the Gaelic
tongue; and it is well named.  For that hill-top, which is more than
three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing
from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make
them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there
would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw.  It brought water, too, and was
mossy {5} to the top in consequence.  I have seen us sitting in broad
sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape upon the
mountain.  But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to
my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet
rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros,
fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track.  It twisted so as nearly to
double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a
man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the
moss came nearly to the knee.  There was no cultivation anywhere, and not
one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros.  Houses of course there
were--three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other
that no stranger could have found them from the track.  A large part of
the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a
two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in
between them where the vipers breed.  Anyway the wind was, it was always
sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over
all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle
with the brightness of the sea.  From the very midst of the land, on a
day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring, like a
battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the
breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself--Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it
means _the House of God_--Aros itself was not properly a piece of the
Ross, nor was it quite an islet.  It formed the south-west corner of the
land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the
coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.
When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land
river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water
itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the
bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could
pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland.  There was some good pasture,
where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better
because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the
Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle.  The house was a good
one for that country, two storeys high.  It looked westward over a bay,
with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the
vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day.  There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides
instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of
them instead of the poisonous viper of the land.  On calm days you can go
wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about
the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that hears
that cauldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size.  Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as
a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,
some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly
blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers
breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs.  But
it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here
running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_ we
call it--at the tail of the land.  I have often been out there in a dead
calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea
swirling and combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and now
and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the _Roost_ were
talking to itself.  But when the tide begins to run again, and above all
in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a mile of
it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place.
You can hear the roaring of it six miles away.  At the seaward end there
comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers
dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have got the
name, in these parts, of the Merry Men.  I have heard it said that they
run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray
runs twice as high as that.  Whether they got the name from their
movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make
about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than
I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our archipelago
is no better than a trap.  If a ship got through the reefs, and weathered
the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south coast of Aros, in
Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our family, as I propose
to tell.  The thought of all these dangers, in the place I knew so long,
makes me particularly welcome the works now going forward to set lights
upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of our iron-bound,
inhospitable islands.

The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from my
uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had transferred
his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage.  There
was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did
business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of
the Roost.  A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there
sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he
was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died,
said only one form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I
cannot tell, but they were thus translated: 'Ah, the sweet singing out of
the sea.'  Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to
man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters.  It was here that a
certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to convert the
Hebrideans.  And, indeed, I think he had some claim to be called saint;
for, with the boats of that past age, to make so rough a passage, and
land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not far short of the
miraculous.  It was to him, or to some of his monkish underlings who had
a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and beautiful name, the House
of God.

Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear
with more credulity.  As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the
ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland,
one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some
solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, her
colours flying even as she sank.  There was some likelihood in this tale;
for another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty miles from
Grisapol.  It was told, I thought, with more detail and gravity than its
companion stories, and there was one particularity which went far to
convince me of its truth: the name, that is, of the ship was still
remembered, and sounded, in my ears, Spanishly.  The _Espirito Santo_
they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns, laden with treasure
and grandees of Spain, and fierce soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to
all eternity, done with her wars and voyages, in Sandag bay, upon the
west of Aros.  No more salvos of ordnance for that tall ship, the 'Holy
Spirit,' no more fair winds or happy ventures; only to rot there deep in
the sea-tangle and hear the shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran
high about the island.  It was a strange thought to me first and last,
and only grew stranger as I learned the more of Spain, from which she had
set sail with so proud a company, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that
sent her on that voyage.

And now I must tell you, as I walked from Grisapol that day, the
_Espirito Santo_ was very much in my reflections.  I had been favourably
remarked by our then Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous writer,
Dr. Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some papers of an
ancient date to rearrange and sift of what was worthless; and in one of
these, to my great wonder, I found a note of this very ship, the
_Espirito Santo_, with her captain's name, and how she carried a great
part of the Spaniard's treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross of
Grisapol; but in what particular spot, the wild tribes of that place and
period would give no information to the king's inquiries.  Putting one
thing with another, and taking our island tradition together with this
note of old King Jamie's perquisitions after wealth, it had come strongly
on my mind that the spot for which he sought in vain could be no other
than the small bay of Sandag on my uncle's land; and being a fellow of a
mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to weigh that good
ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, and doubloons, and bring back
our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten dignity and wealth.

