They stepped to the door together, and stood for a moment in the dank and lifeless darkness.
“The world's getting wonderful lonely, man, and you're all that's left to me now, Phil—you and the child. I'm not for wailing, though. When I got my gun-shot wound out yonder, I was away over the big veldt, hundreds of miles from anywhere, behind the last bush and the last blade of grass, with the stones and the ashes and the dust—about as far, you'd say, as the world was finished, and never looking to see herself and the ould island and the ould faces no more. I'm not so lonesome as that at all. Good-night, ould fellow, and God bless you!”
The gate opened and closed, Philip went stumbling up the road. He was hating Pete. To hate this open-hearted man who had dragged him into an entanglement of lies was the only resource of his stifled conscience.
Pete went back to the house, muttering, “Kirry is dead! Kirry is dead!” He put the catch on the door, said, “Close the shutters, Nancy,” and then returned to his chair by the cradle.
XX.
Later the same night Pete carried the news to Sulby. Grannie was in the bar-room, and he broke it to her gently, tenderly, lovingly.
Loud voices came from the kitchen. Cæsar was there in angry contention with Black Tom. An open Bible was between them on their knees. Tom tugged it towards him, bobbed his blunt forefinger down on the page, and cried, “There's the text—that'll pin you—publicans and sinners.”
Cæsar leaned back'in his seat, and said with withering scorn, “It's a bad business—I'll give you lave to say that. It's men like you that's making it bad. But whether is it better for a bad business to be in bad hands or in good ones? There's a big local praicher in London, they're telling me, that's hot for joining the public-house to the church, and turning the parsons into the publicans. That's what they all were on the Isle of Man in ould days gone by, and pity they're not so still. Oh, I've been giving it my sarious thoughts, sir. I've been making it a subject for prayer. 'Will I give up my public or hould fast to it to keep it out of worse hands?' And I'm strong to believe the Lord hath spoken. 'It's a little vineyard—a little work in a little vineyard. Stick to it, Cæsar,' and so I will.”
Pete stepped into the kitchen and flung his news at Cæsar with a sort of wild melancholy, as who would say, “There, is that enough for you? Are you satisfied now?”