The Merry Men | Page 5

filled with sea-shells
instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare
wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole
adornment - poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities,
woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on
the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of
wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to see it
now, shamed by these incongruous additions, filled me with
indignation and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had come upon
to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; but it burned high, at the
first moment, in my heart.
'Mary, girl,' said I, 'this is the place I had learned to call my home, and I
do not know it.'
'It is my home by nature, not by the learning,' she replied; 'the place I
was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these
changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I
would have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into
the sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on them now.'

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared
with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was
even graver than of custom.
'Ay,' said I, 'I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when my
father died, I took his goods without remorse.'
'Your father died a clean strae death, as the folk say,' said Mary.
'True,' I returned; 'and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she
called?'
'They ca'd her the CHRIST-ANNA,' said a voice behind me; and,
turning round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.
He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;
fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat
between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He
never laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like
the Cameronians he had been brought up among; and indeed, in many
ways, used to remind me of one of the hill- preachers in the killing
times before the Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even,
as I used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits
when he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he
would look back with envy, and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.
As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his
head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to
have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his
face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or
the bones of the dead.
'Ay' he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, 'the
CHRIST-ANNA. It's an awfu' name.'
I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of
health; for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

'I'm in the body,' he replied, ungraciously enough; 'aye in the body and
the sins of the body, like yoursel'. Denner,' he said abruptly to Mary,
and then ran on to me: 'They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten, are
they no? Yon's a bonny knock (2), but it'll no gang; and the napery's by
ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; it's for the like o' them folk sells the
peace of God that passeth understanding; it's for the like o' them, an'
maybe no even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to His face and
burn in muckle hell; and it's for that reason the Scripture ca's them, as I
read the passage, the accursed thing. Mary, ye girzie,' he interrupted
himself to cry with some asperity, 'what for hae ye no put out the twa
candlesticks?'
'Why should we need them at high noon?' she asked.
But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. 'We'll bruik (3) them
while we may,' he said; and so two massive candlesticks of wrought
silver were added to the table equipage, already so unsuited to that
rough sea-side farm.
'She cam' ashore Februar' 10, about ten at nicht,' he went on to me.
'There was nae wind, and a sair run o' sea; and she was in the sook o'
the Roost, as I jaloose. We had seen her a' day, Rorie and me, beating
to the wind. She wasnae a handy craft, I'm thinking, that
CHRIST-ANNA; for she would neither steer nor stey