This was a design of which I soon had reason to repent.  My mind was
sharply turned on different reflections; and since I became the witness
of a strange judgment of God's, the thought of dead men's treasures has
been intolerable to my conscience.  But even at that time I must acquit
myself of sordid greed; for if I desired riches, it was not for their own
sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart--my uncle's
daughter, Mary Ellen.  She had been educated well, and had been a time to
school upon the mainland; which, poor girl, she would have been happier
without.  For Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the servant, and
her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in Scotland, plainly bred
up in a country place among Cameronians, long a skipper sailing out of
the Clyde about the islands, and now, with infinite discontent, managing
his sheep and a little 'long shore fishing for the necessary bread.  If
it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but a month or two, you
may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same desert all the year
round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the Merry Men singing and
dancing in the Roost!



CHAPTER II.  WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS.


It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing
for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat.
I had no need to repeat the signal.  At the first sound, Mary was at the
door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged
serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier.  For all his
hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed
him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously
into the wake.  As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and haggard, and
I thought he avoided my eye.  The coble had been repaired, with two new
thwarts and several patches of some rare and beautiful foreign wood, the
name of it unknown to me.

'Why, Rorie,' said I, as we began the return voyage, 'this is fine wood.
How came you by that?'

'It will be hard to cheesel,' Rorie opined reluctantly; and just then,
dropping the oars, he made another of those dives into the stern which I
had remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my
shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.

'What is wrong?' I asked, a good deal startled.

'It will be a great feesh,' said the old man, returning to his oars; and
nothing more could I get out of him, but strange glances and an ominous
nodding of the head.  In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure
of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake.  The water was still
and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay, exceeding deep.
For some time I could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if
something dark--a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow--followed
studiously in the track of the moving coble.  And then I remembered one
of Rorie's superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in some great,
exterminating feud among the clans; a fish, the like of it unknown in all
our waters, followed for some years the passage of the ferry-boat, until
no man dared to make the crossing.

'He will be waiting for the right man,' said Rorie.

Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of
Aros.  Outside and inside there were many changes.  The garden was fenced
with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in the
kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from the
window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was swinging
from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of linen and
silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain old kitchen
that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the stools, and the
closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun shone into, and the
clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the mantelshelf and the three-
cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells instead of sand, on the floor;
with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three
patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment--poor man's
patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and
Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing.  The room,
like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so
neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed by these incongruous
additions, filled me with indignation and a kind of anger.  In view of
the errand I had come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust;
but it burned high, at the first moment, in my heart.

'Mary, girl,' said I, 'this is the place I had learned to call my home,
and I do not know it.'

'It is my home by nature, not by the learning,' she replied; 'the place I
was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these
changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them.  I would
have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into the sea,
and the Merry Men were dancing on them now.'

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared
with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was even
graver than of custom.

'Ay,' said I, 'I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when
my father died, I took his goods without remorse.'

'Your father died a clean strae death, as the folk say,' said Mary.

'True,' I returned; 'and a wreck is like a judgment.  What was she
called?'

'They ca'd her the _Christ-Anna_,' said a voice behind me; and, turning
round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;
fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat
between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea.  He never
laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like the
Cameronians he had been brought up among; and indeed, in many ways, used
to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times before the
Revolution.  But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I used to think,
much guidance, by his piety.  He had his black fits when he was afraid of
hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would look back with envy,
and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.

As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his
head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to
have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his
face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or
the bones of the dead.

'Ay' he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, 'the _Christ-
Anna_.  It's an awfu' name.'

I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of health;
for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

'I'm in the body,' he replied, ungraciously enough; 'aye in the body and
the sins of the body, like yoursel'.  Denner,' he said abruptly to Mary,
and then ran on to me: 'They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten, are
they no?  Yon's a bonny knock {15}, but it'll no gang; and the napery's
by ordnar.  Bonny, bairnly braws; it's for the like o' them folk sells
the peace of God that passeth understanding; it's for the like o' them,
an' maybe no even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to His face and burn
in muckle hell; and it's for that reason the Scripture ca's them, as I
read the passage, the accursed thing.  Mary, ye girzie,' he interrupted
himself to cry with some asperity, 'what for hae ye no put out the twa
candlesticks?'

