CHAPTER IV.

THE SHIP.

The morning after, his birthday, on meeting him at the breakfast-table as the clock struck eight, I observed to him that he couldn’t have had much sleep: to which, glancing up from his book, he answered, “Enough for the needs of my nature, sir, I think, though I was at work at four minutes before five. The old have greater need of repose, it appears, while, as to the young, the demagogue Cataline, it is written, could dispense with sleep almost altogether.”

“Oho,” said I; “well, let us be eating,” and we sat to the old jug of porridge and oaten loaf.

Presently, as we ate, I said to him, “By the way, I want you now to understand that you are not to knock my servant’s head about any more.”

His answer was that he had discovered that such occasional visitations had the effect of slightly heightening the functioning of the idiot’s wit.

“Never mind your discoveries,” said I: “you are not to do it, sir.”

“I will not, sir,” says he with his formal bow, and buries his brow anew in his volume.

I for my part could hardly eat, for I was uneasy and excited, and my fingers kept on going to feel the old stele, which I had in my pocket; so, fidgeted by his cool reading and feeding, said I to him, “Didn’t I beg you some time since not to be for ever eating and reading together, since it is injurious to the digestion, and there’s a time for everything, as the mightiest minds among men well know.”

“True, sir,” says my man, “you did speak to me on this subject on the third of June two years ago, but your words did not give me an impression of great urgency, so I have dared to disregard them, since, after all, the digestion of the young is hearty and strong, and the days are hardly born but they are fled, and it is hard to the foot to race after the fastness of the horses of time; hence the greater masters, the minds of white-hot ardour, like Cæsar, always delighted themselves in the most entangled exercises, like the dictating of a vast host of letters at once, so as to harbour in their mood a habit of keeping pace with the fleetness of the passing days.”

“So true,” said I, “so true; still, it is as well not to eat and read together; nor are you any longer so ‘young’ as you have been; you know, of course, that to-day is your birthday.”

“So I calculate, sir,” says he: “I have now existed apart from the womb nineteen times as many as three hundred and sixty-five days, less four; that is to say, six thousand nine hundred and thirty-one days, without counting some odd hours.”

“Oho,” said I; “and how are you going to spend the day?”

“I am engaged in a chemical investigation, sir,” says he, leaning back now, and balancing a plate on the edge of his forefinger nail, for he always speedily devoured his food, though with complete mastication, I believe, and was generally done before I was nearly through.

“Ah, and what is the investigation?” I asked.

“You must have noticed, sir,” says he, “the agitation I call it, with which bismuth acts——”

“I know exactly what you are going to say,” said I—God forgive us—“quite so; but look here, before you go I want to show you something, something that will amuse you; just read me that.”

On a sudden now, Reid, the moment long waited for had come, for I now caught the old basalt stele out of my pocket, and laid it before him; whereat immediately the fellow seemed to feel an interest in the mere sight of this object, took it up, looked it up and down and round about, smiling his smile, his brow twitching into momentary frowns.

“Why, sir,” says he suddenly, “where did you come upon this stone?”

“That’s not the point,” said I; “I got it in Abyssinia, but that’s not the point; just read it.”

“It is mainly enchorial and alphabetic,” he breathes aloud, peering into the thing, “but with a great number of syllabary signs, and vowel matres lectionis——”

“Yes, I know; read it,” said I, painfully conscious within myself of being pale in the face.

“Strange,” says he to himself: “both Sahidic and Memphitic, but mainly Memphitic——”

“Yes, I tell you, I know,” said I; “read it, read it, boy.”

He hesitated, sir, and I felt growing within me an agitation almost too great to be any more restrained.

“Have _you_ read it, sir?” he suddenly asks, raising his eyes to my face; and I was foolishly conscious that my eyes drooped before his, even as in a tone of protest I answered, “Why, naturally! I only give it to you as a little exercise to amuse you; just read the whole thing right off.”

