The Merry Men

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THE MERRY MEN
AND
Other Tales and Fables


BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

TENTH EDITION

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1904

Three of the following Tales have appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_;
one in _Longman's_; one in Mr. Henry Norman's Christmas Annual; and one
in the _Court and Society Review_. The Author desires to make proper
acknowledgements to the Publishers concerned.




Dedication


_MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR_,

_To your name_, _if I wrote on brass_, _I could add nothing_; _it has
been already written higher than I could dream to reach_, _by a strong
and dear hand_; _and if I now dedicate to you these tales_, _it is not as
the writer who brings you his work_, _but as the friend who would remind
you of his affection_.

_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON_

SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.




Contents


The Merry Men

i. Eilean Aros

ii. What the wreck had brought to Aros

iii. Land and sea in Sandag Bay

iv. The gale

v. A man out of the sea

Will o' the Mill

Markheim

Thrawn Janet

Olalla

The Treasure of Franchard

i. By the dying Mountebank

ii. Morning tale

iii. The adoption

iv. The education of the philosopher

v. Treasure trove

vi. A criminal investigation, in two parts

vii. The fall of the House of Desprez

viii. The wages of philosophy




THE MERRY MEN


CHAPTER I. EILEAN AROS.


It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for
the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at
Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving
all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck
right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from
an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a
poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the
islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when
she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had
remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means of
life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued;
he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh
adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny.
Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help
nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands;
there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the
luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left
a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student of
Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without
kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the
Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than
water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to
count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in
that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between
the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done
with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July
day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as
rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full
of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen--all overlooked from
the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw.
_The Mountain of the Mist_, they say the words signify in the Gaelic
tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more than
three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing
from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make
them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there
would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was
mossy {5} to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad
sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape upon the
mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to
my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet
rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros,
fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It twisted so as nearly to
double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a
man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the
moss came nearly to the knee. There was no cultivation anywhere, and not
one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course there
were--three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other
that no stranger could have found them from the track. A large part of
the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a
two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in
between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the wind was, it was always
sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over
all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle
with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of the land, on a
day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring, like a
battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the
breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself--Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it
means _the House of God_--Aros itself was not properly a piece of the
Ross, nor was it quite an islet. It formed the south-west corner of the
land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the
coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.
When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land
river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water
itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the
bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could
pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good pasture,
where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better
because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the
Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house was a good
one for that country, two storeys high. It looked westward over a bay,
with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the
vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great
granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the
sea, like cattle on a summer's day. There they stand, for all the world
like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them
instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink blooming on their sides
instead of heather; and the great sea conger to wreathe about the base of
them instead of the poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can go
wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes following you about
the labyrinth; but when the sea is up, Heaven help the man that hears
that cauldron boiling.

Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very many, and much
greater in size. Indeed, they must grow monstrously bigger out to sea,
for there must be ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as
a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet above the tides,
some covered, but all perilous to ships; so that on a clear, westerly
blowing day, I have counted, from the top of Aros, the great rollers
breaking white and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. But
it is nearer in shore that the danger is worst; for the tide, here
running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water--a _Roost_ we
call it--at the tail of the land. I have often been out there in a dead
calm at the slack of the tide; and a strange place it is, with the sea
swirling and combing up and boiling like the cauldrons of a linn, and now
and again a little dancing mutter of sound as though the _Roost_ were
talking to itself. But when the tide begins to run again, and above all
in heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within half a mile of
it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer or live in such a place.
You can hear the roaring of it six miles away. At the seaward end there
comes the strongest of the bubble; and it's here that these big breakers
dance together--the dance of death, it may be called--that have got the
name, in these parts, of the Merry Men. I have heard it said that they
run fifty feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the spray
runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the name from their
movements, which are swift and antic, or from the shouting they make
about the turn of the tide, so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than
I can tell.

The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part of our archipelago
is no better than a trap. If a ship got through the reefs, and weathered
the Merry Men, it would be to come ashore on the south coast of Aros, in
Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our family, as I propose
to tell. The thought of all these dangers, in the place I knew so long,
makes me particularly welcome the works now going forward to set lights
upon the headlands and buoys along the channels of our iron-bound,
inhospitable islands.