'Why should we need them at high noon?' she asked.

But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea.  'We'll bruik {16} them
while we may,' he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought silver
were added to the table equipage, already so unsuited to that rough sea-
side farm.

'She cam' ashore Februar' 10, about ten at nicht,' he went on to me.
'There was nae wind, and a sair run o' sea; and she was in the sook o'
the Roost, as I jaloose.  We had seen her a' day, Rorie and me, beating
to the wind.  She wasnae a handy craft, I'm thinking, that _Christ-Anna_;
for she would neither steer nor stey wi' them.  A sair day they had of
it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it perishin' cauld--ower
cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o' wind, and awa' again,
to pit the emp'y hope into them.  Eh, man! but they had a sair day for
the last o't!  He would have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore
upon the back o' that.'

'And were all lost?' I cried.  'God held them!'

'Wheesht!' he said sternly.  'Nane shall pray for the deid on my hearth-
stane.'

I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and he seemed to accept
my disclaimer with unusual facility, and ran on once more upon what had
evidently become a favourite subject.

'We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an' me, and a' thae braws in the inside
of her.  There's a kittle bit, ye see, about Sandag; whiles the sook rins
strong for the Merry Men; an' whiles again, when the tide's makin' hard
an' ye can hear the Roost blawin' at the far-end of Aros, there comes a
back-spang of current straucht into Sandag Bay.  Weel, there's the thing
that got the grip on the _Christ-Anna_.  She but to have come in ram-stam
an' stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften under, and the back-side
of her is clear at hie-water o' neaps.  But, man! the dunt that she cam
doon wi' when she struck!  Lord save us a'! but it's an unco life to be a
sailor--a cauld, wanchancy life.  Mony's the gliff I got mysel' in the
great deep; and why the Lord should hae made yon unco water is mair than
ever I could win to understand.  He made the vales and the pastures, the
bonny green yaird, the halesome, canty land--

   And now they shout and sing to Thee,
   For Thou hast made them glad,

as the Psalms say in the metrical version.  No that I would preen my
faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind.  "Who go
to sea in ships," they hae't again--

            And in
      Great waters trading be,
   Within the deep these men God's works
      And His great wonders see.

Weel, it's easy sayin' sae.  Maybe Dauvit wasnae very weel acquant wi'
the sea.  But, troth, if it wasnae prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be
temp'it to think it wasnae the Lord, but the muckle, black deil that made
the sea.  There's naething good comes oot o't but the fish; an' the
spentacle o' God riding on the tempest, to be shure, whilk would be what
Dauvit was likely ettling at.  But, man, they were sair wonders that God
showed to the _Christ-Anna_--wonders, do I ca' them?  Judgments, rather:
judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons o' the deep.  And their
souls--to think o' that--their souls, man, maybe no prepared!  The sea--a
muckle yett to hell!'

I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice was unnaturally moved and
his manner unwontedly demonstrative.  He leaned forward at these last
words, for example, and touched me on the knee with his spread fingers,
looking up into my face with a certain pallor, and I could see that his
eyes shone with a deep-seated fire, and that the lines about his mouth
were drawn and tremulous.

Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning of our meal, did not detach
him from his train of thought beyond a moment.  He condescended, indeed,
to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I thought it
was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which was, as
usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his preoccupation,
praying, as he did, that God would 'remember in mercy fower puir,
feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane beside the
great and dowie waters.'

Soon there came an interchange of speeches between him and Rorie.

'Was it there?' asked my uncle.

'Ou, ay!' said Rorie.

I observed that they both spoke in a manner of aside, and with some show
of embarrassment, and that Mary herself appeared to colour, and looked
down on her plate.  Partly to show my knowledge, and so relieve the party
from an awkward strain, partly because I was curious, I pursued the
subject.

'You mean the fish?' I asked.

'Whatten fish?' cried my uncle.  'Fish, quo' he!  Fish!  Your een are fu'
o' fatness, man; your heid dozened wi' carnal leir.  Fish! it's a bogle!'

