The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 20 March 1913, Page 5

The Storyteller

(By Alice Deasb.)

the sick call

n moaning of the wind and the glow of a bright turf fire combined to make Father Healy’s cheerless parlor a very haven of warmth and comfort, and tonight for once—the priest was not alone. It was unmistakable that the man who sat opposite to him was his brother, but, nevertheless, it was years since the two had met; for whilst the priest’s life had been

bounded by the stone walls of his west-country parish, the doctor had held practices in various corners of the globe. The world had used him hard enough, for, though not yet an old man, he had been left without wife or child, as alone, but a thousand times more lonely, than the brother who was his host to-night. Now and again the rain came driving fiercely against the windows, but between the showers it was comparatively quiet, for the house lay in a hollow and was sheltered from the full force of the Atlantic gales. It was in one of these lulls that the priest, whose ears were accustomed to the sounds about him, checked his companion's speech with a gesture, and after listening for a moment turned to him with a sharp, short sigh. & 'A sick call,' he said, 'and from that side; it's bound to be from one of the islands. Well, God help the man who had to come for me this night!' The housekeeper, less on the alert, only heard the summons when the messenger's knock came on the kitchen door, and even then no sound of any voice but hers came to tell the inmates of the parlor who it was who needed the ministrations of the priest at such an hour. Father Healy had said, 'God help the man who had to come over from the island on such a night,' but now he found it was no man who sought him, but a slip of a girl, a mere child of no more than fourteen or fifteen, with hair straight and dark, and jacket and petticoat, of thick homespun though they were, clinging to her, drenched and dripping from a mingling of the spray and rain. ' 'Tis the girl over from Pat Dinny's we have,' announced Honor,, an' I partly guess by her that the old man's done for this turn. Bad luck to him for that same this night/ she went on, half to herself, for long experience had; taught her the uselessness of any expostulation with the priest on the subject of ill-timed sick calls. 'Never a foot would he come next or nigh you, an' him able, yet he needs must choose a night of the likes to go die!' She did not expect to be heeded, and even as she grumbled she was getting ready the priest's things whilst he was busy with his own preparations. 'Bid the child take an air of the fire/ he said, as he turned to leave the room. ' The fire !' exclaimed the housekeeper. ' Didn't she quit out of it ever since I came in to you ? 'Tis down on the shore she'll be now, minding the curraoh over the turn of the tide.' . ° ' Surely that child never came over all alone from the island?' cried the doctor, who had looked out only that afternoon across the grey, angry water of the bay to where half a dozen desolate-looking huts were huddled together on the sheltered side of Inisghila. And who would come with her, only herself' replied the housekeeper, 'when there's ne'er another on the island but Pat himself—an' him dyin'?' 'Who's minding him, then, while the girl is over here?' asked the doctor sharply. 'Just himself an' God Almighty,' said the housekeeper. < With a quick movement the doctor rose from his chair, and when his brother came into the room a moment later he found that he, too, was preparing for a night's journey. - You cried the priest; ' you needn't come. He'll be beyond you, or the child would never have come on such a night. Besides, there's no one but herself and she couldn't row a curragh with the two of us m it.'

' She can pilot/ replied the doctor, 'and I'll row I haven't forgotten the trick of it,' he said, seeing that his brother " was about to demur again. 'Besides, the canoes in Canada have kept my hand in.' ' It's a pretty wild night/ said the priest. ' There's danger—not much, maybe, for that girl knows the bay better than most. Still, there's some.' -

Come along, and don't waste time/ was all the answer that the warning brought, and then they went out into the night together. The priest led the way over what to him was such familiar ground. Inisghila lay at the mouth of the bay, a bare desolate rock, which, in spite of the houses discernible

from the shore, was only inhabited during the fishing season, when the boats put in there for the night. Pat Dinny'was the only man whose home was on the island, and he had no one belonging to him excepting Oonah, the girl at whose bidding now the' priest and doctor were seeking the old man out. The sky was bright between the showers, and even when the quickly drifting clouds hid away the moon the island could be seen as an indistinct blot on the tossing waves of the bay. But, at the first, this was all hidden from the priest and his companion, who kept as long as they could in the shelter of the sandhills.

As they went, the priest told what he knew about the man whom they were about to visit. He had come to Tullaroan some twelve years before, bringing the child with him, and asking for work during the short weeks of the sea-harvest.

