Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (420 page)

To Mary I told all that had passed without suppression, though I own my heart failed me; but I did wrong to doubt her sense of justice.

‘You did the right,’ she said.  ‘God’s will be done.’  And she set out meat for us at once.

As soon as I was satisfied, I bade Rorie keep an eye upon the castaway, who was still eating, and set forth again myself to find my uncle.  I had not gone far before I saw him sitting in the same place, upon the very topmost knoll, and seemingly in the same attitude as when I had last observed him.  From that point, as I have said, the most of Aros and the neighbouring Ross would be spread below him like a map; and it was plain that he kept a bright look-out in all directions, for my head had scarcely risen above the summit of the first ascent before he had leaped to his feet and turned as if to face me.  I hailed him at once, as well as I was able, in the same tones and words as I had often used before, when I had come to summon him to dinner.  He made not so much as a movement in reply.  I passed on a little farther, and again tried parley, with the same result.  But when I began a second time to advance, his insane fears blazed up again, and still in dead silence, but with incredible speed, he began to flee from before me along the rocky summit of the hill.  An hour before, he had been dead weary, and I had been comparatively active.  But now his strength was recruited by the fervour of insanity, and it would have been vain for me to dream of pursuit.  Nay, the very attempt, I thought, might have inflamed his terrors, and thus increased the miseries of our position.  And I had nothing left but to turn homeward and make my sad report to Mary.

She heard it, as she had heard the first, with a concerned composure, and, bidding me lie down and take that rest of which I stood so much in need, set forth herself in quest of her misguided father.  At that age it would have been a strange thing that put me from either meat or sleep; I slept long and deep; and it was already long past noon before I awoke and came downstairs into the kitchen.  Mary, Rorie, and the black castaway were seated about the fire in silence; and I could see that Mary had been weeping.  There was cause enough, as I soon learned, for tears.  First she, and then Rorie, had been forth to seek my uncle; each in turn had found him perched upon the hill-top, and from each in turn he had silently and swiftly fled.  Rorie had tried to chase him, but in vain; madness lent a new vigour to his bounds; he sprang from rock to rock over the widest gullies; he scoured like the wind along the hill-tops; he doubled and twisted like a hare before the dogs; and Rorie at length gave in; and the last that he saw, my uncle was seated as before upon the crest of Aros.  Even during the hottest excitement of the chase, even when the fleet-footed servant had come, for a moment, very near to capture him, the poor lunatic had uttered not a sound.  He fled, and he was silent, like a beast; and this silence had terrified his pursuer.

There was something heart-breaking in the situation.  How to capture the madman, how to feed him in the meanwhile, and what to do with him when he was captured, were the three difficulties that we had to solve.

‘The black,’ said I, ‘is the cause of this attack.  It may even be his presence in the house that keeps my uncle on the hill.  We have done the fair thing; he has been fed and warmed under this roof; now I propose that Rorie put him across the bay in the coble, and take him through the Ross as far as Grisapol.’

In this proposal Mary heartily concurred; and bidding the black follow us, we all three descended to the pier.  Certainly, Heaven’s will was declared against Gordon Darnaway; a thing had happened, never paralleled before in Aros; during the storm, the coble had broken loose, and, striking on the rough splinters of the pier, now lay in four feet of water with one side stove in.  Three days of work at least would be required to make her float.  But I was not to be beaten.  I led the whole party round to where the gut was narrowest, swam to the other side, and called to the black to follow me.  He signed, with the same clearness and quiet as before, that he knew not the art; and there was truth apparent in his signals, it would have occurred to none of us to doubt his truth; and that hope being over, we must all go back even as we came to the house of Aros, the negro walking in our midst without embarrassment.

All we could do that day was to make one more attempt to communicate with the unhappy madman.  Again he was visible on his perch; again he fled in silence.  But food and a great cloak were at least left for his comfort; the rain, besides, had cleared away, and the night promised to be even warm.  We might compose ourselves, we thought, until the morrow; rest was the chief requisite, that we might be strengthened for unusual exertions; and as none cared to talk, we separated at an early hour.