He spoke with great vehemence, as though angry; and perhaps I was not
very willing to be put down so shortly, for young men are disputatious.
At least I remember I retorted hotly, crying out upon childish
superstitions.

'And ye come frae the College!' sneered Uncle Gordon.  'Gude kens what
they learn folk there; it's no muckle service onyway.  Do ye think, man,
that there's naething in a' yon saut wilderness o' a world oot wast
there, wi' the sea grasses growin', an' the sea beasts fechtin', an' the
sun glintin' down into it, day by day?  Na; the sea's like the land, but
fearsomer.  If there's folk ashore, there's folk in the sea--deid they
may be, but they're folk whatever; and as for deils, there's nane that's
like the sea deils.  There's no sae muckle harm in the land deils, when
a's said and done.  Lang syne, when I was a callant in the south country,
I mind there was an auld, bald bogle in the Peewie Moss.  I got a glisk
o' him mysel', sittin' on his hunkers in a hag, as gray's a tombstane.
An', troth, he was a fearsome-like taed.  But he steered naebody.  Nae
doobt, if ane that was a reprobate, ane the Lord hated, had gane by there
wi' his sin still upon his stamach, nae doobt the creature would hae
lowped upo' the likes o' him.  But there's deils in the deep sea would
yoke on a communicant!  Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon wi' the puir lads
in the _Christ-Anna_, ye would ken by now the mercy o' the seas.  If ye
had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would hate the thocht of it as I do.
If ye had but used the een God gave ye, ye would hae learned the
wickedness o' that fause, saut, cauld, bullering creature, and of a'
that's in it by the Lord's permission: labsters an' partans, an' sic
like, howking in the deid; muckle, gutsy, blawing whales; an' fish--the
hale clan o' them--cauld-wamed, blind-eed uncanny ferlies.  O, sirs,' he
cried, 'the horror--the horror o' the sea!'

We were all somewhat staggered by this outburst; and the speaker himself,
after that last hoarse apostrophe, appeared to sink gloomily into his own
thoughts.  But Rorie, who was greedy of superstitious lore, recalled him
to the subject by a question.

'You will not ever have seen a teevil of the sea?' he asked.

'No clearly,' replied the other.  'I misdoobt if a mere man could see ane
clearly and conteenue in the body.  I hae sailed wi' a lad--they ca'd him
Sandy Gabart; he saw ane, shure eneueh, an' shure eneueh it was the end
of him.  We were seeven days oot frae the Clyde--a sair wark we had
had--gaun north wi' seeds an' braws an' things for the Macleod.  We had
got in ower near under the Cutchull'ns, an' had just gane about by soa,
an' were off on a lang tack, we thocht would maybe hauld as far's
Copnahow.  I mind the nicht weel; a mune smoored wi' mist; a fine gaun
breeze upon the water, but no steedy; an'--what nane o' us likit to
hear--anither wund gurlin' owerheid, amang thae fearsome, auld stane
craigs o' the Cutchull'ns.  Weel, Sandy was forrit wi' the jib sheet; we
couldnae see him for the mains'l, that had just begude to draw, when a'
at ance he gied a skirl.  I luffed for my life, for I thocht we were ower
near Soa; but na, it wasnae that, it was puir Sandy Gabart's deid
skreigh, or near hand, for he was deid in half an hour.  A't he could
tell was that a sea deil, or sea bogle, or sea spenster, or sic-like, had
clum up by the bowsprit, an' gi'en him ae cauld, uncanny look.  An', or
the life was oot o' Sandy's body, we kent weel what the thing betokened,
and why the wund gurled in the taps o' the Cutchull'ns; for doon it
cam'--a wund do I ca' it! it was the wund o' the Lord's anger--an' a'
that nicht we foucht like men dementit, and the niest that we kenned we
were ashore in Loch Uskevagh, an' the cocks were crawin' in Benbecula.'

'It will have been a merman,' Rorie said.

'A merman!' screamed my uncle with immeasurable scorn.  'Auld wives'
clavers!  There's nae sic things as mermen.'

'But what was the creature like?' I asked.

