“Billiam? It isn't fit. He'll blackguard you mortal, and the Dempster himself is past it. Just sitting with the brandy and drinking and drinking, and ateing nothing; but that dirt brought up on the Curragh shouting for beefstakes morning and night, and having his dinner laid on a beautiful new white sheet as clane as a bed.”
From the ambush of a screen before an open door, Philip looked into the room where the Deemster was killing himself. The window shutters were up to keep out the daylight; candles were burning in the necks of bottles on the mantelpiece; a fire smouldered in a grate littered with paper and ashes; a coarse-featured man was eating ravenously at the table, a chop-bone in his fingers, and veins like cords moving on his low forehead—and the Deemster himself, judge of his island since the death of Iron Christian, was propped up in a chair, with a smoking glass on a stool beside him, and a monkey perched on his shoulder. “Turn them out, neck and crop, Dempster; the women are all for robbing a man,” said the fellow; and a husky, eaten-out voice replied to him with a grunt and a laugh, “H'm! That's only what you're doing yourself, then, you rascal, and if I'd let the right one in long ago you wouldn't be here now—nor I neither, would I, Jacko?” The tail of the monkey flapped on the Deemster's breast, and Philip crept away with a shiver.
The sun was shining brightly outside the house, and the air was fresh and sweet. Remounting his horse, which was neighing and stamping at the gate, Philip rode hard to bring back a sense of warmth. At the “Fairy” he alighted and put up, and saw Grannie, who was laying tables in the mill.
“I'm busy as Trap's wife,” she said, “and if you were the Govenar itself you wouldn't get lave to spake to me now. Put a sight on himself on the field yonder, the second meadow past the Bishop's bridge, and come back with the boys to supper.”
Philip found the Melliah field. Two-score workers, men, women, and children, a cart and a pair of horses were scattered over it. Where the corn had been cut the day before the stubble had been woven overnight into a white carpet of cobwebs, which neither sun nor step of man had yet dispelled. There were the smell of the straw, the cawing of the rooks in the glen, the hissing to the breeze of the barley still standing, the swish of the scythe and the gling of the sickle, the bending and rising of the shearers, the swaying of the binders dragging the sheaves, the gluck of the wheels of the cart, the merry head of a child peeping out of a stook like a young bird out of the broken egg, and a girl in scarlet, whom Philip recognised, standing at the farthest hedge, and waving the corn band with which she was tieing to some one below.
Philip vaulted into the field, and was instantly seized by every woman working in it, except Kate, tied up with the straw ropes, and only liberated on paying the toll of an intruder.
“But I've come to work,” he protested, and Cæsar who, was plotting the last rigs of the harvest, paired him with Kate and gave him a sickle. “He's a David, he'll smite down his thousands/,” said Cæsar. Then cocking his eye up the field, “the Ballabeg for leader,” he cried, “he's a plate-ribbed man. And let ould Maggie take the butt along with him. Jemmy the Red for the after-rig, and Robbie to follow Mollie with the cart Now ding-dong, boys, bend your backs and down with it.”
Kate had not looked up when Philip came into the field, but she had seen him come, and she gave a little start when he took his place in his shirt-sleeves beside her. He used some conventional phrases which she scarcely answered, and then nothing was heard but the sounds of the sickle and the corn. She worked steadily for some time, and he looked up at her at intervals with her round bare arms and supple waist and firm-set foot and tight red stocking. Two butterflies tumbling in the air played around her sun bonnet and a lady-clock settled on her wrist.
Time was called for rest as Nancy Joe came through the gate bringing a basket with bottles and a can.
“The belly's a malefactor that forgets former kindness,” said Cæsar; “ate and drink.”