Earnest, though broken, were the supplications which rose from those grieving hearts; but their “woman’s heavenly part” was interrupted by the hasty entrance of Rassmie and Hermann, who rushed to their mother, with white and horror-stricken faces.
“We saw it all; oh, mother, we saw it!” they panted forth. “The peat stack had been lighted, and the ship had come on the rocks, lured by the false signals. She went down at once, and then—then we saw father among the crags. Some one floated on shore; and oh, how could he? he—father! struck at the swimming man with his knife, and there was a great cry, and blood among the white surf. Mother, mother! what shall we do? Father saw us beside him there; his face was awful, and oh, there may come others, for he was waiting, when we fled to you!”
Tronda had stood up when her brothers came, and as soon as their hurried tale was told, she spoke calmly and with resolution: “We must all go to father. It is not for us to give him to the hand of justice, but we dare not stand still and see murder committed. Come, mother; come, boys; father must be guided by us now,” and the small decrepit figure and pinched puny face looked noble and beautiful when the spirit spoke so boldly and undauntedly.
In obedience to a mind stronger than their own, the others followed Tronda from the house—from the house, down the slope, over the stony beach, under the moonlight, against the gale, to the scene of the shipwreck. There they found no living thing. There were broken spars and floating débris of various kinds, and there was a helpless human corpse, but that was all. In vain did Rassmie and Hermann search among the crags, in the hope of finding their father concealed there. In vain did Doya call upon his name; and at last they were obliged to believe that fear had compelled Bartle to fly. He had felt that he was safe from discovery while only Doya knew of his crimes, but he could not be so certain of the boys, whose eyes had actually been on him while he committed murder.
They all lingered on the beach for some time, but no one came from either land or sea, and at last the storm compelled them to seek the shelter of their home. You may believe it was a sad, sad night in that lone dwelling, and although the gale calmed down, and the snow lay still and fair when the daylight gleamed upon it, there was no hushing the inward storm. A very dark picture of sin had been presented to young pure spirits, and it was little wonder that their innocent hearts quivered and bled before the remembrance of that dreadful scene.
Morning—Yule morning—with its merry breakfast by candlelight, frothing bowl of “whipcull,” and sweetest of short-cakes for the rich; its “burstin” and rarely-tasted bacon, with jolly drams of whiskey, for the cottagers; and its fun and mystic spells, and football and evening dance, and olden tale and Norland song for both high and low. Morning—Yule morning—brought the discovery to all in the neighbourhood of the disastrous shipwreck on the island. Doya and her children sat in the house and saw the gathering crowd hurry to and fro upon the beach. They saw when the poor sailor’s body was found wounded, as the simple islanders supposed, by their own cruel crags; and all the day long the wife and family of the wrecker watched and waited, but no one came to them. The corpse was conveyed to an uninhabited dwelling close by, and decently buried next day; and Doya fell mechanically into all her accustomed duties. Curious people wondered what had become of Bartle, and somehow a story got about that he had deserted his wife, because she had taunted him with having taken her from a life of ease to one of hard and humble work. Those who believed such a tale had surely observed little of Doya’s meek contented acceptance of her lowlier lot; but she was quite willing that the inquisitive neighbours should accept that solution of Bartle’s conduct. That he had fled from his home and family she knew was true, but the reason, ah! how different from what was supposed.
The events of that most eventful Yule e’en had worked a great change in Rassmie and Hermann. They were sharp enough lads, and had made a pretty shrewd guess that their father gained his livelihood by rescuing from the deep its unlawful prey, but that he employed such criminal means for that end they never dreamed of. The appropriation of wreck was viewed, with smuggling, as a very light offence by the Shetlanders, who, at the same time, would have shrunk with horror from such crimes as those which Bartle had committed, and however little the boys might have thought of the sin against human codes of morality, they saw in all its deepest blackness the enormity of their parent’s offence against Divine laws. Therefore, as I told you, these things went a great way to work a change in the characters of the lads, adding to their hatred of sin, and taking away much that was evil in their disposition.