When the other men went home from Inisghila no one grudged the stranger the shelter of one of the huts, and there he had stayed and made his home. With infinite patience he had coaxed oats and potatoes to grow in sheltered corners, in soil built' up by his own labor; and thus, with a goat and a pig and a few fowls, he had supported himself and the child, leading the wildest, most unfettered lives, which, whilst keepthe girl: as innocent as the white sea-birds that flocked to the island in time of storm, left her every bit as untamed as they.

What his past history was no one knew. He told no one where he came from or what the child was to him; only they had gathered that he had been a sailor, and had seen many countries besides his own. The girl was, waiting for them, a weird figure in the dim light, and at the sight of two figures in place of the one she had expected she looked apprehensively at the curragh and then out across the dashing grey water; but the priest reassured her, and, hearing that the stranger was a doctor, and no stranger to a curragh, she agreed to give him tho oars, crouching herself in the prow, whence she gave her directions with wonderful precision and self-possesion. They headed out straight into the great rolling waves, and the little canvas-covered boat danced as light as a cork on their crests and then slid down, down into the grey-green trough till for a moment nothing was to be seen but the sky and the mountains of water before and behind. To the unitiated there would have been not only danger but certain death, for one of those waves broadside on the frail curragh would have meant immediate destruction. The lives of both men were in the girl's hands, for though the priest could handle a curragh, he was not familiar, as their pilot was, with the hidden rocks and the varying currents of the bay. But duty left him no choice when the danger was not overwhelming, whilst humanity and an unwillingness to let his brother go alone into danger had prompted the doctor to accompany him. ■Gloomy and forbidding at it was, the island was welcome when it rose up before them at length, and then, with the curragh drawn up upon tho shingle, it did not take the occupants many minutes to reach the cabin door.

The end was not so near as the priest had expected, judging by the urgency of the summons, and the first words of the old man were not of his soul, but of the child Oonah, whose future seemed to trouble him even to the exclusion of his own needs. It was only when the. priest had promised repeatedly and solemnly that, whatever happened, she should not darken the workhouse door, that he would listen to any exhortation, and then it seemed that he had forgotten the prayers that once he knew. His tongue had become dumb to them from long disuse, and only five words came back to him wherewith to greet his God : ‘ Lord, I am not worthy ’ * * * * * Father Healy had been right in saying that Pat Hinny would bo beyond what the doctor’s skill could cure, for once he was at peace, at peace with God and at peace concerning the fate of the child, his strength began to fail. The wind had fallen, and the waves, having lost their crest of foam, moved now in

great silvery swells in the shelter of the moonlit bay. The priest could not linger, for the next day was Sunday, and he had an early Mass to say seven long miles away inland; but the doctor was tied by no duties,, and he could not leave the child alone with the Angel of Death hovering over the cabin. He went with his brother to the waterside and helped him to put out the curragh, of which the priest took the sculls with the dexterity that comes with practice, and before he turned to re-enter the cabin he watched the little bubbling craft till it was swallowed up in the shadows of the mainland shore. _ .

The doctor, re-entering, was noiseless from long familiarity with sick-rooms, but never before had he watched for death in such surroundings as these. The cabin was less dark now, for Oonah had stirred up the fire, and the light of the flames had nickered on the dingy walls. The bed on which the dying man lay was built into one corner, and, except for a great chest, a rough dresser, and a couple of creepie-stools, the room was bare. The old man had sunk into a doze, and the girl, crouching between the bedside and the fire, was just as still as he. On the wall above the creepie-stool on which he seated himself Dr. Healy became aware of the smokestained picture of a ship. At the first glance he turned his head quickly away, for in the dim, uncertain light, it seemed to him to be the portrait of the ill-fated vessel which had gone down off the Welsh coast, twelve years ago, with his wife and little girl on board. Certainly the gaily-colored poster of the Kingfisher had had just such a ridiculous sailing-boat in the foreground, and the funnels and smoke of the vessel herself had, in that one glance, looked to him painfully like the picture he had seen in the Montreal shipping office the day he had taken the homeward passage for his dear ones. - Involuntarily he looked again, and the likeness only seemed more striking that before. He rose with a sudden premonition of what was coming. The letters under the picture were scarcely discernible, even with bis eyes close ■ to - it, and, taking a twist of paper from his pocket, he bent and lit it. It was the Kingfisher. The line, the route, the familiar picture told him so, and the proof lay before him, in clumsy, inky characters only the name of the steamer, but the date on which she went down.

