The Wild Geese.
by Stanley John Weyman.
CHAPTER I
ON BOARD THE "CORMORANT" SLOOP
Midway in that period of Ireland"s history during which, according to historians, the distressful country had none--to be more precise, on a spring morning early in the eighteenth century, and the reign of George the First, a sloop of about seventy tons burthen was beating up Dingle Bay, in the teeth of a stiff easterly breeze. The sun was two hours high, and the grey expanse of the bay was flecked with white horses hurrying seaward in haste to leap upon the Blasquets, or to disport themselves in the field of ocean. From the heaving deck of the vessel the mountains that shall not be removed were visible--on the northerly tack Brandon, on the southerly Carntual; the former sunlit, with patches of moss gleaming like emeralds on its breast, the latter dark and melancholy, clothed in the midst of tradition and fancy that in those days garbed so much of Ireland"s bog and hill.
The sloop had missed the tide, and, close hauled to the wind, rode deep in the ebb, making little way with each tack. The breeze hummed through the rigging. The man at the helm humped a shoulder to the sting of the spray, and the rest of the crew, seven or eight in number--tarry, pigtailed, outlandish sailor men--crouched under the windward rail. The skipper sat with a companion on a coil of rope on the dry side of the skylight, and at the moment at which our story opens was oblivious alike of the weather and his difficulties. He sat with his eyes fixed on his neighbour, and in those eyes a wondering, fatuous admiration. So might a mortal look if some strange hap brought him face to face with a centaur.
"Never?" he murmured respectfully.
"Never," his companion answered.
"My faith!" Captain Augustin rejoined. He was a cross between a Frenchman and an Irishman. For twenty years he had carried wine to Ireland, and returned laden with wool to Bordeaux or Cadiz. He knew every inlet between Achill Sound and the Head of Kinsale, and was so far a Jacobite that he scorned to pay duty to King George. "Never? My faith!" he repeated, staring, if possible, harder than ever.
"No," said the Colonel. "Under no provocation, thank G.o.d!"
"But it"s _drole_," Captain Augustin rejoined. "It would bother me sorely to know what you do."
"What we all should do," his pa.s.senger answered gently. "Our duty, Captain Augustin. Our duty! Doing which we are men indeed. Doing which, we have no more to do, no more to fear, no more to question." And Colonel John Sullivan threw out both his hands, as if to ill.u.s.trate the freedom from care which followed. "See! it is done!"
"But west of Shannon, where there is no law?" Augustin answered. "Eh, Colonel? And in Kerry, where we"ll be, the saints helping, before noon--which is all one with Connaught? No, in Kerry, what with Sullivans, and Mahonies, and O"Beirnes, that wear coats only for a gentleman to tread upon, and would sooner shoot a friend before breakfast than spend the day idle, _par ma foi_, I"m not seeing what you"ll be doing there, Colonel."
"A man may protect himself from violence," the Colonel answered soberly, "and yet do his duty. What he may not do--is this. He may not go out to kill another in cold blood, for a point of honour, or for revenge, or to sustain what he has already done amiss! No, nor for vanity, or for the hundred trifles for which men risk their lives and seek the lives of others. I hope I make myself clear, Captain Augustin?" he added courteously.
He asked because the skipper"s face of wonderment was not to be misread. And the skipper answered, "Quite clear!" meaning the reverse.
Clear, indeed? Yonder were the hills and bogs of Kerry--lawless, impenetrable, abominable--a realm of Tories and rapparees. On the sloop itself was scarce a man whose hands were free from blood. He, Augustin, mild-mannered as any smuggler on the coast, had spent his life between fleeing and fighting, with his four carronades ever crammed to the muzzle, and his cargo ready to be jettisoned at sight of a cruiser. And this man talked as if he were in church! Talked--talked--the skipper fairly gasped. "Oh, quite clear!" he mumbled. "Quite clear!" he replied. "But it"s an odd creed."
"Not a creed, my friend," Colonel Sullivan replied precisely. "But the result of a creed. The result, thank G.o.d, of more creeds than one."
Captain Augustin cast a wild eye at the straining, shrieking rigging; the sloop was lurching heavily. But whether he would or no, his eye fluttered back and rested, fascinated, on the Colonel"s face. Indeed, from the hour, ten days earlier, which had seen him mount the side in the Bordeaux river, Colonel John Sullivan had been a subject of growing astonishment to the skipper. Captain Augustin knew his world tolerably.