But time, that never flies from the happy, nor lingers with the sad, although we often think he is cruel enough to do so; time, whose monotonous footsteps echo along the years at the same even pace, no matter how we smile or suffer; time went on, and marked another season on the tablets of eternity, and, as he traced the first lines of the coming year, he also brought back the brave old Yule. Yule came this time with glittering frost and smiling sky, quiet waves, and scarce a breath of wind, and Rassmie launched his fishing boat for a day’s excursion among the cliffs. Their home was, as usual, unbrightened by festivity, so the good lads persuaded their mother and Tronda to accompany them on the water, and the four made a pleasant, if sober, party. Tronda had seldom been upon the sea, and had seen very little of the sublime scenery so near her home, therefore she easily prevailed on her brothers to row close to the shore, that she might the better admire the varied beauty of the crags and caves. One of the latter particularly attracted Tronda’s girlish fancy, and at her desire the boat entered the rock-hewn hall, whose tinted walls gave back a thousand silvery echoes of the splashing oars. It was a vast cavern into which the boat had entered, and the further she went the wider and more extensive seemed the boundaries of that ocean home. Even Doya’s broken spirit seemed to share in the enthusiasm of the young people, whose exclamations of rapture mingled with the shrill cry of the brooding sea fowl, and the whispering of the billows. But suddenly Tronda’s voice changed to a scream of terror, and she pointed to a ledge of rock in one of the deepest recesses of the cave. There lay what at first appeared to be merely a heap of ragged clothing, but which contained too surely a human skeleton. Rassmie’s first instinct was to turn his boat and fly from the horrible sight, but his mother was quite above the vulgar fears of the ignorant, and, after she had by her quiet mien and pious words reassured her children, their skiff was gently impelled nearer to the object of their alarm. There was nothing loathsome about those poor mortal remains; only a few whitened bones, huddled within the folds of a seaman’s dress, and a fleshless hand spread out upon the chilly stone. He had escaped from drowning by the help of a little boat, whose broken bits, cast up beyond the reach of the sea, by some unusually high tide and storm, spoke to so much of the sad tale. On that hard bed of shelving rock the unfortunate man had met a more dreadful death than that of the engulphing wave. Unheard, unsuccoured, he had died of starvation. “What had we better do, mother?” said one of the boys, after a long silence, which had been employed by the young people in gazing upon the miserable spectacle of man’s helpless humanity, and in gathering up the courage which had so suddenly deserted them. Doya did not reply, and the pallor and anguish which had fallen so suddenly upon her features gave much alarm to her children. “Are you ill, dear mother? What is it?” they queried. When at last she spoke, her voice trembled, and her figure shook with the force of some inward trouble, which she evidently tried to conceal and overcome. Having summoned all her strength of mind, she said, hurriedly—“No one must come here, no one must know of this but you and I. Children, children, the guardian spirit, who never forsakes its charge, has guided us here.” By the mother’s direction, Rassmie and Hermann landed on the little strip of sand which carpeted the further end of the cave. There they gathered together some bits of wood belonging to the broken boat, and, clambering up the rude walls, they deposited the spars on a ledge close to that on which the sailor lay. Then Doya got out of the boat, telling her children to return to the mouth of the cavern, and linger there out of sight until she called them. They were reluctant to leave her alone in such a place, and with such a task as they rightly guessed she had set herself to do, but obedience was the first lesson these young people had learned, and reverence for their mother and her wishes was the consequence of her wise training. The oars were dipped into the quiet water, and in a few moments Doya was alone with it. Ah! who but a wife would have knelt so tenderly by that ghastly object, and wrapped it in the folds of her cloak? who else would have laid her living lips on the bleached and bony palm, and have recognized in those un-sepulchred bones something she had once loved? Who but a wife, whose young affections had been altogether his, would have forgotten the sin and sorrow, the neglect and unkindness of years, and have thus cared for the poor remains of a wicked man?
Doya knelt long and prayed by her husband’s corpse, then with reverent hands she wrapped it closer in the shroud she had taken from her own person for that purpose, and while doing so she found among the skeleton fingers a small pocket-book. With an eager hope she opened this message from the departed. The sleeve of the dead man’s oil-skin coat had protected the paper from destruction, and the words which Bartle’s dying hand had pencilled on the leaves were easily deciphered. This is what he had written:—