Gentle as he had been, the man who was dying was roused by the movement in the room and opened his eyes. ' Who's that?' he asked, addressing himself half to the child, half to the stranger himself. ' 'Tis a doctor he says he is,' replied the former, whilst the latter, dropping the now smoldering s paper, moved to the bedside, and spoke of .his brother as the best way to explain his identity. Then, heedless for once of the sick man as a patient, he questioned him eagerly. ' How came you by that picture?' he said. ' What do you know of the Kingfisher and her loss?' The old man hesitated a moment, and then a light broke upon him.

' Would it be too late now to find out about one that wasn't drowned in her?' he asked, meeting question with question. And then, with pauses, for he was very weak, he told his story.

Just as the Kingfisher was about to leave Montreal, on what was destined to be her last voyage, one of the hands was missing, and Pat Dinny, an oddity always and a wanderer, had been taken on in his place, but by some oversight his name had not been registered, and nearing the coast of Wales the ship went down. The boats were lowered, but no craft could live in such a sea. There was a woman with her child.in the.boat that Pat Dinny was put to row, and when the end came for the others he managed to save himself and the child. It was days afterwards that he presented himself before the representatives of the line, and he went to them alone. He said nothing to begin with about the child, and his story was disbelieved. His name was not down upon the roll, and he was treated merely as a clumsy imposter. Then, with sullen anger and unreasoning perversity, he had

kept silence as to the saving of the child, and, going to the cottage where he had left her, he took her in his arms and tramped to Bristol, whence he contrived to get across to Dublin, and thence he had again tramped west. Chance led him to Tullaroan, and then,' the home on Inisghila offering itself, he had stayed, the wanderings of a lifetime brought to a close by the hands of a baby girl. Now, with death at his side, he bethought himself at last that maybe the child whom he was leaving might have had other relations besides those who had been drowned, and eagerly he questioned the doctor, who knew of the Kingfisher, of the possibility of finding them out. -

But, the doctor, spell-bound, not daring even to think, asked with dry lips what the mother of the child, had been like.

' The very picture of ' Pat Dinny broke off and looked with bewildered air from • Oonah—who, kneeling still, had listened with no less interest than his other auditor to the old man's recital— the doctor himself. , '

' "lis foolish. I'm gettin',' he muttered, ' an' me so near to death. Sure, wasn't Oonah ever her mother over again till" you came in, an' now, 'tis the dead .spit of yourself she is.' ."" . ' Then with tardy-born compunction he turned to the child:

' I didn't ought to have done it, asthore machree, for maybe there was a father an' a home left stript for want of you. God in heaven, don't let her suffer for the fault that was mine!' he cried aloud, raising himself in his bed, only to fall back speechless and exhausted. ... The end had been coming surely, but this exertion had hastened it, and the doctor had to put aside his own enthralling interest to minister to the dying man. "Half an hour later all was over. Without another word, except a half-articulate cry for mercy, Pat Dinny passed away: and, as the grey light of dawn crept through the unshuttered window, the two so strangely brought together were left alone in the dim bare cabin.

It was not time yet for the father—for that Oonah was his child Dr. Healy had no doubt—to claim his daughter, for she, worn out with grief for him who had been all the world to her, could only sob and sob, till at length she fell into a sleep of pure exhaustion, from which she was at last aroused by the coming of the priest's boy, who had brought back the curragh, towing after it another in which to take his master's brother home. And even after that it was only because Pat Dinny would have wished it that Oonah listed to her father's pleading and allowed herself to be taken across to the mainland, where, soon after, the body of her old friend was brought for burial.

Once that was done, she was ready and eager to get away from the familiar landmarks which brought back to her the loss which, for the moment, swallowed up everything else. Childlike, she took the wonderful change that came into her life as a matter of course, and in the new house which her father made for her she quickly grew used to the new life so full of new things for her to learn. Then, by degrees, the warm heart that had mourned so deeply for the old man who had left her turned, to the new love that was offered so patiently to her, and then to Dr. Healy the long, lonely years were blotted out and forgotten by the joy that came to him through what he had found" upon the island.