Part 4 (2/2)

”So she's been telling you the same old story?” he said briskly. ?

At that Pete's face stiffened all at once. ”She's been telling me that you're my father, sir.”

The Ballawhaine tried to laugh. ”Indeed!” he replied; ”it's a wise child, now, that knows its own father.”

”I'm not rightly knowing what you mane, sir,” said Pete.

Then the Ballawhaine fell to slandering the poor woman in her grave, declaring that she could not know who was the father of her child, and protesting that no son of hers should ever see the colour of money of his. Saying this with a snarl, he brought down his right hand with a thump on to the table. There was a big hairy mole near the joint of the first finger.

”Aisy, sir, if you plaze,” said Pete; ”she was telling me you gave her this.”

He turned up the corner of his jersey, tugged out of his pocket, from behind his flaps, the eighty Manx bank-notes, and held them in his right hand on the table. There was a mole at the joint of Pete's first finger also.

The Ballawhaine saw it. He drew back his hand and slid it behind him.

Then in another voice he said, ”Well, my lad, isn't it enough? What are you wanting with more?”

”I'm not wanting more,” said Pete; ”I'm not wanting this. Take it back,”

and he put down the roll of notes between them.

The Ballawhaine sank into the chair, took a handkerchief out of his tails with the hand that had been lurking there, and began to mop his forehead. ”Eh? How? What d'ye mean, boy?” he stammered.

”I mane,” said Pete, ”that if I kept that money there is people would say my mother was a bad woman, and you bought her and paid her--I'm hearing the like at some of them.”

He took a step nearer. ”And I mane, too, that you did wrong by my mother long ago, and now that she's dead you're blackening her; and you're a bad heart, and a low tongue, and if I was only a man, and didn't _know_ you were my father, I'd break every bone in your skin.”

Then Pete twisted about and shouted into the dark part of the hall, ”Come along, there, my ould c.o.c.katoo! It's time to be putting me to the door.”

The English footman in the scarlet breeches had been peeping from under the stairs.

That was Pete's first and last interview with his father. Peter Christian Ballawhaine was a terror in the Keys by this time, but he had trembled before his son like a whipped cur.

V.

Katherine Cregeen, Pete's champion at school, had been his companion at home as well. She was two years younger than Pete. Her hair was a black as a gipsy's, and her face as brown as a berry. In summer she liked best to wear a red frock without sleeves, no boots and no stockings, no collar and no bonnet, not even a sun-bonnet. From constant exposure to the sun and rain her arms and legs were as ruddy as her cheeks, and covered with a soft silken down. So often did you see her teeth that you would have said she was always laughing. Her laugh was a little saucy trill given out with head aside and eyes aslant, like that of a squirrel when he is at a safe height above your head, and has a nut in his open jaws.

Pete had seen her first at school, and there he had tried to draw the eyes of the maiden upon himself by methods known only to heroes, to savages, and to boys. He had prowled around her in the playground with the wild vigour of a young colt, tossing his head, swinging his arms, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his body, kicking up his legs, walking on his hands, lunging out at every lad that was twice as big as himself, and then bringing himself down at length with a whoop and a crash on his hindmost parts just in front of where she stood. For these tremendous efforts to show what a fellow he could be if he tried, he had won no applause from the boys, and Katherine herself had given no sign, though Pete had watched her out of the corners of his eyes. But in other scenes the children came together.

After Philip had gone to King William's, Pete and Katherine had become bosom friends. Instead of going home after school to cool his heels in the road until his mother came from the fields, he found it neighbourly to go up to Ballajora and round by the network of paths to Cornaa. That was a long detour, but Caesar's mill stood there. It nestled down in the low bed of the river that runs through the glen called Ballagla.s.s.

Song-birds built about it in the spring of the year, and Caesar's little human songster sang there always.

When Pete went that way home, what times the girl had of it! Wading up the river, clambering over the stones, playing female Blondin on the fallen tree-trunks that spanned the chasm, slipping, falling, holding on any way up (legs or arms) by the rotten branches below, then calling for Pete's help in a voice between a laugh and a cry, flinging chips into the foaming back-wash of the mill-wheel, and chasing them down stream, racing among the gorse, and then lying full length like a lamb, without a thought of shame, while Pete took the thorns out of her bleeding feet.

She was a wild duck in the glen where she lived, and Pete was a great lumbering tame duck waddling behind her.

But the glorious, happy, make-believe days too soon came to an end. The swinging cane of the great John Thomas Corlett, and the rod of a yet more relentless tyrant, darkened the suns.h.i.+ne of both the children. Pete was banished from school, and Catherine's father removed from Cornaa.

When Caesar had taken a wife, he had married Betsy, the daughter of the owner of the inn at Sulby. After that he had ”got religion,” and he held that persons in the household of faith were not to drink, or to buy or to sell drink. But Grannie's father died and left his house, ”The Manx Fairy,” and his farm, Glenmooar, to her and her husband. About the same time the miller at Sulby also died, and the best mill in the island cried out for a tenant. Caesar took the mill and the farm, and Grannie took the inn, being brought up to such profanities and no way bound by principle. From that time forward, Caesar pinned all envious cavillers with the text which says, ”Not that which goeth into the mouth of a man defileth him, but that which cometh out.”

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