'What like was it?  Gude forbid that we suld ken what like it was!  It
had a kind of a heid upon it--man could say nae mair.'

Then Rorie, smarting under the affront, told several tales of mermen,
mermaids, and sea-horses that had come ashore upon the islands and
attacked the crews of boats upon the sea; and my uncle, in spite of his
incredulity, listened with uneasy interest.

'Aweel, aweel,' he said, 'it may be sae; I may be wrang; but I find nae
word o' mermen in the Scriptures.'

'And you will find nae word of Aros Roost, maybe,' objected Rorie, and
his argument appeared to carry weight.

When dinner was over, my uncle carried me forth with him to a bank behind
the house.  It was a very hot and quiet afternoon; scarce a ripple
anywhere upon the sea, nor any voice but the familiar voice of sheep and
gulls; and perhaps in consequence of this repose in nature, my kinsman
showed himself more rational and tranquil than before.  He spoke evenly
and almost cheerfully of my career, with every now and then a reference
to the lost ship or the treasures it had brought to Aros.  For my part, I
listened to him in a sort of trance, gazing with all my heart on that
remembered scene, and drinking gladly the sea-air and the smoke of peats
that had been lit by Mary.

Perhaps an hour had passed when my uncle, who had all the while been
covertly gazing on the surface of the little bay, rose to his feet and
bade me follow his example.  Now I should say that the great run of tide
at the south-west end of Aros exercises a perturbing influence round all
the coast.  In Sandag Bay, to the south, a strong current runs at certain
periods of the flood and ebb respectively; but in this northern bay--Aros
Bay, as it is called--where the house stands and on which my uncle was
now gazing, the only sign of disturbance is towards the end of the ebb,
and even then it is too slight to be remarkable.  When there is any
swell, nothing can be seen at all; but when it is calm, as it often is,
there appear certain strange, undecipherable marks--sea-runes, as we may
name them--on the glassy surface of the bay.  The like is common in a
thousand places on the coast; and many a boy must have amused himself as
I did, seeking to read in them some reference to himself or those he
loved.  It was to these marks that my uncle now directed my attention,
struggling, as he did so, with an evident reluctance.

'Do ye see yon scart upo' the water?' he inquired; 'yon ane wast the gray
stane?  Ay?  Weel, it'll no be like a letter, wull it?'

'Certainly it is,' I replied.  'I have often remarked it.  It is like a
C.'

He heaved a sigh as if heavily disappointed with my answer, and then
added below his breath: 'Ay, for the _Christ-Anna_.'

'I used to suppose, sir, it was for myself,' said I; 'for my name is
Charles.'

'And so ye saw't afore?', he ran on, not heeding my remark.  'Weel, weel,
but that's unco strange.  Maybe, it's been there waitin', as a man wad
say, through a' the weary ages.  Man, but that's awfu'.'  And then,
breaking off: 'Ye'll no see anither, will ye?' he asked.

'Yes,' said I.  'I see another very plainly, near the Ross side, where
the road comes down--an M.'

'An M,' he repeated very low; and then, again after another pause: 'An'
what wad ye make o' that?' he inquired.

'I had always thought it to mean Mary, sir,' I answered, growing somewhat
red, convinced as I was in my own mind that I was on the threshold of a
decisive explanation.

But we were each following his own train of thought to the exclusion of
the other's.  My uncle once more paid no attention to my words; only hung
his head and held his peace; and I might have been led to fancy that he
had not heard me, if his next speech had not contained a kind of echo
from my own.

'I would say naething o' thae clavers to Mary,' he observed, and began to
walk forward.

There is a belt of turf along the side of Aros Bay, where walking is
easy; and it was along this that I silently followed my silent kinsman.  I
was perhaps a little disappointed at having lost so good an opportunity
to declare my love; but I was at the same time far more deeply exercised
at the change that had befallen my uncle.  He was never an ordinary,
never, in the strict sense, an amiable, man; but there was nothing in
even the worst that I had known of him before, to prepare me for so
strange a transformation.  It was impossible to close the eyes against
one fact; that he had, as the saying goes, something on his mind; and as
I mentally ran over the different words which might be represented by the
letter M--misery, mercy, marriage, money, and the like--I was arrested
with a sort of start by the word murder.  I was still considering the
ugly sound and fatal meaning of the word, when the direction of our walk
brought us to a point from which a view was to be had to either side,
back towards Aros Bay and homestead, and forward on the ocean, dotted to
the north with isles, and lying to the southward blue and open to the
sky.  There my guide came to a halt, and stood staring for awhile on that
expanse.  Then he turned to me and laid a hand on my arm.