I lay long awake, planning a campaign for the morrow.  I was to place the black on the side of Sandag, whence he should head my uncle towards the house; Rorie in the west, I on the east, were to complete the cordon, as best we might.  It seemed to me, the more I recalled the configuration of the island, that it should be possible, though hard, to force him down upon the low ground along Aros Bay; and once there, even with the strength of his madness, ultimate escape was hardly to be feared.  It was on his terror of the black that I relied; for I made sure, however he might run, it would not be in the direction of the man whom he supposed to have returned from the dead, and thus one point of the compass at least would be secure.

When at length I fell asleep, it was to be awakened shortly after by a dream of wrecks, black men, and submarine adventure; and I found myself so shaken and fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped out before the house.  Within, Rorie and the black were asleep together in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful clear night of stars, with here and there a cloud still hanging, last stragglers of the tempest.  It was near the top of the flood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the windless quiet of the night.  Never, not even in the height of the tempest, had I heard their song with greater awe.  Now, when the winds were gathered home, when the deep was dandling itself back into its summer slumber, and when the stars rained their gentle light over land and sea, the voice of these tide-breakers was still raised for havoc.  They seemed, indeed, to be a part of the world’s evil and the tragic side of life.  Nor were their meaningless vociferations the only sounds that broke the silence of the night.  For I could hear, now shrill and thrilling and now almost drowned, the note of a human voice that accompanied the uproar of the Roost.  I knew it for my kinsman’s; and a great fear fell upon me of God’s judgments, and the evil in the world.  I went back again into the darkness of the house as into a place of shelter, and lay long upon my bed, pondering these mysteries.

It was late when I again woke, and I leaped into my clothes and hurried to the kitchen.  No one was there; Rorie and the black had both stealthily departed long before; and my heart stood still at the discovery.  I could rely on Rorie’s heart, but I placed no trust in his discretion.  If he had thus set out without a word, he was plainly bent upon some service to my uncle.  But what service could he hope to render even alone, far less in the company of the man in whom my uncle found his fears incarnated?  Even if I were not already too late to prevent some deadly mischief, it was plain I must delay no longer.  With the thought I was out of the house; and often as I have run on the rough sides of Aros, I never ran as I did that fatal morning.  I do not believe I put twelve minutes to the whole ascent.

My uncle was gone from his perch.  The basket had indeed been torn open and the meat scattered on the turf; but, as we found afterwards, no mouthful had been tasted; and there was not another trace of human existence in that wide field of view.  Day had already filled the clear heavens; the sun already lighted in a rosy bloom upon the crest of Ben Kyaw; but all below me the rude knolls of Aros and the shield of sea lay steeped in the clear darkling twilight of the dawn.

‘Rorie!’ I cried; and again ‘Rorie!’  My voice died in the silence, but there came no answer back.  If there were indeed an enterprise afoot to catch my uncle, it was plainly not in fleetness of foot, but in dexterity of stalking, that the hunters placed their trust.  I ran on farther, keeping the higher spurs, and looking right and left, nor did I pause again till I was on the mount above Sandag.  I could see the wreck, the uncovered belt of sand, the waves idly beating, the long ledge of rocks, and on either hand the tumbled knolls, boulders, and gullies of the island.  But still no human thing.

At a stride the sunshine fell on Aros, and the shadows and colours leaped into being.  Not half a moment later, below me to the west, sheep began to scatter as in a panic.  There came a cry.  I saw my uncle running.  I saw the black jump up in hot pursuit; and before I had time to understand, Rorie also had appeared, calling directions in Gaelic as to a dog herding sheep.

I took to my heels to interfere, and perhaps I had done better to have waited where I was, for I was the means of cutting off the madman’s last escape.  There was nothing before him from that moment but the grave, the wreck, and the sea in Sandag Bay.  And yet Heaven knows that what I did was for the best.

