The Deemster

by Sir Hall Caine

Whether, from the day whereon I heard the converse of the two men who went by my house, I was ever seen of any man for a twelvemonth or more, I scarce can tell. Great was my care to keep out of the ways wherein even the shepherds walked, and never a foot seemed to come within two furlongs of these abandoned parts from the bleak Black Head to the margin of the sound. But it happened, upon a day toward winter, beginning the second year since my cutting off, that I turned toward Port-le-Mary, and walking on with absent mind, came nearer than I had purposed to the village over the Kallow Point. There I was suddenly encountered by four or five men who, much in liquor, were playing at leap-frog among the gorse. English seamen they seemed to be, and perhaps from the brig that some time before I had noted where she lay anchored to the lee of the Carrick Rock, in the Poolvash below. At sight of them I was for turning quickly aside, but they raised such a cry and shot out such a volley of levities and blasphemies that, try how I would to go on, I could not but stop on the instant and turn my face to them.

Then I saw that of me the men took no note whatever, and that all their eyes were on my dog Millish-veg-veen, who was with me, and was now creeping between my feet with his stump of a tail under his belly, and his little cunning face full of terror. "Why, here's the dog that killed our monkey," said one, and another shouted, "It's my old cur, sure enough," and a third laughed and said he had kept a rod in pickle for more than a year, and the first cried again, "I'll teach the beast to kill no more Jackeys." Then, before I was yet fully conscious of what was being done, one of the brawny swaggerers made toward us, and kicked at the dog with the fierce lunge of a heavy seaman's boot. The dog yelped and would have made off, but another of the blusterers kicked him back, and then a third kicked him, and whatever way he tried to escape between them, one of them lifted his foot and kicked again.

While they were doing this I felt myself struggling to cry out to them to stop, but not a syllable could I utter, and, like a man paralyzed, I stood stock-still, and did nothing to save my housemate and only companion in life. At length one of the men, laughing a great roistering laugh, stooped and seized the dog by the nape of the neck and swung him round in the air. Then I saw the poor cur's piteous look toward me, and heard its bitter cry; but at the next instant it was flying ten feet above our heads, and when it fell to the ground it was killed on the instant.

At that sight I heard an awful groan burst from my mouth, and I saw a cloud of fire flash before my eyes. When next I knew what I was doing I was holding one of the men by a fierce grip about the waist, and was swinging him high above my shoulders.

Now, if the good God had not given me back my consciousness at that moment, I know full well that at the next he who was then in my power would have drawn no more the breath of a living man. But I felt on a sudden the same ghostly hand upon me that I have written of before, and heard the same ghostly voice in mine ear. So, dropping the man gently to his feet, as gently as a mother might slip her babe to its cot, I lifted up my poor mangled beast by its hinder legs and turned away with it. And as I went the other men fell apart from me with looks of terror, for they saw that God had willed it that, with an awful strength, should I, a man of great passions, go through life in peril.

When I had found coolness to think of this that had happened, I mourned for the loss of the only companion that had ever shared with me my desolate state; but more than my grief for the dog was my fear for myself, remembering with horror that when I would have called on the men to desist I could not utter one word. Truly, it may have been the swift access of anger that then tied my tongue, but I could not question that my sudden speechlessness told me I was losing the faculty of speech. This conclusion fastened upon me with great pain, and I saw that for a twelvemonth or more I had been zealously preserving the minor qualities of humanity, while this its greatest faculty, speech, that distinguishes man from the brute, had been silently slipping from me. Preserve my power of speech also I resolved I would, and though an evil spirit within me seemed to make a mock at me, and to say, "Wherefore this anxiety to keep your speech, seeing that you will never require it, being a man cut off forever from all intercourse with other men?" yet I held to my purpose.

Then I asked myself how I was to preserve my speech, save by much and frequent speaking, and how I was to speak, having none—not even my dog now—to speak to. For, to speak constantly with myself was a practise I shrank from as leading perchance to madness, since I had noted that men of broken wit were much given to mumbling vain words to themselves. At last I concluded that there was but one way for me, and that was to pray. Having lighted on this thought I had still some misgivings, for the evil spirit within me again made a mock at me, asking why I should speak to God, being a man outside God's grace, and why I should waste myself in the misspent desire of prayer, seeing that the Heavenly Majesty had set His face from me in rejecting the atonement of my life, which I had offered for my crime. But after great inward strivings I came back to my old form of selfishness, and was convinced that, though when I prayed God would not hear me, yet that the yearning and uplooking of prayer might be a good thing for the spiritual part of my nature as a man—for when was the beast known to pray?

At this I tried to recall a few good words such as my father used, and at length, after much beating of the wings of my memory, I remembered some that were the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and did betake myself to prayer in this manner: "O most gracious God, I tremble to come into Thy presence, so polluted and dishonored as I am by my foul stain of sin which I have contracted; but I must come or I perish. I am useless to any purposes of God and man, and, like one that is dead, unconcerned in the changes and necessities of the world, living only to spend my time, and, like a vermin, eat of the fruits of the earth. O my God, I can not help it now; miserable man that I am, to reduce myself to so sad a state that I neither am worthy to come to Thee nor dare I stay from Thee. The greatness of my crime brings me to my remedy; and now I humbly pray Thee to be merciful to my sin, for it is great."

And this prayer I spoke aloud twice daily thenceforward, at the rising and the setting of the sun, going out of my house and kneeling on the turf on the top of the Black Head. And when I had prayed I sang what I could remember of the psalm that runs, "It is good for me that I have been in trouble, that I may learn Thy statutes."

In my mind's eye I see myself, a solitary man in that lone place, with the sea stretching wide below me, and only the sound of its heavy beat on the rocks rising over me in the quiet air.