'Ye think there's naething there?' he said, pointing with his pipe; and
then cried out aloud, with a kind of exultation: 'I'll tell ye, man!  The
deid are down there--thick like rattons!'

He turned at once, and, without another word, we retraced our steps to
the house of Aros.

I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was not till after supper, and
then but for a short while, that I could have a word with her.  I lost no
time beating about the bush, but spoke out plainly what was on my mind.

'Mary,' I said, 'I have not come to Aros without a hope.  If that should
prove well founded, we may all leave and go somewhere else, secure of
daily bread and comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that,
which it would seem extravagant in me to promise.  But there's a hope
that lies nearer to my heart than money.'  And at that I paused.  'You
can guess fine what that is, Mary,' I said.  She looked away from me in
silence, and that was small encouragement, but I was not to be put off.
'All my days I have thought the world of you,' I continued; 'the time
goes on and I think always the more of you; I could not think to be happy
or hearty in my life without you: you are the apple of my eye.'  Still
she looked away, and said never a word; but I thought I saw that her
hands shook.  'Mary,' I cried in fear, 'do ye no like me?'

'O, Charlie man,' she said, 'is this a time to speak of it?  Let me be, a
while; let me be the way I am; it'll not be you that loses by the
waiting!'

I made out by her voice that she was nearly weeping, and this put me out
of any thought but to compose her.  'Mary Ellen,' I said, 'say no more; I
did not come to trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your time too;
and you have told me all I wanted.  Only just this one thing more: what
ails you?'

She owned it was her father, but would enter into no particulars, only
shook her head, and said he was not well and not like himself, and it was
a great pity.  She knew nothing of the wreck.  'I havenae been near it,'
said she.  'What for would I go near it, Charlie lad?  The poor souls are
gone to their account long syne; and I would just have wished they had
ta'en their gear with them--poor souls!'

This was scarcely any great encouragement for me to tell her of the
_Espirito Santo_; yet I did so, and at the very first word she cried out
in surprise.  'There was a man at Grisapol,' she said, 'in the month of
May--a little, yellow, black-avised body, they tell me, with gold rings
upon his fingers, and a beard; and he was speiring high and low for that
same ship.'

It was towards the end of April that I had been given these papers to
sort out by Dr. Robertson: and it came suddenly back upon my mind that
they were thus prepared for a Spanish historian, or a man calling himself
such, who had come with high recommendations to the Principal, on a
mission of inquiry as to the dispersion of the great Armada.  Putting one
thing with another, I fancied that the visitor 'with the gold rings upon
his fingers' might be the same with Dr. Robertson's historian from
Madrid.  If that were so, he would be more likely after treasure for
himself than information for a learned society.  I made up my mind, I
should lose no time over my undertaking; and if the ship lay sunk in
Sandag Bay, as perhaps both he and I supposed, it should not be for the
advantage of this ringed adventurer, but for Mary and myself, and for the
good, old, honest, kindly family of the Darnaways.



CHAPTER III.  LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAY.


I was early afoot next morning; and as soon as I had a bite to eat, set
forth upon a tour of exploration.  Something in my heart distinctly told
me that I should find the ship of the Armada; and although I did not give
way entirely to such hopeful thoughts, I was still very light in spirits
and walked upon air.  Aros is a very rough islet, its surface strewn with
great rocks and shaggy with fernland heather; and my way lay almost north
and south across the highest knoll; and though the whole distance was
inside of two miles it took more time and exertion than four upon a level
road.  Upon the summit, I paused.  Although not very high--not three
hundred feet, as I think--it yet outtops all the neighbouring lowlands of
the Ross, and commands a great view of sea and islands.  The sun, which
had been up some time, was already hot upon my neck; the air was listless
and thundery, although purely clear; away over the north-west, where the
isles lie thickliest congregated, some half-a-dozen small and ragged
clouds hung together in a covey; and the head of Ben Kyaw wore, not
merely a few streamers, but a solid hood of vapour.  There was a threat
in the weather.  The sea, it is true, was smooth like glass: even the
Roost was but a seam on that wide mirror, and the Merry Men no more than
caps of foam; but to my eye and ear, so long familiar with these places,
the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a sound of it, like a long sigh,
mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet as it was, the Roost itself
appeared to be revolving mischief.  For I ought to say that all we
dwellers in these parts attributed, if not prescience, at least a quality
of warning, to that strange and dangerous creature of the tides.

