Part 20 (1/2)
”Ay, there's wood, but ef we had the tools 'twould still be no easy matter. An' then ye've got to reckon wi' the weather. 'Twould be a bad move to spend our time building a boat only to go to the bottom in her with all the gear we'd gathered. We're safe here, anyway. Mebbe some day a boat'll come ash.o.r.e not so broke but we can patch her up....
How'd ye like to be afloat in a home-made boat a night like this?”
For while they sat, eating and talking, the day had darkened, and now and again there came a menacing whuffle down the open hatch, and the little s.h.i.+p was filled with a tremulous humming as the rising wind played on their bare masts, and the growl of the spit had deepened into a long hoa.r.s.e roar.
”It'll be a bitter bad night I'm thinking. I saw it coming away out yonder. Mebbe it'll add some to our pile of stuff. Mebbe it'll bring us a boat.”
”We will not hope for either,” said Wulfrey soberly, ”for that means more deaths out yonder----”
A long shrill scream outside sent a creepy chill down his spine for a moment. He glanced apprehensively across at Macro in the flickering light of the fire, and saw his face livid, his eyes like great black wells, his jaw dropped.
”The spirits o' the dead!” jerked the mate. ”There's a hantle o' them out there.... They're mebbe after me for these things....” and he rocked himself to and fro, where he sat on the floor, and muttered strange words,--”An ainm au Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh,”--in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
The weird shrieking waxed louder and shriller. Wulfrey got up and climbed the steps, and found the stormy twilight gray with that vast cloud of birds, all fleeing blindly before the gale and each one screaming its loudest.
It was a fearsome, blood-curdling clamour, an ear-splitting pandemonium, a whirling Sabbat, as if all the demons of the pit had broken loose and clothed themselves in wings and shrieks and deadly fear.
”It's only those d.a.m.nable birds,” he bent and shouted gruffly down to Macro, vexed with himself at his own momentary fright.
But the mate was not for accepting any such simple explanation as that.
”Man!” he said hoa.r.s.ely. ”Birds ye may think 'em, but I know better.
It is spirits they are,--spirits of all the dead that ever died in this dread place,--a great mult.i.tude--their bones are white out there, but the spirits of them cannot rest. A Mhoire ghradhach! 'Twas under the Dark Star we were born, and here we'll die and leave our bones to whiten in the sand, and the spirits of us will go screeching and scrauchling wi' the rest. Come away, man, and shut the doors tight or they'll be in on us!”
Wulfrey had never seen anything like it. Those myriads of fluttering wings looked as though the whole gray sky had come tumbling down in fragments. It was like a snowstorm on a gigantic scale, every whirling flake a bundle of wildly screaming feathers.
He stood watching for a time and listening to the growing thunder of the rollers on the spit. He imagined their cras.h.i.+ng in white foam-fury among the stark ribs of the dead s.h.i.+ps out there on the banks.
He s.h.i.+vered as he recalled the chill horrors of their own undoing and deliverance. It was wonderful beyond words, with that in his mind, to be standing there, safe and warm, and well provided, and his heart was full of grat.i.tude.
”G.o.d help any who are out there this night!” he said to himself, and closed the doors on the storm-fiends, and squatted on the floor over against the mate, who sat rocking slowly to and fro in great discomfort and muttered Gaelic seuns as a protection against the unholy things that wandered outside.
All night long their little s.h.i.+p was filled with the hum of the shuddering masts, broken now and again with the creaking and jerking of their rusty cable. And whenever Wulfrey, warm in his bunk with many blankets, woke up for a moment, he heard the deep thunder of the waves on the spit, and the howl of the wind, outside, and the thras.h.i.+ng of the rain on deck; and he thanked G.o.d for warmth and shelter, and lay listening for a moment, and then rolled over and went to sleep again.
The storm lasted three full days, during which they never once left the s.h.i.+p. They had all they needed, and fresh water was obtainable in any quant.i.ty by slinging an empty keg outside one of the scupper-holes through which the rain drained off the deck.
Macro's gloomy humour lasted, off and on, as long as the storm. The birds had mostly hidden themselves in sheltered nooks among the sandhills. But every now and again the evil in them, or maybe it was hunger, would stir them up and set them whirling and shrieking round the s.h.i.+p, and sometimes lighting on it in prodigious numbers, and the mate would curse them long and deep and fall once more to his spells and invocations. The fury of the storm did not trouble him, but the screaming of the birds seemed to touch the superst.i.tious spot in his nature and set all his nerves jangling.
It was during one of the lull times that he astonished Wulfrey by hauling out his rolls of silks and velvets, and with an elemental, almost barbaric, delight in their rich colourings, he cut them into long strips, which he fixed neatly to the walls of the cabin by means of wooden pegs. The gorgeous results afforded him the greatest satisfaction, which nothing but the wailing of the birds could damp.
Whenever their shrill clamour broke out the darkness fell on him again.
He hurled uncouth curses at them and no arguments availed against his humour.
To Wulfrey, on the other hand, the birds and their dismal shriekings were but an incident, the fury of the storm a wonder and a revelation.
All through that former time of stress, which had ended in their undoing, his powers of observation and appreciation had been dulled by his fears of disaster. Then, the howl of the gale and the onslaught of the seas had been like hungry deaths close at his heels. But here, in the perfect security of the land-locked lake, he was free to watch and to wonder.
At times, indeed, it seemed to him that the terrible force of the wind might lift them bodily, s.h.i.+p and all, and hurl them into the turmoil beyond. Then he remembered that many such storms must have swept the island and still the s.h.i.+ps were there.
The waves that broke on the spit seemed to him higher than tall houses, and the weight of them, as they curled and crashed on the sand, made the whole island tremble, he was certain. The uproar was deafening, and at times great lashes of white spray came hurtling over into the lake, and scourging it into sizable waves of its own.