My uncle Gordon saw in what direction, horrible to him, the chase was driving him.  He doubled, darting to the right and left; but high as the fever ran in his veins, the black was still the swifter.  Turn where he would, he was still forestalled, still driven toward the scene of his crime.  Suddenly he began to shriek aloud, so that the coast re-echoed; and now both I and Rorie were calling on the black to stop.  But all was vain, for it was written otherwise.  The pursuer still ran, the chase still sped before him screaming; they avoided the grave, and skimmed close past the timbers of the wreck; in a breath they had cleared the sand; and still my kinsman did not pause, but dashed straight into the surf; and the black, now almost within reach, still followed swiftly behind him.  Rorie and I both stopped, for the thing was now beyond the hands of men, and these were the decrees of God that came to pass before our eyes.  There was never a sharper ending.  On that steep beach they were beyond their depth at a bound; neither could swim; the black rose once for a moment with a throttling cry; but the current had them, racing seaward; and if ever they came up again, which God alone can tell, it would be ten minutes after, at the far end of Aros Roost, where the seabirds hover fishing.

WILL O’ THE MILL.

CHAPTER I.  THE PLAIN AND THE STARS.

The Mill here Will lived with his adopted parents stood in a falling valley between pinewoods and great mountains.  Above, hill after hill, soared upwards until they soared out of the depth of the hardiest timber, and stood naked against the sky.  Some way up, a long grey village lay like a seam or a ray of vapour on a wooded hillside; and when the wind was favourable, the sound of the church bells would drop down, thin and silvery, to Will.  Below, the valley grew ever steeper and steeper, and at the same time widened out on either hand; and from an eminence beside the mill it was possible to see its whole length and away beyond it over a wide plain, where the river turned and shone, and moved on from city to city on its voyage towards the sea.  It chanced that over this valley there lay a pass into a neighbouring kingdom; so that, quiet and rural as it was, the road that ran along beside the river was a high thoroughfare between two splendid and powerful societies.  All through the summer, travelling-carriages came crawling up, or went plunging briskly downwards past the mill; and as it happened that the other side was very much easier of ascent, the path was not much frequented, except by people going in one direction; and of all the carriages that Will saw go by, five-sixths were plunging briskly downwards and only one-sixth crawling up.  Much more was this the case with foot-passengers.  All the light-footed tourists, all the pedlars laden with strange wares, were tending downward like the river that accompanied their path.  Nor was this all; for when Will was yet a child a disastrous war arose over a great part of the world.  The newspapers were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles around the coil of battle terrified good people from their labours in the field.  Of all this, nothing was heard for a long time in the valley; but at last one of the commanders pushed an army over the pass by forced marches, and for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril, drum and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill.  All day the child stood and watched them on their passage — the rhythmical stride, the pale, unshaven faces tanned about the eyes, the discoloured regimentals and the tattered flags, filled him with a sense of weariness, pity, and wonder; and all night long, after he was in bed, he could hear the cannon pounding and the feet trampling, and the great armament sweeping onward and downward past the mill.  No one in the valley ever heard the fate of the expedition, for they lay out of the way of gossip in those troublous times; but Will saw one thing plainly, that not a man returned.  Whither had they all gone?  Whither went all the tourists and pedlars with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing downward and ever renewed from above?  Even the wind blew oftener down the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall.  It seemed like a great conspiracy of things animate and inanimate; they all went downward, fleetly and gaily downward, and only he, it seemed, remained behind, like a stock upon the wayside.  It sometimes made him glad when he noticed how the fishes kept their heads up stream.  They, at least, stood faithfully by him, while all else were posting downward to the unknown world.

One evening he asked the miller where the river went.

‘It goes down the valley,’ answered he, ‘and turns a power of mills — six score mills, they say, from here to Unterdeck — and is none the wearier after all.  And then it goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walling up and down before the door.  And it goes under bridges with stone men upon them, looking down and smiling so curious it the water, and living folks leaning their elbows on the wall and looking over too.  And then it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and tobacco from the Indies.  Ay, it has a long trot before it as it goes singing over our weir, bless its heart!’