Now, sir, he puts the bit of a stele on the table, and he bends his brow studiously over it, supporting his head between his hands.

“Seven of the words are purposely secret,” says he to himself; “it is not an easy cypher....”

“Well, I know, I know that,” said I, deadly anxious now, “that’s why I give it to you—for a little fun on your birthday; just read it off, boy, to please me.”

“Ah, I see,” says he all at once: “this whole half-line is a long rebus or pun; the sound of each ideograph combines with the third following to form a word: that is clearly the idea of the inventor; I can trace his thought; I see. Oh, it is not difficult, sir!”

“Good—very good,” said I; “then just read it right off, and go up to your science, boy,” for I felt my face growing white with excitement, seeing that, in spite of his brave words, the man’s manner showed some hesitation, and lower and lower bent his head over the thing.

“A moment, sir,” he murmurs, “one moment; your servant is slow and dull, but”—something; and another minute went by in a silence that was most bitter to me to bear, till, all in a scare, I called to him, “Well, but haven’t you done it _yet_?”

“Yes, sir, I think——” he falters.

“Then read it!”

“In Coptic?”

“In English.”

Now, very deliberately, my man begins to utter syllables, his brow between his hands bent low down over the symbols, and, syllable by syllable, says he, “It is graved on a golden brick within the grave of Arunzebe, that when the white strangers from over the Great Hill came with fire and warfare, then did eighty princes bear together their braveries for safety, and they heaped them into the grave of Arunzebe. Even a spirit (_nat_) could scarce penetrate to their secret place, nor could a rain of men, straining through many days, attain to them. There is the Silence that annihilates. Let no man strive to visit them at——”

There my man stopped short. “At,” he repeated, but couldn’t go on, and there in the shameful silence he sat now frowning into the thing with a sort of haughty, excruciated self-surprise, but without progress.

“Well?” said I, and my looks, I know, were ghastly, for all that he had read of the thing I, too, long ago had read, though I admit that it had cost me some few months of effort.

“At, sir,” says he, more to himself than to me, “at—something; fifteen other ideographs remain, making three words, I am certain. But they are without determinatives, and their outlines are so blurred, they bring no meaning, no meaning—to my mind; they seem to belong....”

“Better say at once, Hannibal, that you can’t read the epigraph!” I cried out.

“_You_ have read it, sir, no doubt?” says he for the second time with, I fancied now, just a touch of scepticism somewhere.

“Why, naturally, boy!” I cried, with such a noise that, at the moment, I almost believed it myself. “Can’t _you_, then?”

“It is strange, sir,” says he, “it seems to contain _htar_, and the old verb _secha_, to write.... Pray, bear with your servant a little, sir, I shall read the words, I see clearly that I _can_, if you will only vouchsafe me a little time—down by the seashore.”

“Time,” said I, with some disdain; “why _time_? The human mind should strike and divide like the very scythe of the lightning!... And how much time?”

