CHAPTER XVII—THE STORM
The vessel, straining at the rope that bound her to the shore, lay with a clumsy shoulder over the bank that shelved abruptly into the great depths where slimy weeds entangled. Her sails were housed and snug, the men in the bows lay under the flapping corner of the jib and played at cards, though the noise of the raindrops on their canvas roof might well disturb them. Gilian made no pause; he ran up at the tale’s conclusion, at a bound he was on the shore, staggering upon the rocks and slipping upon the greasy weeds till he came to the salt bent grass, and with firmer footing ran like a young deer for the shelter of the wood. The rain battered after him, the wind rose. In front, the wood, so still an hour before, in its winter slumber, with no birds now to mar its dreams, had of a sudden roused to the rumour of the storm. As by an instinct, the young trees on the edge seemed to shudder before the winds came to them. Their slim tips could not surely be bowing, even so little, to the gale that was yet behind Gilian. But he passed them and plunged under the tall firs, and he felt secure only when the ruddy needles of other years were a soft carpet underfoot It was true he found shelter here from the rain that slanted terrifically, but it was not for sanctuary from the elements he sought the rude aisles, though now he appreciated the peace of them. It was for escape from himself, from his sense of hopeless, inexplicable longing, from some tremendous convulsion of his mind created by Black Duncan’s fable.
The wood was all a wood of fir, not old nor very young, but at that mid age when it has to all of country blood an invitation to odorous dusks and pathless wanderings below laced branches. The sun never could reach the heart of it, except at the hour of setting, when it flamed bloody through the pillars. The rain never seemed to penetrate, for the fir-needles underfoot grew more dusty year by year. But when the rain beat as it did now, through the whole of it went a sound of gobbling and drumming, and the wind, striking upon the trunks as if they were the strings of Ossian, harped a great and tremendous tune, wanting start or ending. And by-and-by there came company for Gilian as he sheltered in the wood. Birds of all kinds beat hurriedly through the trees and settled upon the boughs with a shudder of the quill, pleased to be out of the inclement open and cosily mantled in.
The boy went into the very inmost part of the wood without knowing the reason why thus he should fly from the ship that so recently had enchanted him, from the tales he loved. But in the soothing presence of the firs and the content of the animals sheltering from the storm, he found a momentary peace from the agitation that had set up in him, roused at the song of the girl, the story of the mariner. The emotions, the fears, longings, discontents that jangled through him as they had never done before relapsed to a mood level and calm, as if they, too, had sheltered from the storm like the birds upon the trees.
But by-and-by he became ashamed of his action, that must seem so foolish to the friends he had left in the ship without a word of explanation. His face flamed hotly at the thought of his rude departure. He would give a world to be able to go back again as if nothing had happened and sit unchallenged in the cosy den of the Jean. And musing thus he went through the wood till he came upon the bank of the Duglas, roaring grey and ragged, a robber from the hills, bearing spoil of the upper reaches, the town-lands, the open and windswept plains. It carried the trunks of great trees that had lain since other storms upon its banks, and with a great chafing and cracking no less than the wooden bridge from Clonary which the children were wont to cross from those parts on their way to school.
“That will go battering on the vessel,” he thought, looking amazed at its ponderous beams flicking through the water and over the little cascades as if they had been feathers blown by an evening breeze. “That will go battering on the Jean” he thought, and of a sudden it seemed his manifest duty to warn the occupants of the ship to defend themselves from the unexpected attack.
He followed the bridge for a little, fascinated, wondering what was to become of it next in the tumult of waters till he came to the falls, where he had looked for a check to it. But it stayed no more than a moment on the lip of the precipice swung up a jagged edge above the deep, then crashed into the linn, where it seemed to swerve and turn, giddy with its adventure. Gilian stood spellbound on the banks looking at it so far down, then he turned, and cutting off the bend of the river, made for the shore.