In his time he had conveyed many a strange pa.s.senger from strand to strand: haggard men who ground their shoulders against the bulkhead, and saw things in corners; dark, down-looking adventurers, whose hands flew to hilts if a gentleman addressed them suddenly; gay young sparks bound on foreign service and with the point of honour on their lips, or their like, returning old and broken to beg or cut throats on the highway--these, and men who carried their lives in their hands, and men who went, cloaked, on mysterious missions, and men who wept as the Irish coast faded behind them, and men, more numerous, who wept when they saw it again--he knew them all! All, he had carried them, talked with them, learned their secrets, and more often their hopes.
But such a man as this he had never carried. A man who indeed wore outlandish fur-trimmed clothes, and had seen, if his servant"s spa.r.s.e words went for aught, outlandish service; but who neither swore, nor drank above measure, nor swaggered, nor threatened. Who would not dice, nor game--save for trifles. Who, on the contrary, talked of duty, and had a peaceful word for all, and openly condemned the duello, and was mild as milk and as gentle as an owl. Such a one seemed, indeed, the fabled "phaynix," or a bat with six wings, or any other prodigy which the fancy, Irish or foreign, could conceive.
Then, to double the marvel, the Colonel had a servant, a close-tongued fellow, William Bale by name, and reputed an Englishman, who, if he was not like his master, was as unlike other folk. He was as quiet-spoken as the Colonel, and as precise, and as peaceable. He had even been heard to talk of his duty. But while the Colonel was tall and spare, with a gentle eye and a long, kindly face, and was altogether of a pensive cast, Bale was short and stout, of a black pallor, and very forbidding. His mouth, when he opened it--which was seldom--dropped honey. But his brow scowled, his lip sneered, and his silence invited no confidence.
Such being the skipper"s pa.s.senger, and such his man, the wonder was that Captain Augustin"s astonishment had not long ago melted into contempt. But it had not. For one thing, a seaman had been hurt, and the Colonel had exhibited a skill in the treatment of wounds which would not have disgraced an experienced chirurgeon. Then in the Bay the sloop had met with half a gale, and the pa.s.senger, in circ.u.mstances which the skipper knew to be more trying to landsmen than to himself, had maintained a serenity beyond applause. He had even, clinging to the same ring-bolt with the skipper, while the south-wester tore overhead and the gallant little vessel lay over wellnigh to her beam-ends, praised with a queer condescension the conduct of the crew.
"This is the finest thing in the world," he had shouted, amid the roar of things, "to see men doing their duty! I would not have missed this for a hundred crowns!"
"I"d give as much to be safe in Cherbourg," had been the skipper"s grim reply as he watched his mast.
But Augustin had not forgotten the Colonel"s coolness. A landsman, for whom the trough of the wave had no terrors, and the leeward breakers, falling mountain high on Ushant, no message, was not a man to be despised.
Indeed, from that time the skipper had begun to find a charm in the Colonel"s gentleness and courtesy. He had fought against the feeling, but it had grown upon him. Something that was almost affection began to mingle with and augment his wonder. Hence the patience with which, with Kerry on the beam, he listened while the Colonel sang his siren song.
"He will be one of the people called Quakers," the skipper thought, after a while. "I"ve heard of them, but never seen one. Yes, he will be a Quaker."
Unfortunately, as he arrived at this conclusion a cry from the steersman roused him. He sprang to his feet. Alas! the sloop had run too far on the northerly tack, and simultaneously the wind had shifted a point to the southward. In the open water this had advantaged her; but she had been allowed to run into a bight of the north sh.o.r.e and a line of foam cut her off to the eastward, leaving small room to tack.
She might still clear the westerly rocks and run out to sea, but the skipper saw--with an oath--that this was doubtful, and with a seaman"s quickness he made up his mind.
"Keep her on!--keep her on!" he roared, "you son of a _maudite mere_!
Child of the accursed! We must run into Skull haven! And if the men of Skull take so much as an iron bolt from us, and I mis...o...b.. them, I"ll keel-haul you, son of the _Diable_! I"ll not leave an inch of skin upon you!"
The man, cowering over the wheel, obeyed, and the little vessel ran up the narrowing water--in which she had become involved--on an even keel.
