"Go home, go home, every man of you! Away with you!" he shouted, hysterically, and then dropped like a log into a chair.
One by one, with many wise shakes of many sapient heads, the tipsy revelers broke up and went off, leaving the master of Ballamona alone in that chamber, dense with dead smoke, and noisome with the fumes of liquor.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEEMSTER OF MAN
Twenty times that night Thorkell devised expedients to break the web of fate. At first his thoughts were of revengeful defiance. By fair means or foul the woman Kerruish should suffer. She should be turned out of house and home. She should tramp the roads as a mendicant. He would put his foot on her neck. Then they would see what her uncanny threats had come to.
He tried this unction for his affrighted spirit, and put it aside as useless. No, no; he would conciliate the woman. He would settle an annuity of five pounds a year upon her; he would give her the snug gate cottage of old Ballamona to live in; his wife should send her warm blankets in winter, and sometimes a pound of tea, such as old folks love. Then must her imprecation fall impotent, and his own fate be undisturbed.
Thorkell's bedroom in his new house on Slieu Dhoo looked over the Curraghs to the sea. As the day dawned he opened the window, and thrust out his head to drink of the cool morning air. The sun was rising over the land behind, a strong breeze was sweeping over the marshes from the shore, and the white curves of the breakers to the west reflected here and there the glow of the eastern sky. With the salt breath of the sea in his nostrils, it seemed to Thorkell a pitiful thing that a man should be a slave to a mere idea; a thing for shame and humiliation that the sneezing of an old woman should disturb the peace of a strong man. Superstition was the bugbear of the Manxman, but it would die of shame at its sheer absurdity, only that it was pampered by the law. Toleration for superstition! Every man who betrayed faith in omens or portents, or charms or spells, or the power of the evil eye, should be instantly clapped in the Castle. It was but right that a rabid dog should be muzzled.
Thorkell shut the window, closed the shutters, threw off his clothes, and went back to bed. In the silence and the darkness, his thoughts took yet another turn. What madness it was, what pertness and unbelief, to reject that faith in which the best and wisest of all ages had lived and died! Had not omens and portents, and charms and spells, and the evil eye been believed in in all ages? What midget of modern days should now arise with a superior smile and say, "Behold, this is folly: Saul of Israel and Saul of Tarsus, and Samuel and Solomon, rose up and lay down in folly."
Thorkell leaped out of bed, sweating from every pore. The old woman Kerruish should be pensioned; she should live in the cozy cottage at the gates of Ballamona; she should have blankets and tea and many a snug comfort; her daughter should be brought back and married—yes, married—to some honest fellow.