The Deemster

by Sir Hall Caine

From these and other startling occurrences that came to me vaguely, as if by the one sense of the buried man, I felt that with the poor people of this island all was not well. But nothing did I know of a certainty until a day toward the first week of September—as I have reckoned it—and then a strange thing befell.

The sun was not shining, and when there was no sun there was little mist. A strong wind, too, had got up from the northeast, and the atmosphere over land and sea grew clearer as the day wore on. The wind strengthened after the turn of the ebb, and at half-flood, which was toward three in the afternoon, it had risen to the pitch of a gale, with heavy swirling rain. The rain ceased in a few hours, and in the lift of the heavy clouds I could see from the rising ground above my house a brig with shortened sail toiling heavily to the southwest of the Calf. She was struggling in the strong currents that flow there to get into the lee of the island, but was beaten back and back, never catching the shelter of the cliffs for the rush of the wind that swept over them. The darkness was falling in while I watched her, and when she was swept back and hidden from me by the forehead of the Calf I turned my face homeward. Then I noticed that on the top of the Mull Hills a great company of people had gathered, and I thought I saw that they were watching the brig that was laboring heavily in the sea.

That night I had close employment at my fireside, for I was finishing a coat that I had someways fashioned with my undeft fingers from the best pieces of many garments that of themselves would no longer hold together. Rough as a monk's long sack it was, and all but as shapeless, but nevertheless a fit companion for the curranes on my feet, which I had made some time before from the coat of my hapless Millish-veg-veen.

While I wrought with my great sail-maker's needle and twine, the loud wind moaned about the walls of my house and whistled through its many crevices, and made the candle whereby I worked to flicker and gutter. Yet my mind was more cheerful than had lately been its wont, and I sang to myself with my face to the glow of the fire.

But when toward ten o'clock the sea below sent up a louder hiss than before, followed by a deeper undergroan, suddenly there was a clash at my window, and a poor, panting sea-mew, with open beak, came through it and fell helpless on the floor. I picked up the storm-beaten creature and calmed it, and patched with the needle the skin of the window which it had broken by its entrance.

Then all at once my mind went back to the brig laboring in the sea behind the Calf. Almost at the same moment, and for the first time these seven years, a quick knock came to my door. I was startled, and made no answer, but stood stock-still in the middle of the floor with the frightened bird in my hand. Before I was yet fully conscious of what was happening, the wooden latch of the door had been lifted, and a man had stepped across the threshold. In another moment he had closed the door behind him, and was speaking to me.

"You will never find heart to deny me shelter on such a night as this?" he said.

I answered him nothing. Surely with my mind I did not hear him, but only with mine ears. I was like the one who is awakened suddenly out of a long dream, and can scarce be sure which is the dream and which the reality, what is behind and what is before.

The man stumbled a step forward, and said, speaking falteringly, "I am faint from a blow."

He staggered another pace forward, and would have fallen, but I, recovering in some measure my self-command, caught him in my arms, and put him to sit on the settle before the hearth.