“If I may have half an hour on the shore, sir,” says he, rather down-heartedly, and as I knew that his mind usually rose to the height of any problem which bothered him with a lighter spring down there amid the droning of the waves, I said nothing when he took up the little stone, and passed out through the door. And so, Reid, we parted without one last clasp of the hand after nineteen years, for that was four days ago, and neither Shan nor I have since seen him. He is gone, he is no longer on Shunter, that is our one certainty: he may be drowned, or he may be living, but on Shunter he no longer is, I’ll vow. After waiting in suspense an hour, nearly two hours, for him to return with the basalt stele, I despatched Shan Healy from the castle to seek him over the shore, and to command him to come back to me. When Shan was gone on this errand, I took my stand at a window, looking anxiously out over the eastern shores and over the rolling ground of the sea: and while there I chanced to catch sight of a schooner, about the size of a dove, some two leagues to eastward, breasting southward through that gaudy kind of haze that shrowds with a gauze of azure the bridal and gala glances of the brighter days on these islands. But little did I heed her then, nor to this moment do I know that she had anything to do with the vanishing of the young man. Meantime, Shan did not come back, Hannibal did not come back, and at last, angry and anxious, I ran out of the castle, and had got some half a mile over the western shore before I encountered Shan Healy dashing back to the castle in a white heat, with a wild countenance, hardly able to gasp out the words, “Found this, doctor,” as he paraded before my marvelling gaze a paltry square of cloth and lace, a lady’s handkerchief, marked with the initials “R. V.,” and tainted with some effluvium of stale perfume. That thing on Shunter shore! My heart failed me, Reid: for the young man’s notions of female man had so far been gathered only from certain Greek and Egyptian urn-traceries, meagre things; and I thought that if eye of his had indeed fallen that morning upon the carnal fact of womanhood, then it would be small wonder if all were lost, and his parting from me an everlasting parting. For fourteen years, so far as we know, no human foot but those of us three has passed over those peats and marshes of Shunter; no spar nor oar has approached within even half a league of its shores; but when Shan and I had run together to the little harbour at the north, where the bit of a flag-staff stands, we found the boat empty of the two pairs of half-tame _motacillæ lugubres_ which had made nests in her, and half-way down to the edge of the low tide I found the sands much trampled. Unknown to us, some craft had put in there, had anchored, and had departed, perhaps taking with her what far surpassed the understanding of those on her. Shan and I, having separated, searched each of us one of the promontories which enclose the harbour like claws, since, being dark with growths of bush, they seemed worth the searching: and on the east side I found, far out toward the last rocks, a track of footsteps going down to the sea, going, alas, without return: and they seemed to me, though I could hardly be certain, rather like the track of sandals than of boots, in which case he may have chosen that place to swim off to the craft in the harbour, so as to stow himself away below—I don’t know. If so, it is remarkable that he should have acted in that fashion. At first we fancied that, maddened by the sight of man and woman, the boy might have started to swim to Barra, and have been destroyed by a shark or a narwhal _en route_. But we are still quite in the dark as to the actual truth. Shan afterwards discovered half a bon-bon—a bitten bit of chocolate—amid the kelp on the shore, and no more know we of it....

Such, then, is the close of our eighteen years of the cloister on Shunter. Without a message of good-bye to his father the boy is gone. But, after all, I should have known beforehand, I should have guessed: for latterly he has been most museful, given to porings over the ocean through half a night, with more, perhaps, going on in the soul of him than I had any notion of, for we least of all see and know those that are nearest us, Reid; we see their faces and only fancy that we see themselves. Anyhow, it is all passed and over now; the little castle that was our home, that I had grown to love, and hoped that he, too, had grown to love, stands now lone through grey days, and darkling through nightlongs of thunderous weather without us: for, as I have told you, we have passed over to Barra in the boat, we two and the dog, and the poor mare and cows and goats will go hungry now, no doubt, or will soon grow to the humour of the guillemots and herring-gulls on the crags, and become sea-things, goblin of eye, like the tangles of kelp on the shore, or the stench of the ocean’s throat, or the pools remote from the foot of men with little bleaks brooding in their green glooms, or the inclemency of gales that gather over this sea. I tell you truth, man, I am sad, for nineteen years of life is not nothing, Reid. The young man’s gone, and how he is going to adjust himself to the world, and how the world is going to manage to adjust itself to _him_—God only knows. His books will become covered with particles of peat now; our little garth, with its darg of peat heaped in one corner for our fire next winter, will hearken now no more, alas, to the echoes of our passing; our little garden will grow wild; and Shunter will forget the unlasting foot of man and boy, to go back anew with joy to the largeness and boisterous ocean-mood of her past, and the charm of her harsh old solitude. To-morrow, I hope, we shall be able to take boat to Uist, and so to the mainland, but I’m not sure, this poor Shan Healy is so beastly seedy and down in the mouth ... etc., etc.