The crew were already on their feet, they had loosened the sheet, and squared the boom; they stood by to lower the yard. All--the skipper with a grim face--stood looking forward, as the inlet narrowed, the green banks closed in, the rocks that fringed them approached. Silently and gracefully the sloop glided on, more smoothly with every moment, until a turn in the pa.s.sage opened a small land-locked haven. At the head of the haven, barely a hundred yards above high-water mark, stood a ruined tower--the Tower of Skull--and below this a long house of stone with a thatched roof.
It was clear that the sloop"s movements had been watched from the sh.o.r.e, for although the melancholy waste of moor and mountain disclosed no other habitation, a score of half-naked barefoot figures were gathered on the jetty; while others could be seen hurrying down the hillside. These cried to one another in an unknown tongue, and with shrill eldritch voices, which vied with the screams of the gulls swinging overhead.
"Stand by to let go the kedge," Augustin cried, eyeing them gloomily.
"We are too far in now! Let go!--let go!"
But the order and the ensuing action at once redoubled the clamour on sh.o.r.e. A dozen of the foremost natives flung themselves into crazy boats, that seemed as if they could not float long enough to reach the vessel. But the men handled them with consummate skill and with equal daring. In a twinkling they were within hail, and a man, wearing a long frieze coat, a fisherman"s red cap, and little besides, stood up in the bow of the nearest.
"You will be coming to the jetty, Captain?" he cried in imperfect English.
The skipper scowled at him, but did not answer.
"You will come to the jetty, Captain," the man repeated in his high, sing-song voice. "Sure, and you"ve come convenient, for there"s no one here barring yourselves."
"And you"re wanting brandy!" Augustin muttered bitterly under his breath. He glanced at his men, as if he meditated resistance.
But, "Kerry law! Kerry law!" the man cried. "You know it well, Captain!
It"s not I"ll be answerable if you don"t come to the jetty."
The skipper, who had fallen ill at Skull once before, and got away with some loss, hoping that he might never see the place again, knew that he was in the men"s power. True, a single discharge of his carronades would blow the boats to pieces; but he could not in a moment warp his ship out through the narrow pa.s.sage. And if he could, he knew that the act would be bloodily avenged if he ever landed again in that part of Ireland. He swore under his breath, and the steersman who had wrought the harm by holding on too long wilted under his eye. The crew looked other ways.
At length he yielded, and sulkily gave the order, the windla.s.s was manned, and the kedge drawn up. Fenders were lowered, and the sloop slid gently to the jetty side.
In a twinkling a score of natives swarmed aboard. The man in the frieze coat followed more leisurely, and with such dignity as became the owner of a stone-walled house. He sauntered up to the skipper, a leer in his eye. "You will have lost something the last time you were here, Captain?" he said. "It is not I that will be responsible this time unless the stuff is landed."
Augustin laughed scornfully. "The cargo is for Crosby of Castlemaine,"
he said. And he added various things which he hoped would happen to himself if he landed so much as a single tub.
"It"s little we know of Crosby here," the other replied; and he spat on the deck. "And less we"ll be caring, my dear. I say it shall be landed.
Here, you, Darby Sullivan, off with the hatch!"
Augustin stepped forward impulsively, as if he had a mind to throw the gentleman in the frieze coat into the sea. But he had not armed himself before he came on deck, the men of Skull outnumbered his crew two to one, and, savage and half-naked as they were, were furnished to a man with long sharp skenes and the skill to use them. If resistance had been possible at any time, he had let the moment pa.s.s. The nearest Justice lived twelve Irish miles away, and had he been on the spot he would, since he was of necessity a Protestant, have been as helpless--unless he brought the garrison of Tralee at his back--as a churchwarden in a Synod of Cardinals. The skipper hesitated, and while he hesitated the hatches were off, and the Sullivans swarmed down like monkeys. Before the sloop could be made fast, the smaller kegs were being tossed up, and pa.s.sed over the side, a line was formed on land, and the cargo, which had last seen the sun on the banks of the Garonne, was swiftly vanishing in the maw of the stone house on the sh.o.r.e.
The skipper"s rage was great, but he could only swear, and O"Sullivan Og, the man in the frieze coat, who bore him an old grudge, grinned in mockery. "For better custody, Captain!" he said. "For better custody!
Under my roof, _bien_! And when you will to go again there will be the dues to be paid, the little dues over which we quarrelled last time!
And all will be rendered to a stave!"