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CHAPTER XV.
Rienvella Cove presented an animated scene on the eve of the herring fishery. A hooker had come in from exploration, and reported a shoal bearing right from the north along the coast. May it be a good shoal, may the fish be plentiful, and not shy, but disposed to keep in shore, to enter the inlets, and be captured! Comfort or necessity in many a cabin for the year depended on it. Great was the caulking of boats and tarring of canoes and mending of nets, and other preparations for the night. Every fisherman’s wife had oaten bread ready for him, and a bottle of whey, where it could be procured, and a bit of fire extemporized in a small iron pot, wherewith to light pipes, etc. Clothes were scoured, and jackets mended; and all was ready now.
Drawn up on the sandy beach in a row, ready for launching by hand, were near a dozen boats; two or three hookers flapped sail idly farther out, for the wind in this deep fiord had dropped almost dead, or beat across from cliff to cliff high over the tide, and oars would have to be used to get the hookers out to sea, where their brown canvas might stretch fully. Every boat had an oar uplifted at its head, stuck in the sand, and decorated with some strip of coloured rag as a streamer, from a flagstaff; a pile of net and tackle lay heaped in each bow, and the owner or partners stood by, arrayed in their cleanest and best. All the village population had come to look on; women and children sitting on the raised inland edge of the beach.
They were waiting for Father Devenish’s blessing on the boats. More and more, during the past year, the administration of the parish had fallen into his hands, owing to the failing health of the senior priest, and thus he could carry out his own ideas of discipline with little restraint; it was even said that he did not inform Father Eusebius of much that went on in an ecclesiastical way.
Mr. Devenish stood on a low gravelly knoll, about the center of the short strip of shore in the cove. His keen eyes travel over the line of expectants, and note where his clerk Devlin is carrying from group to group the wooden saucer for the humble collection of dues usually made. At last he has recieved a copper from the farthest fisherman, and returns. He will next go round with a vessel of holy water and sprinkle their nets and tackle. They have now paid for the anticipated benefits, that is, increase of fish, and an exemption for each man from the dangers of the sea.
Father Devenish begins, not the established formula of blessing yet, but a discourse in Irish. His flock have learned to be rather afraid of these sermons, for scolding is the staple. On this occasion he told them (after a preamble) that he could not possibly bless the boats while that of a heretic was among them, for even if he did utter the words no good would follow. They could all have their dues back, what each man had given, by application to Mr. Devlin. Here he paused, and every one looked about for the black sheep.
Did they ask him who was the apostate—the turncoat? They need go no further than Pat Colman. He wondered that man dared come among them under his very eyes! But as he had come, there was no help for it. Even if the holy water were sprinkled on the nets and tackle now it would rather turn into a curse upon them.
The priest stepped away from the knoll, and began to walk up the rocky path leading to the village. Then arose a cry of disappointment, a confusion of voices, a clamor on the beach. These fisherman really believed that their chance of taking herrings for the whole season depended on the priestly blessing which seemed vanishing from their grasp. With one accord they rushed upon Colman, where he stood half petrified beside his boat.
It is easy to destroy one of these canvas-covered canoes: a stout knife would create irreparable mischief in a few minutes. Even the two fisher-youths, hired by Colman “on shares,” as his helpers, turned to the popular side, and aided in tearing and smashing the frail concern. He himself was hustled roughly, his clothes torn, and a blow from one of his own oars laid him prostrate.
“The dirty turncoat! the jumper! haow daur he come here among dacent people, to chate us of our blessin’!”
One ally had poor Pat in his hour of need. Owen the “natural” had come down to the beach “to look at the fun,” with a child of Colman’s on his shoulder and another by the hand. The broad, placid grin had never left his countenance during the priest’s address, showing how much he understood of it. But when he saw the assault made on his friend, without the dimmest comprehension of the cause, he laid down his nurseling among the women, and rushed with two springs and a shout into the fray. Sorely handled he was himself in consequence, sorely beaten, while beating in return with the vehemence of unreasoning passionate rage. Nature had granted him an athletic frame for his nutshell of a brain; and probably it was owing to the diversion of his onslaught effected that Pat Colman made his escape with only bruises and a deep cut over the eye. Pelted and hooted and hunted, the two at last gained the upper ground beyond reach of their assailant’s stones, Owen blubbering and sobbing like a child.
