In one of the vessels behind him, as he mused, a seaman noiselessly thrust his head out at a companion to look the hour upon the town’s clock, and the boy, pale, fair-haired, pondering, with eyes upon the shrouds of a gabbart, forced himself by his stillness and inaction upon the man’s notice. He was a little, stout, well-built man, with a face tanned by sunshine and salt air to the semblance of Spanish mahogany, with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black. His dress was singularly perjink, cut trim and tight from a blue cloth, the collar of a red shirt rolled over on the bosom, a pair of simple gold rings pierced the ears. As he looked at the boy, he was humming very softly to himself a Skye song, and he stopped in the midst of it with “So ‘iile, have you lost your ship?” A playful scamp was revealed in his smile.
Gilian turned round with a start of alarm, for he had been on some coracle of fancy, sailing upon magic seas, and thus to break upon his reverie with the high Gaelic of Skye was to plunge him in chilling waters.
“Thig an so—come here,” said the seaman, beckoning, setting an easy foot upon the deck.
Gilian went slowly forward, he was amazed and fascinated by this wondrous seaman come upon the stillness of the harbour without warning, a traveller so important yet so affable in his invitation. Black Duncan that day was in a good humour, for his owners had released him at last from his weeks of tethering to the quay and this dull town and he was to depart to-morrow with his cargo of timber. In a little he had Gilian’s history, and they were comrades. He took him round the deck and showed its simple furniture, then in the den he told him mariners’ tales of the sea.
A Carron stove burned in the cabin, dimly, yet enough to throw at times a flicker of light upon the black beams overhead, the vessel’s ribs, the bunks that hung upon them. Sitting on a sea-chest, Gilian felt the floor lift and fall below him, a steady motion wholly new, yet confirming every guess he had made in dreams of life upon the wave. A ceaseless sound of water came through the wood, of the tide glucking along the bows, surely to the mariner the sweetest of all sounds when he lies in benign weather moving home upon the sigh of God.
Black Duncan but wanted a good listener. He was not quite the world’s traveller he would have Gilian believe; but he had voyaged in many outlandish parts and a Skyeman’s memory is long and his is the isle where fancy riots. He made his simple ventures round the coast voyages terrible and unending. The bays, the water-mouths, the rocks, the bosky isles—he clothed them with delights, and made them float in the haze wherein a boy untravelled would envelop them.
“There’s a story I know.” said Gilian, “of a young son who went to a town where the king of Erin bides, and he found it full of music from end to end, every street humming with song.”
“Oh, lad, I have been there,” said the seaman, unabashed, his teeth very white in the brown of his smiling face. “You sail and sail in winds and drift in calms, and there is a place called Erin’s Eye and a mountain rock behind it, and then you come upon the town of the king’s daughter. It is a town reeling with music; some people without the ears would miss it, you and Black Duncan would be jigging to the sound of it. The world, ‘ille (and here’s the sailorman who has sailed the seven seas and knows its worst and best), is a very grand place to such as understand and allow. I was born with a caul as we say; I know that I’ll never drown, so that when winds crack I feel safe in the most staggering ship. I have gone into foreign ports in the dead of night, our hail for light but answered by Sir Echo, and we would be waiting for light, with the smell of flowers and trees about us, and—”
“That would be worth sailing for,” said Gilian, looking hard at the embers in the Carron stove.
“Or the beast of the wood might come roaring and bellowing to the shore.”