He crashed through bracken and bramble and through the fir-wood again, startling the sheltering birds by his hurry, emerging upon the face of the brae in sight of the Jean and the sea. In his absence a great change had come upon the wave, upon the hilly distance, upon the whole countenance of nature. The rain was no longer in drumming torrents, but in a soft and almost imperceptible veil; but if the rain had lost the wind had gained. And as he passed from the edge of the wood, all the trees seemed to twang and creak, or cracked loudly, parting perhaps at some dear nerve where sap and beauty would no longer course. In every bush along the edge of the wood there seemed a separate chorus of voices, melodious and terrific, whistle and whoop, shriek and moan. Even the grass nodding in the wind lent a thin voice to the chorus, a voice such as only the sharp and sea-trained ear may comprehend, that beasts hear long before the wind itself is apparent, so that they remove themselves to the bieldy sides of the hills before tumult breaks.
But it was the aspect of the sea that most surprised the boy, for where before there had been but a dreaming plain of smiles there was the riot of waters. The black lips of the wave parted and showed the white fangs underneath, or spat the spume of passion into the face of the day. It looked as if every glen and every gully, every corry and eas on that mountainous coast was spending its breath upon the old sea, the poor old sea that would be let alone to dream and rest, but must suffer the humours of the mischievous winds.
It was but for a moment Gilian lent his eye to the open and troubled expanse. He saw there no sign of ship, but looking lower into shore he beheld the Jean in travail at the Duglas mouth. The tide had come fully in while he was absent, the delta that before had been so much lagoon and isle was become an estuary, where, in the unexpected tide and rush of the river, the logs of fir and oak were all adrift about the sides of the vessel. Every hand was busy. They poled off as best they might the huge trunks that battered at the carvel planks and pressed upon the twanging cable. Forward of the mast Black Duncan stood commanding in loud shouts that could not reach the boy through the wind’s bellowing, and as he shouted, he lent, like a good seaman, vigour to a spar and pushed off the besieging timbers, all his weight aslant upon the wood, his arms tense, a great and wholesome figure of endeavour.
But not Black Duncan nor his striving seamen so busy in that confusion of wind and water were the first to catch the boy’s eye. It was Nan, struggling by her captain’s side at the unshipped tiller, and in the staggering ship seeking to send it home in the avoiding helm-head. Her hair blew round her with the vaunting spirit of a banner, her body in every move was rich with a sort of exaltation.
As yet the bridge had not reached them. It might have been checked altogether in the linn, or it might still be slowly grinding its way round the great bend of the river, that Gilian had cut off by his plunge through the wood. But at least he was there to alarm, for its assault, borne down on the spate, would be worse by far than that of the timber. He beat his way again, bent, through the wind, to the water-edge now so far in and separate from the ship, and cried out a loud warning. It seemed to himself as he did so the voice of an infant, so weak was it, so shrill and piping, buffeted about by Heaven’s large and overwhelming utterance. They paid no heed at first, but by-and-by they heard him.
“The bridge! God! do you tell me?” cried Black Duncan in a visible consternation. “Is it far up?”
Gilian put his hand to his mouth and trumpeted his response.
“The bend! My sorrow! she’s as good as on us then. We must be at our departures.”
The mariners scurried about the deck; Black Duncan threw off the prisoning cable; there were shouts, swift looks, and a breathless pause; the Jean swung round before the corner of her jib laboured clumsily for a moment unbelieving of her release, then drifted slowly from the river mouth, her little boat and her tiller left behind, the first caught by the warring tree-trunks, the latter dashed from Nan’s hands by the swing of an unfastened boom. As helpless as the logs she had been encountering, she was loose before the wind that drove her parallel with the shore at no safe distance from its fringe of rocks.
Gilian, scarcely knowing what he did, ran along the shore, following her course, looking at her with a wild eye. The men were calling to him, waving, pointing, but what they meant he could not surmise; all his interest was in the girl who stood motionless, seemingly aghast at her mishap, with her hair still blowing about her.