“Don’t be throwin’ back at ‘em any more, Owneen,” said Colman. “I wish ‘em joy of their victory, so I do—thirty or forty against two! But I’ll have the law of ‘em, I will, every man of ‘em,” he muttered between his teeth. Seeing him stand to look back, the mob below raised another yell, and sent aloft another volley of stones. The two went on prudently, climbing the steep cliff path.
“Stop cryin’, cant you?” The poor simpleton’s whimpering close behind irritated him, though Owen had just proved such an affectionate and vigorous ally. Poor Colman! no wonder if he was wrathful and easily angered; he had just seen all his property and means of living destroyed; canoe, nets, tackle, and all. “To think the neighbours would be the ones to do it, too!” The reflection added tenfold bitterness.
The Apostle speaks of the Hebrew Christians as taking “joyfully the spoiling of their goods;” an attainment of self-devotion solely explainable by the mighty faith that is more convinced of the realities of heaven (if that were possible) than of the realities of earth; a faith anchored in the “better and more enduring substance” which God has prepared for them that love him.
This fisherman had no pretensions to such fortitude. He had read the Testament all winter and all spring, liking it first as a matter of mere human interest, until gradually God gave him to see somewhat deeper into its divine teachings. Mr. Devlin had been sent to demand the book from him, and he had refused to give it up; but he carefully avoided causing other offense. He paid his dues regularly, as thinking that would go far to win for him quietness; he attended mass every Sunday, and made the usual genuflections. And the mental reservation by which he latterly justified to his own mind the bowing to the host was this: “I don’t bow to that bread, but to God Almighty himself.” For in certain talks with the Manuscript Man he had come to see that the wafer used in the mass could not possibly have been transmuted into the flesh and blood of his Saviour, and that there was no ground in Scripture for the assertion. A similar feeling caused his appearance at Rienvella Cove to-day. Not that he believed in Mr. Devenish’s blessing one whit, or that it would bring a single additional herring to the meshes of his net; but that he must do as others did for safety’s sake. Before we censure his conduct as unmanly let us place ourselves amid his difficulties, and under his very partial light.
However, this was the end of the poor fellow’s time-serving: he could scarcely have been worse off had he stood forth boldly: he was a ruined man as to worldly gear. When they came to the seaward edge of the cliffs, he threw himself down on the grass in exhaustion. And Owen, after a strong endeavor to conquer the sobs, yielded to them again, as he saw his own hand torn and bleeding, and felt other aches and pains from the ill-treatment he had received.
“But, daddy, what is it for? What did you do dat dey beat you, daddy?”
From being commonly in company with the children, Owen had learned to call Colman as they called him; and his speech was always imperfect in certain sounds.
“’Tis all for reading that book, Owneen: the book you see me wid in the evenins over the fire. The book of God, Owneen.”
And herewith entered a ray of comfort into this bewildered and exasperated mind: Colman felt, without at all having mental words for the expression, something of the divine consolation conveyed by the inspired reasoner, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” If he be enduring loss and suffering for the sake of God, will not God himself be the defender and the rewarder?
Presently he saw emerge from the mouth of the fiord the first of the boats, manned by four stout rowers; and being without keel or rudder, it was so light as actually to leap over the undulating water in its speed to the distant shoal. The others followed, in a sort of procession, and then came the heavy hookers with creaking sails, and a slow oar sculling from the stern. Of course they had all got the blessing.
Colman sat up and shaded his eyes from the level western glow to search for traces of the shoal out at sea. Ay, he could percieve the scarcely definable whitish patch from afar, near the purple horizon, which he knew to be produced by clouds of sea birds whirling over and alighting on the crowded water. His heart would have bounded at the sight another time; plenty and prosperity were its promise; but now he was all rankling with a sense of injustice, his head ached, his wounds smarted.
“Come home, Owneen.”