The country people had many a story about Aros, as I used to hear from my
uncle's man, Rorie, an old servant of the Macleans, who had transferred
his services without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. There
was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, that dwelt and did
business in some fearful manner of his own among the boiling breakers of
the Roost. A mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and there
sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so that in the morning he
was found stricken crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died,
said only one form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I
cannot tell, but they were thus translated: 'Ah, the sweet singing out of
the sea.' Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to
man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters. It was here that a
certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to convert the
Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some claim to be called saint;
for, with the boats of that past age, to make so rough a passage, and
land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not far short of the
miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his monkish underlings who had
a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and beautiful name, the House
of God.

Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined to hear
with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which scattered the
ships of the Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scotland,
one great vessel came ashore on Aros, and before the eyes of some
solitary people on a hill-top, went down in a moment with all hands, her
colours flying even as she sank. There was some likelihood in this tale;
for another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty miles from
Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with more detail and gravity than its
companion stories, and there was one particularity which went far to
convince me of its truth: the name, that is, of the ship was still
remembered, and sounded, in my ears, Spanishly. The _Espirito Santo_
they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns, laden with treasure
and grandees of Spain, and fierce soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to
all eternity, done with her wars and voyages, in Sandag bay, upon the
west of Aros. No more salvos of ordnance for that tall ship, the 'Holy
Spirit,' no more fair winds or happy ventures; only to rot there deep in
the sea-tangle and hear the shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran
high about the island. It was a strange thought to me first and last,
and only grew stranger as I learned the more of Spain, from which she had
set sail with so proud a company, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that
sent her on that voyage.

And now I must tell you, as I walked from Grisapol that day, the
_Espirito Santo_ was very much in my reflections. I had been favourably
remarked by our then Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous writer,
Dr. Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some papers of an
ancient date to rearrange and sift of what was worthless; and in one of
these, to my great wonder, I found a note of this very ship, the
_Espirito Santo_, with her captain's name, and how she carried a great
part of the Spaniard's treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross of
Grisapol; but in what particular spot, the wild tribes of that place and
period would give no information to the king's inquiries. Putting one
thing with another, and taking our island tradition together with this
note of old King Jamie's perquisitions after wealth, it had come strongly
on my mind that the spot for which he sought in vain could be no other
than the small bay of Sandag on my uncle's land; and being a fellow of a
mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to weigh that good
ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, and doubloons, and bring back
our house of Darnaway to its long-forgotten dignity and wealth.

This was a design of which I soon had reason to repent. My mind was
sharply turned on different reflections; and since I became the witness
of a strange judgment of God's, the thought of dead men's treasures has
been intolerable to my conscience. But even at that time I must acquit
myself of sordid greed; for if I desired riches, it was not for their own
sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart--my uncle's
daughter, Mary Ellen. She had been educated well, and had been a time to
school upon the mainland; which, poor girl, she would have been happier
without. For Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the servant, and
her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in Scotland, plainly bred
up in a country place among Cameronians, long a skipper sailing out of
the Clyde about the islands, and now, with infinite discontent, managing
his sheep and a little 'long shore fishing for the necessary bread. If
it was sometimes weariful to me, who was there but a month or two, you
may fancy what it was to her who dwelt in that same desert all the year
round, with the sheep and flying sea-gulls, and the Merry Men singing and
dancing in the Roost!



CHAPTER II. WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS.


It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and there was nothing
for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat.
I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the
door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged
serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his
hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed
him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously
into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and haggard, and
I thought he avoided my eye. The coble had been repaired, with two new
thwarts and several patches of some rare and beautiful foreign wood, the
name of it unknown to me.

'Why, Rorie,' said I, as we began the return voyage, 'this is fine wood.
How came you by that?'

'It will be hard to cheesel,' Rorie opined reluctantly; and just then,
dropping the oars, he made another of those dives into the stern which I
had remarked as he came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my
shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of the bay.

'What is wrong?' I asked, a good deal startled.