To the north where he was running, black masses of clouds were piling, and the sea, so far as the eye could reach, was weltering more cruelly than before. Seagulls screamed without ceasing, and the human imitation of their calls roused uncanny notions that they welcomed the vessel to her doom. She seemed so helpless, so hopeless, dashed upon by the spume of those furious lips, bit by the grinding teeth.
But yet he ran on and on over the salt grass or the old wrack that the sea-spray wet to a new slime, never pausing but for a moment now and then to try and understand what the men on deck were shouting to him.
Off the shore north of the Duglas is a rock called Ealan Dubh, or the Black Island, a single bare and rounded block without a blade of grass on it, that juts out of the sea in all weathers and tides and is grown on thickly with little shell-fish. To-day it could not be seen, but the situation of it was plain in the curling crest of the white waves that bent constantly over it Straight for this rock the Jean was driving and a great pity came over Gilian, a pity for himself as he anticipated the sickening crash upon the rock, the rip of the timber, the gurgle at the holes, the sundering of the bolted planks, the collapse of the mast, the ultimate horrible plunge. He was Black Duncan, the swimmer, fighting hard for life between the ship and the shore; he was the girl, with wet hair flapping blindly at the eyes, clinging with bleeding finger-nails to the rough shells that clustered on the rock. It was horrible, horrible! And then many tales from the shelves of Marget Maclean came to his memory where one in such circumstances had done a brave thing. To save the girl and bring her from the rock ashore—that was the thing to be done—but how? Even the sea fairy, as he had said, might be worth drowning for. Helplessly he looked up and down the shore. There was nothing to see but the torn fringe of the tide, the waving branches of the coast He had no more than grasped the solitude of the country-side (feeling himself something of God’s proxy thus to be watching the destruction of the ship) when the Jean went upon the rock. Her shock upon it was not to be heard from the shore, and she did not break up all at once as he had anticipated; she paused as it might seem, quite willingly, in her career before the wind and slewed round a tarry broadside to the crested wave. She began to settle in the water by her riven quarter, but Gilian did not see that, for it came about slowly. All he could see was that Black Duncan and his men upon the higher part of the slanted deck were calling to him more loudly than before and pointing with frenzied gestures back in the direction whence they had come.
He looked back, he could not comprehend.
More loudly yet they called. They clustered, the three of them on the shrouds, and in one voice tried to bellow down the gale.
He could not understand. He turned a pitiful figure on the shore, his mind tumultuous with wrestling thoughts and dreads, with images of the rough depths where the girl’s hair would sway like weed in a green haze in an everlasting stillness.
Again the seamen called, and it seemed, as he looked at their meaningless gesticulations, that the bowsprit of the vessel now pointed higher than before. The appalling story thus told to him had barely got home when he saw a change in the conduct of the seamen. They ceased to cry and wave; they looked no longer at him but in the direction whence he had come, and turning, he saw the vessel’s little boat bobbing in the sea-troughs. It had an occupant too, a lad not greatly older than himself, using only a guiding oar, who so was directing the boat in the drifting waves towards the Ealan Dubh and the counter of the Jean.
Then the whole folly of his conduct, the meaning of the seamen’s cries, the obvious and simple thing he should have done came to Gilian—he discovered himself the dreamer again. A deep contempt for himself came over him and he felt inclined to run back to the solace of the woods with a shame more burdensome than before, but the doings of the lad who had but to wade to pick up the lost boat and was now bearing down on the doomed vessel prevented him. He watched with a fascination the things being done that he should have done himself, he made himself, indeed, the lad who did them. It was as if in a dream, looking upon himself with a stranger’s admiration, he saw the little boat led dexterously beside the vessel in spite of the tumbling waves, and Black Duncan, out upon her bowsprit, board her, lift his master’s daughter in, and row laboriously ashore. Then Gilian turned and made a poor, contemptuous retreat.