Chapter III.
Fifty years had passed, with all their seasons' changes, and the changing life of nature both by land and sea, and had made as little impression on the island as the ceaseless dashing of the waves against its coast. The cliffs, the caves and the sea-beaten boulders were the same; the colours of the bracken on the September hills, and of the sea anemones in their green, pellucid pools, were the same, and the fishermen's path down to the cove was the same. No iron chain had been put there, but the rope had never broken again.
A violent south-west gale was blowing, driving scud and sea-foam before it, while ever new armies of rain-clouds advanced threateningly across the shadowy waters—mighty, moving mists, whose grey-winged squadrons, swift and irresistible, enveloped and almost blotted from sight the little rock-bound island, against which the forces of nature seemed to be for ever spending themselves in vain. From time to time through a gap in the shifting cloud-ranks there shone a sudden dazzling gleam of sunlight on the white crests of the sea-horses far away.
The good French pastor, who struggled to discharge the offices of religion in that impoverished and for the most part socially abandoned spot, had just allowed himself to be persuaded by his wife that it was unnecessary to visit his sick parishioner at the other end of the island that afternoon, when a loud rat-tat was heard in the midst of a shriek of wind, through a grudged inch of open door-way. The hurricane burst into the house while a dripping, breathless girl panted forth her message, that "old Marie" had been suddenly taken bad, and was dying, and wanted but one thing in the world, to see the Vicar.
"I wonder what it is she has got to say," said the Vicar, as his wife buttoned his mackintosh up to his throat. "I always did think there was something strange about old Marie."
A mile of bitter, breathless battling with the storm, then a close cottage-room, with rain-flooded floor, the one small window carefully darkened, and on a pillow in the furthest corner, shaded by heavy bed-curtains, a wrinkled old woman's face, pinched and colourless, on which the hand of Death lay visibly.
But in the eagerness with which she signed to the pastor to come close, and in the keen glance she cast round the room to see that no one else was near, the vigour of life still asserted itself.
"I've somewhat to tell you, Father," she began in a rapid undertone, in the island dialect. "I can't carry it to the grave with me, tho' I've borne it in my conscience all my life. When I was a young lass it happened, when things was different, and the men were rougher than now, and strange deeds might be done from time to time, and never come under the eye o' the law. And you must judge me, Father, by the way things was then, for that was what I had to think of when it all happened.
"There was a young man that used to come a' courting me when I was a lass o' nineteen, and he had a black heart for all he spoke so fair; but I didn't see it at the first, and he was that cliver and insinuatin', and had such a way o' talkin', and made so much o' me, I couldn't but listen to him for a while. And he used to go out fishin' wi' my father, and Daddy, he was lame, so Pierre used to take the fish round and do jobs with the boats for him, and this and that, so as Daddy thought a rare lot o' him; and when he seed we was thinkin' o' each other, he sort o' thought he'd leave the business to him and me, and we'd be able to keep him when he got too old to go out any more. And all was goin' right, when one day Pierre says to me, would I go out in the boat and row with him to the village, as he'd got a creel of crabs to take round, so I got in and we rowed: and we went through the Devil's Drift, and he says to me sudden like, 'When we're man and wife, Marie, what'll your father do to keep hisself?' 'Keep hisself,' I said, 'why ain't we agoin' to keep him?' And then he began such a palaver about a man bein' bound to keep his wife but not his father-in-law, and it not bein' fit for three grown people to live in one room, as if my father and mother and his father afore him and all his brothers and sisters hadn't lived in this very room that now I lie a-dyin' in; and I said 'well, as I see it, if you take Daddy's custom off of him, you're bound to keep Daddy.' And he said that wasn't his way o' lookin' at it, and I went into a sudden anger, and declared I wouldn't have nought to do with a man that could treat my Daddy so, and he was just turning the boat round to go into the Drift, and there came such an evil look in his eyes so as it seemed to go through my bones like a knife, and he said 'You shall repent this one day—you and your daddy too,' and I said not another word and he began to row forwards through the Devil's Drift. And somehow bein' there alone with him in that fearsome place, when a foot's error one side or the other may mean instant death, as he sat facin' me I seemed to see the black heart of him, as I'd never seen it before, and there was summat came over me and made me feel my life was in his hands, in the hands of my enemy.
"Well, I said no more to him, not one word good or bad, the rest of that evenin's row, and I never went out with him no more. But now, Father, this is what I want to say—for my breath is a goin' from me every minute—my Daddy, he was like my child to me, me that have never had a child of my own. I had watched him and cared for him as if I was his mother, 'stead of his bein' my father, and a hurt to him was like a hurt to me: and when that man talked o' leavin' him to fend for himself in his old age, the thought seemed as if it would break my heart: and now I knew he had an enemy, and a pitiless enemy: and I tried to stop him goin' out alone with Pierre, and I wanted him to get rid o' him out of the fishing business altogether, and father he took it up so, when I told him Pierre said he was gettin' too old to manage for hisself, that he up and dismissed him that very day: and then I heard Lisette Nevin and Paul talkin' and savin' how ill Pierre had taken it, and I seemed to see his face with the evil look on it; and something seemed to say in my heart that Daddy was in danger, and I couldn't stop a moment; I went flying to the cove where I knew he'd gone by hisself, and there from the top of the path I saw the other one creeping, closer and closer, like a cruel beast of prey as he was: and I went down and I met him, and he'd a knife in his belt, and of one thing I was certain, he might have been only goin' to frighten Daddy, but he meant him no good."
She lowered her voice, and spoke in a hoarse whisper.
"Father, do you understand? Here was a man without ruth or pity, and with a sore grudge in his black heart. Was I to trust my Daddy to his hands, and him old and lame?" She paused another moment, then drew the Vicar close to her and whispered in his ear, "I cut the rope. I knew he was followin' me. I let myself halfway down, then clung to the iron hold and cut the rope, with the knife I'd taken from him. It was at the risk of my life I did it. And he followed me, and he fell and was killed. Father, will God punish me for it? It has blighted my life. I have never been like other women. I never was wed, for how could I tend little children with blood on my hands? And the children shrank from me, or I thought they did. But it was for Daddy's sake. He had a happy old age, and he gave me his blessing when he died. Father"—her voice became almost inaudible—"when I stand before God's throne—will God remember—it was for Daddy's sake?"
The failing eye was fixed on the pastor's face, as if it would search his soul for the truth. The fellow-being, on whom she laid so great a burden, for one moment, quailed: then spoke assuring words of the mercy of that God to whom all hearts are open: but already the ebbing strength, too severely strained in the effort of disclosure, was passing away, and the words of comfort were spoken to ears that were closed in death.
Under the South wall of the island burying-ground is a nameless grave: where in the summer days fragments of toys and nose-gays are often to be seen scattered about; for the sunny corner is a favourite play-place, and the voices of children sound there; and they trample with their little feet the grass above Marie's grave, and strew wild flowers on it.