'It will be a great feesh,' said the old man, returning to his oars; and
nothing more could I get out of him, but strange glances and an ominous
nodding of the head. In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure
of uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The water was still
and transparent, but, out here in the middle of the bay, exceeding deep.
For some time I could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if
something dark--a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow--followed
studiously in the track of the moving coble. And then I remembered one
of Rorie's superstitions: how in a ferry in Morven, in some great,
exterminating feud among the clans; a fish, the like of it unknown in all
our waters, followed for some years the passage of the ferry-boat, until
no man dared to make the crossing.

'He will be waiting for the right man,' said Rorie.

Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae and into the house of
Aros. Outside and inside there were many changes. The garden was fenced
with the same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were chairs in the
kitchen covered with strange brocade; curtains of brocade hung from the
window; a clock stood silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was swinging
from the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of linen and
silver; and all these new riches were displayed in the plain old kitchen
that I knew so well, with the high-backed settle, and the stools, and the
closet bed for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun shone into, and the
clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the mantelshelf and the three-
cornered spittoons, 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 {15}, 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 {16} 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 wi' them. A sair day they had of
it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it perishin' cauld--ower
cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o' wind, and awa' again,
to pit the emp'y hope into them. Eh, man! but they had a sair day for
the last o't! He would have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore
upon the back o' that.'

'And were all lost?' I cried. 'God held them!'

'Wheesht!' he said sternly. 'Nane shall pray for the deid on my hearth-
stane.'

I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and he seemed to accept
my disclaimer with unusual facility, and ran on once more upon what had
evidently become a favourite subject.

'We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an' me, and a' thae braws in the inside
of her. There's a kittle bit, ye see, about Sandag; whiles the sook rins
strong for the Merry Men; an' whiles again, when the tide's makin' hard
an' ye can hear the Roost blawin' at the far-end of Aros, there comes a
back-spang of current straucht into Sandag Bay. Weel, there's the thing
that got the grip on the _Christ-Anna_. She but to have come in ram-stam
an' stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften under, and the back-side
of her is clear at hie-water o' neaps. But, man! the dunt that she cam
doon wi' when she struck! Lord save us a'! but it's an unco life to be a
sailor--a cauld, wanchancy life. Mony's the gliff I got mysel' in the
great deep; and why the Lord should hae made yon unco water is mair than
ever I could win to understand. He made the vales and the pastures, the
bonny green yaird, the halesome, canty land--

And now they shout and sing to Thee,
For Thou hast made them glad,

as the Psalms say in the metrical version. No that I would preen my
faith to that clink neither; but it's bonny, and easier to mind. "Who go
to sea in ships," they hae't again--

And in
Great waters trading be,
Within the deep these men God's works
And His great wonders see.

Weel, it's easy sayin' sae. Maybe Dauvit wasnae very weel acquant wi'
the sea. But, troth, if it wasnae prentit in the Bible, I wad whiles be
temp'it to think it wasnae the Lord, but the muckle, black deil that made
the sea. There's naething good comes oot o't but the fish; an' the
spentacle o' God riding on the tempest, to be shure, whilk would be what
Dauvit was likely ettling at. But, man, they were sair wonders that God
showed to the _Christ-Anna_--wonders, do I ca' them? Judgments, rather:
judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons o' the deep. And their
souls--to think o' that--their souls, man, maybe no prepared! The sea--a
muckle yett to hell!'

I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice was unnaturally moved and
his manner unwontedly demonstrative. He leaned forward at these last
words, for example, and touched me on the knee with his spread fingers,
looking up into my face with a certain pallor, and I could see that his
eyes shone with a deep-seated fire, and that the lines about his mouth
were drawn and tremulous.

Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning of our meal, did not detach
him from his train of thought beyond a moment. He condescended, indeed,
to ask me some questions as to my success at college, but I thought it
was with half his mind; and even in his extempore grace, which was, as
usual, long and wandering, I could find the trace of his preoccupation,
praying, as he did, that God would 'remember in mercy fower puir,
feckless, fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane beside the
great and dowie waters.'