I hurried on, then, with the greater speed, and had soon descended the
slope of Aros to the part that we call Sandag Bay.  It is a pretty large
piece of water compared with the size of the isle; well sheltered from
all but the prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low
sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several fathoms deep
along a ledge of rocks.  It is upon that side that, at a certain time
each flood, the current mentioned by my uncle sets so strong into the
bay; a little later, when the Roost begins to work higher, an undertow
runs still more strongly in the reverse direction; and it is the action
of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured that part so deep.  Nothing
is to be seen out of Sandag Bay, but one small segment of the horizon
and, in heavy weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef.

From half-way down the hill, I had perceived the wreck of February last,
a brig of considerable tonnage, lying, with her back broken, high and dry
on the east corner of the sands; and I was making directly towards it,
and already almost on the margin of the turf, when my eyes were suddenly
arrested by a spot, cleared of fern and heather, and marked by one of
those long, low, and almost human-looking mounds that we see so commonly
in graveyards.  I stopped like a man shot.  Nothing had been said to me
of any dead man or interment on the island; Rorie, Mary, and my uncle had
all equally held their peace; of her at least, I was certain that she
must be ignorant; and yet here, before my eyes, was proof indubitable of
the fact.  Here was a grave; and I had to ask myself, with a chill, what
manner of man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the signal of the
Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place?  My mind supplied no
answer but what I feared to entertain.  Shipwrecked, at least, he must
have been; perhaps, like the old Armada mariners, from some far and rich
land over-sea; or perhaps one of my own race, perishing within eyesight
of the smoke of home.  I stood awhile uncovered by his side, and I could
have desired that it had lain in our religion to put up some prayer for
that unhappy stranger, or, in the old classic way, outwardly to honour
his misfortune.  I knew, although his bones lay there, a part of Aros,
till the trumpet sounded, his imperishable soul was forth and far away,
among the raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or the pangs of hell; and
yet my mind misgave me even with a fear, that perhaps he was near me
where I stood, guarding his sepulchre, and lingering on the scene of his
unhappy fate.

Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat over-shadowed that I turned away
from the grave to the hardly less melancholy spectacle of the wreck.  Her
stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a little
abaft the foremast--though indeed she had none, both masts having broken
short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was very sharp and
sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the fracture gaped
widely open, and you could see right through her poor hull upon the
farther side.  Her name was much defaced, and I could not make out
clearly whether she was called _Christiania_, after the Norwegian city,
or _Christiana_, after the good woman, Christian's wife, in that old book
the 'Pilgrim's Progress.'  By her build she was a foreign ship, but I was
not certain of her nationality.  She had been painted green, but the
colour was faded and weathered, and the paint peeling off in strips.  The
wreck of the mainmast lay alongside, half buried in sand.  She was a
forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not look without emotion at the bits
of rope that still hung about her, so often handled of yore by shouting
seamen; or the little scuttle where they had passed up and down to their
affairs; or that poor noseless angel of a figure-head that had dipped
into so many running billows.

I do not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but I
fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one
hand against the battered timbers.  The homelessness of men and even of
inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon
my mind.  To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an
unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of
something sacrilegious in its nature.  But when I remembered Mary, I took
heart again.  My uncle would never consent to an imprudent marriage, nor
would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full approval.  It behoved
me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I thought with a laugh how
long it was since that great sea-castle, the _Espirito Santo_, had left
her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it would be to consider rights so
long extinguished and misfortunes so long forgotten in the process of
time.

I had my theory of where to seek for her remains.  The set of the current
and the soundings both pointed to the east side of the bay under the
ledge of rocks.  If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after these
centuries, any portion of her held together, it was there that I should
find it.  The water deepens, as I have said, with great rapidity, and
even close along-side the rocks several fathoms may be found.  As I
walked upon the edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of
the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the deeps; the bay
seemed rather like a great transparent crystal, as one sees them in a
lapidary's shop; there was naught to show that it was water but an
internal trembling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows,
and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round the edge.  The
shadows of the rocks lay out for some distance at their feet, so that my
own shadow, moving, pausing, and stooping on the top of that, reached
sometimes half across the bay.  It was above all in this belt of shadows
that I hunted for the _Espirito Santo_; since it was there the undertow
ran strongest, whether in or out.  Cool as the whole water seemed this
broiling day, it looked, in that part, yet cooler, and had a mysterious
invitation for the eyes.  Peer as I pleased, however, I could see nothing
but a few fishes or a bush of sea-tangle, and here and there a lump of
rock that had fallen from above and now lay separate on the sandy floor.
Twice did I pass from one end to the other of the rocks, and in the whole
distance I could see nothing of the wreck, nor any place but one where it
was possible for it to be.  This was a large terrace in five fathoms of
water, raised off the surface of the sand to a considerable height, and
looking from above like a mere outgrowth of the rocks on which I walked.
It was one mass of great sea-tangles like a grove, which prevented me
judging of its nature, but in shape and size it bore some likeness to a
vessel's hull.  At least it was my best chance.  If the _Espirito Santo_
lay not there under the tangles, it lay nowhere at all in Sandag Bay; and
I prepared to put the question to the proof, once and for all, and either
go back to Aros a rich man or cured for ever of my dreams of wealth.

I stripped to the skin, and stood on the extreme margin with my hands
clasped, irresolute.  The bay at that time was utterly quiet; there was
no sound but from a school of porpoises somewhere out of sight behind the
point; yet a certain fear withheld me on the threshold of my venture.  Sad
sea-feelings, scraps of my uncle's superstitions, thoughts of the dead,
of the grave, of the old broken ships, drifted through my mind.  But the
strong sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I stooped
forward and plunged into the sea.

It was all that I could do to catch a trail of the sea-tangle that grew
so thickly on the terrace; but once so far anchored I secured myself by
grasping a whole armful of these thick and slimy stalks, and, planting my
feet against the edge, I looked around me.  On all sides the clear sand
stretched forth unbroken; it came to the foot of the rocks, scoured into
the likeness of an alley in a garden by the action of the tides; and
before me, for as far as I could see, nothing was visible but the same
many-folded sand upon the sun-bright bottom of the bay.  Yet the terrace
to which I was then holding was as thick with strong sea-growths as a
tuft of heather, and the cliff from which it bulged hung draped below the
water-line with brown lianas.  In this complexity of forms, all swaying
together in the current, things were hard to be distinguished; and I was
still uncertain whether my feet were pressed upon the natural rock or
upon the timbers of the Armada treasure-ship, when the whole tuft of
tangle came away in my hand, and in an instant I was on the surface, and
the shores of the bay and the bright water swam before my eyes in a glory
of crimson.

I clambered back upon the rocks, and threw the plant of tangle at my
feet.  Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin.  I
stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an
iron shoe-buckle.  The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the
heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy.  I
held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like
the presence of an actual man.  His weather-beaten face, his sailor's
hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot
that had once worn that buckle and trod so much along the swerving
decks--the whole human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair
and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, solitary place, not
like a spectre, but like some friend whom I had basely injured.  Was the
great treasure ship indeed below there, with her guns and chain and
treasure, as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the
seaweed, her cabin a breeding place for fish, soundless but for the
dredging water, motionless but for the waving of the tangle upon her
battlements--that old, populous, sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag
Bay?  Or, as I thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of
the foreign brig--was this shoe-buckle bought but the other day and worn
by a man of my own period in the world's history, hearing the same news
from day to day, thinking the same thoughts, praying, perhaps, in the
same temple with myself?  However it was, I was assailed with dreary
thoughts; my uncle's words, 'the dead are down there,' echoed in my ears;
and though I determined to dive once more, it was with a strong
repugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of the rocks.